Journal articles on the topic 'Nature Effect of human beings on South Australia'

IntroductionMulticomponent school-based physical activity (PA) interventions can improve students’ cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and PA. Due to the complex nature of such interventions when delivered at scale their effect sizes markedly reduce. Modifying student school uniforms, so that they are more PA enabling, may be a simple intervention that could enhance student health. The primary aim of this trial is to assess the effectiveness of an activity enabling uniform intervention (shorts, polo shirt and sports shoes) in improving children’s CRF.Methods and analysisA cluster randomised controlled trial will be conducted in 24 primary schools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Schools will be randomly allocated to either intervention or usual practice following baseline data collection. Active WeAR Everyday intervention schools will allow students in grades 4–6 (aged approx. 9–12 years) to wear their existing sports uniform (shorts, polo shirt and sports shoes) every day. To avoid any financial cost to students they will be provided with two additional sports shirts and one pair of shorts. Study outcomes will be assessed at baseline and 9 months postbaseline. The primary outcome is students’ CRF measured using the 20 m multistage fitness test. Secondary outcomes include students’: mean daily steps and steps/minute measured via accelerometer, quality of life, mental well-being and perceived PA self-efficacy. The acceptability, feasibility and cost of the intervention will be assessed. Analyses will be performed using an intention-to-treat framework. Linear mixed effects regression models will be used to assess intervention effects on the primary outcome at follow-up. Planned exploratory analyses will examine effects by subgroups (eg, gender).Ethics and disseminationThis study has received approval from Hunter New England Local Health District Human Ethics Committee (2020/ETHO2602) the University of Newcastle, Human Research Ethics Committee (H-2021-0013), NSW Department of Education (SERAP: 2020387) and Catholic School Offices.Trial registration numberACTRN12621000201875.

Design is about wealth creation for the comfort and well-being of human beings. In this context, the process and experiences associated with teaching and learning of engineering design are pivotal in sustaining and advancing the progress of modern day civilization. However, the teaching of engineering design is not easy and fraught with difficulties as the students have to be provided with the opportunity to develop their creative skills while retaining a professional and practical base. It is also important to proactively harness the available and emerging technologies to greater effect in the learning process. At the University of New South Wales in Australia, we have approached the teaching and learning of design in undergraduate aerospace engineering from a perspective to prepare students to be creative and become practically oriented for productive employment in the very competitive world of today.

A scientific understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on the psychological status of residents is important for improving medical services and responding to public health emergencies. With the help of some of the most popular network communication tools (including Wechat and Weiboand QQ), online questionnaires were completed by South China citizens during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic based on psychological stress theory and using a comprehensive sampling method. Through cooperation with experts from other institutions, the content of the questionnaire was designed to include interviewees’ spatial locations and individual information, identify whether negative emotions were generated, and determine the level of psychological stress and the degree of perception change, etc. According to the data type, mathematical statistics and multiple logistic regression methods were used to examine regional differentiation and influencing factors regarding the psychological stress of residents using 1668 valid questionnaires from 53 municipal administrative units in South China. The results firstly showed that over the whole area there was typical regional differentiation in South China, especially in relation to negative expression and psychological stress, with this feature reflecting the dual urban–rural structure. Secondly, regional differences were obvious. Residents of Hainan showed stronger change of psychological stress than those of the other two provinces. In contrast, Guangdong residents were the least psychological stress, and the concept of a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature was not accepted as well as in the other two provinces. Thirdly, in each province the capital city acted as the regional pole, with greater psychological status. This polarization effect decreased with greater distance, reflecting the theory of growth poles in human geography. Fourthly, gender, education level, occupation, informational correction, and the possibility of infection were notable factors that affected the psychological status of interviewees facing COVID-19. However, the functions were different and were decided by the dependent variable. Lastly, based on conclusions summarized from three perspectives, it was found that regional differentiation, public information, and social structure need to focused upon in order to handle sudden major health issues.

In this article I introduce the non-English word, harraga, to address the convoluted nature of migration, death, borders and colonial legacies. My empirical material comes from the south of Tunisia. I draw on practices of migration from Tunisia, the extraction of resources and its effect on the economy of the country, and the washing ashore of bodies on the southern Tunisian coast. I also reflect on the recent European border management in this area that is intended to stop migration from both Tunisia and Libya. Harraga (الحراقة) is an Arabic word used in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. It could be translated as those who burn. A pragmatic or accommodating translation would be ‘sans papiers’, or ‘undocumented migrants’. However, harraga is not a word for a group of people, but for an activity. The activity of moving out of the Magreb. Those who engage in harga, ‘burn’ borders in order to enter European territories, or overstay their visa. Yet enfolded in the word harraga is much more than the activity of leaving for Europe. I will slowly unpack this word and show that (1) harraga is not about identity (the migrant/the refugee), but an activity, the activity of burning borders and of expanding living space; (2) harraga is not about burning bridges or leaving histories behind, but about crafting connections as well as colonial extractions; (3) harraga problematizes Europe’s borders by siding with those who burn them, human beings.

AbstractIntroduction: Although this paper deals mostly with the positive effects of a posthumanist worldview on environmental sustainability, partnership, or moral accountability in science and scientific research, it also promotes a new understanding of our educational practice in higher education. The ideas espoused have the ability to inspire educators at all levels to show students, future researchers or other professions about the importance of a progressive, holistic approach to our environment. We claim that being sensitive and caring for our environment is not only part of our moral and ethical responsibility, it is an inseparable aspect of our environmental education, our environmental intelligence. This paper discusses posthumanist1 reciprocity ethics in the context of traditional knowledge (TK) and the protection of indigenous traditional knowledge from commercial exploitation.Methods: Instances of unethical bioprospecting and biopiracy were common throughout the turn of the 21st century and are discussed using cases in countries such as Cameroon, India, South Africa and Australia, where medicinal plant species were, are still a highly sought-after source of potent, pharmacologically active phytochemicals.Results and discussion: The observed increase in regulations against bioprospecting on indigenous land in these countries as a result of intellectual property monopoly by big pharmaceutical companies is discussed in this paper along the lines of a ‘humanist vs posthumanist’ ontology. Patent exclusivity laws have historically marginalized the proprietary owners of indigenous traditional knowledge, creating a moral and ethical rift between those that seek to exploit this knowledge commercially and those from whom the knowledge originally comes from. This disconnection from nature and natural resources due to a humanistic approach2 to growth and development, often leads to environmental exploitation, exploitation of indigenous people and unsustainable commercial practices. Existing research and bioprospecting ethics that are practiced on indigenous lands must be questioned in their ability to provide mutually beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders.Conclusions: The posthumanist approach to morality and research ethics is discussed in this paper as a possible and practical alternative to humanism along with the potential for posthumanist ethics to be a tool to shape legal frameworks and the policies that protect at-risk communities and their respective natural environments. Our current developmental trajectory as a collective species has us blurring the lines that separate the ‘human’ from the ‘non-human’ elements in our world as humanity grows towards a more technologically advanced but equally environmentally dependent people. Thus, the currently existing systems of ethics that govern the relationship between the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ must be called into question. This paper aims to illustrate the positive effects of a posthumanist worldview on issues such as environmental sustainability, partnership, moral accountability and reciprocity ethics in the context of modern science and modern scientific research.

Climate change induced sea-level rise (SLR) is on its increase globally. Regionally the lowlands of China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and islands of the Malaysian, Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos are among the world’s most threatened regions. Sea-level rise has major impacts on the ecosystems and society. It threatens coastal populations, economic activities, and fragile ecosystems as mangroves, coastal salt-marches and wetlands. This paper provides a summary of the current state of knowledge of sea level-rise and its effects on both human and natural ecosystems. The focus is on coastal urban areas and low lying deltas in South-East Asia and Vietnam, as one of the most threatened areas in the world. About 3 mm per year reflects the growing consensus on the average SLR worldwide. The trend speeds up during recent decades. The figures are subject to local, temporal and methodological variation. In Vietnam the average values of 3.3 mm per year during the 1993-2014 period are above the worldwide average. Although a basic conceptual understanding exists that the increasing global frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones is related with the increasing temperature and SLR, this relationship is insufficiently understood. Moreover the precise, complex environmental, economic, social, and health impacts are currently unclear. SLR, storms and changing precipitation patterns increase flood risks, in particular in urban areas. Part of the current scientific debate is on how urban agglomeration can be made more resilient to flood risks. Where originally mainly technical interventions dominated this discussion, it becomes increasingly clear that proactive special planning, flood defense, flood risk mitigation, flood preparation, and flood recovery are important, but costly instruments. Next to the main focus on SLR and its effects on resilience, the paper reviews main SLR associated impacts: Floods and inundation, salinization, shoreline change, and effects on mangroves and wetlands. The hazards of SLR related floods increase fastest in urban areas. This is related with both the increasing surface major cities are expected to occupy during the decades to come and the increasing coastal population. In particular Asia and its megacities in the southern part of the continent are increasingly at risk. The discussion points to complexity, inter-disciplinarity, and the related uncertainty, as core characteristics. An integrated combination of mitigation, adaptation and resilience measures is currently considered as the most indicated way to resist SLR today and in the near future.References Aerts J.C.J.H., Hassan A., Savenije H.H.G., Khan M.F., 2000. Using GIS tools and rapid assessment techniques for determining salt intrusion: Stream a river basin management instrument. 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The main reasons for climate change which are explained in this article are as follows: -Climate pollution by gases with CO2 emission and Greenhouse Effect; Climate contamination of viruses with viruses from nature by animals or glaciers when thawing or produced in Laboratories; Induced Climate Change due to meteorological weapons with high intensity radio waves to produce rains, hurricanes and possible induction of earthquakes; Climate pollution by radiation due wars with irreversible consequences in the climate and Nuclear Winter; Climate Change due the explosion of missiles and atomic weapons in the oceans; Climate Change due the natural cyclical phases of the Earth affected by the cyclical variations of the Earth's magnetic field lines which can be affected by the severe cyclical activity of the sun due storms and sunspot because of the combustion that occurs inside the Sun which is due to the gravitational instabilities produced by the planets of the solar system, asteroids or the Comet Planet; Climate Change due to the invading Comet Planet into the solar system that affects with its gravitational field to the sun with solar storms and the planets with variation of the magnetic field lines affecting the climate, earthquakes and activation of volcanoes and indeed with the entry of many meteors and asteroids to the Earth; Climate change due to the Arm of God Allah explaining all the above reasons being more evident in times of Tribulation. The specific methods and devices of the control and manipulation of the population (inclusive to induce to the concupiscence) in times of new world order (Universal Big Brother Program for the control of human in the Earth) and possible Tribulation are explained in this article: Surveillance programs with all technological devices and networks used by humans systematic methods of persuasive manipulation and indoctrination used by some zombie humans and dark; Through the subjugation of employees and humans (inclusive children teaching them how to manipulate in the same style of the zombies); By enterprises or dark groups so that employees make manipulation games with details (investing work time to play like children) receiving bribes, money or labor benefits or with possible retaliation if they do not obey; Surveillance programs in living and working places with covert technological cameras, coincidence games, activities, plans and events programmed in sequence (inclusive pyrotechnic sounds in sequence); Covert numbers and words (in identification documents, cards, car plates, devices used by humans); Encrypted, hidden codes or small phrases and numbers not visible to the naked eye concealed in objects; Covert words in the speech of zombie humans and from multimedia and channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts and inclusive to speak in code with the humans who know the surveillance programs and worst using in those channels and programs derogatory words against the Nazarenes (in the style of Nazism with the Jews) in complicity of close acquaintances, zombies and dark who participate profiting from the system for the vile metal; By means of an epidemic and viruses produced in laboratories creating epidemics and chaos in the Earth for the reduction and control of the population; Through strict restrictions and reduction of freedoms; Confinement with subsequent compulsory vaccination to be able to access human rights such as the right to work and the right to travel (with the cover-up of the respective organizations responsibles for it: OIT OMT), without responsibility of the authorities in charge of vaccination worldwide (OMS) for the short or long term counterproductive effects of the vaccinated population due to the risk with the liquid of the vaccines by interfering with the DNA and RNA of the population; Possible marking and elimination of many humans (possibility of control of the pulmonary alveoly or induction controlled of diseases or pain due a virus by means of chips introduced in humans); Control of humans by the introduction of liquid and solid chips in humans (liquid crystals that crystallize in the organism and settle in neurons and receive ultrasonic waves of very low frequency) (possibly inserted from vaccines in global epidemiological programs for population control or invasive medical examination when this is not necessary as a figurative example of review of a patient with a sore in the mouth and introduction of the whole hand in the throat or prostate examination or specific injections to certain objective humans or Nazarenes who have opened the matrix of the darks and the elite that controls the humans in the Earth) in times of epidemic in medical examinations and treatments in hospitals (false medical negligence with breach of the medical oath of the use of Medicine for human good). The possible liquid and solid chips introduced into the human being can be used for mind reading (telepath) and thought induction (double direction: sending and receiving messages in the style of Stephen Hawking and the style of the technology already used in sending probes into space and to the moon) and possible human marking with surveillance program and the possible creation of zombie humans. Humans who have the mind reader chip installed can speak without speaking (the dumb speak playing like the miracles of Jesus Christ). It is possible to detect if the humans who have the mental reading chip installed have psychological alterations without going to a doctor. It is possible to know if humans are good or bad without seeing their actions and without going to a priest. In this way, human beings with the chip installed can be sanctioned before they do somewhat wrong (simply because it is known to be thinking). This can be used to know the fidelity to a political guideline or direction (this is known by the strong rumor in communist countries that already have the technology to detect the fidelity to the political party and possibly this is through this chip installed in the human being and mind reading). The inserted chip can also perform thought induction: this is possibly the apocalyptic mark mentioned in the apocalypse because many humans will perform sins or concupiscence induced and not naturally. Then, this will most probably activate the Wrath of God, the seals, and the trumpets of the apocalypse. It surprises me that actually the OMS wants to bring the vaccination program to Africa when in Africa there are not many dead by the epidemy (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be in all the Earth). Afterward, the OMS mentioned that wants to insert a manufacturing center of vaccines in many countries and inclusive vigilance programs (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be effective at the local level). But, what the OMS needs to mention is that it is necessary to eliminate the laboratories of virus creation and not create more vaccine laboratories. Humans do not want more vaccine and injections and laboratories for the creation of vaccines but the elimination of virus laboratories which are most probably used for for the control and reduction of the population: thus, the reason for spreading a virus created in a laboratoy across the Earth is evident: population reduction and control of humanity in preparation for a global elite program (new world order or program 2030 for the control of the dark and of the elite; Connection of covert surveillance cameras (in living and working places) with channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts (including newscasts that usually make signs of dumb and deaf to those who have already discovered them) used by the dark with the respective programs and in addition, to monitor and tracing to verify the induction to concupiscence through mental reading (chips in humans) and surveillance cameras on line in the best style of James Bond espionage movies (including control of faces, pupils, irises, reflections, details and diseases); Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes (playing at being gods) and also profiting from the vile metal through the system and contributing to the persecution of the Nazarenes; Fake judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes because many of these sins have been induced with technology due the possible induction of thoughts by the liquid cristal settle in neurons and have not been natural (dark inducing sin through technology and playing gods to induce evil and destruction of intimacy and privacy even in the mind of the human being); Retaliation to those who report the surveillance and manipulation programs and marking of humans for mind reading (telepathy) and thought induction (making them sick sending to the hospitals or removing them); Digital identification plan and digital money to do digital control and avoid conflict and protests of marked and Nazarenes in surveillance programs who discover that there is no privacy in their documents and inclusive in theirs mind (telepathy: mind reading and thought induction: artificial intelligence): it surprises that EU mention that has a digital plan for europeans for digital control on line. But, before the epidemy, Europe and the world advanced a lot in technology and the data of humans are digitally in hospitals and institutes that humans need. After, the EU mentions artificial intelligence for human beings. Then and in vaccination and epidemy time, it is possible that the digital control is a new digital control with artifitial intelligence and with possible chips installed in the human being (possibly already installed in many human beings); Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes (change games of victim to accused by companies that regulate the order with subsequent rectification of the game made by the same companies when the Nazarenes claim); Games of recognition of the identity of human beings (in the style of the movie Unknown) by enterprises and service stations which are necessary for the daily movement of human beings creating conflicts of manipulation and stress in the marked or Nazarenes Salary payment games (payment of wages with dinners and game of check payment) creating manipulation conflicts and stress in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes Programmed plans of theft and scams of enterprises and humans even knowing of the surveillance cameras for the control of the marked, target or Nazarenes. Then, there is severe control of human beings in their daily activities to verify the follow-up of the matrix and darks that plan situations of concupiscence in the human being. Besides, this is occurring in coincidence with an accelerated new world order program and possible tribulation times and possibly already with the installation of the apocalyptic mark (possible chips introduced in the human being for mind reading and thought induction to induce concupiscence) in humans mentioned in the apocalypse for dark control of humans. The global forms of the severe manipulation and population control in times of new world order and Tribulation are explained in this article are as follows: By increasing taxes; Through armed conflicts and wars create discord, wars and chaos between countries (often bordering countries with the same origins and with the same culture: Russia and Ukraine: war motivated by US OTAN EU): To later usurp its resources (oil energy resource: US Iraq Kuwait); To later control them politically and economically (US Iraq Kuwait) and when these power or developed countries cannot control or usurp their resources, they begin to block them economically (Russia in the war between Russia and Ukraine where besides developed countries influence in the war by printing additional money to use for the war causing imbalance and global economic crisis instead of looking for ways to avoid it) in order to cause chaos and economic crisis with the knowledge and complicity of the world organizations responsible (OEA ONU) and make the population believe that the cause of the economic crisis is the government in power. However, some countries have resisted these blockades (Cuba Venezuela Nicaragua Russia China) and managed to show that it is possible to have governments independent of the control of these powers or countries that believe they own the Earth; To put rulers (governing) of interest in the same countries in conflict; To control them using the pretext of placing military bases in the countries in conflict (NATO OTAN: military bases in some European countries, US military bases: in some South American countries and some countries of Europe). In addition, this is preferable to reduce military bases in other countries and reduction of nuclear weapons, and use the financial resources for the reduction of inequity and poverty on the Earth. Thus, the organizations responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons (OIEA) have played an ineffective and passive (cover-up) role, which has caused the risk of a third nuclear world war to be imminent); Through the war against terror: however and actually, this is a false speech used to point to countries that oppose the control or directive of the powers and that have a culture or political structure different from that of the powers and later make conflict and war to later control them or usurp their resources (some Arab and Muslim countries, for example, US, Irak, Lybia and blaming an entire country for terrorism and occupying for years (Afganistán)). In this way and actually, some countries have developed nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran) to protect themselves in some way and thus, the same thing does not happen to them as to the countries mentioned above (Irak, Lybia) and that have been destroyed with the false discourse of the war against terror. In this way, the best thing is to have good relations with all the countries of the Earth which are again summed in the Bible [1] in a message: Love your brother (all human beings) as yourself! (Mt.22-39) (and not to go around the Earth pointing out terrorists to any country that opposes its guidelines). Therefore, it is possible to reduce the economic resources for the war against terror which can be used to reduce poverty and inequity in human beings; Through the war against drugs: there are many other substances and products consumed by humans that can be harmful to health and that are allowed and have not become a vice (when something is forbidden: this increases the interest in obtaining it explained from the beginning of creation in Genesis [1]: an apple from the tree of good and evil in the garden of Eden: Adam and Eve). In addition, many countries have allowed the use of certain types of drugs for medical purposes (Uruguay, Bolivia) where drug use has gone unnoticed in these countries; Through religión: with a structure of religion that tries to control the population through a guideline and speeches that obey the Vatican and the actual governments of each country (which is evident when there are countries such as Nicaragua that do not follow a guideline of the church and the elite and then, the religion surprisingly actively intervenes in politics): the conclusion is reached and to which many humans have reached, that religion is a power most actually used (along with political and economic power); Through political power by means of the false argument used by politicians to reduce inequity and poverty: where a large amount of resources and money have been allocated to the political powers and rulers of many countries for centuries by the respective organizations responsable (FMI BM) without any results and in many countries poverty and inequity have increased. Besides, the bureaucracy is a structure of order and rules of management and administration used within the governments of each country that contribute to the inefficiency and manipulation of the required procedures in human life that ultimately affect the life of each human being when they require formalities that end up being complicated and time-consuming. Then, this power structure in politics, economics, and religion for the control of the population is ineffective and obeys the interests of the dark who control humans on the Earth, and is used ineffectively by the rulers (governing) of the countries who come to power precisely with the false discourse of reducing poverty and inequity; Through the pretext of climate change: severe climate change due to the emission of CO2 and the greenhouse effect is a complete fallacy. The world organizations involved with the climate (ONU) try to make humanity believe that this is the reason for the severe climatic changes that the human being has experienced on the Earth to obtain economic resources and avoid mentioning God in control of the Earth and course the climate and to avoid mentioning the Omnipotence of God [1] in the control of the Earth and the climate: the severe climate change is frequently due to solar storms and variations in the magnetic field lines of the Earth because of gravitational variations in the solar system or due to the entry of an asteroid or Comet Planet what is controlled and all the Universe by God. Therefore, the climate change is controlled by the Eternal God (wich is explained in the Bibles with a lot of examples with Moses, Josue, Hezekiah) and thus, this is better to use the resources and money for so-called climate change to reduce poverty and inequity in the Earth and increase equity in humans: Human Beings must not believe everything said by the organizations and individuals that control the humans in the Earth and that obey the directions imposed within the matrix triangle of control of the Earth; Through the sport by means of the persuasive manipulation of observers or attendees at sporting events through commercials programs, commentators (hidden words and numbers in speech), players participating in the match: with gestures or sequence of plays, numbers, words or details in the players uniform, referees (make decisión of plays in favor of a team purposely: false bad arbitration) or leading organizers committing sports corruption not applying the rules or discriminating players (Serbian, Russian and Belarusian tennis players at tennis competitions due to some tennis organizations) or teams (Russian sports clubs and inclusive the Russian national team due FIFA decision) at convenience. Besides, when there are countries in conflict or war: instead of uniting the countries in conflict by means of the sport, the respective organizations (FIFA UEFA) discriminate and increase the conflict: discriminating and not allowing the participation of tennis players (including top tennis players), Football Countries and Sport Clubs in international competitions for reasons of restrictions due to the epidemic, conflict or war (including countries that organized previous World Cups: Russia) where the interest, quality and love for this sport has increased and that must be used to unite human beings and countries and not to not allow them to participate: which increases the division and conflict between countries or humans: This is important to highlight and value the position of the ATP for deciding that the ATP does not agree that athletes from certain countries (Russia and Belarus) cannot participate in international tournaments stating that this is against the principles of merit and non-discrimination: then, this is tremendously criticizable that the organization responsible of Football (FIFA UEFA) participates in armed conflicts or war with discriminatory decisions in Football, increasing the war by not allowing countries in conflict to participate in World Cup of Football: FIFA slogan of no to racism and some form of discrimination is a complete farce and used for convenience and interest (in the same style of all the other organizations (mainly ONU, OEA, FMI, BM, VATICAN) that control humans and that in 2000 years of the coming of the Envoy of God have not been able to solve iniquity and poverty), discrimination that has been evident in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: Football is the main sport in the Earth and it is the one that can unite human beings the most and should be used as a source of union and not división; Through education: where this is used by many countries to induce and manipulate their inhabitants in a certain political direction through the dissemination of knowledge and even the textbooks of the students: many underdeveloped countries have increased illiteracy and degradation in education because this favors the politicians of the country's government: having an ignorant people who do not see what they do with the country's money and who cannot criticize them: the greatness of peoples depends on the education that gives the independence of individuals who are the ones that make the country advance; Through world organizations to control countries: ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE: many countries have to obey the guidelines of these organizations, which often do not respond to the needs of the citizens of each country: many institutions in the countries must obey the organizations (the Vatican for the religion) in a rigid way, which is often not in accordance with the situation of the country's citizens, who often need new variants or guidelines (some organizations can cause chaos, conflict or war as for example the war of Russia with Ucrania where the possible annexation of Ucrania to the OTAN and UE is one of the reasons for the war between these two countries. Therefore, there would be no war between these two countries where without those organizations); Through world organizations of espionage (CIA, FBI, KGB, Gestapo, SS): employing persuasive interference in the countries and rulers of some undeveloped countries (some South America and Center America countries and some European, Asia and Africa countries) with the objective of the power countries of control, manipulate or destabilize countries and inclusive simple humans (using the personal data of thousands of people around the world). Through the control and intervention of the Creator God Allah which is necessary and essential in times of Tribulation at the time timely (Holy Bible: Apoc. 6 Apoc. 8:6 Apoc. 5 Apoc. 7 Apoc. 21) due to everything mentioned in this scientific research respect to the control and manipulation of the population (regarding the increase of inequity, discord, and evil among humans) which is not following the guideline given by the envoy of God 2000 years ago: Jesus Christ. Keywords: God, Allah, Jesuchrist, Bible, Creator, Education, Climate change, Population Control, Climate Pollution, Gases CO2, Greenhouse Effect, Epidemic, Viruses, Laboratory, Zombies, Dark, Elite, new world order, OMS, ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE, FMI, BM, OIT, OMT, Meteorological weapons, Haarp, Sura, Wars, Sport, Religion, Radiation, Nuclear Winter, Sun, Magnetic field lines, Storms, Asteroids, Comet Planet, Volcanoes, Climate Catastrophies, Tribulation, Taxes, Terror, Drugs, Organizations, Inequity, Poverty, Manipulation, Indoctrination, Technological Devices, Covert technological devices, networks, Newscasts, Surveillance programs, Big Brother Program, Digital Identification Plan, Digital Money, Covert numbers and covert words, Encrypted, Hidden codes or small phrases not visible to the naked eye, Covert words in the speech of zombie humans in multimedia and traditional technological devices, Nazism, Jews, Coincidence games, Activities, Plans, Events Programmed in sequence, Pyrotechnic sounds in sequence, Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts, Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes, Games of recognition of the identity of human beings, Unknown, Companies, Service stations, Salary payment games, Programmed plans of theft and scams of companies and enterprises, Retaliation, Marking, Reduction, False medical negligence, Medical oath, Medicine, Liquid and solid chips in humans, Liquid crystals, Neurons, Ultrasonic waves, Vaccines, Global epidemiological programs, Matrix, Dark, Elite, Mind Reading, Telepath, Thought induction, Apocalipse, Wrath of God.

It was the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan who first introduced the term ‘global village’ into the lexicon, almost fifty years ago. He was referring to the phenomenon of global interconnectedness of which we are all too aware today. At that time, we were witnessing the world just opening up. In 1946, British Airways had commenced a twice weekly service from London to New York. The flight involved one or two touch downs en-route and took a scheduled 19 hours and 45 minutes. By the time McLuhan had published his book “Understanding media; the extensions of man”, there were regular services by jet around the globe. London to Sydney was travelled in just under 35 hours. Moving forward to a time immediately pre-covid, there were over 30 non-stop flights a day in each direction between London and New York. The travel time from London to Sydney had been cut by a third, to slightly under 22 hours, with just one touchdown en-route. The world has well and truly ‘opened up’. No place is unreachable by regular services. But that is just one part of the picture. In 1962, the very first live television pictures were transmitted across the Atlantic, via satellite. It was a time when sports’ fans would tune in besides a crackling radio set to hear commentary of their favourite game relayed from the other side of the world. Today of course, not only can we watch a live telecast of the Olympic Games in the comfort of our own homes wherever the games are being held, but we can pick up a telephone and talk face to face with friends and relatives in real time, wherever they may be in the world. To today’s generation – generation Z – this does not seem in the least bit remarkable. Indeed, they have been nicknamed ‘the connected generation’ precisely because such a degree of human interconnectedness no longer seems worth commenting on. The media technology and the transport advances that underpin this level of connectedness, have become taken for granted assumptions to them. This is why the global events of 2020 and the associated public health related reactions, have proved to be so remarkable to them. It is mass travel and the closeness and variety of human contact in day-to-day interactions, that have provided the breeding ground for the pandemic. Consequently, moving around and sharing close proximity with many strangers, have been the activities that have had to be curbed, as the initial primary means to manage the spread of the virus. This has caused hardship to many, either through the loss of a job and the associated income or, the lengthy enforced separation from family and friends – for the many who find themselves living and working far removed from their original home. McLuhan’s powerful metaphor was ahead of its time. His thoughts were centred around media and electronic communications well prior to the notion of a ‘physical’ pandemic, which today has provided an equally potent image of how all of our fortunes have become intertwined, no matter where we sit in the world. Yet it is this event which seems paradoxically to have for the first time forced us to consider more closely the path of progress pursued over the last half century. It is as if we are experiencing for the first time the unleashing of powerful and competing forces, which are both centripetal and centrifugal. On the one hand we are in a world where we have a World Health Organisation. This is a body which has acted as a global force, first declaring the pandemic and subsequently acting in response to it as a part of its brief for international public health. It has brought the world’s scientists and global health professionals together to accelerate the research and development process and develop new norms and standards to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and help care for those affected. At the same time, we have been witnessing nations retreating from each other and closing their borders in order to restrict the interaction of their citizens with those from other nations around the world. We have perceived that danger and risk are increased by international travel and human to human interaction. As a result, increasingly communication has been carried out from the safety and comfort of one’s own home, with electronic media taking the place of personal interaction in the real world. The change to the media dominated world, foreseen by McLuhan a half century ago, has been hastened and consolidated by the threats posed by Covid 19. Real time interactions can be conducted more safely and more economically by means of the global reach of the internet and the ever-enhanced technologies that are being offered to facilitate that. Yet at a geopolitical level prior to Covid 19, the processes of globalism and nationalism were already being recognised as competing forces. In many countries, tensions have emerged between those who are benefitting from the opportunities presented by the development of free trade between countries and those who are invested in more traditional ventures, set in their own nations and communities. The emerging beneficiaries have become characterised as the global elites. Their demographic profile is one associated with youth, education and progressive social ideas. However, they are counter-balanced by those who, rather than opportunities, have experienced threats from the disruptions and turbulence around them. Among the ideas challenged, have been the expected certainties of employment, social values and the security with which many grew up. Industries which have been the lifeblood of their communities are facing extinction and even the security of housing and a roof over the heads of self and family may be under threat. In such circumstances, some people may see waves of new immigrants, technology, and changing social values as being tides which need to be turned back. Their profile is characterised by a demographic less equipped to face such changes - the more mature, less well educated and less mobile. Yet this tension appears to be creating something more than just the latest version of the generational divide. The recent clashes between Republicans and Democrats in the US have provided a very potent example of these societal stresses. The US has itself exported some of these arenas of conflict to the rest of the world. Black lives Matter and #Me too, are social movements with their foundation in the US which have found their way far beyond the immediate contexts which gave them birth. In the different national settings where these various tensions have emerged, they have been characterised through labels such as left and right, progressive and traditional, the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have nots’ etc. Yet common to all of this growing competitiveness between ideologies and values is a common thread. The common thread lies in the notion of competition itself. It finds itself expressed most potently in the spread and adoption of ideas based on what has been termed the neoliberal values of the free market. These values have become ingrained in the language and concepts we employ every day. Thus, everything has a price and ultimately the price can be represented by a dollar value. We see this process of commodification around us on a daily basis. Sports studies’ scholars have long drawn attention to its continuing growth in the world of sport, especially in situations when it overwhelms the human characteristics of the athletes who are at the very heart of sport. When the dollar value of the athlete and their performance becomes more important than the individual and the game, then we find ourselves at the heart of some of the core problems reported today. It is at the point where sport changes from an experience, where the athletes develop themselves and become more complete persons experiencing positive and enriching interactions with fellow athletes, to an environment where young athletes experience stress and mental and physical ill health as result of their experiences. Those who are supremely talented (and lucky?) are rewarded with fabulous riches. Others can find themselves cast out on the scrap heap as a result of an unfair selection process or just the misfortune of injury. Sport as always, has proved to be a mirror of life in reflecting this process in the world at large, highlighting the heights that can be climbed by the fortunate as well as the depths that can be plumbed by the ill-fated. Advocates of the free-market approach will point to the opportunities it can offer. Figures can show that in a period of capitalist organised economies, there has been an unprecedented reduction in the amount of poverty in the world. Despite rapid growth in populations, there has been some extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, the numbers in poverty fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people (The Economist Leader, June 1st, 2013). Nonetheless the critics of capitalism will continue to point to an increasing gap between the haves and don’t haves and specifically a decline in the ‘middle classes’, which have for so long provided the backbone of stable democratic societies. This delicate balance between retreating into our own boundaries as a means to manage the pandemic and resuming open borders to prevent economic damage to those whose businesses and employment depend upon the continuing movement of people and goods, is one which is being agonised over at this time in liberal democratic societies around the world. The experience of the pandemic has varied between countries, not solely because of the strategies adopted by politicians, but also because of the current health systems and varying social and economic conditions of life in different parts of the world. For many of us, the crises and social disturbances noted above have been played out on our television screens and websites. Increasingly it seems that we have been consuming our life experiences in a world dominated by our screens and sheltered from the real messiness of life. Meanwhile, in those countries with a choice, the debate has been between public health concerns and economic health concerns. Some have argued that the two are not totally independent of each other, while others have argued that the extent to which they are seen as interrelated lies in the extent to which life’s values have themselves become commodified. Others have pointed to the mental health problems experienced by people of all ages as a result of being confined for long periods of time within limited spaces and experiencing few chances to meet with others outside their immediate household. Still others have experienced different conditions – such as the chance to work from home in a comfortable environment and be freed from the drudgery of commuting in crowded traffic or public transport. So, at a national/communal level as well as at an individual level, this international crisis has exposed people to different decisions. It has offered, for many, a chance to recalibrate their lives. Those who have the resources, are leaving the confines of the big capital cities and seeking a healthier and less turbulent existence in quieter urban centres. For those of us in what can be loosely termed ‘an information industry’, today’s work practices are already an age away from what they were in pre-pandemic times. Yet again, a clear split is evident. The notion of ‘essential industries’ has been reclassified. The delivery of goods, the facilitation of necessary purchase such as food; these and other tasks have acquired a new significance which has enhanced the value of those who deliver these services. However, for those whose tasks can be handled via the internet or offloaded to other anonymous beings a readjustment of a different kind is occurring. So to the future - for those who have suffered ill-health and lost loved ones, the pandemic only reinforces the human priority. Health and well-being trumps economic health and wealth where choices can be made. The closeness of human contact has been reinforced by the tales of families who have been deprived of the touch of their loved ones, many of whom still don’t know when that opportunity will be offered again. When writing our editorial, a year ago, I little expected to be still pursuing a Covid related theme today. Yet where once we were expecting to look back on this time as a minor hiccough, with normal service being resumed sometime last year, it has not turned out to be that way. Rather, it seems that we have been offered a major reset opportunity in the way in which we continue to progress our future as humans. The question is, will we be bold enough to see the opportunity and embrace a healthier more equitable more locally responsible lifestyle or, will we revert to a style of ‘progress’ where powerful countries, organisations and individuals continue to amass increased amounts of wealth and influence and become increasingly less responsive to the needs of individuals in the throng below. Of course, any retreat from globalisation as it has evolved to date, will involve disruption of a different kind, which will inevitably lead to pain for some. It seems inevitable that any change and consequent progress is going to involve winners and losers. Already airline companies and the travel industry are putting pressure on governments to “get back to normal” i.e. where things were previously. Yet, in the shadow of widespread support for climate activism and the extinction rebellion movement, reports have emerged that since the lockdowns air pollution has dropped dramatically around the world – a finding that clearly offers benefits to all our population. In a similar vein the impossibility of overseas air travel in Australia has resulted in a major increase in local tourism, where more inhabitants are discovering the pleasures of their own nation. The transfer of their tourist and holiday dollars from overseas to local tourist providers has produced at one level a traditional zero-sum outcome, but it has also been accompanied by a growing appreciation of local citizens for the wonders of their own land and understanding of the lives of their fellow citizens as well as massive savings in foregone air travel. Continuing to define life in terms of competition for limited resources will inevitably result in an ever-continuing run of zero-sum games. Looking beyond the prism of competition and personal reward has the potential to add to what Michael Sandel (2020) has termed ‘the common good’. Does the possibility of a reset, offer the opportunity to recalibrate our views of effort and reward to go beyond a dollar value and include this important dimension? How has sport been experiencing the pandemic and are there chances for a reset here? An opinion piece from Peter Horton in this edition, has highlighted the growing disconnect of professional sport at the highest level from the communities that gave them birth. Is this just another example of the outcome of unrestrained commodification? Professional sport has suffered in the pandemic with the cancelling of fixtures and the enforced absence of crowds. Yet it has shown remarkable resilience. Sport science staff may have been reduced alongside all the auxiliary workers who go to make up the total support staff on match days and other times. Crowds have been absent, but the game has gone on. Players have still been able to play and receive the support they have become used to from trainers, physiotherapists and analysts, although for the moment there may be fewer of them. Fans have had to rely on electronic media to watch their favourites in action– but perhaps that has just encouraged the continuing spread of support now possible through technology which is no longer dependent on personal attendance through the turnstile. Perhaps for those committed to the watching of live sport in the outdoors, this might offer a chance for more attention to be paid to sport at local and community levels. Might the local villagers be encouraged to interrelate with their hometown heroes, rather than the million-dollar entertainers brought in from afar by the big city clubs? To return to the village analogy and the tensions between global and local, could it be that the social structure of the village has become maladapted to the reality of globalisation? If we wish to retain the traditional values of village life, is returning to our village a necessary strategy? If, however we see that today the benefits and advantages lie in functioning as one single global community, then perhaps we need to do some serious thinking as to how that community can function more effectively for all of its members and not just its ‘elites’. As indicated earlier, sport has always been a reflection of our society. Whichever way our communities decide to progress, sport will have a place at their heart and sport scholars will have a place in critically reflecting the nature of the society we are building. It is on such a note that I am pleased to introduce the content of volume 43:1 to you. We start with a reminder from Hoyoon Jung of the importance of considering the richness provided by a deep analysis of context, when attempting to evaluate and compare outcomes for similar events. He examines the concept of nation building through sport, an outcome that has been frequently attributed to the conduct of successful events. In particular, he examines this outcome in the context of the experiences of South Africa and Brazil as hosts of world sporting events. The mega sporting event that both shared was the FIFA world cup, in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Additional information could be gained by looking backwards to the 1995 Rugby World Cup in the case of South Africa and forward to the 2016 Olympics with regard to Brazil. Differentiating the settings in terms of timing as well as in the makeup of the respective local cultures, has led Jung to conclude that a successful outcome for nation building proved possible in the case of South Africa. However, different settings, both economically and socially, made it impossible for Brazil to replicate the South African experience. From a globally oriented perspective to a more local one, our second paper by Rafal Gotowski and Marta Anna Zurawak examines the growth and development, with regard to both participation and performance, of a more localised activity in Poland - the Nordic walking marathon. Their analysis showed that this is a locally relevant activity that is meeting the health-related exercise needs of an increasing number of people in the middle and later years, including women. It is proving particularly beneficial as an activity due to its ability to offer a high level of intensity while reducing the impact - particularly on the knees. The article by Petr Vlček, Richard Bailey, Jana Vašíčková XXABSTRACT Claude Scheuer is also concerned with health promoting physical activity. Their focus however is on how the necessary habit of regular and relevant physical activity is currently being introduced to the younger generation in European schools through the various physical education curricula. They conclude that physical education lessons, as they are currently being conducted, are not providing the needed 50% minimum threshold of moderate to vigorous physical activity. They go further, to suggest that in reality, depending on the physical education curriculum to provide the necessary quantum of activity within the child’s week, is going to be a flawed vision, given the instructional and other objectives they are also expected to achieve. They suggest implementing instead an ‘Active Schools’ concept, where the PE lessons are augmented by other school-based contexts within a whole school programme of health enhancing physical activity for children. Finally, we step back to the global and international context and the current Pandemic. Eric Burhaein, Nevzt Demirci, Carla Cristina Vieira Lourenco, Zsolt Nemeth and Diajeng Tyas Pinru Phytanza have collaborated as a concerned group of physical educators to provide an important international position statement which addresses the role which structured and systematic physical activity should assume in the current crisis. This edition then concludes with two brief contributions. The first is an opinion piece by Peter Horton which provides a professional and scholarly reaction to the recent attempt by a group of European football club owners to challenge the global football community and establish a self-governing and exclusive European Super League. It is an event that has created great alarm and consternation in the world of football. Horton reflects the outrage expressed by that community and concludes: While recognising the benefits accruing from well managed professionalism, the essential conflict between the values of sport and the values of market capitalism will continue to simmer below the surface wherever sport is commodified rather than practised for more ‘intrinsic’ reasons. We conclude however on a more celebratory note. We are pleased to acknowledge the recognition achieved by one of the members of our International Review Board. The career and achievements of Professor John Wang – a local ‘scholar’- have been recognised in his being appointed as the foundation E.W. Barker Professor in Physical Education and Sport at the Nanyang Technological University. This is a well-deserved honour and one that reflects the growing stature of the Singapore Physical Education and Sports Science community within the world of International Sport Studies. John Saunders Brisbane, June 2021

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. International Journal of Water and Wastewater Treatment, 6(2). 1-14, (Sci Forschen2020): doi.org/10.16966/2381-5299.168 Elhoucine Essefi. ‘Record of the Anthropocene-Great Acceleration along a core from the coast of Sfax, southeastern Tunisia’. Turkish journal of earth science, (TÜBİTAK,2021). 1-16. Chiara Xausa. ‘Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8(2), (WARWICK 2021): 99-119. Akyol, Özlem. "Climate Change: An Apocalypse for Urban Space? An Ecocritical Reading of “Venice Drowned” and “The Tamarisk Hunter”." Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 101 (UluslararasıKıbrısÜniversitesi 2020): 115-126. Boswell, Suzanne F. "The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse: Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction.". Paradoxa 31, (Academia 2020): 359-378. Ayt Ougougdal, Houssam, Mohamed YacoubiKhebiza, Mohammed Messouli, and Asia Lachir. "Assessment of future water demand and supply under IPCC climate change and socio-economic scenarios, using a combination of models in Ourika Watershed, High Atlas, Morocco." Water 12, no. 6 (MPDI 2020): 1751.DOI:10.3390/w12061751. Wu, Jia, Zhenyu Han, Ying Xu, Botao Zhou, and Xuejie Gao. "Changes in extreme climate events in China under 1.5 C–4 C global warming targets: Projections using an ensemble of regional climate model simulations." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 125, no. 2 (Wiley2020): e2019JD031057.https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031057 Khan, Md Jamal Uddin, A. K. M. Islam, Sujit Kumar Bala, and G. M. Islam. "Changes in climateextremes over Bangladesh at 1.5° C, 2° C, and 4° C of global warmingwith high-resolutionregionalclimate modeling." Theoretical&AppliedClimatology 140 (EBSCO2020). Gudoshava, Masilin, Herbert O. Misiani, Zewdu T. Segele, Suman Jain, Jully O. Ouma, George Otieno, Richard Anyah et al. "Projected effects of 1.5 C and 2 C global warming levels on the intra-seasonal rainfall characteristics over the Greater Horn of Africa." Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 3 (IOPscience2020): 34-37. Wang, Lawrence K., Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Nai-Yi Wang, and Josephine O. Wong. "Effect of Global Warming and Climate Change on Glaciers and Salmons." In Integrated Natural Resources Management, ed.Lawrence K. Wang, Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Yung-Tse Hung, Nazih K. Shammas(Springer 2021), 1-36. Merschroth, Simon, Alessio Miatto, Steffi Weyand, Hiroki Tanikawa, and Liselotte Schebek. "Lost Material Stock in Buildings due to Sea Level Rise from Global Warming: The Case of Fiji Islands." Sustainability 12, no. 3 (MDPI 2020): 834.doi:10.3390/su12030834 Hofer, Stefan, Charlotte Lang, Charles Amory, Christoph Kittel, Alison Delhasse, Andrew Tedstone, and Xavier Fettweis. "Greater Greenland Ice Sheet contribution to global sea level rise in CMIP6." 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Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threatened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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Wandering the aisles of my local Woolworths in April this year, I noticed a large number of chocolate bilbies replacing chocolate rabbits. In these harsh economic times it seems that even the Easter bunny is in danger of losing his Easter job. While the changing shape of Easter chocolate may seem to be a harmless affair, the expulsion of the rabbit from Easter celebrations has a darker side. In this paper I look at the campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby, and the implications this mediated conservation move has for living rabbits in the Australian ecosystem. Essential to this discussion is the premise that studies of ecology must take into account the impact of media and culture on environmental issues. Of particular interest is the role of narrative, and the way the stories we tell about rabbits determine how they are treated in real life. While I recognise that the Australian bilby’s struggle for survival is a tale which should be told, I also argue that the vilification of the European-Australian rabbit is part of the native/invasive dualism which has ceased to be helpful, and has instead become a motivator of unproductive violence. In place of this simplified dichotomous narrative, I propose an ethic of "ecological remembrance" to combat the totalising eradication of the European rabbit from the Australian environment and culture. The Bilby vs the Bunny: A Case Study in "Media Selection" Easter Bunny says, ‘Bilby, I want you to have my job.You know about sharing and taking care.I think Australia should have an Easter Bilby.We rabbits have become too greedy and careless.Rabbits must learn from bilbies and other bush creatures’. The lines above are taken from Ali Garnett and Kaye Kessing’s children’s story, Easter Bilby, co-published by the Australian Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation as part of the campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the eco-politically correct Easter bilby. The first chocolate bilbies were made in 1982, but the concept really took off when major chocolate retailer Darrell Lea became involved in 2002. Since this time Haigh’s chocolate, Cadbury, and Pink Lady have also released delicious cocoa natives for consumption, and both Darrell Lea and Haigh’s use their profits to support bilby assistance programs, creating the “pleasant Easter sensation” that “eating a chocolate bilby is helping save the real thing” (Phillips). The Easter bilby campaign is a highly mediated approach to conservation which demonstrates the new biological principle Phil Bagust has recognised as “media selection.” Bagust observes that in our “hybridised global society” it is impossible to separate “the world of genetic selection from the world of human symbolic and material diversity as if they exist in different universes” (8). The Australian rabbit thrives in “natural selection,” having adapted to the Australian environment so successfully it threatens native species and the economic productivity of farmers. But the rabbit loses out in “cultural selection” where it is vilified in the media for its role in environmental degradation. The campaign to conserve the bilby depends, in a large part, on the rabbit’s failures in “media selection”. On Good Friday 2012 Sky News Australia quoted Mike Drinkwater of Wild Life Sydney’s support of the Easter bilby campaign: Look, the reason that we want to highlight the bilby as an iconic Easter animal is, number one, rabbits are a pest in Australia. Secondly, the bilby has these lovely endearing rabbit-like qualities. And thirdly, the bilby is a beautiful, iconic, native animal that is struggling. It is endangered so it’s important that we do all we can to support that. Drinkwater’s appeal to the bilby’s “endearing rabbit-like qualities” demonstrates that it is not the Australian rabbit’s individual embodiment which detracts from its charisma in Australian society. In this paper I will argue that the stories we tell about the European-Australian rabbit’s alienation from Indigenous country diminish the species cultural appeal. These stories are told with passionate conviction to save and protect native flora and fauna, but, too often, this promotion of the native relies on the devaluation of non-native life, to the point where individual rabbits are no longer morally considerable. Such a hierarchical approach to conservation is not only ethically problematic, but can also be ineffective because the native/invasive approach to ecology is overly simplistic. A History of Rabbit Stories In the Easter Bilby children’s book the illustrated rabbit offers to make itself disappear from the “Easter job.” The reason for this act of self-destruction is a despairing recognition of its “greedy and careless” nature, and at the same time, its selfless offer to be replaced by the ecologically conscious Bilby. In this sacrificial gesture is the implicit offering of all rabbit life for the salvation of native ecosystems and animal life. This plot line slots into a much larger series of stories we have been telling about the Australian environment. Libby Robin has observed that settler Australians have always had a love-hate relationship with the native flora and fauna of the continent (6), either devaluing native plants, animals, and ecosystems, or launching into an “overcompensating patriotic strut about the Australian biota” (Robin 9). The colonising dynamic of early Australian society was built on the devaluation of animals such as the bilby. This was reflected in the introduction of feral animals by “acclimatisation societies” and the privileging of “pets” such as cats and dogs over native animals (Plumwood). Alfred Crosby has made the persuasive argument that the invasion of Australia, and other “neo-European” countries, was, necessarily, more-than-human. In his work, Ecological Imperialism, Crosby charts the historical partnership between human European colonisers in Indigenous lands and the “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche” (194) of introduced life that they brought with them. In response to this “guilt by association” Australians have reversed the values in the dichotomous colonial dynamic to devalue the introduced and so “empower” the colonised native. In this new “anti-colonial” story, rabbits signify a wound of colonisation which has spread across and infected indigenous country. J. M. Arthur’s (130) analysis of language in relation to colonisation highlights some of the important lexical characteristics in the rabbit stories we now tell. He observes that the rabbits’ impact on the county is described using a vocabulary of contamination: “It is a ‘menace’, a ‘problem’, an ‘infestation’, a ‘nuisance’, a ‘plague’” (170). This narrative of disease encourages a redemptive violence against living rabbits to “cure” the rabbit problem in order to atone for human mistakes in a colonial past. Redemptive Violence in Action Rabbits in Australia have been subject to a wide range of eradication measures over the past century including shooting, the destruction of burrows, poisoning, ferreting, trapping, and the well-known rabbit proof fence in Western Australia. Particularly noteworthy in this slaughter has been the introduction of biological control measures with the release of the savage and painful disease Myxomatosis in late December 1950, followed by the release of the Calicivirus (Rabbit Haemorrhage Disease, or RHD) in 1996. As recently as March 2012 the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries announced a 1.5 million dollar program called “RHD Boost” which is attempting to develop a more effective biological control agent for rabbits who have become immune to the Calicivirus. In this perverse narrative, disease becomes a cure for the rabbit’s contamination of Australian environments. Calicivirus is highly infectious, spreads rapidly, and kills rabbits en masse. Following the release of Calicivirus in 1995 it killed 10 million rabbits in eight weeks (Ponsonby Veterinary Centre). While Calicivirus appears to be more humane than the earlier biological control, Myxomatosis, there are indications that it causes rabbits pain and stress. Victims are described as becoming very quiet, refusing to eat, straining for breath, losing coordination, becoming feverish, and excreting bloody nasal discharge (Heishman, 2011). Post-mortem dissection generally reveals a “pale and mottled liver, many small streaks or blotches on the lungs and an enlarged spleen... small thrombi or blood clots” (Coman 173). Public criticism of the cruel methods involved in killing rabbits is often assuaged with appeals to the greater good of the ecosystem. The Anti-Rabbit research foundation state on their Website, Rabbit-Free Australia, that: though killing rabbits may sound inhumane, wild rabbits are affecting the survival of native Australian plants and animals. It is our responsibility to control them. We brought the European rabbit here in the first place — they are an invasive pest. This assumption of personal and communal responsibility for the rabbit “problem” has a fundamental blind-spot. Arthur (130) observes that the progress of rabbits across the continent is often described as though they form a coordinated army: The rabbit extends its ‘dominion’, ‘dispossesses’ the indigenous bilby, causes sheep runs to be ‘abandoned’ and country ‘forfeited’, leaving the land in ‘ecological tatters’. While this language of battle pervades rabbit stories, humans rarely refer to themselves as invaders into Aboriginal lands. Arthur notes that, by taking responsibility for the rabbit’s introduction and eradication, the coloniser assumes an indigenous status as they defend the country against the exotic invader (134). The apprehension of moral responsibility can, in this sense, be understood as the assumption of settler indigeneity. This does not negate the fact that assuming human responsibility for the native environment can be an act of genuine care. In a country scarred by a history of ecocide, movements like the Easter Bilby campaign seek to rectify the negligent mistakes of the past. The problem is that reactive responses to the colonial devaluation of native life can be unproductive because they preserve the basic structure of the native/invasive dichotomy by simplistically reversing its values, and fail to respond to more complex ecological contexts and requirements (Plumwood). This is also socially problematic because the native/invasive divide of nonhuman life overlays more complex human politics of colonisation in Australia. The Native/Invasive Dualism The bilby is currently listed as an “endangered” species in Queensland and as “vulnerable” nationally. Bilbies once inhabited 70% of the Australian landscape, but now inhabit less than 15% of the country (Save the Bilby Fund). This dramatic reduction in bilby numbers has multiple causes, but the European rabbit has played a significant role in threatening the bilby species by competing for burrows and food. Other threats come from the predation of introduced species, such as feral cats and foxes, and the impact of farmed introduced species, such as sheep and cattle, which also destroy bilby habitats. Because the rabbit directly competes with the bilby for food and shelter in the Australian environment, the bilby can be classed as the underdog native, appealing to that larger Australian story about “the fair go”. It seems that the Easter bilby campaign is intended to level out the threat posed by the highly successful and adaptive rabbit through promoting the bilby in the “cultural selection” stakes. This involves encouraging bilby-love, while actively discouraging love and care for the introduced rabbits which threaten the bilby’s survival. On the Rabbit Free Australia Website, the campaign rationale to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby claims that: Very young children are indoctrinated with the concept that bunnies are nice soft fluffy creatures whereas in reality they are Australia’s greatest environmental feral pest and cause enormous damage to the arid zone. In this statement the lived corporeal presence of individual rabbits is denied as the “soft, fluffy” body disappears behind the environmentally problematic species’ behaviour. The assertion that children are “indoctrinated” to find rabbits love-able, and that this conflicts with the “reality” of the rabbit as environmentally destructive, denies the complexity of the living animal and the multiple possible responses to it. That children find rabbits “fluffy” is not the result of pro-rabbit propaganda, but because rabbits are fluffy! That Rabbit Free Australia could construe this to be some kind of elaborate falsehood demonstrates the disappearance of the individual rabbit in the native/invasive tale of colonisation. Rabbit-Free Australia seeks to eradicate the animal not only from Australian ecosystems, but from the hearts and minds of children who are told to replace the rabbit with the more fitting native bilby. There is no acceptance here of the rabbit as a complex animal that evokes ambivalent responses, being both worthy of moral consideration, care and love, and also an introduced and environmentally destructive species. The native/invasive dualism is a subject of sustained critique in environmental philosophy because it depends on a disjunctive temporal division drawn at the point of European settlement—1788. Environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren points out that the divide between animals who belong and animals who should be eradicated is “fundamentally premised on the reification of a specific historical moment that ignores the changing and dynamic nature of ecologies” (11). Mark Davis et al. explain that the practical value of the native/invasive dichotomy in conservation programs is seriously diminished and in some cases is becoming counterproductive (153). They note that “classifying biota according to their adherence to cultural standards of belonging, citizenship, fair play and morality does not advance our understanding of ecology” (153). Instead, they promote a more inclusive approach to conservation which accepts non-native species as part of Australia’s “new nature” (Low). Recent research into wildlife conservation indicates a striking lack of evidence for the case that pest control protects native diversity (see Bergstromn et al., Davis et al., Ewel & Putz, Reddiex & Forsyth). The problematic justification of “killing for conservation” becomes untenable when conservation outcomes are fundamentally uncertain. The mass slaughter which rabbits have been subjected to in Australia has been enacted with the goal of fostering life. This pursuit of creation through destruction, of re-birth through violent death, enacts a disturbing twist where death comes to signal the presence of life. This means, perversely, that a rabbit’s dead body becomes a valuable sign of environmental health. Conservation researchers Ben Reddiex and David M. Forsyth observe that this leads to a situation where environmental managers are “more interested in estimating how many pests they killed rather than the status of biodiversity they claimed to be able to protect” (715). What Other Stories Can We Tell about the Rabbit? With an ecological narrative that is failing, producing damage and death instead of fostering love and life, we are left with the question—what other stories can we tell about the place of the European rabbit in the Australian environment? How can the meaning ecologies of media and culture work in harmony with an ecological consciousness that promotes compassion for nonhuman life? Ignoring the native/invasive distinction entirely is deeply problematic because it registers the ecological history of Australia as continuity, and fails to acknowledge the colonising impact of European settlement on the environment. At the same time, continually reinforcing that divide through pro-invasive or pro-native stories drastically simplifies complex and interconnected ecological systems. Instead of the unproductive native/invasive dualism, ecologists and philosophers alike are suggesting “reconciliatory” approaches to the inhabitants of our shared environments which emphasise ecology as relational rather than classificatory. Evolutionary ecologist Scott P. Carroll uses the term “conciliation biology” as an alternative to invasion biology which focuses on the eradication of invasive species. “Conciliation biology recognises that many non-native species are permanent, that outcomes of native-nonnative interactions will vary depending on the scale of assessment and the values assigned to the biotic system, and that many non-native species will perform positive functions in one or more contexts” (186). This hospitable approach aligns with what Michael Rosensweig has termed “reconciliation ecology”—the modification and diversification of anthropogenic habitats to harbour a wider variety of species (201). Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Mark Bekoff encourages a “compassionate conservation” which avoids the “numbers game” of species thinking where certain taxonomies are valued above others and promotes approaches which “respect all life; treat individuals with respect and dignity; and tread lightly when stepping into the lives of animals”(24). In a similar vein environmental philosopher Deborah Bird Rose offers the term “Eco-reconciliation”, to describe a mode of “living generously with others, singing up relationships so that we all flourish” (Wild Dog 59). It may be that the rabbit cannot live in harmony with the bilby, and in this situation I am unsure of what a conciliation approach to ecology might look like in terms of managing both of these competing species. But I am sure what it should not look like if we are to promote approaches to ecology and conservation which avoid the simplistic dualism of native/invasive. The devaluation of rabbit life to the point of moral inconsiderability is fundamentally unethical. By classifying certain lives as “inappropriate,” and therefore expendable, the process of rabbit slaughter is simply too easy. The idea that the rabbit should disappear is disturbing in its abstract approach to these living, sentient creatures who share with us both place and history. A dynamic understanding of ecology dissipates the notion of a whole or static “nature.” This means that there can be no simple or comprehensive directives for how humans should interact with their environments. One of the most insidious aspects of the native/invasive divide is the way it makes violent death appear inevitable, as though rabbits must be culled. This obscures the many complex and contingent choices which determine the fate of nonhuman life. Understanding the dynamism of ecology requires an acceptance that nature does not provide simple prescriptive responses to problems, and instead “people are forced to choose the kind of environment they want” (189) and then take actions to engender it. This involves difficult decisions, one of which is culling to maintain rabbit numbers and facilitate environmental resilience. Living within a world of “discordant harmonies”, as Daniel Botkin evocatively describes it, environmental decisions are necessarily complex. The entanglement of ecological systems demands that we reject simplistic dualisms which offer illusory absolution from the consequences of the difficult choices humans make about life, ecologies, and how to manage them. Ecological Remembrance The vision of a rabbit-free Australia is unrealistic. As organisation like the Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation pursue this future ideal, they eradicate rabbits from the present, and seek to remove them from the past by replacing them culturally with the more suitable bilby. Culled rabbits lie rotting en masse in fields, food for no one, and even their cultural impact in human society is sought to be annihilated and replaced with more appropriate native creatures. The rabbits’ deaths do not turn back to life in transformative and regenerative processes that are ecological and cultural, but rather that death becomes “an event with no future” (Rose, Wild Dog 25). This is true oblivion, as the rabbit is entirely removed from the world. In this paper I have made a case for the importance of stories in ecology. I have argued that the kinds of stories we tell about rabbits determines how we treat them, and so have positioned stories as an essential part of an ecological system which takes “cultural selection” seriously. In keeping with this emphasis on story I offer to the conciliation push in ecological thinking the term “ecological remembrance” to capture an ethic of sharing time while sharing space. This spatio-temporal hospitality is focused on maintaining heterogeneous memories and histories of all beings who have impacted on the environment. In Deborah Bird Rose’s terms this is a “recuperative work” which commits to direct dialogical engagement with the past that is embedded in the present (Wild Country 23). In this sense it is a form of recuperation that promotes temporal and ecological continuity. Eco-remembrance aligns with dynamic understandings of ecology because it is counter-linear. Instead of approaching the past as a static idyll, preserved and archived, ecological remembrance celebrates the past as an ongoing, affective presence which is lived and performed. Ecological remembrance, applied to the European rabbit in Australia, would involve rejecting attempts to extricate the rabbit from Australian environments and cultures. It would seek acceptance of the rabbit as part of Australia’s “new nature” (Low), and aim for recognition of the rabbit’s impact on human society as part of dynamic multi-species ecologies. In this sense ecological remembrance of the rabbit directly opposes the goal of the Foundation for Rabbit Free Australia to eradicate the European rabbit from Australian environment and culture. On the Rabbit Free Australia website, the section on biological controls states that “the point is not how many rabbits are killed, but how many are left behind”. The implication is that the millions upon millions of rabbit lives extinguished have vanished from the earth, and need not be remembered or considered. However, as Deborah Rose argues, “all deaths matter” (Wild Dog 21) and “no death is a mere death” (Wild Dog 22). Every single rabbit is an individual being with its own unique life. To deny this is tantamount to claiming that each rabbit that dies from shooting or poisoning is the same rabbit dying again and again. Rose has written that “death makes claims upon all of us” (Wild Dog 19). These are claims of ethics and compassion, a claim that “we look into the eyes of the dying and not flinch, that we reach out to hold and to help” (Wild Dog 20). This claim is a duty of remembrance, a duty to “bear witness” (Wiesel 160) to life and death. The Nobel Peace Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, argued that memory is a reconciliatory force that creates bonds as mass annihilation seeks to destroy them. Memory ensures that no life becomes truly life-less as it wrests the victims of mass slaughter from “oblivion” and allows the dead to “vanquish death” (21). In a continent inhabited by dead rabbits—a community of the dead—remembering these lost individuals and their lost lives is an important task for making sure that no death is a mere death. An ethic of ecological remembrance follows this recuperative aim. References Arthur, Jay M. The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Bagust, Phil. “Cuddly Koalas, Beautiful Brumbies, Exotic Olives: Fighting for Media Selection in the Attention Economy.” “Imaging Natures”: University of Tasmania Conference Proceedings (2004). 25 April 2012 ‹www.utas.edu.au/arts/imaging/bagust.pdf› Bekoff, Marc. “First Do No Harm.” New Scientist (28 August 2010): 24 – 25. Bergstrom, Dana M., Arko Lucieer, Kate Kiefer, Jane Wasley, Lee Belbin, Tore K. Pederson, and Steven L. Chown. “Indirect Effects of Invasive Species Removal Devastate World Heritage Island.” Journal of Applied Ecology 46 (2009): 73– 81. Botkin, Daniel. B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Carroll, Scott. P. “Conciliation Biology: The Eco-Evolutionary Management of Permanently Invaded Biotic Systems.” Evolutionary Applications 4.2 (2011): 184 – 99. Coman, Brian. Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1999. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 – 1900. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Davis, Mark., Matthew Chew, Richard Hobbs, Ariel Lugo, John Ewel, Geerat Vermeij, James Brown, Michael Rosenzweig, Mark Gardener, Scott Carroll, Ken Thompson, Steward Pickett, Juliet Stromberg, Peter Del Tredici, Katharine Suding, Joan Ehrenfield, J. Philip Grime, Joseph Mascaro and John Briggs. “Don’t Judge Species on their Origins.” Nature 474 (2011): 152 – 54. Ewel, John J. and Francis E. Putz. “A Place for Alien Species in Ecosystem Restoration.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2.7 (2004): 354-60. Forsyth, David M. and Ben Reddiex. “Control of Pest Mammals for Biodiversity Protection in Australia.” Wildlife Research 33 (2006): 711–17. Garnett, Ali, and Kaye Kessing. Easter Bilby. Department of Environment and Heritage: Kaye Kessing Productions, 2006. Heishman, Darice. “VHD Factsheet.” House Rabbit Network (2011). 15 June 2012 ‹http://www.rabbitnetwork.org/articles/vhd.shtml› Low, Tim. New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. Melbourne: Penguin, 2002. Phillips, Sara. “How Eating Easter Chocolate Can Save Endangered Animals.” ABC Environment (1 April 2010). 15 June 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/04/01/2862039.htm› Plumwood, Val. “Decolonising Australian Gardens: Gardening and the Ethics of Place.” Australian Humanities Review 36 (2005). 15 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-July-2005/09Plumwood.html› Ponsonby Veterinary Centre. “Rabbit Viral Hemorrhagic Disease (VHD).” Small Pets. 26 May 2012 ‹http://www.petvet.co.nz/small_pets.cfm?content_id=85› Robin, Libby. How a Continent Created a Nation. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports From a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. ——-. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Rosenzweig, Michael. L. “Reconciliation Ecology and the Future of Species Diversity.” Oryx 37.2 (2003): 194 – 205. Save the Bilby Fund. “Bilby Fact Sheet.” Easterbilby.com.au (2003). 26 May 2012 ‹http://www.easterbilby.com.au/Project_material/factsheet.asp› Van Dooren, Thom. “Invasive Species in Penguin Worlds: An Ethical Taxonomy of Killing for Conservation.” Conservation and Society 9.4 (2011): 286 – 98. Wiesel, Elie. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books, 1990.

Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. 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“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

In 2013, the Capricornia Arts Mob (CAM), an Indigenous collective of artists situated in Rockhampton, central Queensland, Australia, successfully tendered for one of three public art projects that were grouped under the title Flood Markers (Roberts; Roberts and Mackay; Robinson and Mackay). Commissioned as part of the Queensland Government's Community Development and Engagement Initiative, Flood Markers aims to increase awareness of Rockhampton’s history, with particular focus on the Fitzroy River and the phenomena of flooding. Honouring Land Connections is CAM’s contribution to the project and consists of several “memory poles” that stand alongside the Fitzroy River in Toonooba Park. Rockhampton lies on Dharumbal Country with Toonooba being the Dharumbal name for the Fitzroy River and the inspiration for the work due to its cultural significance to the Aboriginal people of that region. The name Toonooba, as well as other images and icons including boomerangs, spears, nets, water lily, and frogs, amongst others, are carved, burnt, painted and embedded into the large ironbark poles. These stand with the river on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton on the other (see fig. 1, 2 and 3).Figure 1 Figure 2Figure 3Within this article, we discuss Honouring Land Connections as having two main functions which contribute to its significance as Indigenous cultural expression and identity affirmation. Firstly, the memory poles (as well as the process of sourcing materials and producing the final product) are a manifestation of Country and a representation of its stories and lived memories. Honouring Land Connections provides a means for Aboriginal people to revel in Country and maintain connections to a vital component of their being as Indigenous. Secondly, by revealing Indigenous stories, experiences, and memories, Honouring Land Connections emphasises Indigenous voices and perspectives within a place dominated by Eurocentric outlooks and knowledges. Toonooba provides the backdrop on which the complexities of cultural and identity formation within settler-colonial spaces are highlighted whilst revelling in continuous Indigenous presence.Flood Markers as ArtArtists throughout the world have used flood markers as a means of visual expression through which to explore and reveal local histories, events, environments, and socio-cultural understandings of the relationships between persons, places, and the phenomena of flooding. Geertz describes art as a social text embedded within wider socio-cultural systems; providing insight into cultural, social, political, economic, gendered, religious, ethnic, environmental, and biographical contexts. Flood markers are not merely metric tools used for measuring the height of a river, but rather serve as culture artefacts or indexes (Gell Art and Agency; Gell "Technology of Enchantment") that are products and producers of socio-culture contexts and the memories and experiences embedded within them. Through different methods, mediums, and images, artists have created experiential and intellectual spaces where those who encounter their work are encouraged to engage their surroundings in thought provoking and often-new ways.In some cases, flood markers have brought attention to the “character and natural history” of a particular place, where artists such as Louise Lavarack have sought to provoke consciousness of the movement of water across flood plains (Lavarack). In other works, flood markers have served as memorials to individuals such as Gilbert White whose daughter honoured his life and research through installing a glass spire at Boulder Creek, Colorado in 2011 (White). Tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 have also been commemorated through flood markers. Artist Christopher Saucedo carved 1,836 waves into a freestanding granite block; each wave representing a life lost (University of New Orleans). The weight of the granite symbolises the endurance and resilience of those who faced, and will continue to face, similar forces of nature. The Pillar of Courage erected in 2011 in Ipswich, Queensland, similarly contains the words “resilience, community, strength, heroes, caring and unity” with each word printed on six separate sections of the pillar, representing the six major floods that have hit the region (Chudleigh).Whilst these flood markers provide valuable insights into local histories, specific to each environmental and socio-cultural context, works such as the Pillar of Courage fail to address Indigenous relationships to Country. By framing flooding as a “natural disaster” to be overcome, rather than an expression of Country to be listened to and understood, Euro and human-centric perspectives are prioritised over Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Indigenous knowledges however encourages a reorientation of Eurocentric responses and relationships to Country, and in doing so challenge compartmentalised views of “nature” where flooding is separated from land and Country (Ingold Perception; Seton and Bradley; Singer). Honouring Land Connections symbolises the voice and eternal presence of Toonooba and counters presentations of flooding that depict it as historian Heather Goodall (36) once saw “as unusual events of disorder in which the river leaves its proper place with catastrophic results.”Country To understand flooding from Indigenous perspectives it is first necessary to discuss Country and apprehend what it means for Indigenous peoples. Country refers to the physical, cosmological, geographical, relational, and emotional setting upon which Indigenous identities and connections to place and kin are embedded. Far from a passive geographic location upon which interactions take place, Country is an active and responsive agent that shapes and contextualises social interactions between and amongst all living beings. Bob Morgan writes of how “Country is more than issues of land and geography; it is about spirituality and identity, knowing who we are and who we are connected to; and it helps us understand how all living things are connected.” Country is also an epistemological frame that is filled with knowledge that may be known and familiarised whilst being knowledge itself (Langton "Sacred"; Rose Dingo; Yunupingu).Central to understanding Country is the fact that it refers to a living being’s spiritual homeland which is the ontological place where relationships are formed and maintained (Yunupingu). As Country nurtures and provides the necessities for survival and prosperity, Indigenous people (but also non-Indigenous populations) have moral obligations to care for Country as kin (Rose Nourishing Terrains). Country is epistemic, relational, and ontological and refers to both physical locations as well as modes of “being” (Heidegger), meaning it is carried from place to place as an embodiment within a person’s consciousness. Sally Morgan (263) describes how “our country is alive, and no matter where we go, our country never leaves us.” Country therefore is fluid and mobile for it is ontologically inseparable to one’s personhood, reflected through phrases such as “I am country” (B. Morgan 204).Country is in continuous dialogue with its surroundings and provides the setting upon which human and non-human beings; topographical features such as mountains and rivers; ancestral beings and spirits such as the Rainbow Snake; and ecological phenomena such as winds, tides, and floods, interact and mutually inform each other’s existence (Rose Nourishing Terrains). For Aboriginal people, understanding Country requires “deep listening” (Atkinson; Ungunmerr), a responsive awareness that moves beyond monological and human-centric understandings of the world and calls for deeper understandings of the mutual and co-dependant relationships that exist within it. The awareness of such mutuality has been discussed through terms such as “kincentrism” (Salmón), “meshworks” (Ingold Lines), “webs of connection” (Hokari), “nesting” (Malpas), and “native science” (Cajete). Such concepts are ways of theorising “place” as relational, physical, and mental locations made up of numerous smaller interactions, each of which contribute to the identity and meaning of place. Whilst each individual agent or object retains its own autonomy, such autonomy is dependent on its wider relation to others, meaning that place is a location where “objectivity, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity converge” (Malpas 35) and where the very essence of place is revealed.Flooding as DialogueWhen positioned within Indigenous frameworks, flooding is both an agent and expression of Toonooba and Country. For the phenomenon to occur however, numerous elements come into play such as the fall of rain; the layout of the surrounding terrain; human interference through built weirs and dams; and the actions and intervention of ancestral beings and spirits. Furthermore, flooding has a direct impact on Country and all life within it. This is highlighted by Dharumbal Elder Uncle Billy Mann (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann") who speaks of the importance of flooding in bringing water to inland lagoons which provide food sources for Dharumbal people, especially at times when the water in Toonooba is low. Such lagoons remain important places for fishing, hunting, recreational activities, and cultural practices but are reliant on the flow of water caused by the flowing, and at times flooding river, which Uncle Mann describes as the “lifeblood” of Dharumbal people and Country (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann"). Through her research in the Murray-Darling region of New South Wales, Weir writes of how flooding sustains life though cycles that contribute to ecological balance, providing nourishment and food sources for all beings (see also Cullen and Cullen 98). Water’s movement across land provokes the movement of animals such as mice and lizards, providing food for snakes. Frogs emerge from dry clay plains, finding newly made waterholes. Small aquatic organisms flourish and provide food sources for birds. Golden and silver perch spawn, and receding waters promote germination and growth. Aboriginal artist Ron Hurley depicts a similar cycle in a screen-print titled Waterlily–Darambal Totem. In this work Hurley shows floodwaters washing away old water lily roots that have been cooked in ant bed ovens as part of Dharumbal ceremonies (UQ Anthropology Museum). The cooking of the water lily exposes new seeds, which rains carry to nearby creeks and lagoons. The seeds take root and provide food sources for the following year. Cooking water lily during Dharumbal ceremonies contributes to securing and maintaining a sustainable food source as well as being part of Dharumbal cultural practice. Culture, ecological management, and everyday activity are mutually connected, along with being revealed and revelled in. Aboriginal Elder and ranger Uncle Fred Conway explains how Country teaches Aboriginal people to live in balance with their surroundings (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). As Country is in constant communication, numerous signifiers can be observed on land and waterscapes, indicating the most productive and sustainable time to pursue certain actions, source particular foods, or move to particular locations. The best time for fishing in central Queensland for example is when Wattles are in bloom, indicating a time when fish are “fatter and sweeter” (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). In this case, the Wattle is 1) autonomous, having its own life cycle; 2) mutually dependant, coming into being because of seasonal weather patterns; and 3) an agent of Country that teaches those with awareness how to respond and benefit from its lessons.Dialogue with Country As Country is sentient and responsive, it is vital that a person remains contextually aware of their actions on and towards their surroundings. Indigenous peoples seek familiarity with Country but also ensure that they themselves are known and familiarised by it (Rose Dingo). In a practice likened to “baptism”, Langton ("Earth") describes how Aboriginal Elders in Cape York pour water over the head of newcomers as a way of introducing them to Country, and ensuring that Country knows those who walk upon it. These introductions are done out of respect for Country and are a way of protecting outsiders from the potentially harmful powers of ancestral beings. Toussaint et al. similarly note how during mortuary rites, parents of the deceased take water from rivers and spit it back into the land, symbolising the spirit’s return to Country.Dharumbal man Robin Hatfield demonstrates the importance of not interfering with the dialogue of Country through recalling being told as a child not to disturb Barraru or green frogs. Memmott (78) writes that frogs share a relationship with the rain and flooding caused by Munda-gadda, the Rainbow Snake. Uncle Dougie Hatfield explains the significance of Munda-gadda to his Country stating how “our Aboriginal culture tells us that all the waterways, lagoons, creeks, rivers etc. and many landforms were created by and still are protected by the Moonda-Ngutta, what white people call the Rainbow Snake” (Memmott 79).In the case of Robin Hatfield, to interfere with Barraru’s “business” is to threaten its dialogue with Munda-gadda and in turn the dialogue of Country in form of rain. In addition to disrupting the relational balance between the frog and Munda-gadda, such actions potentially have far-reaching social and cosmological consequences. The rain’s disruption affects the flood plains, which has direct consequences for local flora and transportation and germination of water lily seeds; fauna, affecting the spawning of fish and their movement into lagoons; and ancestral beings such as Munda-gadda who continue to reside within Toonooba.Honouring Land Connections provided artists with a means to enter their own dialogue with Country and explore, discuss, engage, negotiate, and affirm aspects of their indigeneity. The artists wanted the artwork to remain organic to demonstrate honour and respect for Dharumbal connections with Country (Roberts). This meant that materials were sourced from the surrounding Country and the poles placed in a wave-like pattern resembling Munda-gadda. Alongside the designs and symbols painted and carved into the poles, fish skins, birds, nests, and frogs are embalmed within cavities that are cut into the wood, acting as windows that allow viewers to witness components of Country that are often overlooked (see fig. 4). Country therefore is an equal participant within the artwork’s creation and continuing memories and stories. More than a representation of Country, Honouring Land Connections is a literal manifestation of it.Figure 4Opening Dialogue with Non-Indigenous AustraliaHonouring Land Connections is an artistic and cultural expression that revels in Indigenous understandings of place. The installation however remains positioned within a contested “hybrid” setting that is informed by both Indigenous and settler-colonial outlooks (Bhabha). The installation for example is separated from the other two artworks of Flood Markers that explore Rockhampton’s colonial and industrial history. Whilst these are positioned within a landscaped area, Honouring Land Connections is placed where the grass is dying, seating is lacking, and is situated next to a dilapidated coast guard building. It is a location that is as quickly left behind as it is encountered. Its separation from the other two works is further emphasised through its depiction in the project brief as a representation of Rockhampton’s pre-colonial history. Presenting it in such a way has the effect of bookending Aboriginal culture in relation to European settlement, suggesting that its themes belong to a time past rather than an immediate present. Almost as if it is a revelation in and of itself. Within settler-colonial settings, place is heavily politicised and often contested. In what can be seen as an ongoing form of colonialism, Eurocentric epistemologies and understandings of place continue to dominate public thought, rhetoric, and action in ways that legitimise White positionality whilst questioning and/or subjugating other ways of knowing, being, and doing (K. Martin; Moreton-Robinson; Wolfe). This turns places such as Toonooba into agonistic locations of contrasting and competing interests (Bradfield). For many Aboriginal peoples, the memories and emotions attached to a particular place can render it as either comfortable and culturally safe, or as unsafe, unsuitable, unwelcoming, and exclusionary (Fredericks). Honouring Land Connections is one way of publicly asserting and recognising Toonooba as a culturally safe, welcoming, and deeply meaningful place for Indigenous peoples. Whilst the themes explored in Honouring Land Connections are not overtly political, its presence on colonised/invaded land unsettles Eurocentric falsities and colonial amnesia (B. Martin) of an uncontested place and history in which Indigenous voices and knowledges are silenced. The artwork is a physical reminder that encourages awareness—particularly for non-Indigenous populations—of Indigenous voices that are continuously demanding recognition of Aboriginal place within Country. Similar to the boomerangs carved into the poles representing flooding as a natural expression of Country that will return (see fig. 5), Indigenous peoples continue to demand that the wider non-Indigenous population acknowledge, respect, and morally responded to Aboriginal cultures and knowledges.Figure 5Conclusion Far from a historic account of the past, the artists of CAM have created an artwork that promotes awareness of an immediate and emerging Indigenous presence on Country. It creates a space that is welcoming to Indigenous people, allowing them to engage with and affirm aspects of their living histories and cultural identities. Through sharing stories and providing “windows” into Aboriginal culture, Country, and lived experiences (which like the frogs of Toonooba are so often overlooked), the memory poles invite and welcome an open dialogue with non-Indigenous Australians where all may consider their shared presence and mutual dependence on each other and their surroundings.The memory poles are mediatory agents that stand on Country, revealing and bearing witness to the survival, resistance, tenacity, and continuity of Aboriginal peoples within the Rockhampton region and along Toonooba. Honouring Land Connections is not simply a means of reclaiming the river as an Indigenous space, for reclamation signifies something regained after it has been lost. What the memory poles signify is something eternally present, i.e. Toonooba is and forever will be embedded in Aboriginal Country in which we all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and non-human, share. The memory poles serve as lasting reminders of whose Country Rockhampton is on and describes the life ways of that Country, including times of flood. Through celebrating and revelling in the presence of Country, the artists of CAM are revealing the deep connection they have to Country to the wider non-Indigenous community.ReferencesAtkinson, Judy. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Spinifex Press, 2002.Bhabha, Homi, K. The Location of Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2012.Bradfield, Abraham. "Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia." Religions 10.8 (2019): 469.Cajete, Gregory. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. 1st ed. 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Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

Introduction Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”.If veganism meansa philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. (Vegan Society)then our interest in this article lies in how a stereotyped label of veganism (and other associated attributes) is being used across Australian public spheres to challenge the work of animal activists as they call out factory farming for entrenched animal cruelty. This is carried out in three main parts. First, following an outline of our research approach, we examine the processes of stereotyping and the key dimensions of vegan stereotyping. Second, in the main part of the article, we reveal how opponents to such animal activist organisations as Animals Australia attempt to undermine activist calls for change by framing them as promoting an un-Australian vegan agenda. Finally, we consider how, despite such framing, that organisation is generating productive public debate around animal welfare, and, further, facilitating the creation of new activist identifications and identities.Research ApproachData collection involved searching for articles where Animals Australia and animal activism were yoked with veg*n (vegan and vegetarian), across the period May 2011 to 2016 (discussion peaked between May and June 2013). This period was of interest because it exposed a flare point with public discord being expressed between communities—namely between rural and urban consumers, farmers and animal activists, Coles Supermarkets (identified by The Australian Government the Treasury as one of two major supermarkets holding over 65% share of Australian food retail market) and their producers—and a consequent voicing of disquiet around Australian identity. We used purposive sampling (Waller, Farquharson, and Dempsey 67) to identify relevant materials as we knew in advance the case was “information-rich” (Patton 181) and would provide insightful information about a “troublesome” phenomenon (Emmel 6). Materials were collected from online news articles (30) and readers’ comments (167), online magazines (2) and websites (2) and readers’ comments (3), news items (Factiva 13), Australian Broadcasting Commission television (1) and radio (1), public blogs (2), and Facebook pages from involved organisations, specifically Australia’s National Farmers’ Federation (NFF, 155 posts) and Coles Supermarkets (29 posts). Many of these materials were explicitly responsive to a) Animals Australia’s Make It Possible campaign against Australian factory farming (launched and highly debated during this period), and b) Coles Supermarket’s short-lived partnership with Animals Australia in 2013. We utilised content analysis so as to make visible the most prominent and consistent stereotypes utilised in these various materials during the identified period. The approach allowed us to code and categorise materials so as to determine trends and patterns of words used, their relationships, and key structures and ways of speaking (Weerakkody). In addition, discourse analysis (Gee) was used in order to identify and track “language-in-use” so as to make visible the stereotyping deployed during the public reception of both the campaign and Animals Australia’s associated partnership with Coles. These methods enabled a “nuanced approach” (Coleman and Moss 12) with which to spot putdowns, innuendos, and stereotypical attitudes.Vegan StereotypingStereotypes creep into everyday language and are circulated and amplified through mainstream media, speeches by public figures, and social media. Stereotypes maintain their force through being reused and repurposed, making them difficult to eradicate due to their “cumulative effects” and influence (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht, Tullett, Legault, and Kang; Pickering). Over time stereotypes can become the lens through which we view “the world and social reality” (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht et al.). In summation, stereotyping:reduces identity categories to particular sets of deeds, attributes and attitudes (Whitley and Kite);informs individuals’ “cognitive investments” (Blum 267) by associating certain characteristics with particular groups;comprises symbolic and connotative codes that carry sets of traits, deeds, or beliefs (Cover; Rosello), and;becomes increasingly persuasive through regulating language and image use as well as identity categories (Cover; Pickering; Rosello).Not only is the “iterative force” (Rosello 35) of such associative stereotyping compounded due to its dissemination across digital media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, websites, and online news, but attempts to denounce it tend to increase its “persuasive power” (29). Indeed, stereotypes seem to refuse “to die” (23), remaining rooted in social and cultural memory (Whitley and Kite 10).As such, despite the fact that there is increasing interest in Australia and elsewhere in new food norms and plant-based diets (see, e.g., KPMG), as well as in vegan lifestyle options (Wright), studies still show that vegans remain a negatively stereotyped group. Previous studies have suggested that vegans mark a “symbolic threat” to Western, conventionally meat-eating cultures (MacInnis and Hodson 722; Stephens Griffin; Cole and Morgan). One key UK study of national newspapers, for instance, showed vegans continuing to be discredited in multiple ways as: 1) “self-evidently ridiculous”; 2) “ascetics”; 3) having a lifestyle difficult and impossible to maintain; 4) “faddist”; 5) “oversensitive”; and 6) “hostile extremists” (Cole and Morgan 140–47).For many Australians, veganism also appears anathema to their preferred culture and lifestyle of meat-eating. For instance, the NFF, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), and other farming bodies continue to frame veganism as marking an extreme form of lifestyle, as anti-farming and un-Australian. Such perspectives are also circulated through online rural news and readers’ comments, as will be discussed later in the article. Such representations are further exemplified by the MLA’s (Lamb, Australia Day, Celebrate Australia) Australia Day lamb advertising campaigns (Bembridge; Canning). For multiple consecutive years, the campaign presented vegans (and vegetarians) as being self-evidently ridiculous and faddish, representing them as mentally unhinged and fringe dwellers. Such stereotyping not only invokes “affective reactions” (Whitley and Kite 8)—including feelings of disgust towards individuals living such lifestyles or holding such values—but operates as “political baits” (Rosello 18) to shore-up or challenge certain social or political positions.Although such advertisements are arguably satirical, their repeated screening towards and on Australia Day highlights deeply held views about the normalcy of animal agriculture and meat-eating, “homogenizing” (Blum 276; Pickering) both meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike. Cultural stereotyping of this kind amplifies “social” as well as political schisms (Blum 276), and arguably discourages consumers—whether meat-eaters or non-meat-eaters—from advocating together around shared goals such as animal welfare and food safety. Additionally, given the rise of new food practices in Australia—including flexitarian, reducetarian, pescatarian, kangatarian (a niche form of ethical eating), vegivores, semi-vegetarian, vegetarian, veganism—alongside broader commitments to ethical consumption, such stereotyping suggests that consumers’ actual values and preferences are being disregarded in order to shore-up the normalcy of meat-eating.Animals Australia and the (So-Called) Vegan Agenda of Animal ActivismGiven these points, it is no surprise that there is a tacit belief in Australia that anyone labelled an animal activist must also be vegan. Within this context, we have chosen to primarily focus on the attitudes towards the campaigning work of Animals Australia—a not-for-profit organisation representing some 30 member groups and over 2 million individual supporters (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)—as this organisation has been charged as promoting a vegan agenda. Along with the RSPCA and Voiceless, Animals Australia represents one of the largest animal protection organisations within Australia (Chen). Its mission is to:Investigate, expose and raise community awareness of animal cruelty;Provide animals with the strongest representation possible to Government and other decision-makers;Educate, inspire, empower and enlist the support of the community to prevent and prohibit animal cruelty;Strengthen the animal protection movement. (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)In delivery of this mission, the organisation curates public rallies and protests, makes government and industry submissions, and utilises corporate outreach. Campaigning engages the Web, multiple forms of print and broadcast media, and social media.With regards to Animals Australia’s campaigns regarding factory farming—including the Make It Possible campaign (see fig. 1), launched in 2013 and key to the period we are investigating—the main message is that: the animals kept in these barren and constrictive conditions are “no different to our pets at home”; they are “highly intelligent creatures who feel pain, and who will respond to kindness and affection – if given the chance”; they are “someone, not something” (see the Make It Possible transcript). Campaigns deliberately strive to engender feelings of empathy and produce affect in viewers (see, e.g., van Gurp). Specifically they strive to produce mainstream recognition of the cruelties entrenched in factory farming practices and build community outrage against these practices so as to initiate industry change. Campaigns thus expressly challenge Australians to no longer support factory farmed animal products, and to identify with what we have elsewhere called everyday activist positions (Rodan and Mummery, “Animal Welfare”; “Make It Possible”). They do not, however, explicitly endorse a vegan position. Figure 1: Make It Possible (Animals Australia, campaign poster)Nonetheless, as has been noted, a common counter-tactic used within Australia by the industries targeted by such campaigns, has been to use well-known negative stereotypes to discredit not only the charges of systemic animal cruelty but the associated organisations. In our analysis, we found four prominent interconnected stereotypes utilised in both digital and print media to discredit the animal welfare objectives of Animals Australia. Together these cast the organisation as: 1) anti-meat-eating; 2) anti-farming; 3) promoting a vegan agenda; and 4) hostile extremists. These stereotypes are examined below.Anti-Meat-EatingThe most common stereotype attributed to Animals Australia from its campaigning is of being anti-meat-eating. This charge, with its associations with veganism, is clearly problematic for industries that facilitate meat-eating and within a culture that normalises meat-eating, as the following example expresses:They’re [Animals Australia] all about stopping things. They want to stop factory farming – whatever factory farming is – or they want to stop live exports. And in fact they’re not necessarily about: how do I improve animal welfare in the pig industry? Or how do I improve animal welfare in the live export industry? Because ultimately they are about a meat-free future world and we’re about a meat producing industry, so there’s not a lot of overlap, really between what we’re doing. (Andrew Spencer, Australian Pork Ltd., qtd. in Clark)Respondents engaging this stereotype also express their “outrage at Coles” (McCarthy) and Animals Australia for “pedalling [sic]” a pro-vegan agenda (Nash), their sense that Animals Australia is operating with ulterior motives (Flint) and criminal intent (Brown). They see cultural refocus as unnecessary and “an exercise in futility” (Harris).Anti-FarmingTo be anti-farming in Australia is generally considered to be un-Australian, with Glasgow suggesting that any criticism of “farming practices” in Australian society can be “interpreted as an attack on the moral integrity of farmers, amounting to cultural blasphemy” (200). Given its objectives, it is unsurprising that Animals Australia has been stereotyped as being “anti-farming”, a phrase additionally often used in conjunction with the charge of veganism. Although this comprises a misreading of veganism—given its focus on challenging animal exploitation in farming rather than entailing opposition to all farming—the NFF accused Animals Australia of being “blatantly anti-farming and proveganism” (Linegar qtd. in Nason) and as wanting “to see animal agriculture phased out” (National Farmers’ Federation). As expressed in more detail:One of the main factors for VFF and other farmers being offended is because of AA’s opinion and stand on ALL farming. AA wants all farming banned and us all become vegans. Is it any wonder a lot of people were upset? Add to that the proceeds going to AA which may have been used for their next criminal activity washed against the grain. If people want to stand against factory farming they have the opportunity not to purchase them. Surely not buying a product will have a far greater impact on factory farmed produce. Maybe the money could have been given to farmers? (Hunter)Such stereotyping reveals how strongly normalised animal agriculture is in Australia, as well as a tendency on the part of respondents to reframe the challenge of animal cruelty in some farming practices into a position supposedly challenging all farming practices.Promoting a Vegan AgendaAs is already clear, Animals Australia is often reproached for promoting a vegan agenda, which, it is further suggested, it keeps hidden from the Australian public. This viewpoint was evident in two key examples: a) the Australian public and organisations such as the NFF are presented as being “defenceless” against the “myopic vitriol of the vegan abolitionists” (Jonas); and b) Animals Australia is accused of accepting “loans from liberation groups” and being “supported by an army of animal rights lawyers” to promote a “hard core” veganism message (Bourke).Nobody likes to see any animals hurt, but pushing a vegan agenda and pushing bad attitudes by group members is not helping any animals and just serves to slow any progress both sides are trying to resolve. (V.c. Deb Ford)Along with undermining farmers’ “legitimate business” (Jooste), veganism was also considered to undermine Australia’s rural communities (Park qtd. in Malone).Hostile ExtremistsThe final stereotype linking veganism with Animals Australia was of hostile extremism (cf. Cole and Morgan). This means, for users, being inimical to Australian national values but, also, being akin to terrorists who engage in criminal activities antagonistic to Australia’s democratic society and economic livelihood (see, e.g., Greer; ABC News). It is the broad symbolic threat that “extremism” invokes that makes this stereotype particularly “infectious” (Rosello 19).The latest tag team attacks on our pork industry saw AL giving crash courses in how to become a career criminal for the severely impressionable, after attacks on the RSPCA against the teachings of Peter Singer and trying to bully the RSPCA into vegan functions menu. (Cattle Advocate)The “extremists” want that extended to dairy products, as well. The fact that this will cause the total annihilation of practically all animals, wild and domestic, doesn’t bother them in the least. (Brown)What is interesting about these last two dimensions of stereotyping is their displacement of violence. That is, rather than responding to the charge of animal cruelty, violence and extremism is attributed to those making the charge.Stereotypes and Symbolic Boundary ShiftingWhat is evident throughout these instances is how stereotyping as a “cognitive mechanism” is being used to build boundaries (Cherry 460): in the first instance, between “us” (the meat-eating majority) and “them” (the vegan minority aka animal activists); and secondly between human interest and livestock. This point is that animals may hold instrumental value and receive some protection through such, but any more stringent arguments for their protection at the expense of perceived human interests tend to be seen as wrong-headed (Sorenson; Munro).These boundaries are deeply entrenched in Western culture (Wimmer). They are also deeply problematic in the context of animal activism because they fragment publics, promote restrictive identities, and close down public debate (Lamont and Molnár). Boundary entrenching is clearly evident in the stereotyping work carried out by industry stakeholders where meat-eating and practices of industrialised animal agriculture are valorised and normalised. Challenging Australia’s meat production practices—irrespective of the reason given—is framed and belittled as entailing a vegan agenda, and further as contributing to the demise of farming and rural communities in Australia.More broadly, industry stakeholders are explicitly targeting the activist work by such organisations as Animals Australia as undermining the ‘Australian way of life’. In their reading, there is an irreconcilable boundary between human and animal interests and between an activist minority which is vegan, unreasonable, extremist and hostile to farming and the meat-eating majority which is representative of the Australian community and sustains the Australian economy. As discussed so far, such stereotyping and boundary making—even in their inaccuracies—can be pernicious in the way they entrench identities and divisions, and close the possibility for public debate.Rather than directly contesting the presuppositions and inaccuracies of such stereotyping, however, Animals Australia can be read as cultivating a process of symbolic boundary shifting. That is, rather than responding by simply underlining its own moderate position of challenging only intensive animal agriculture for systemic animal cruelty, Animals Australia uses its campaigns to develop “boundary blurring and crossing” tactics (Cherry 451, 459), specifically to dismantle and shift the symbolic boundaries conventionally in place between humans and non-human animals in the first instance, and between those non-human animals used for companionship and those used for food in the second (see fig. 2). Figure 2: That Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady (Animals Australia, campaign image on back of taxi)Indeed, the symbolic boundaries between humans and animals left unquestioned in the preceding stereotyping are being profoundly shaken by Animals Australia with campaigns such as Make It Possible making morally relevant likenesses between humans and animals highly visible to mainstream Australians. Namely, the organisation works to interpellate viewers to exercise their own capacities for emotional identification and moral imagination, to identify with animals’ experiences and lives, and to act upon that identification to demand change.So, rather than reactively striving to refute the aforementioned stereotypes, organisations such as Animals Australia are modelling and facilitating symbolic boundary shifting by building broad, emotionally motivated, pathways through which Australians are being encouraged to refocus their own assumptions, practices and identities regarding animal experience, welfare and animal-human relations. Indeed the organisation has explicitly framed itself as speaking on behalf of not only animals but all caring Australians, suggesting thereby the possibility of a reframing of Australian national identity. Although such a tactic does not directly contest this negative stereotyping—direct contestation being, as noted, ineffective given the perniciousness of stereotyping—such work nonetheless dismantles the oppositional charge of such stereotyping in calling for all Australians to proudly be a little bit anti-meat-eating (when that meat is from factory farmed animals), a little bit anti-factory farming, a little bit pro-veg*n, and a little bit proud to consider themselves as caring about animal welfare.For Animals Australia, in other words, appealing to Australians to care about animal welfare and to act in support of that care, not only defuses the stereotypes targeting them but encourages the work of symbolic boundary shifting that is really at the heart of this dispute. 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IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chapter 2.Graham, Mary. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/graham.html›.Gregory, Jenny. “Remembering Mounts Bay: The Narrows Scheme and the Internationalization of Perth Planning.” Studies in Western Australian History 27 (2011): 145–66.Independent Journal of Politics and News. “Perth Town Trust.” The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News 8 Jul. 1848: 2–3.Moore, George Fletcher. Extracts from the Letters of George Fletcher Moore. Ed. Martin Doyle. London: Orr and Smith, 1834.Morel-EdnieBrown, Felicity. “Layered Landscape: The Swamps of Colonial Northbridge.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2009): 390–419. Nannup, Noel. Songlines with Dr Noel Nannup. Dir. Faculty of Regional Professional Studies, Edith Cowan University (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://vimeo.com/129198094›. (Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

When I saw the word ‘bubbles’ my immediate thought went to the painting by John Millais of a child blowing bubbles that subsequently became part of the advertising campaign for Pears soap. Bubbles blown by children, as we all once did, last but a few seconds and lead on naturally to the theme of transience and constant change. Nothing lasts forever, even if human beings make attempts to impose permanence on the world. A child’s disappointment at having a soap bubble burst represents a deep human desire for permanence which is the focus of this article. Before the modern age, human life could be considered to be somewhat like a bubble in that it could be pricked at any time. This was especially the case with babies and young children who could be easily carried off. As Jeremy Taylor put it: but if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents. (9) More generally, human beings understood that there was nothing permanent about their existing circumstances and that the possibility of famine, disease and, even war was ever present. Pax Romana, which is eulogised by Edward Gibbon as a felicitous time, did not suffer much in the way of war, famine, or epidemics but it was still a time when many Romans would have suffered from a range of diseases and not always have been well nourished. It was, however, a time of considerable security for most Romans who did not need to fear a band of marauders turning up on their doorstep. Disease and war would follow in the wake of climate change during the next century (Harper). Pax Romana was a bubble of relative tranquillity in human history. For a short period of time, climatic conditions, economic circumstances and political stability coalesced to still the winds of time temporarily. But such bubbles were unusual in the European context, which was usually riven by war. Peace reigned, by and large, in the long nineteenth century and in the period following World War II, to which it is possible to attach the name ‘pax moderna’. In China, much longer bubbles have been the norm, but they were succeeded by terrible periods of famine, dislocation, and war. The Ming bubble burst in the seventeenth century amidst a time of cold, famine, and plague (Parker 115-151). In such circumstances there was an appreciation of the precariousness of human existence. This had two major effects: A search for permanence in a world of change and uncertainty, a means of creating a bubble that can resist that change. When living in a time of relative stability, dealing with the fear that that stability will only last so long and that bad things may be just around the corner. These two matters form the basis of this article. Human beings create bubbles as they attempt to control change. They then become attached to their bubbles, even to the extent of believing that their bubbles are the real world. This has the effect of bubbles continuing to exist even if they harm human understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Impermanence is the great reality of human existence; as Heraclitus (Burnet 136) correctly stated, we cannot place our foot in the same river twice. The extraordinary thing is that human beings possess a plastic nature that allows them to adapt to that impermanence (Melleuish & Rizzo ‘Limits’). The plasticity of human beings, as expressed in their culture, can be seen most clearly in the way that human languages constantly change. This occurs both in terms of word usage and grammatical structure. English was once an inflected language but cases now only really survive in personal pronouns. Words constantly change their meanings, both over time and in different places. Words appear to take on the appearance of permanence; they appear to form bubbles that are encased in lead, even when the reality is that words form multiple fragile bubbles that are constantly being burst and remade. The changing nature of the meaning of words only becomes known to a literate society, in particular a literate society that has a genuine sense of history. In an oral society words are free to change over time and there is little sense of those changes. Writing has the effect of fixing texts into a particular form; at the very least it makes creative reworking of texts much more difficult. Of course, there are counter examples to such a claim, the most famous of which are the Vedas which, it is argued, remained unchanged despite centuries of oral transmission (Doniger104-7). This fixed nature could be achieved because of the strict mode of transmission, ensuring that the hymns did not change when transmitted. As the Vedas are linked to the performance of rituals this exactness was necessary for the rituals to be efficacious (Olivelle xli-xlv). The transmission of words is not the same thing as the transmission of meaning. Nor does it mean that many words that today are used as seemingly universal ideas have always existed. Religion (Nongeri), state (Melleuish, ‘State’), civilisation, and culture (Melleuish, ‘Civilisation’) are all modern creations; ‘identity’ is only about sixty years old (Stokes 2). New words emerge to deal with new circumstances. For example, civilisation came into being partially because the old term ‘Christendom’ had become redundant; ‘identity’ replaced an earlier idea of national character. Words, then, are bubbles that human beings cast out onto the world and that appear to create the appearance of permanence. These bubbles encase the real world giving the thing that they name ‘being’, even as that thing is in flux and a condition of becoming. For Parmenides (loc. 1355-1439), the true nature of the world is being. The solidity provided by ‘being’ is a comfort in a world that is constantly changing and in which there is a constant threat of change. Words and ideas do not form stable bubbles, they form a string of bubbles, with individuals constantly blowing out new versions of a word, but they appear as if they were just the one bubble. One can argue, quite correctly, I believe, that this tendency to meld a string of bubbles into a single bubble is central to the human condition and actually helps human beings to come to terms with their existence in the world. ‘Bubble as being’ provides human beings with a considerable capacity to gain a degree of control over their world. Amongst other things, it allows for radical simplification. A.R. Luria (20-47), in his study of the impact of literacy on how human beings think, noted that illiterate Uzbeks classified colour in a complex way but that with the coming of literacy came to accept the quite simple colour classifications of the modern world. Interestingly, Uzbeks have no word for orange; the ‘being’ of colours is a human creation. One would think that this desire for ‘being’, for a world that is composed of ‘constants’, is confined to the world of human culture, but that is not the case. Everyone learns at school that the speed of light is a constant. Rupert Sheldrake (92-3) decided to check the measurement of the speed of light and discovered that the empirical measurements taken of its speed actually varied. Constants give the universe a smooth regularity that it would otherwise lack. However, there are a number of problems that emerge from a too strong attachment to these bubbles of being. One is that the word is mistaken for the thing; the power of the word, the logos, becomes so great that it comes to be assumed that all the objects described by a word must fit into a single model or type. This flies in the face of two realities. One is that every example of a named object is different. Hence, when one does something practically in the world, such as construct a building, one must adjust one’s activities according to local circumstances. That the world is heterogeneous explains why human beings need plasticity. They need to adapt their practices as they encounter new and different circumstances. If they do not, it may be the case that they will die. The problem with the logos introduced by literacy, the bubble of being, is that it makes human beings less flexible in their dealings with the world. The other reality is human plasticity itself. As word/bubbles are being constantly generated then each bubble will vary in its particular meaning, both at the community and, even, individual, level. Over time words will vary subtly in meaning in different places. There is no agreed common meaning to any word; being is an illusion. Of course, it is possible for governments and other institutions to lay down what the ‘real’ meaning of a word is, much in the same way as the various forms of measurement are defined by certain scientific criteria. This becomes dangerous in the case of abstract nouns. It is the source of ‘heresy’ which is often defined in terms of the meaning of particular words. Multiple, almost infinite, bubbles must be amalgamated into one big bubble. Attempts by logos professionals to impose a single meaning are often resisted by ordinary human beings who generally seem to be quite happy living with a range of bubbles (Tannous; Pegg). One example of mutation of meaning is the word ‘liberal’, which means quite different things in America and Australia. To add to the confusion, there are occasions when liberal is used in Australia in its American sense. This simply illustrates the reality that liberal has no specific ‘being’, some universal idea of which individual liberals are particular manifestations. The problem becomes even worse when one moves between languages and cultures. To give but one example; the ancient Greek word πολις is translated as state but it can be argued that the Greek πολις was a stateless society (Berent). There are good arguments for taking a pragmatic attitude to these matters and assuming that there is a vague general agreement regarding what words such as ‘democracy’ mean, and not to go down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of infinite bubbles. This works so long as individuals understand that bubbles of being are provisional in nature and are capable of being pricked. It is possible, however, for the bubbles to harden and to impose on us what is best described as the ‘tyranny of concepts’, whereby the idea or word obscures the reality. This can occur because some words, especially abstract nouns, have very vague meanings: they can be seen as a sort of cloudy bubble. Again, democracy is good example of a cloudy bubble whose meaning is very difficult to define. A cloudy bubble prevents us from analysing and criticising something too closely. Bubbles exist because human beings desire permanence in a world of change and transience. In this sense, the propensity to create bubbles is as much an aspect of human nature as its capacity for plasticity. They are the product of a desire to ‘tame time’ and to create a feeling of security in a world of flux. As discussed above, a measure of security has not been a common state of affairs for much of human history, which is why the Pax Romana was so idealised. If there is modern ‘bubble’ created by the Enlightenment it is the dream of Kantian perpetual peace, that it is possible to bring a world into being that is marked by permanent peace, in which all the earlier horrors of human existence, from famine to epidemics to war can be tamed and humanity live harmoniously and peacefully forever. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to ‘tame’ history (Melleuish & Rizzo, ‘Philosophy’). This can be done through the idea of progress. History can be placed into a bubble of constant improvement whereby human beings are constantly getting better, not just materially but also intellectually and morally. Progress very easily turns into a utopian fantasy where people no longer suffer and can live forever. The horrors of the first half of the twentieth century did little to dent the power of this bubble. There is still an element of modern culture that dreams of such a world actually coming into being. Human beings may try to convince themselves that the bubble of progress will not burst and that perpetual peace may well be perpetual, but underlying that hope there are deep anxieties born of the knowledge that ‘nothing lasts forever’. Since 1945, the West has lived through a period of peace and relative prosperity, a pax moderna; the European Union is very much a Kantian creation. Underneath the surface, however, contemporary Western culture has a deep fear that the bubble can burst very easily and that the veneer of modern civilisation will be stripped away. This fear manifests itself in a number of ways. One can be seen in the regular articles that appear about the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the earth (Drake). Such a collision will eventually occur but it is sixty five million years since the dinosaurs became extinct. Another is the fear of solar storm that could destroy both electricity grids and electronic devices (Britt). Another expression of this fear can be found in forms of artistic expression, including zombie, disaster, and apocalypse movies. These reveal something about the psyche of modernity, and modern democracy, in the same way that Athenian tragedy expressed the hopes and fears of fifth-century Athenian democracy through its elaboration of the great Greek myths. Robert Musil remarks in The Man without Qualities (833) that if humanity dreamed collectively it would dream Moosbrugger, a serial murderer. Certainly, it appears to be the case that when the modern West dreams collectively it dreams of zombies, vampires, and a world in which civilised values have broken down and everyone lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all (Hobbes 86-100). This theme of the bursting of the ‘civilised bubble’ is a significant theme in contemporary culture. In popular culture, two of the best examples of this bursting are the television shows Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. In Galactica, human beings fall prey to the vengeful artificial creatures that they have created and mistreated. In The Walking Dead, as in all post-apocalyptic Zombie creations, the great fear is that human beings will turn into zombies, creatures that have been granted a form of immortality but at the cost of the loss of their souls. The fear of death is primal in all human beings, as is the fear of the loss of one’s humanity after death. This fear is expressed in the first surviving work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes unsuccessfully in search of immortal life. In perhaps the bleakest modern portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we encounter the ultimate Hobbesian universe. This is a world that has undergone an apocalypse of unknown origin. There is only darkness and dust and ash; nothing grows any longer and the few survivors are left to scavenge for the food left behind in tins. Or they can eat each other. It is the ultimate war of all against all. The clipped language, the lack of identity of the inhabitants, leads us into something that is almost no longer human. There is little or no hope. Reading The Road one is drawn back to the ‘House of Darkness’ described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the afterlife in terms of dust (“The Great Myths”): He bound my arms like the wings of a bird, to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:to the house which none who enters ever leaves, on the path that allows no journey back, to the house whose residents are deprived of light, where soil is itself their sustenance and clay their food,where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers, and see no light, but dwell in darkness. The Road is a profoundly depressing work, and the movie is barely watchable. In bursting the bubble of immortality, it plays on human fears and anxieties that stretch back millennia. The really interesting question is why such fears should emerge at a time when people in countries like America are living through a period of peace and prosperity. Much as people dream of a bubble of infinite progress and perpetual peace, they instinctively understand that that particular bubble is very fragile and may very easily be punctured. My final example is the less than well-known movie Zardoz, dating from the 1970s and starring Sean Connery. In it, some human beings have achieved ‘immortality’ but the consequences are less than perfect, and the Sean Connery character has the task, given to him by nature, to restore the balance between life and death, just as Gilgamesh had to understand that the two went together. There are some bubbles that are meant to be burst, some realities that human beings have to face if they are to appreciate their place in the scheme of things. Hence, we face a paradox. Human beings are constantly producing bubbles as they chart their way through a world that is also always changing. This is a consequence of their plastic nature. For good reasons, largely out of a desire for stability and security, they also tend to bring these infinite bubbles together into a much smaller number of bubbles that they view as possessing being and hence permanence. The problem is that these ‘bubbles of being’ are treated as if they really described the world in some sort of universal fashion, rather than treated as useful tools. Human beings can become the victims of their own creations. At the same time, human beings have an instinctive appreciation that the world is not stable and fixed, and this appreciation finds its expression in the products of their imagination. They burst bubbles through the use of their imagination in response to their fears and anxieties. Bubbles are the product of the interaction between the changing nature of both the world and human beings and the desire of those human beings for a degree of stability. Human beings need to appreciate both the reality of change and the strengths and weaknesses of bubbles as they navigate their way through the world. References Berent, M. “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics.” History of Political Thought XIX.3 (1998). Britt, R.R. “150 Years Ago: The Worst Solar Storm Ever.” Space.com, 2 Sep. 2009. <https://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html>. Burnet, J. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892. Doniger, W. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Drake, N. “Why NASA Plans to Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid.” National Geographic, 28 Apr. 2020. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/giant-asteroid-nasa-dart-deflection/>. Gibbons, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 1. 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Rizzo. “Limits of Naturalism: Plasticity, Finitude and the Imagination.” Cosmos & History 11.1 (2015): 221-238. Melleuish, G., and S.G. Rizzo. “Philosophy of History: Change, Stability and the Tragic Human Condition.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13.3 (2017): 292-311. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Vol. 2. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Vintage International, 1996. Nongeri, B. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Olivelle, P. Introduction. Upanisads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Parker, G. Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale, 2013. Parmenides. Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction by David Gallop. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. Kindle edition. Pegg, M.G. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Illusion. London: Coronet: 2013. Stokes, G. Introduction. In The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Tannous, J. The Making of the Medieval Middle East. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019. Taylor, J. Holy Dying. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000.

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Brien, Donna Lee. “Looking at Death with Writers’ Eyes: Developing Protocols for Utilising Roadside Memorials in Creative Writing Classes.” Roadside Memorials. Ed. Jennifer Clark. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2006. 208–216. Campbell, Elaine. “Public Sphere as Assemblage: The Cultural Politics of Roadside Memorialization.” The British Journal of Sociology 64.3 (2013): 526–547. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. 43 BC. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1903. Clark, Jennifer. “But Statistics Don’t Ride Skateboards, They Don’t Have Nicknames Like ‘Champ’: Personalising the Road Dead with Roadside Memorials.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Roadside Memorials in Northeastern Thailand.” OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 66.4 (2012–13): 343–363. 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Haider, Amna. “War Trauma and Gothic Landscapes of Dispossession and Dislocation in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.” Gothic Studies 14.2 (2012): 55–73. Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2003. Hartig, Kate V., and Kevin M. Dunn. “Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Australian Geographical Studies 36 (1998): 5–20. Hockey, Jenny, and Janet Draper. “Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course.” Body & Society 11.2 (2005): 41–57. Online version: 1–25. Jones, Ian, and Kaye McColl. (2006) “Highway Tragedy.” Goondiwindi Argus 9 Jun. 2006. Kiernan, Stephen P. “The Transformation of Death in America.” Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make. Eds. Nan Bauer-Maglin, and Donna Perry. Rutgers University: Rutgers UP, 2010. 163–182. Klaassens, M., P.D. Groote, and F.M. 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This article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian gastro-multiculturalism and a marked public resistance to other recycling and reuse of food products, have not yet been a focus of study. The process of producing Vegemite from waste would seem to align with contemporary moves towards recycling food waste, and ensuring environmental sustainability and food security, yet even during times of austerity and environmental concern this has not provided the company with a viable marketing strategy. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of product memorialisation have created a superbrand through focusing on Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value.John Scanlan notes that producing waste is a core feature of modern life, and what we dispose of as surplus to our requirements—whether this comprises material objects or more abstract products such as knowledge—reveals much about our society. In observing this, Scanlan asks us to consider the quite radical idea that waste is central to everything of significance to us: the “possibility that the surprising core of all we value results from (and creates even more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (9). Others have noted the ambivalent relationship we have with the waste we produce. C. T. Anderson notes that we are both creator and agent of its disposal. It is our ambivalence towards waste, coupled with its ubiquity, that allows waste materials to be described so variously: negatively as garbage, trash and rubbish, or more positively as by-products, leftovers, offcuts, trimmings, and recycled.This ambivalence is also crucial to understanding the affectionate relationship the Australian public have with Vegemite, a relationship that appears to exist in spite of the product’s unpalatable origins in waste. A study of Vegemite reveals that consumers can be comfortable with waste, even to the point of eating recycled waste, as long as that fact remains hidden and unmentioned. In Vegemite’s case not only has the product’s connection to waste been rendered invisible, it has been largely kept out of sight despite considerable media and other attention focusing on the product. Recycling Food Waste into Food ProductRecent work such as Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land and Tristram Stuart’s Waste make waste uncomfortably visible, outlining how much waste, and food waste in particular, the Western world generates and how profligately this is disposed of. Their aim is clear: a call to less extravagant and more sustainable practices. The relatively recent interest in reducing our food waste has, of course, introduced more complexity into a simple linear movement from the creation of a food product, to its acquisition or purchase, and then to its consumption and/or its disposal. Moreover, the recycling, reuse and repurposing of what has previously been discarded as waste is reconfiguring the whole idea of what waste is, as well as what value it has. The initiatives that seem to offer the most promise are those that reconfigure the way waste is understood. However, it is not only the process of transforming waste from an abject nuisance into a valued product that is central here. It is also necessary to reconfigure people’s acculturated perceptions of, and reactions to waste. Food waste is generated during all stages of the food cycle: while the raw materials are being grown; while these are being processed; when the resulting food products are being sold; when they are prepared in the home or other kitchen; and when they are only partly consumed. Until recently, the food industry in the West almost universally produced large volumes of solid and liquid waste that not only posed problems of disposal and pollution for the companies involved, but also represented a reckless squandering of total food resources in terms of both nutrient content and valuable biomass for society at large. While this is currently changing, albeit slowly, the by-products of food processing were, and often are, dumped (Stuart). In best-case scenarios, various gardening, farming and industrial processes gather household and commercial food waste for use as animal feed or as components in fertilisers (Delgado et al; Wang et al). This might, on the surface, appear a responsible application of waste, yet the reality is that such food waste often includes perfectly good fruit and vegetables that are not quite the required size, shape or colour, meat trimmings and products (such as offal) that are completely edible but extraneous to processing need, and other high grade product that does not meet certain specifications—such as the mountains of bread crusts sandwich producers discard (Hickman), or food that is still edible but past its ‘sell by date.’ In the last few years, however, mounting public awareness over the issues of world hunger, resource conservation, and the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste has accelerated efforts to make sustainable use of available food supplies and to more efficiently recycle, recover and utilise such needlessly wasted food product. This has fed into and led to multiple new policies, instances of research into, and resultant methods for waste handling and treatment (Laufenberg et al). Most straightforwardly, this involves the use or sale of offcuts, trimmings and unwanted ingredients that are “often of prime quality and are only rejected from the production line as a result of standardisation requirements or retailer specification” from one process for use in another, in such processed foods as soups, baby food or fast food products (Henningsson et al. 505). At a higher level, such recycling seeks to reclaim any reusable substances of significant food value from what could otherwise be thought of as a non-usable waste product. Enacting this is largely dependent on two elements: an available technology and being able to obtain a price or other value for the resultant product that makes the process worthwhile for the recycler to engage in it (Laufenberg et al). An example of the latter is the use of dehydrated restaurant food waste as a feedstuff for finishing pigs, a reuse process with added value for all involved as this process produces both a nutritious food substance as well as a viable way of disposing of restaurant waste (Myer et al). In Japan, laws regarding food waste recycling, which are separate from those governing other organic waste, are ensuring that at least some of food waste is being converted into animal feed, especially for the pigs who are destined for human tables (Stuart). Other recycling/reuse is more complex and involves more lateral thinking, with the by-products from some food processing able to be utilised, for instance, in the production of dyes, toiletries and cosmetics (Henningsson et al), although many argue for the privileging of food production in the recycling of foodstuffs.Brewing is one such process that has been in the reuse spotlight recently as large companies seek to minimise their waste product so as to be able to market their processes as sustainable. In 2009, for example, the giant Foster’s Group (with over 150 brands of beer, wine, spirits and ciders) proudly claimed that it recycled or reused some 91.23% of 171,000 tonnes of operational waste, with only 8.77% of this going to landfill (Foster’s Group). The treatment and recycling of the massive amounts of water used for brewing, rinsing and cooling purposes (Braeken et al.; Fillaudeaua et al.) is of significant interest, and is leading to research into areas as diverse as the development microbial fuel cells—where added bacteria consume the water-soluble brewing wastes, thereby cleaning the water as well as releasing chemical energy that is then converted into electricity (Lagan)—to using nutrient-rich wastewater as the carbon source for creating bioplastics (Yu et al.).In order for the waste-recycling-reuse loop to be closed in the best way for securing food supplies, any new product salvaged and created from food waste has to be both usable, and used, as food (Stuart)—and preferably as a food source for people to consume. There is, however, considerable consumer resistance to such reuse. Resistance to reusing recycled water in Australia has been documented by the CSIRO, which identified negative consumer perception as one of the two primary impediments to water reuse, the other being the fundamental economics of the process (MacDonald & Dyack). This consumer aversion operates even in times of severe water shortages, and despite proof of the cleanliness and safety of the resulting treated water. There was higher consumer acceptance levels for using stormwater rather than recycled water, despite the treated stormwater being shown to have higher concentrations of contaminants (MacDonald & Dyack). This reveals the extent of public resistance to the potential consumption of recycled waste product when it is labelled as such, even when this consumption appears to benefit that public. Vegemite: From Waste Product to Australian IconIn this context, the savoury yeast spread Vegemite provides an example of how food processing waste can be repurposed into a new food product that can gain a high level of consumer acceptability. It has been able to retain this status despite half a century of Australian gastronomic multiculturalism and the wide embrace of a much broader range of foodstuffs. Indeed, Vegemite is so ubiquitous in Australian foodways that it is recognised as an international superbrand, a standing it has been able to maintain despite most consumers from outside Australasia finding it unpalatable (Rozin & Siegal). However, Vegemite’s long product history is one in which its origin as recycled waste has been omitted, or at the very least, consistently marginalised.Vegemite’s history as a consumer product is narrated in a number of accounts, including one on the Kraft website, where the apocryphal and actual blend. What all these narratives agree on is that in the early 1920s Fred Walker—of Fred Walker and Company, Melbourne, canners of meat for export and Australian manufacturers of Bonox branded beef stock beverage—asked his company chemist to emulate Marmite yeast extract (Farrer). The imitation product was based, as was Marmite, on the residue from spent brewer’s yeast. This waste was initially sourced from Melbourne-based Carlton & United Breweries, and flavoured with vegetables, spices and salt (Creswell & Trenoweth). Today, the yeast left after Foster Group’s Australian commercial beer making processes is collected, put through a sieve to remove hop resins, washed to remove any bitterness, then mixed with warm water. The yeast dies from the lack of nutrients in this environment, and enzymes then break down the yeast proteins with the effect that vitamins and minerals are released into the resulting solution. Using centrifugal force, the yeast cell walls are removed, leaving behind a nutrient-rich brown liquid, which is then concentrated into a dark, thick paste using a vacuum process. This is seasoned with significant amounts of salt—although less today than before—and flavoured with vegetable extracts (Richardson).Given its popularity—Vegemite was found in 2009 to be the third most popular brand in Australia (Brand Asset Consulting)—it is unsurprising to find that the product has a significant history as an object of study in popular culture (Fiske et al; White), as a marker of national identity (Ivory; Renne; Rozin & Siegal; Richardson; Harper & White) and as an iconic Australian food, brand and product (Cozzolino; Luck; Khamis; Symons). Jars, packaging and product advertising are collected by Australian institutions such as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and are regularly included in permanent and travelling exhibitions profiling Australian brands and investigating how a sense of national identity is expressed through identification with these brands. All of this significant study largely focuses on how, when and by whom the product has been taken up, and how it has been consumed, rather than its links to waste, and what this circumstance could add to current thinking about recycling of food waste into other food products.It is worth noting that Vegemite was not an initial success in the Australian marketplace, but this does not seem due to an adverse public perception to waste. Indeed, when it was first produced it was in imitation of an already popular product well-known to be made from brewery by-products, hence this origin was not an issue. It was also introduced during a time when consumer relationships to waste were quite unlike today, and thrifty re-use of was a common feature of household behaviour. Despite a national competition mounted to name the product (Richardson), Marmite continued to attract more purchasers after Vegemite’s launch in 1923, so much so that in 1928, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed “Parwill—the all Australian product” (punning on the idea that “Ma-might” but “Pa-will”) (White 16). When this campaign was unsuccessful, the original, consumer-suggested name was reinstated, but sales still lagged behind its UK-owned prototype. It was only after remaining in production for more than a decade, and after two successful marketing campaigns in the second half of the 1930s that the Vegemite brand gained some market traction. The first of these was in 1935 and 1936, when a free jar of Vegemite was offered with every sale of an item from the relatively extensive Kraft-Walker product list (after Walker’s company merged with Kraft) (White). The second was an attention-grabbing contest held in 1937, which invited consumers to compose Vegemite-inspired limericks. However, it was not the nature of the product itself or even the task set by the competition which captured mass attention, but the prize of a desirable, exotic and valuable imported Pontiac car (Richardson 61; Superbrands).Since that time, multinational media company, J Walter Thompson (now rebranded as JWT) has continued to manage Vegemite’s marketing. JWT’s marketing has never looked to Vegemite’s status as a thrifty recycler of waste as a viable marketing strategy, even in periods of austerity (such as the Depression years and the Second World War) or in more recent times of environmental concern. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of cultural/media memorialisation have created a superbrand by focusing on two factors: its nutrient value and, as the brand became more established, its status as national icon. Throughout the regular noting and celebration of anniversaries of its initial invention and launch, with various commemorative events and products marking each of these product ‘birthdays,’ Vegemite’s status as recycled waste product has never been more than mentioned. Even when its 60th anniversary was marked in 1983 with the laying of a permanent plaque in Kerferd Road, South Melbourne, opposite Walker’s original factory, there was only the most passing reference to how, and from what, the product manufactured at the site was made. This remained the case when the site itself was prioritised for heritage listing almost twenty years later in 2001 (City of Port Phillip).Shying away from the reality of this successful example of recycling food waste into food was still the case in 1990, when Kraft Foods held a nationwide public campaign to recover past styles of Vegemite containers and packaging, and then donated their collection to Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse then held an exhibition of the receptacles and the historical promotional material in 1991, tracing the development of the product’s presentation (Powerhouse Museum), an occasion that dovetailed with other nostalgic commemorative activities around the product’s 70th birthday. Although the production process was noted in the exhibition, it is noteworthy that the possibilities for recycling a number of the styles of jars, as either containers with reusable lids or as drinking glasses, were given considerably more notice than the product’s origins as a recycled product. By this time, it seems, Vegemite had become so incorporated into Australian popular memory as a product in its own right, and with such a rich nostalgic history, that its origins were no longer of any significant interest or relevance.This disregard continued in the commemorative volume, The Vegemite Cookbook. With some ninety recipes and recipe ideas, the collection contains an almost unimaginably wide range of ways to use Vegemite as an ingredient. There are recipes on how to make the definitive Vegemite toast soldiers and Vegemite crumpets, as well as adaptations of foreign cuisines including pastas and risottos, stroganoffs, tacos, chilli con carne, frijole dip, marinated beef “souvlaki style,” “Indian-style” chicken wings, curries, Asian stir-fries, Indonesian gado-gado and a number of Chinese inspired dishes. Although the cookbook includes a timeline of product history illustrated with images from the major advertising campaigns that runs across 30 pages of the book, this timeline history emphasises the technological achievement of Vegemite’s creation, as opposed to the matter from which it orginated: “In a Spartan room in Albert Park Melbourne, 20 year-old food technologist Cyril P. Callister employed by Fred Walker, conducted initial experiments with yeast. His workplace was neither kitchen nor laboratory. … It was not long before this rather ordinary room yielded an extra-ordinary substance” (2). The Big Vegemite Party Book, described on its cover as “a great book for the Vegemite fan … with lots of old advertisements from magazines and newspapers,” is even more openly nostalgic, but similarly includes very little regarding Vegemite’s obviously potentially unpalatable genesis in waste.Such commemorations have continued into the new century, each one becoming more self-referential and more obviously a marketing strategy. In 2003, Vegemite celebrated its 80th birthday with the launch of the “Spread the Smile” campaign, seeking to record the childhood reminisces of adults who loved Vegemite. After this, the commemorative anniversaries broke free from even the date of its original invention and launch, and began to celebrate other major dates in the product’s life. In this way, Kraft made major news headlines when it announced that it was trying to locate the children who featured in the 1954 “Happy little Vegemites” campaign as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the television advertisement. In October 2006, these once child actors joined a number of past and current Kraft employees to celebrate the supposed production of the one-billionth jar of Vegemite (Rood, "Vegemite Spreads" & "Vegemite Toasts") but, once again, little about the actual production process was discussed. In 2007, the then iconic marching band image was resituated into a contemporary setting—presumably to mobilise both the original messages (nutritious wholesomeness in an Australian domestic context) as well as its heritage appeal. Despite the real interest at this time in recycling and waste reduction, the silence over Vegemite’s status as recycled, repurposed food waste product continued.Concluding Remarks: Towards Considering Waste as a ResourceIn most parts of the Western world, including Australia, food waste is formally (in policy) and informally (by consumers) classified, disposed of, or otherwise treated alongside garden waste and other organic materials. Disposal by individuals, industry or local governments includes a range of options, from dumping to composting or breaking down in anaerobic digestion systems into materials for fertiliser, with food waste given no special status or priority. Despite current concerns regarding the security of food supplies in the West and decades of recognising that there are sections of all societies where people do not have enough to eat, it seems that recycling food waste into food that people can consume remains one of the last and least palatable solutions to these problems. This brief study of Vegemite has attempted to show how, despite the growing interest in recycling and sustainability, the focus in both the marketing of, and public interest in, this iconic and popular product appears to remain rooted in Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value and its status as a brand, and firmly away from any suggestion of innovative and prudent reuse of waste product. That this is so for an already popular product suggests that any initiatives that wish to move in this direction must first reconfigure not only the way waste itself is seen—as a valuable product to be used, rather than as a troublesome nuisance to be disposed of—but also our own understandings of, and reactions to, waste itself.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers for their perceptive, useful, and generous comments on this article. All errors are, of course, my own. The research for this work was carried out with funding from the Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics and Education, CQUniversity, Australia.ReferencesAnderson, C. T. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 35-60.Blake, J. The Vegemite Cookbook: Delicious Recipe Ideas. Melbourne: Ark Publishing, 1992.Braeken, L., B. Van der Bruggen and C. 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AbstractThis paper reflects on leadership shown in Venda, Southern Africa to protect the lungs of the planet and draws out key themes on the way Indigenous wisdom — underpinned by a sense of the sacred and the profane – expressed in solidarity with nature - are vital for protecting forests. It explores indigenous wisdom on their kinship with organic and inorganic sacred totems (plants, animals and features of the landscape) which are protected through relationships that inform governance. The ongoing community of practice and related projects make a case for standing together to address climate change. The paper was developed as part of a University of South Africa project together with the named authors. Mphatheleni Makaulule has developed an a priori and a posteriori approach to Ecosystemic governance that resonates with the work of Wangari Maathai. Makaulule’s leadership in Venda that is discussed with fellow project members who are exploring how the agendas for COP 26 could be attained by fostering law informed by Bateson’s concept an “ecology of mind – which means an understanding of human beings’ place within living systems and our need for both education and laws to protect ecosystems such as forests (which are the lungs of the world) and the water systems (which are the life blood of all living systems). The governance approach in Venda emphasised the need to think in terms of our relationships with all living systems. The idea of extending a sense of solidarity to others is explored deeply with Makaulule and colleagues by considering similar approaches in other places, such as the Amazon where Makaulule spent time learning from shamanic leaders, Ghana (where Akwasi Achemfuor has undertaken research), Northern Territory and South Australia (where McIntyre was mentored by Peter Turner and Olive Veverbrants). The paper also refers to the work of Widianingsih based on an in-depth discussion on the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar community in West Java that has also been protecting the forests for more than 300 years. The authors explore whether attributing personhood to nature, could be regarded as limiting a notion of mystical and pragmatic recognition of interbeing or even a form of colonising the notion of interbeing? We suggest that a community of practice approach (Wenger, 1999, Wenger et al., 2009) to support learning organisations and communities could support two-way education to enable cross cultural, cross disciplinary and transnational learning to support steps towards wellbeing through sharing our understanding of interbeing in dialogue, it became clear that transcendence through totemism, dreams and shamanistic rituals support a sense of oneness with nature, relationality as well as a sense of awe, solidarity and responsibility for others which is being increasingly recognised in the arts and sciences.

IntroductionWe five friends clinked glasses in our favourite wine and cocktail bar, and considered our next collaborative writing project. We had seen M/C Journal’s call for articles for a special issue on ‘regional’ and when one of us mentioned the television program, Escape from the City, we began our critique:“They haven’t featured Armidale yet, but wouldn’t it be great if they did?”“Really? I mean, some say any publicity is good publicity but the few early episodes I’ve viewed seem to give little or no screen time to the sorts of lifestyle features I most value in our town.”“Well, seeing as we all moved here from the city ages ago, let’s talk about what made us stay?”We had found our next project.A currently popular lifestyle television show (Escape from the City) on Australia’s national public service broadcaster, the ABC, highlights the limitations of popular cultural representations of life in a regional centre. The program is targeted at viewers interested in relocating to regional Australia. As Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly note, popular television is an important entry point into the construction of public knowledge as well as a launching point for viewers as they seek additional information (65). In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of ‘reality’, televisual texts offer a significant insight into our understandings and expectations of what is going on around us. Similar to the concerns raised by Esther Peeren and Irina Souch in their analysis of the popular TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (a version set in the Netherlands from 2004–present), we worry that these shows “prevent important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood” (37) by the viewers, and do a disservice to regional communities.For the purposes of this article, we interrogate the episodes of Escape from the City screened to date in terms of the impact they may have on promoting regional Australia and speculate on how satisfied (or otherwise) we would be should the producers direct their lens onto our regional community—Armidale, in northern NSW. We start with a brief précis of Escape from the City and then, applying an autoethnographic approach (Butz and Besio) focusing on our subjective experiences, we share our reflections on living in Armidale. We blend our academic knowledge and knowledge of everyday life (Klevan et al.) to argue there is greater cultural diversity, complexity, and value in being in the natural landscape in regional areas than is portrayed in these representations of country life that largely focus on cheaper real estate and a five-minute commute.We employ an autoethnographic approach because it emphasises the socially and politically constituted nature of knowledge claims and allows us to focus on our own lives as a way of understanding larger social phenomena. We recognise there is a vast literature on lifestyle programs and there are many different approaches scholars can take to these. Some focus on the intention of the program, for example “the promotion of neoliberal citizenship through home investment” (White 578), while others focus on the supposed effect on audiences (Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak). Here we only assert the effects on ourselves. We have chosen to blend our voices (Gilmore et al.) in developing our arguments, highlighting our single voices where our individual experiences are drawn on, as we argue for an alternative representation of regional life than currently portrayed in the regional ‘escapes’ of this mainstream lifestyle television program.Lifestyle TelevisionEscape from the City is one of the ‘lifestyle’ series listed on the ABC iview website under the category of ‘Regional Australia’. Promotional details describe Escape from the City as a lifestyle series of 56-minute episodes in which home seekers are guided through “the trials and tribulations of their life-changing decision to escape the city” (iview).Escape from the City is an example of format television, a term used to describe programs that retain the structure and style of those produced in another country but change the circumstances to suit the new cultural context. The original BBC format is entitled Escape to the Country and has been running since 2002. The reach of lifestyle television is extensive, with the number of programs growing rapidly since 2000, not just in the United Kingdom, but internationally (Hill; Collins). In Australia, they have completed, but not yet screened, 60 episodes of Escape from the City. However, with such popularity comes great potential to influence audiences and we argue this program warrants critical attention.Like House Hunters, the United States lifestyle television show (running since 1997), Escape from the City follows “a strict formula” (Loof 168). Each episode uses the same narrative format, beginning with an introduction to the team of experts, then introducing the prospective house buyers, briefly characterising their reasons for leaving the city and what they are looking for in their new life. After this, we are shown a map of the region and the program follows the ‘escapees’ as they view four pre-selected houses. As we leave each property, the cost and features are reiterated in the written template on the screen. We, the audience, wait in anticipation for their final decision.The focus of Escape from the City is the buying of the house: the program’s team of experts is there to help the potential ‘escapees’ find the real estate gem. Real estate value for money emerges as the primary concern, while the promise of finding a ‘life less ordinary’ as highlighted in the opening credits of the program each week, seems to fall by the wayside. Indeed, the representation of regional centres is not nuanced but limited by the emphasis placed on economics over the social and cultural.The intended move of the ‘escapees’ is invariably portrayed as motivated by disenchantment with city life. Clearly a bigger house and a smaller mortgage also has its hedonistic side. In her study of Western society represented in lifestyle shows, Lyn Thomas lists some of the negative aspects of city life as “high speed, work-dominated, consumerist” (680), along with pollution and other associated health risks. While these are mentioned in Escape from the City, Thomas’s list of the pleasures afforded by a simpler country life including space for human connection and spirituality, is not explored to any satisfying extent. Further, as a launching point for viewers in the city (Boyle and Kelly), we fear the singular focus on the price of real estate reinforces a sense of the rural as devoid of creative arts and cultural diversity with a focus on the productive, rather than the natural, landscape. Such a focus does not encourage a desire to find out more and undersells the richness of our (regional) lives.As Australian regional centres strive to circumvent or halt the negative impacts of the drift in population to the cities (Chan), lifestyle programs are important ‘make or break’ narratives, shaping the appeal and bolstering—or not—a decision to relocate. With their focus on cheaper real estate prices and the freeing up of the assets of the ‘escapees’ that a move to the country may entail, the representation is so focused on the economics that it is almost placeless. While the format includes a map of the regional location, there is little sense of being in the place. Such a limited representation does not do justice to the richness of regional lives as we have experienced them.Our TownLike so many regional centres, Armidale has much to offer and is seeking to grow (Armidale Regional Council). The challenges regional communities face in sustaining their communities is well captured in Gabriele Chan’s account of the city-country divide (Chan) and Armidale, with its population of about 25,000, is no exception. Escape from the City fails to emphasise cultural diversity and richness, yet this is what characterises our experience of our regional city. As long-term and satisfied residents of Armidale, who are keenly aware of the persuasive power of popular cultural representations (O’Sullivan and Sheridan; Sheridan and O’Sullivan), we are concerned about the trivialising or reductive manner in which regional Australia is portrayed.While we acknowledge there has not been an episode of Escape from the City featuring Armidale, if the characterisation of another, although larger, regional centre, Toowoomba, is anything to go by, our worst fears may be realised if our town is to feature in the future. Toowoomba is depicted as rural landscapes, ‘elegant’ buildings, a garden festival (the “Carnival of the Flowers”) and the town’s history as home of the Southern Cross windmill and the iconic lamington sponge. The episode features an old shearing shed and a stock whip demonstration, but makes no mention of the arts, or of the University that has been there since 1967. Summing up Toowoomba, the voiceover describes it as “an understated and peaceful place to live,” and provides “an attractive alternative” to city life, substantiated by a favourable comparison of median real estate prices.Below we share our individual responses to the question raised in our opening conversation about the limitations of Escape from the City: What have we come to value about our own town since escaping from city life?Jane: The aspects of life in Armidale I most enjoy are, at least in part, associated with or influenced by the fact that this is a centre for education and a ‘university town’. As such, there is access to an academic library and an excellent town library. The presence of the University of New England, along with independent and public schools, and TAFE, makes education a major employer, attracting a significant student population, and is a major factor in Armidale being one of the first towns in the roll-out of the NBN/high-speed broadband. University staff and students may also account for the thriving cafe culture, along with designer breweries/bars, art house cinema screenings, and a lively classical and popular music scene. Surely the presence of a university and associated spin-offs would deserve coverage in a prospective episode about Armidale.Alison: Having grown up in the city, and now having lived more than half my life in an inner-regional country town, I don’t feel I am missing out ‘culturally’ from this decision. Within our town, there is a vibrant arts community, with the regional gallery and two local galleries holding regular art exhibitions, theatre at a range of venues, and book launches at our lively local book store. And when my children were younger, there was no shortage of sporting events they could be involved with. Encountering friends and familiar faces regularly at these events adds to my sense of belonging to my community. The richness of this life does not make it to the television screen in episodes of Escape from the City.Kerry: I greatly value the Armidale community’s strong social conscience. There are many examples of successful programs to support diverse groups. Armidale Sanctuary and Humanitarian Settlement sponsored South Sudanese refugees for many years and is currently assisting Ezidi refugees. In addition to the core Sanctuary committee, many in the local community help families with developing English skills, negotiating daily life, such as reading and responding to school notes and medical questionnaires. The Backtrack program assists troubled Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. The program helps kids “to navigate their relationships, deal with personal trauma, take responsibility […] gain skills […] so they can eventually create a sustainable future for themselves.” The documentary film Backtrack Boys shows what can be achieved by individuals with the support of the community. Missing from Escape from the City is recognition of the indigenous experience and history in regional communities, unlike the BBC’s ‘original’ program in which medieval history and Vikings often get a ‘guernsey’. The 1838 Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people, led to the first prosecution and conviction of a European for killing Aboriginals. Members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community in Armidale are now active in acknowledging the past wrongs and beginning the process of reconciliation.Josie: About 10am on a recent Saturday morning I was walking from the car park to the shopping complex. Coming down the escalator and in the vestibule, there were about thirty people and it occurred to me that there were at least six nationalities represented, with some of the people wearing traditional dress. It also struck me that this is not unusual—we are a diverse community as a result of our history and being a ‘university city’. The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place was established in 1988 and is being extended in 2019. Diversity is apparent in cultural activities such as an international film festival held annually and many of the regular musical events and stalls at the farmers’ market increasingly reflect the cultural mix of our town. As a long-term resident, I appreciate the lifestyle here.Wendy: It is early morning and I am walking in a forest of tall trees, with just the sounds of cattle and black cockatoos. I travel along winding pathways with mossy boulders and creeks dry with drought. My dog barks at rabbits and ‘roos, and noses through the nooks and crannies of the hillside. In this public park on the outskirts of town, I can walk for two hours without seeing another person, or I can be part of a dog-walking pack. The light is grey and misty now, the ranges blue and dark green, but I feel peaceful and content. I came here from the city 30 years ago and hated it at first! But now I relish the way I can be at home in 10 minutes after starting the day in the midst of nature and feeling part of the landscape, not just a tourist—never a possibility in the city. I can watch the seasons and the animals as they come and go and be part of a community which is part of the landscape too. For me, the first verse of South of My Days, written by a ‘local’ describing our New England environment, captures this well:South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapplebranching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. (Wright 20)Whilst our autoethnographic reflections may not reach the heady heights of Judith Wright, they nevertheless reflect the experience of living in, not just escaping to the country. We are disappointed that the breadth of cultural activities and the sense of diversity and community that our stories evoke are absent from the representations of regional communities in Escape from the City.Kate Oakley and Jonathon Ward argue that ‘visions of the good life’, in particular cultural life in the regions, need to be supported by policy which encourages a sustainable prosperity characterised by both economic and cultural development. Escape from the City, however, dwells on the material aspects of consumption—good house prices and the possibility of a private enterprise—almost to the exclusion of any coverage of the creative cultural features.We recognise that the lifestyle genre requires simplification for viewers to digest. What we are challenging is the sense that emerges from the repetitive format week after week whereby differences between places are lost (White 580). Instead what is conveyed in Escape from the City is that regions are homogenous and monocultural. We would like to see more screen time devoted to the social and cultural aspects of the individual locations.ConclusionWe believe coverage of a far richer and more complex nature of rural life would provide a more ‘realistic’ preview of what could be ahead for the ‘escapees’ and perhaps swing the decision to relocate. Certainly, there is some evidence that viewers gain information from lifestyle programs (Hill 106). We are concerned that a lifestyle television program that purports to provide expert advice on the benefits and possible pitfalls of a possible move to the country should be as accurate and all-encompassing as possible within the constraints of the length of the program and the genre.So, returning to what may appear to have been a light-hearted exchange between us at our local bar, and given the above discussion, we argue that television is a powerful medium. We conclude that a popular lifestyle television program such as Escape from the City has an impact on a large viewing audience. For those city-based viewers watching, the message is that moving to the country is an economic ‘no brainer’, whereas the social and cultural dimensions of regional communities, which we posit have sustained our lives, are overlooked. Such texts influence viewers’ perceptions and expectations of what escaping to the country may entail. Escape from the City exploits regional towns as subject matter for a lifestyle program but does not significantly challenge stereotypical representations of country life or does not fully flesh out what escaping to the country may achieve.ReferencesArmidale Regional Council. Community Strategic Plan 2017–2027. Armidale: Armidale Regional Council, 2017.“Backtrack Boys.” Dir. Catherine Scott. Sydney: Umbrella Entertainment, 2018.Boyle, Raymond, and Lisa W. 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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. 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In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. 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Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

Introduction There is, as Andrew Rowan dubs it, a “constant paradox” in the way we treat, relate to, and consume animals in our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 4). This paper examines this paradox in relation to the rise of vegetarianism as a new taste and consumer culture in the West. The first part of the paper, drawing upon Bourdieu, argues that vegetarian “taste” is fundamentally a social practice linked to class and gender. It then offers a preliminary theoretical sketch of the sociological drivers and consequences of vegetarianism in late-modernity, drawing on social theory. Having established the theoretical framework, the second part of the paper turns to an empirical analysis of the moral motivations and experiences of a selection of Australian bloggers. The key argument is that the bloggers narrate vegetarianism as a taste practice that entangles self-care with a larger assemblage of non-human responsibility that works to re-enchant a demoralised consumer modernity. Vegetarianism as Taste Practice “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”, Pierre Bourdieu famously claimed (xxix). Bourdieu demonstrated the classificatory power of taste not only in relation to music, home décor, and art but also in relation to food. Taste, for Bourdieu, is a social process by which people actively communicate social position through classification of the judgements and preferences of both themselves and others. For example, he highlighted how the working-class dislike for fish was part of a wider class system of dispositions where the middle-class favour “the light, the refined and the delicate” defined in negation of working-class taste for “the heavy, the fat and the coarse” (182–83). How then do we read vegetarianism as a taste practice? First, we need to take Bourdieu’s point that vegetarianism is not simply an expression of personal preference, but is a social practice that articulates identity, group membership, and systems of cultural distinction. Bourdieu, while not writing about vegetarianism, did link meat eating to masculine and working-class displays of embodied strength and power—“warrior food”, as Nietzsche called it (Bennett 141). Meat, Bourdieu wrote, was “nourishing food par excellence, strong and strong-making, giving vigour, blood, and health is the dish for men” (190). On this reading, meat avoidance can be located as part of a middle-class taste for the “light” and the “healthy” but also a rejection of working-class and masculine food taste practices. Vegetarianism, like buying fair-trade, organic, and eco-friendly, might be theorised as a symbolic device for enacting middle-class displays of cultural distinction based on claims to moral purity and virtue. On the gender front, female vegetarians conform to taste trends for middle-class women—light, not fattening, and healthy—whereas for men, vegetarianism is linked to the rejection of “hegemonic” masculinity and patriarchy (Bourdieu; Connell). Empirical research partially lends support to this depiction, showing that vegetarianism is predominantly practiced by female, middle-class, university-qualified professionals working in service-sector or white-collar occupations (RealEat; Keane and Willetts). This kind of Bourdieuian analysis is important in drawing attention to the social configurations of vegetarianism as a taste practice. It, however, misses the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider social and cultural changes that are driving its growth in the West. The following section addresses this gap. Theorising Vegetarianism Adrian Franklin explains the growth of vegetarianism in the last part of the 20th century as part of a process of “de-centring” human-animal relations in conditions of late-modernity. Franklin suggests that vegetarianism is part of a wider social and cultural shift where animals make new types of moral claims on humans as they form closer and more intimate emotional bonds. He argues that in the context of widespread feelings of moral decline and disorder, animals are constructed as morally pure and innocent, and humans morally blameworthy and destructive (Franklin 196). From this perspective, vegetarianism is less about an ethical regards for animals but more about what animals reveal about human moral worlds: the reflections are less about an ethical consideration of the “Other” and more about a moral consideration of “ourselves” (Franklin 196). A sticker plastered on the door of my local vegetarian café encapsulates this perspective: it reads, “humans are the real pests.” Unlike Bourdieu and Franklin, Tester is important in moving from a narrow focus on what humans “do” with animals as symbolic or communicative acts to the ethical significance of vegetarianism. Tester makes a critical distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian. In Tester’s terms, the “lifestyle” vegetarian avoids meat for health and well-being reasons while the “ethical” vegetarian is concerned for the ethical treatment of animals. The “lifestyle” vegetarian is problematic for Tester due to “the being of the ethical conduct of life” being substituted for “the doing of the consumer” (218). Vegetarianism becomes emptied of moral meaning as it turns into big business marked by the growth of a multi-billion dollar faux meat industry, trendy vegetarian restaurants, lifestyle converts, and celebrity endorsements. In “lifestyle” mode, Tester argues, vegetarian concern for animal cruelty, slaughter, and death is colonised by a narcissistic concern for slimming, youth, and health—for the promotion of a contented consumer self (Humphery). Although Tester highlights the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the challenges it faces in a consumer world, like the rest of the accounts, it tends to be anthropocentric. Animals tend to speak solely to human worlds, ignoring the vitality and “distributed agency” (Bennett 38) of the non-human. The non-human animal tends to be construed as a passive and inert resource existing solely for human intentionality, rather than acknowledging their “vital power” and “liveliness” outside human agendas (133). Bennett claims that eating highlights the inseparability of humans and edible matter, and the capacity for both human and nonhuman bodies to effect social and political change. She proposes that through a greater sense of ourselves as entwined with, and part of, nature as physical entities, we can enchant the world and become energised as co-participants. Here vegetarianism can be understood as part of recognition of the “assemblage” of human and non-human actions, where self, body, nature and planet become mutually constituting and supportive. Vegetarian taste is not just about middle-class concerns for distinction, but an ethics of the non-human. What does vegetarianism as an ethical taste practice look like “on the ground”? What are the moral motivations for becoming vegetarian, and how is this understood and experienced? What roles do lifestyle and ethical motivations play in vegetarian eating behaviours? In the following section, I turn to a selection of Australian bloggers to make a modest contribution to understanding these questions in the contemporary Australian context. The bloggers are taken from a wider study that analysed 44 urban Australian blogs as part of a project on everyday Australian moralities. The blogs were sampled from the blog hosting website LiveJournal (LJ) between 2006 and 2007. Blog usernames used have been fictionalised to maintain anonymity. Specifically, I focus on a selection of three blog case studies: Universal_cloak, a 32-year-old female artistic designer from Melbourne, Starbright, a 28-year-old female student from Brisbane, and Snig, a 25-year-old male paramedic from Melbourne. The bloggers are a representative selection from a wider sample of blog writing on vegetarianism and human-animal relations. The blog narratives complicate Tester’s simplistic distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian, articulating vegetarianism as form of ethical practice that works to morally enchant the world in a dialogue between self-improvement, personal well-being, and ethical relationships with animals and the planet (Taylor). Vegetarianism in Practice: “Positive for Me, Positive for Others” Universal_cloak writes how “being hippy—wearing hippy clothes, eating healthy organic food and being full of positive energy” makes her “feel healthier […] like I’m doing a better thing for the world (society in particular) […] like I’m doing something good”. Being “authentic” to a “hippy” identity—“being true to herself”—is connected for Universal_cloak to a wider concern for the non-human—for animals, nature, and the planet. An important component of this link between self-fulfilment and “doing a better thing for the world” is not eating the “corpses of animals.” Universal_cloak describes this in detail, at the same time underlining the environmental dimensions of her vegetarianism: I feel sick to my stomach to think that an animal dies so I can eat. Why is it any different to feel the same way that people are abused, tortured and killed, that eco-systems are ravaged and torn up and irreversibly damaged, just so I can have the choice of four kinds of marinated tuna in a can? So I can have two newsagents to choose from? So I can have Alice Cooper iron-on patches, miniature plastic bowling pins, disposable cameras, instant oats, microwavable popcorn, extra-soft, quilted and fucking fragranced toilet paper? McDonalds fucking everywhere [...] ugh, I can't take it. I need to go to bed. No wonder depression is on the rise—we have a kingdom of putrid revulsion to look down upon. Vegetarianism figures for Universal_cloak as a form of ethical consumption that enables resistance to feelings of modern demoralisation, to the feeling of being “swallowed up by the great hulky polluted monster, with ads and consumer shit everywhere around you.” For Universal_cloak, vegetarianism works to both critique and re-enchant modernity: a way of saying “she doesn’t agree with the modern world” but also building a “better world around herself.” She writes that following her “ideal diet” of “fair-trade, veg-o, organic and local” and not “white bread and processed meat” gives her a strong sense of “staving off her fear that I’m fucking up the planet”. Universal_cloak locates vegetarianism within an assemblage of self-interest, nutritional advantage, ecological sustainability, and anti-consumerism (Bennett). Universal_cloak, ­as Tester distinguishes, is neither a straightforward “lifestyle vegetarian” or “ethical vegetarian” (218), neither avoiding meat-eating solely because of reasons to do with health, well-being, and risk avoidance or due to an ethical regard for the being of animals. Universal_cloak shows up Tester’s critique on two fronts. First, she highlights how vegetarianism comes alive in an assemblage that includes not only the needs of the non-human animal but also the materiality of food production, marketing, consumerism, and issues of ecological unsustainability. Universal_Cloak’s practice reflects a wider “greening of the ‘vegetarian assemblage’.” As an advertisement on the Australian Vegetarian Society’s website states: “reduce your eco footprint—GO VEGO.” Secondly, Universal_cloak underscores how Tester is bound to an overly pessimistic reading of contemporary lifestyle cultures of well-being or self-improvement. Tester reads the “lifestyle vegetarian,” focused on well-being and health, as morally inferior. In contrast, Universal_cloak reveals how vegetarianism built around a culture of self-improvement—being true to her “hippy” identity—connects her to a larger web of interacting material flows and forces constituted between self, body, non-human animals, and planetary concern. As Bennett argues, recognising the entanglement of self within a larger assemblage of the non-human means that self-interest is refashioned as ecological and interconnected ­(119). Starbright, a 28-year-old woman from Brisbane and newly practising Buddhist, further captures the expansion of self-interest within the larger aggregate of ecological and non-human concern. Picking up a copy of Peter Singer’s call to arms Animal Liberation in a second-hand bookshop while travelling in Laos, Starbright describes how she initially decided to make “a firm decision to stick to vegetarianism.” Now a devoted vegan, Starbright abstains from eating and using “anything that comes from an animal”, including clothing and footwear (e.g., wool, silk, and leather), food sources such as eggs, milk, honey or cochineal (red dye from beetles) and cosmetic products that may either contain animal derivatives or have been tested on animals. While requiring rigorous discipline and regulation of the self—a kind of secular version of Weber’s Protestant ascetic—Starbright depicts her decision to become vegan as being “one of the easiest and most rewarding changes I've made in my life.” In explaining this, Starbright, in a manner similar to that of Universal_cloak, invokes the interconnections between humans and ecological and animal life as the basis of her moral motivation. She writes: “I’m just another well-informed individual who has discovered the virtues of not eating meat, like being environmentally and ethically aware.” Starbright positions her choice not to eat meat as both an ethical and political act, which compounds to improve the lives of both human and non-human animals: If I don’t support the meat industry, I make a tiny dent in the consumption rate. Others around me take on vegetarianism, and the effect increases. Others eat less meat around me, and the dent gets slightly bigger [...] Less grazing land needed means less environmental destruction as well. Less crops to feed the animals as well. Veganism is a “rewarding change” not only because “its good to reduce suffering” but also because it is “positive to [her] health”, that she is “happier now” and she “get[s] a positive feeling out of it.” Starbright adds: “it just makes me happy, and it reduces the suffering in the world—that’s the main reason I do it.” Vegetarianism enables Starbright to engage in clearly defined morally “good works,” where there is mutual reinforcement of the “feel-good factor” (Franklin 36) between personal wellbeing and “care for the Other” (Bauman 8): “it just seems positive for me, and positive for others.” This is a form of care not perpetuating a human centred approach, which Bennett (88) warns against, but one that recognises the entanglement of human lives with non-human lives—where humans are called upon to recognise that the plight of animals and the environment is also our own plight. Snig similarly places his practice of vegetarianism within a dialectic of self-fulfilment and interconnection with the non-human world. For him, vegetarianism is about maintaining what he refers to as “internal balance,” enabling him to avoid “over-filling” his “physical needs” bucket at the expense of his “emotional bucket.” Snig believes that much of the “physical or psychic illness, unhappiness and dissatisfaction” experienced in the contemporary West is due to an “over-filling” or “over-satisfaction of one at the expense of another.” Accordingly, he advocates the “positive effects” of “filling the emotional bucket” by “doing good works” which downplay the negative psychological consequences of an “excess of sex but no romantic love” and an “excess of shallow entertainment but no deeper intellectual life.” Snig writes: If you put yourself in a position where you have a greater capacity to do good works, the path to do so becomes easier. But if you’re hopelessly mired in your own filth, any benefit you do to the world will be by accident. If you’re so locked up in your tiny little world of tv-fast-food-boring job, you can’t see what the big wide world has to offer, and what you have to offer it. Step outside and it can become much clearer. Similar to Universal_cloak, there is an emphasis in Snig’s blog on how “doing good works” (which includes vegetarianism, alongside working as a paramedic, living in small flat in the city, and volunteering on conservation projects) enables a kind of moral renewal in a perceived demoralised consumer modernity. Abstaining from eating meat—sometimes alone, but often in conjunction with a range of other eco-friendly acts—works as a way of distancing oneself, of “stepping outside,” from the excess and waste of modernity and a practical way of “doing good,” of “trying to make a better world.” Conclusion This paper has analysed vegetarianism as a contemporary taste and consumer practice. Drawing upon Bourdieu, the first part argued that it is important to recognise vegetarianism as a taste practice with distinct social configurations that are classed and gendered. Vegetarianism is linked to taste as a vehicle of distinction, making and reinforcing social divisions and distance. In such an analysis, Vegetarianism aligns with feminine and middle-class notions of food as “light, healthy and non-fattening” and for men can figure as a rejection of dominant forms of masculinity. It was argued that while Bourdieu is useful for highlighting the social dimensions of taste, this form of analysis underplays the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider drivers of change in contemporary human–animal relations. Here the paper drew upon the work of Franklin, Tester, and Bennett. The first two authors underline the tensions between ethics, consumerism, and lifestyle in late-modernity while Bennett highlights the distribution of agency across human/non-human “assemblages.” This theoretical background was used as a framework to investigate blogged accounts of vegetarianism. The bloggers highlight how vegetarianism works as a moral space for performing “good works” and re-enchanting a demoralised consumer modernity. In Universal_cloak’s words, vegetarianism serves as a way of saying “you don’t agree with the modern world”. Critiquing Tester’s distinction between the “lifestyle” and “ethical” vegetarian, the bloggers show how vegetarianism/veganism is constituted in a complex assemblage between health, personal well-being, animal, and environmental concerns. Drawing upon Bennett, it was suggested that vegetarianism emerges as part of a refashioning of self-interest where concerns for self and personal wellbeing are articulated within wider concerns for nature, animals and the planet. This paper raises bigger questions concerning how animals enter into human lives as “particular” Others in conditions of growing human–animal closeness. For example, to what extent will responsibility for and with the non-human grow and how will this impact upon meat eating in the West? Will vegetarianism flourish as part of contemporary middle-class taste trends toward “green,” “healthy,” and “organic” consumption? The question remains whether vegetarianism will primarily be an expression of middle-class distinction or part of a genuine ecological sensibility where the non-human—both animal and planetary—play a significant role in the working out of moral sensibilities. Perhaps Universal_cloak’s practice of vegetarianism provides an important model, where contemporary concern for self-fulfilment, health, and well-being are articulated within a large assemblage of interdependence and connection with animals, nature and the environment. The recent UN recommendation to either reduce meat-intake or adopt a plant-based diet to minimise carbon emissions (Steinfeld et al.) suggests that the nexus between human, animal, and environmental responsibility is, and will continue to be, central to everyday moral negotiation in late-modernity. References Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard UP, 1984. Franklin, Adrian. Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage, 1999.Humphrey, Kim. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Keane, Anne, and Anna Willets. Concepts of Healthy Eating: An Anthropological Investigation in South-East London. London: Goldsmiths College, 1996. RealEat Survey Office. The RealEat Survey 1984–1993: Changing Attitudes to Meat Consumption. London: Vegetarian Society, 1995. Steinfeld, Henning, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, M. and Cees de Haan. “LiveStock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (2006). 10 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM›. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Tester, Keith. “The Moral Malaise of McDonaldization: The Values of Vegetarianism”. Resisting McDonaldization. Ed. Barry Smart. London: Sage, 1999. 207–222.

In Australia the “intimacy” of citizenship (Berlant 2), is often used to reinforce subscription to heteronormative romantic and familial structures. Because this framing promotes discourses of moral failure, recent political attention to sexuality and same-sex couples can be filtered through insights into coalitional affiliations. This paper uses contemporary shifts in Australian politics and culture to think through the concept of coalition, and in particular to analyse connections between sexuality and governmentality (or more specifically normative bias and same-sex relationships) in what I’m calling post-coalitional Australia. Against the unpredictability of changing parties and governments, allegiances and alliances, this paper suggests the continuing adherence to a heteronormatively arranged public sphere. After the current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard deposed the previous leader, Kevin Rudd, she clung to power with the help of independents and the Greens, and clichés of a “rainbow coalition” and a “new paradigm” were invoked to describe the confused electorate and governmental configuration. Yet in 2007, a less confused Australia decisively threw out the Howard–led Liberal and National Party coalition government after eleven years, in favour of Rudd’s own rainbow coalition: a seemingly invigorated party focussed on gender equity, Indigenous Australians, multi-cultural visibility, workplace relations, Austral-Asian relations, humane refugee processing, the environment, and the rights and obligations of same-sex couples. A post-coalitional Australia invokes something akin to “aftermath culture” (Lambert and Simpson), referring not just to Rudd’s fall or Howard’s election loss, but to the broader shifting contexts within which most Australian citizens live, and within which they make sense of the terms “Australia” and “Australian”. Contemporary Australia is marked everywhere by cracks in coalitions and shifts in allegiances and belief systems – the Coalition of the Willing falling apart, the coalition government crushed by defeat, deposed leaders, and unlikely political shifts and (re)alignments in the face of a hung parliament and renewed pushes toward moral and cultural change. These breakdowns in allegiances are followed by swift symbolically charged manoeuvres. Gillard moved quickly to repair relations with mining companies damaged by Rudd’s plans for a mining tax and to water down frustration with the lack of a sustainable Emissions Trading Scheme. And one of the first things Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister was to change the fittings and furnishings in the Prime Ministerial office, of which Wright observed that “Mr Howard is gone and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has moved in, the Parliament House bureaucracy has ensured all signs of the old-style gentlemen's club… have been banished” (The Age, 5 Dec. 2007). Some of these signs were soon replaced by Ms. Gillard herself, who filled the office in turn with memorabilia from her beloved Footscray, an Australian Rules football team. In post-coalitional Australia the exile of the old Menzies’ desk and a pair of Chesterfield sofas works alongside the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and renewed pledges for military presence in Afghanistan, apologising to stolen generations of Indigenous Australians, the first female Governor General, deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister (the last two both Gillard), the repealing of disadvantageous workplace reform, a focus on climate change and global warming (with limited success as stated), a public, mandatory paid maternity leave scheme, changes to the processing and visas of refugees, and the amendments to more than one hundred laws that discriminate against same sex couples by the pre-Gillard, Rudd-led Labor government. The context for these changes was encapsulated in an announcement from Rudd, made in March 2008: Our core organising principle as a Government is equality of opportunity. And advancing people and their opportunities in life, we are a Government which prides itself on being blind to gender, blind to economic background, blind to social background, blind to race, blind to sexuality. (Rudd, “International”) Noting the political possibilities and the political convenience of blindness, this paper navigates the confusing context of post-coalitional Australia, whilst proffering an understanding of some of the cultural forces at work in this age of shifting and unstable alliances. I begin by interrogating the coalitional impulse post 9/11. I do this by connecting public coalitional shifts to the steady withdrawal of support for John Howard’s coalition, and movement away from George Bush’s Coalition of the Willing and the War on Terror. I then draw out a relationship between the rise and fall of such affiliations and recent shifts within government policy affecting same-sex couples, from former Prime Minister Howard’s amendments to The Marriage Act 1961 to the Rudd-Gillard administration’s attention to the discrimination in many Australian laws. Sexual Citizenship and Coalitions Rights and entitlements have always been constructed and managed in ways that live out understandings of biopower and social death (Foucault History; Discipline). The disciplining of bodies, identities and pleasures is so deeply entrenched in government and law that any non-normative claim to rights requires the negotiation of existing structures. Sexual citizenship destabilises the post-coalitional paradigm of Australian politics (one of “equal opportunity” and consensus) by foregrounding the normative biases that similarly transcend partisan politics. Sexual citizenship has been well excavated in critical work from Evans, Berlant, Weeks, Richardson, and Bell and Binnie’s The Sexual Citizen which argues that “many of the current modes of the political articulation of sexual citizenship are marked by compromise; this is inherent in the very notion itself… the twinning of rights with responsibilities in the logic of citizenship is another way of expressing compromise… Every entitlement is freighted with a duty” (2-3). This logic extends to political and economic contexts, where “natural” coalition refers primarily to parties, and in particular those “who have powerful shared interests… make highly valuable trades, or who, as a unit, can extract significant value from others without much risk of being split” (Lax and Sebinius 158). Though the term is always in some way politicised, it need not refer only to partisan, multiparty or multilateral configurations. The subscription to the norms (or normativity) of a certain familial, social, religious, ethnic, or leisure groups is clearly coalitional (as in a home or a front, a club or a team, a committee or a congregation). Although coalition is interrogated in political and social sciences, it is examined frequently in mathematical game theory and behavioural psychology. In the former, as in Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, it refers to people (or players) who collaborate to successfully pursue their own self-interests, often in the absence of central authority. In behavioural psychology the focus is on group formations and their attendant strategies, biases and discriminations. Experimental psychologists have found “categorizing individuals into two social groups predisposes humans to discriminate… against the outgroup in both allocation of resources and evaluation of conduct” (Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides 15387). The actions of social organisation (and not unseen individual, supposedly innate impulses) reflect the cultural norms in coalitional attachments – evidenced by the relationship between resources and conduct that unquestioningly grants and protects the rights and entitlements of the larger, heteronormatively aligned “ingroup”. Terror Management Particular attention has been paid to coalitional formations and discriminatory practices in America and the West since September 11, 2001. Terror Management Theory or TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon) has been the main framework used to explain the post-9/11 reassertion of large group identities along ideological, religious, ethnic and violently nationalistic lines. Psychologists have used “death-related stimuli” to explain coalitional mentalities within the recent contexts of globalised terror. The fear of death that results in discriminatory excesses is referred to as “mortality salience”, with respect to the highly visible aspects of terror that expose people to the possibility of their own death or suffering. Naverette and Fessler find “participants… asked to contemplate their own deaths exhibit increases in positive evaluations of people whose attitudes and values are similar to their own, and derogation of those holding dissimilar views” (299). It was within the climate of post 9/11 “mortality salience” that then Prime Minister John Howard set out to change The Marriage Act 1961 and the Family Law Act 1975. In 2004, the Government modified the Marriage Act to eliminate flexibility with respect to the definition of marriage. Agitation for gay marriage was not as noticeable in Australia as it was in the U.S where Bush publicly rejected it, and the UK where the Civil Union Act 2004 had just been passed. Following Bush, Howard’s “queer moral panic” seemed the perfect decoy for the increased scrutiny of Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. Howard’s changes included outlawing adoption for same-sex couples, and no recognition for legal same-sex marriages performed in other countries. The centrepiece was the wording of The Marriage Amendment Act 2004, with marriage now defined as a union “between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. The legislation was referred to by the Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown as “hateful”, “the marriage discrimination act” and the “straight Australia policy” (Commonwealth 26556). The Labor Party, in opposition, allowed the changes to pass (in spite of vocal protests from one member) by concluding the legal status of same-sex relations was in no way affected, seemingly missing (in addition to the obvious symbolic and physical discrimination) the equation of same-sex recognition with terror, terrorism and death. Non-normative sexual citizenship was deployed as yet another form of “mortality salience”, made explicit in Howard’s description of the changes as necessary in protecting the sanctity of the “bedrock institution” of marriage and, wait for it, “providing for the survival of the species” (Knight, 5 Aug. 2003). So two things seem to be happening here: the first is that when confronted with the possibility of their own death (either through terrorism or gay marriage) people value those who are most like them, joining to devalue those who aren’t; the second is that the worldview (the larger religious, political, social perspectives to which people subscribe) becomes protection from the potential death that terror/queerness represents. Coalition of the (Un)willing Yet, if contemporary coalitions are formed through fear of death or species survival, how, for example, might these explain the various forms of risk-taking behaviours exhibited within Western democracies targeted by such terrors? Navarette and Fessler (309) argue that “affiliation defences are triggered by a wider variety of threats” than “existential anxiety” and that worldviews are “in turn are reliant on ‘normative conformity’” (308) or “normative bias” for social benefits and social inclusions, because “a normative orientation” demonstrates allegiance to the ingroup (308-9). Coalitions are founded in conformity to particular sets of norms, values, codes or belief systems. They are responses to adaptive challenges, particularly since September 11, not simply to death but more broadly to change. In troubled times, coalitions restore a shared sense of predictability. In Howard’s case, he seemed to say, “the War in Iraq is tricky but we have a bigger (same-sex) threat to deal with right now. So trust me on both fronts”. Coalitional change as reflective of adaptive responses thus serves the critical location of subsequent shifts in public support. Before and since September 11 Australians were beginning to distinguish between moderation and extremism, between Christian fundamentalism and productive forms of nationalism. Howard’s unwavering commitment to the American-led war in Iraq saw Australia become a member of another coalition: the Coalition of the Willing, a post 1990s term used to describe militaristic or humanitarian interventions in certain parts of the world by groups of countries. Howard (in Pauly and Lansford 70) committed Australia to America’s fight but also to “civilization's fight… of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”. Although Bush claimed an international balance of power and influence within the coalition (94), some countries refused to participate, many quickly withdrew, and many who signed did not even have troops. In Australia, the war was never particularly popular. In 2003, forty-two legal experts found the war contravened International Law as well as United Nations and Geneva conventions (Sydney Morning Herald 26 Feb. 2003). After the immeasurable loss of Iraqi life, and as the bodies of young American soldiers (and the occasional non-American) began to pile up, the official term “coalition of the willing” was quietly abandoned by the White House in January of 2005, replaced by a “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” (ABC News Online 22 Jan. 2005). The coalition and its larger war on terror placed John Howard within the context of coalitional confusion, that when combined with the domestic effects of economic and social policy, proved politically fatal. The problem was the unclear constitution of available coalitional configurations. Howard’s continued support of Bush and the war in Iraq compounded with rising interest rates, industrial relations reform and a seriously uncool approach to the environment and social inclusion, to shift perceptions of him from father of the nation to dangerous, dithery and disconnected old man. Post-Coalitional Change In contrast, before being elected Kevin Rudd sought to reframe Australian coalitional relationships. In 2006, he positions the Australian-United States alliance outside of the notion of military action and Western territorial integrity. In Rudd-speak the Howard-Bush-Blair “coalition of the willing” becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “willingness of the heart”. The term coalition was replaced by terms such as dialogue and affiliation (Rudd, “Friends”). Since the 2007 election, Rudd moved quickly to distance himself from the agenda of the coalition government that preceded him, proposing changes in the spirit of “blindness” toward marginality and sexuality. “Fix-it-all” Rudd as he was christened (Sydney Morning Herald 29 Sep. 2008) and his Labor government began to confront the legacies of colonial history, industrial relations, refugee detention and climate change – by apologising to Aboriginal people, timetabling the withdrawal from Iraq, abolishing the employee bargaining system Workchoices, giving instant visas and lessening detention time for refugees, and signing the Kyoto Protocol agreeing (at least in principle) to reduce green house gas emissions. As stated earlier, post-coalitional Australia is not simply talking about sudden change but an extension and a confusion of what has gone on before (so that the term resembles postcolonial, poststructural and postmodern because it carries the practices and effects of the original term within it). The post-coalitional is still coalitional to the extent that we must ask: what remains the same in the midst of such visible changes? An American focus in international affairs, a Christian platform for social policy, an absence of financial compensation for the Aboriginal Australians who received such an eloquent apology, the lack of coherent and productive outcomes in the areas of asylum and climate change, and an impenetrable resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage are just some of the ways in which these new governments continue on from the previous one. The Rudd-Gillard government’s dealings with gay law reform and gay marriage exemplify the post-coalitional condition. Emulating Christ’s relationship to “the marginalised and the oppressed”, and with Gillard at his side, Rudd understandings of the Christian Gospel as a “social gospel” (Rudd, “Faith”; see also Randell-Moon) to table changes to laws discriminating against gay couples – guaranteeing hospital visits, social security benefits and access to superannuation, resembling de-facto hetero relationships but modelled on the administering and registration of relationships, or on tax laws that speak primarily to relations of financial dependence – with particular reference to children. The changes are based on the report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements (HREOC) that argues for the social competence of queer folk, with respect to money, property and reproduction. They speak the language of an equitable economics; one that still leaves healthy and childless couples with limited recognition and advantage but increased financial obligation. Unable to marry in Australia, same-sex couples are no longer single for taxation purposes, but are now simultaneously subject to forms of tax/income auditing and governmental revenue collection should either same-sex partner require assistance from social security as if they were married. Heteronormative Coalition Queer citizens can quietly stake their economic claims and in most states discreetly sign their names on a register before becoming invisible again. Mardi Gras happens but once a year after all. On the topic of gay marriage Rudd and Gillard have deferred to past policy and to the immoveable nature of the law (and to Howard’s particular changes to marriage law). That same respect is not extended to laws passed by Howard on industrial relations or border control. In spite of finding no gospel references to Jesus the Nazarene “expressly preaching against homosexuality” (Rudd, “Faith”), and pre-election promises that territories could govern themselves with respect to same sex partnerships, the Rudd-Gillard government in 2008 pressured the ACT to reduce its proposed partnership legislation to that of a relationship register like the ones in Tasmania and Victoria, and explicitly demanded that there be absolutely no ceremony – no mimicking of the real deal, of the larger, heterosexual citizens’ “ingroup”. Likewise, with respect to the reintroduction of same-sex marriage legislation by Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young in September 2010, Gillard has so far refused a conscience vote on the issue and restated the “marriage is between a man and a woman” rhetoric of her predecessors (Topsfield, 30 Sep. 2010). At the same time, she has agreed to conscience votes on euthanasia and openly declared bi-partisan (with the federal opposition) support for the war in Afghanistan. We see now, from Howard to Rudd and now Gillard, that there are some coalitions that override political differences. As psychologists have noted, “if the social benefits of norm adherence are the ultimate cause of the individual’s subscription to worldviews, then the focus and salience of a given individual’s ideology can be expected to vary as a function of their need to ally themselves with relevant others” (Navarette and Fessler 307). Where Howard invoked the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”, Rudd chose to cite a “Christian ethical framework” (Rudd, “Faith”), that saw him and Gillard end up in exactly the same place: same sex relationships should be reduced to that of medical care or financial dependence; that a public ceremony marking relationship recognition somehow equates to “mimicking” the already performative and symbolic heterosexual institution of marriage and the associated romantic and familial arrangements. Conclusion Post-coalitional Australia refers to the state of confusion borne of a new politics of equality and change. The shift in Australia from conservative to mildly socialist government(s) is not as sudden as Howard’s 2007 federal loss or as short-lived as Gillard’s hung parliament might respectively suggest. Whilst allegiance shifts, political parties find support is reliant on persistence as much as it is on change – they decide how to buffer and bolster the same coalitions (ones that continue to privilege white settlement, Christian belief systems, heteronormative familial and symbolic practices), but also how to practice policy and social responsibility in a different way. Rudd’s and Gillard’s arguments against the mimicry of heterosexual symbolism and the ceremonial validation of same-sex partnerships imply there is one originary form of conduct and an associated sacred set of symbols reserved for that larger ingroup. Like Howard before them, these post-coalitional leaders fail to recognise, as Butler eloquently argues, “gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy” (31). To make claims to status and entitlements that invoke the messiness of non-normative sex acts and romantic attachments necessarily requires the negotiation of heteronormative coalitional bias (and in some ways a reinforcement of this social power). As Bell and Binnie have rightly observed, “that’s what the hard choices facing the sexual citizen are: the push towards rights claims that make dissident sexualities fit into heterosexual culture, by demanding equality and recognition, versus the demand to reject settling for heteronormativity” (141). The new Australian political “blindness” toward discrimination produces positive outcomes whilst it explicitly reanimates the histories of oppression it seeks to redress. The New South Wales parliament recently voted to allow same-sex adoption with the proviso that concerned parties could choose not to adopt to gay couples. The Tasmanian government voted to recognise same-sex marriages and unions from outside Australia, in the absence of same-sex marriage beyond the current registration arrangements in its own state. In post-coalitional Australia the issue of same-sex partnership recognition pits parties and allegiances against each other and against themselves from within (inside Gillard’s “rainbow coalition” the Rainbow ALP group now unites gay people within the government’s own party). Gillard has hinted any new proposed legislation regarding same-sex marriage may not even come before parliament for debate, as it deals with real business. Perhaps the answer lies over the rainbow (coalition). As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those that will not see”. References ABC News Online. “Whitehouse Scraps Coalition of the Willing List.” 22 Jan. 2005. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1286872.htm›. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2000. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives 12 Aug. 2004: 26556. (Bob Brown, Senator, Tasmania.) Evans, David T. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. “The Causes and Consequences of the Need for Self-Esteem: A Terror Management Theory.” Public Self, Private Self. Ed. Roy F. Baumeister. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. 189-212. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html›. Kaplan, Morris. Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1997. Knight, Ben. “Howard and Costello Reject Gay Marriage.” ABC Online 5 Aug. 2003. Kurzban, Robert, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. "Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98.26 (2001): 15387–15392. Lambert, Anthony, and Catherine Simpson. "Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland." M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). 20 Oct. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/81›. Lax, David A., and James K. Lebinius. “Thinking Coalitionally: Party Arithmetic Process Opportunism, and Strategic Sequencing.” Negotiation Analysis. Ed. H. Peyton Young. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991. 153-194. Naverette, Carlos, and Daniel Fessler. “Normative Bias and Adaptive Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology and a Critique of Terror Management Theory.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 297-325. Pauly, Robert J., and Tom Lansford. Strategic Preemption: US Foreign Policy and Second Iraq War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Randall-Moon, Holly. "Neoliberal Governmentality with a Christian Twist: Religion and Social Security under the Howard-Led Australian Government." Eds. Michael Bailey and Guy Redden. Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio- Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century. Farnham: Ashgate, in press. Richardson, Diane. Rethinking Sexuality. London: Sage, 2000. Rudd, Kevin. “Faith in Politics.” The Monthly 17 (2006). 31 July 2007 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics--300›. Rudd, Kevin. “Friends of Australia, Friends of America, and Friends of the Alliance That Unites Us All.” Address to the 15th Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The Australian, 24 Aug. 2007. 13 Mar. 2008 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/kevin-rudds-address/story-e6frg6xf-1111114253042›. Rudd, Kevin. “Address to International Women’s Day Morning Tea.” Old Parliament House, Canberra, 11 Mar. 2008. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5900›. Sydney Morning Herald. “Coalition of the Willing? Make That War Criminals.” 26 Feb. 2003. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/25/1046064028608.html›. Topsfield, Jewel. “Gillard Rules Out Conscience Vote on Gay Marriage.” The Age 30 Sep. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/gillard-rules-out-conscience-vote-on-gay-marriage-20100929-15xgj.html›. Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Sexual Citizen." Theory, Culture and Society 15.3-4 (1998): 35-52. 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Introduction For some time now there has been a strong critical framework that identifies a significant shift in the politics of homosexuality in the Anglo-oriented West over the last fifteen to twenty years. In this article I draw on this framework to describe the current moment in the Australian cultural politics of homosexuality. I focus on the issue of same-sex marriage as a key indicator of the currently emerging era. I then turn to two Australian texts about marriage that were produced in “the period before” this time, with the aim of recovering what has been partially lost from current formations of GLBT politics and from available memories of the past. Critical Histories Lisa Duggan’s term “the new homonormativity” is the frame that has gained widest currency among writers who point to the incorporation of certain versions of homosexuality into the neo-liberal (U.S.) mainstream. She identifies a sexual politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). More recently, writing of the period inaugurated by the so-called “war on terror” and following Duggan, Jasbir Puar has introduced the term “homonationalism” to refer to “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (39). Damien Riggs adds the claims of Indigenous peoples in ongoing colonial contexts to the ground from which contemporary GLBT political claims can be critiqued. He concludes that while “queer people” will need to continue to struggle for rights, it is likely that cultural intelligibility “as a subject of the nation” will be extended only to those “who are established through the language of the nation (i.e., one that is founded upon the denial of colonial violence)” (97). Most writers who follow these kinds of critical analyses refer to the discursive place of homosexual couples and families, specifically marriage. For Duggan it was the increasing focus on “full gay access to marriage and military service” that defined homonormativity (50). Puar allows for a diversity of meanings of same-sex marriage, but claims that for many it is “a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular” (29; see also Riggs 66–70). Of course not all authors locate the political focus on same-sex marriage and its effects as a conservative affair. British scholar Jeffrey Weeks stresses what “we” have gained and celebrates the rise of the discourse of human rights in relation to sexuality. “The very ordinariness of recognized same-sex unions in a culture which until recently cast homosexuality into secret corners and dark whispers is surely the most extraordinary achievement of all” (198), he writes. Australian historian Graham Willett takes a similar approach in his assessment of recent Australian history. Noting the near achievement of “the legal equality agenda for gay people” (“Homos” 187), he notes that “the gay and lesbian movement went on reshaping Australian values and culture and society through the Howard years” (193). In his account it did this in spite of, and untainted by, the dominance of Howard's values and programs. The Howard period was “littered with episodes of insult and discrimination … [as the] government tried to stem the tide of gay, lesbian and transgender rights that had been flowing so strongly since 1969”, Willett writes (188). My own analysis of the Howard years acknowledges the significant progress made in law reform relating to same-sex couples and lesbian and gay parents but draws attention to its mutual constitution with the dominance of the white, patriarchal, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies which dominated social and political life (2013 forthcoming). I argue that the costs of reform, fought for predominantly by white and middle class lesbians and gay men deploying homonormative discourses, included the creation of new identities—single lesbians and gays whose identity did not fit mainstream notions, non-monogamous couples and bad mothers—which were positioned on the illegitimate side of the newly enfranchised. Further the success of the reforms marginalised critical perspectives that are, for many, necessary tools for survival in socially conservative neoliberal times. Same-Sex Marriage in Australia The focus on same-sex marriage in the Australian context was initiated in April 2004 by then Prime Minister Howard. An election was looming and two same-sex couples were seeking recognition of their Canadian marriages through the courts. With little warning, Howard announced that he would amend the Federal Marriage Act to specify that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. His amendment also prevented the recognition of same-sex marriages undertaken overseas. Legislation was rushed through the parliament in August of that year. In response, Australian Marriage Equality was formed in 2004 and remains at the centre of the GLBT movement. Since that time political rallies in support of marriage equality have been held regularly and the issue has become the key vehicle through which gay politics is understood. Australians across the board increasingly support same-sex marriage (over 60% in 2012) and a growing majority of gay and lesbian people would marry if they could (54% in 2010) (AME). Carol Johnson et al. note that while there are some critiques, most GLBT people see marriage “as a major equality issue” (Johnson, Maddison and Partridge 37). The degree to which Howard’s move changed the terrain of GLBT politics cannot be underestimated. The idea and practice of (non-legal) homosexual marriage in Australia is not new. And some individuals, publicly and privately, were calling for legal marriage for same-sex couples before 2004 (e.g. Baird, “Kerryn and Jackie”). But before 2004 legal marriage did not inspire great interest among GLBT people nor have great support among them. Only weeks before Howard’s announcement, Victorian legal academic and co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby Miranda Stewart concluded an article about same-sex relationship law reform in Victoria with a call to “begin the debate about gay marriage” (80, emphasis added). She noted that the growing number of Australian couples married overseas would influence thinking about marriage in Australia. She also asked “do we really want to be part of that ‘old edifice’ of marriage?” (80). Late in 2003 the co-convenors of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby declared that “many members of our community are not interested in marriage” and argued that there were more pressing, and more practical, issues for the Lobby to be focused on (Cerise and McGrory 5). In 2001 Jenni Millbank and Wayne Morgan, two leading legal academics and activists in the arena of same-sex relationship politics in Australia, wrote that “The notion of ‘same-sex marriage’ is quite alien to Australia” (Millbank and Morgan, 295). They pointed to the then legal recognition of heterosexual de facto relationships as the specific context in Australia, which meant that marriage was not viewed as "paradigmatic" (296). In 1998 a community consultation conducted by the Equal Opportunity Commission in Victoria found that “legalising marriage for same-sex couples did not enjoy broad based support from either the community at large or the gay and lesbian community” (Stewart 76). Alongside this general lack of interest in marriage, from the early-mid 1990s gay and lesbian rights groups in each state and territory began to think about, if not campaign for, law reform to give same-sex couples the same entitlements as heterosexual de facto couples. The eventual campaigns differed from state to state, and included moments of high profile public activity, but were in the main low key affairs that met with broadly sympathetic responses from state and territory ALP governments (Millbank). The previous reforms in every state that accorded heterosexual de facto couples near equality with married couples meant that gay and lesbian couples in Australia could gain most of the privileges available to heterosexual couples without having to encroach on the sacred territory (and federal domain) of marriage. In 2004 when Howard announced his marriage bill only South Australia had not reformed its law. Notwithstanding these reforms, there were matters relating to lesbian and gay parenting that remained in need of reform in nearly every jurisdiction. Further, Howard’s aggressive move in 2004 had been preceded by his dogged refusal to consider any federal legislation to remove discrimination. But in 2008 the new Rudd government enacted legislation to remove all discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law, with marriage and (ironically) the lack of anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexuality the exceptions, and at the time of writing most states have made or will soon implement the reforms that give full lesbian and gay parenting rights. In his comprehensive account of gay politics from the 1950s onwards, published in 2000, Graham Willett does not mention marriage at all, and deals with the moves to recognise same-sex relationships in one sixteen line paragraph (Living 249). Willett’s book concludes with the decriminalisation of sex between men across every state of Australia. It was written just as the demand for relationship reform was becoming the central issue of GLBT politics. In this sense, the book marks the end of one era of homosexual politics and the beginning of the next which, after 2004, became organised around the desire for marriage. This understanding of the recent gay past has become common sense. In a recent article in the Adelaide gay paper blaze a young male journalist wrote of the time since the early 1970s that “the gay rights movement has shifted from the issue of decriminalising homosexuality nationwide to now lobbying for full equal rights for gay people” (Dunkin 3). While this (reductive and male-focused) characterisation is not the only one possible, I simply note that this view of past and future progress has wide currency. The shift of attention in this period to the demand for marriage is an intensification and narrowing of political focus in a period of almost universal turn by state and federal governments to neoliberalism and an uneven turn to neo-conservatism, directions which have detrimental effects on the lives of many people already marginalised by discourses of sexuality, race, class, gender, migration status, (dis)ability and so on. While the shift to the focus on marriage from 2004 might be understood as the logical final step in gaining equal status for gay and lesbian relationships (albeit one with little enthusiasm from the GLBT political communities before 2004), the initiation of this shift by Prime Minister Howard, with little preparatory debate in the LGBT political communities, meant that the issue emerged onto the Australian political agenda in terms defined by the (neo)conservative side of politics. Further, it is an example of identity politics which, as Lisa Duggan has observed in the US case, is “increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism” and settles for “a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (xx). Brides before Marriage In the last part of this article I turn to two texts produced early in 1994—an activist document and an ephemeral performance during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. If we point only to the end of the era of (de)criminalisation, then the year 1997, when the last state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosex, marks the shift from one era of the regulation of homosexuality to another. But 1994 bore the seeds of the new era too. Of course attempts to identify a single year as the border between one era and the next are rhetorical devices. But some significant events in 1994 make it a year of note. The Australian films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Sum of Us were both released in 1994, marking particular Australian contributions to the growing presence of gay and lesbian characters in Western popular culture (e.g. Hamer and Budge). 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras chose the theme “We are Family” and published endorsement from both Prime Minister Keating and the federal opposition leader John Hewson in their program. In 1994 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to pass legislation that recognised the rights and entitlements of same-sex couples, albeit in a very limited and preliminary form (Millbank 29). The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby's (GLRL) 1994 discussion paper, The Bride Wore Pink, can be pinpointed as the formal start to community-based activism for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It was a revision of an earlier version that had been the basis for discussion among (largely inner Sydney) gay and lesbian communities where there had been lively debate and dissent (Zetlein, Lesbian Bodies 48–57). The 1994 version recommended that the NSW government amend the existing definition of de facto in various pieces of legislation to include lesbian and gay relationships and close non-cohabiting interdependent relationships as well. This was judged to be politically feasible. In 1999 NSW became the first state to implement wide ranging reforms of this nature although these were narrower than called for by the GLRL, “including lesser number of Acts amended and narrower application and definition of the non-couple category” (Millbank 10). My concern here is not with the politics that preceded or followed the 1994 version of The Bride, but with the document itself. Notwithstanding its status for some as a document of limited political vision, The Bride bore clear traces of the feminist and liberationist thinking, the experiences of the AIDS crisis in Sydney, and the disagreements about relationships within lesbian and gay communities that characterised the milieu from which it emerged. Marriage was clearly rejected, for reasons of political impossibility but also in light of a list of criticisms of its implication in patriarchal hierarchies of relationship value (31–2). Feminist analysis of relationships was apparent throughout the consideration of pros and cons of different legislative options. Conflict and differences of opinion were evident. So was humour. The proliferation of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies was listed as both a pro and a con of marriage. On the one hand "just think about the prezzies” (31); on the other, “what will you wear” (32). As well as recommending change to the definition of de facto, The Bride recommended the allocation of state funds to consider “the appropriateness or otherwise of bestowing entitlements on the basis of relationships,” “the focusing on monogamy, exclusivity and blood relations” and the need for broader definitions of “relationships” in state legislation (3). In a gesture towards a political agenda beyond narrowly defined lesbian and gay interests, The Bride also recommended that “the lesbian and gay community join together with other groups to lobby for the removal of the cohabitation rule in the Social Security Act 1991” (federal legislation) (34). This measure would mean that the payment of benefits and pensions would not be judged in the basis of a person’s relationship status. While these radical recommendations may not have been energetically pursued by the GLRL, their presence in The Bride records their currency at the time. The other text I wish to excavate from 1994 is the “flotilla of lesbian brides” in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. These lesbians later appeared in the April 1994 issue of Sydney lesbian magazine Lesbians on the Loose, and they have a public afterlife in a photo by Sydney photographer C Moore Hardy held in the City of Sydney archives (City of Sydney). The group of between a dozen and twenty lesbians (it is hard to tell from the photos) was dressed in waist-to-ankle tulle skirts, white bras and white top hats. Many wore black boots. Unshaven underarm hair is clearly visible. Many wore long necklaces around their necks and the magazine photo makes clear that one bride has a black whip tucked into the band of her skirt. In an article about lesbians and legal recognition of their relationships published in 1995, Sarah Zetlein referred to the brides as “chicks in white satin” (“Chicks”). This chick was a figure that refused the binary distinction between being inside and outside the law, which Zetlein argued characterised thinking about the then emerging possibilities of the legal recognition of lesbian (and gay) relationships. Zetlein wrote that “the chick in white satin”: Represents a politics which moves beyond the concerns of one’s own identity and demands for inclusion to exclusion to a radical reconceptualisation of social relations. She de(con)structs and (re) constructs. … The chick in white satin’s resistance often lies in her exposure and manipulation of her regulation. It is not so much a matter of saying ‘no’ to marriage outright, or arguing only for a ‘piecemeal’ approach to legal relationship regulation, or lobbying for de facto inclusion as was recommended by The Bride Wore Pink, but perverting the understanding of what these legally-sanctioned sexual, social and economic relationships mean, hence undermining their shaky straight foundations.(“Chicks” 56–57) Looking back to 1994 from a time nearly twenty years later when (straight) lesbian brides are celebrated by GLBT culture, incorporated into the mainstream and constitute a market al.ready anticipated by “the wedding industrial complex” (Ingraham), the “flotilla of lesbian brides” can be read as a prescient queer negotiation of their time. It would be a mistake to read the brides only in terms of a nascent interest in legally endorsed same-sex marriage. In my own limited experience, some lesbians have always had a thing for dressing up in wedding garb—as brides or bridesmaids. The lesbian brides marching group gave expression to this desire in queer ways. The brides were not paired into couples. Zetlein writes that “the chick in white satin … [has] a veritable posse of her girlfriends with her (and they are all the brides)” (“Chicks” 63, original emphasis). Their costumes were recognisably bridal but also recognisably parodic and subverting; white but hardly innocent; the tulle and bras were feminine but the top hats were accessories conventionally worn by the groom and his men; the underarm hair a sign of feminist body politics. The whip signalled the lesbian underground sexual culture that flourished in Sydney in the early 1990s (O’Sullivan). The black boots were both lesbian street fashion and sensible shoes for marching! Conclusion It would be incorrect to say that GLBT politics and lesbian and gay couples who desire legal marriage in post-2004 Australia bear no trace of the history of ambivalence, critique and parody of marriage and weddings that have come before. The multiple voices in the 2011 collection of “Australian perspectives on same-sex marriage” (Marsh) put the lie to this claim. But in a climate where our radical pasts are repeatedly forgotten and lesbian and gay couples increasingly desire legal marriage, the political argument is hell-bent on inclusion in the mainstream. There seems to be little interest in a dance around the margins of inclusion/exclusion. I add my voice to the concern with the near exclusive focus on marriage and the terms on which it is sought. It is not a liberationist politics to which I have returned in recalling The Bride Wore Pink and the lesbian brides of the 1994 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but rather an attention to the differences in the diverse collective histories of non-heterosexual politics. The examples I elaborate are hardly cases of radical difference. But even these instances might remind us that “we” have never been on a single road to equality: there may be incommensurable differences between “us” as much as commonalities. They also remind that desires for inclusion and recognition by the state should be leavened with a strong dose of laughter as well as with critical political analysis. References Australian Marriage Equality (AME). “Public Opinion Nationally.” 22 Oct. 2012. ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/who-supports-equality/a-majority-of-australians-support-marriage-equality/›. Baird, Barbara. “The Politics of Homosexuality in Howard's Australia.” Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010. Eds. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013 (forthcoming). —. “‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Historically about Lesbian Marriages.” Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005): 253–271. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cerise, Somali, and Rob McGrory. “Why Marriage Is Not a Priority.” Sydney Star Observer 28 Aug. 2003: 5. City of Sydney Archives [061\061352] (C. Moore Hardy Collection). ‹http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org//image/40440?zoom_highlight=c+moore+hardy›. Duggan Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dunkin, Alex. “Hunter to Speak at Dr Duncan Memorial.” blaze 290 (August 2012): 3. Hamer, Diane, and Belinda Budege, Eds. The Good Bad And The Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance With Lesbianism. London: Pandora, 1994. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, Carol, and Sarah Maddison, and Emma Partridge. “Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas.” The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State. Ed. Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 27–42. Lesbian and Gay Legal Rights Service. The Bride Wore Pink, 2nd ed. Sydney: GLRL, 1994. Marsh, Victor, ed. Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Melbourne: Clouds of Mgaellan, 2011. Millbank Jenni, “Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law—Part one: Couples.” Federal Law Review 34 (2006): 1–44Millbank, Jenni, and Wayne Morgan. “Let Them Eat Cake and Ice Cream: Wanting Something ‘More’ from the Relationship Recognition Menu.” Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A Study of National, European and International Law. Ed. Robert Wintermute and Mads Andenaes. Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001. 295–316. O'Sullivan Kimberley. “Dangerous Desire: Lesbianism as Sex or Politics.” Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 120–23. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007 Stewart, Miranda, “It’s a Queer Thing: Campaigning for Equality and Social Justice for Lesbians and Gay Men”. Alternative Law Journal 29.2 (April 2004): 75–80. Walker, Kristen. “The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in Australia.” The International Journal of Human Rights 11.1–2 (2007): 109–130. Weeks, Jeffrey. The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Abindgdon: Routledge, 2007. Willett, Graham. Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Willett, Graham. “Howard and the Homos.” Social Movement Studies 9.2 (2010): 187–199. Zetlein, Sarah. Lesbian Bodies Before the Law: Intimate Relations and Regulatory Fictions. Honours Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994. —. “Lesbian Bodies before the Law: Chicks in White Satin.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 5 (1995): 48–63.

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . < http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2675 >. Charkiewicz, Ewa. “Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics.” Development 48.1 (2005): 75-83. Clark, Nigel, and Nick Stevenson. “Care in a Time of Catastrophe: Citizenship, Community and the Ecological Imagination.” Journal of Human Rights 2.2 (2003): 235-246. Crombie, Angela. A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising Your Impact on the Planet. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007. Di Muzio, Tim. “Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11.” Global Governance. 14.3 (2008): 305-326. Elden, Stuart. “Governmentality, Calculation and Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248. Mares, Noortje. “Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability and Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12.1 (2009): 117-133. MGI Business Solutions Worldwide. “Carbon News.” Adelaide. 2 Aug. 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 499-505. Potter, Emily. “Footprints in the Mallee: Climate Change, Sustaining Communities, and the Nature of Place.” Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World. Ed. Margaret Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Sense Publishers. Forthcoming. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195-217. Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1-30. World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2008. Switzerland, 2008.

“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. 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"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›.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hayward, Mark. "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>. APA Style Hayward, M. (Apr. 2008) "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>.

Central within the discourses that have surrounded the commercial internet during its emergence has been an underlying promise of disorder. The claims for consumer empowerment with which e-commerce was promoted and discussed within industry and academic literature (Flamberg; Gates; Horton; Levine et al. for instance), coupled with recurring claims that the emergence of e-commerce was as profound a shift as that occasioned by the Industrial Revolution (Dancer; Sullivan; Lynch for instance), established an underlying sense of chaotic upheaval – a clear and present danger to the established order. And on the surface it would appear as if the commercial internet does serve as a challenge to established authority. User interfaces function by offering a degree of autonomy and informal control to the user. However, the infrastructure supporting e-commerce is multi-layered. It is here that the friendly interface cedes to a vast data structure: an ordered and ordering database. Using an August 2002 sample of the corporate portal ninemsn extensively analysed as part of a broader PhD project, this paper explores the tension between front end disorder and back end order. Its goal is to indicate how the surface forms of this site are superimposed on a machinery which orders, or perhaps disciplines, consumer activity. The ninemsn Interface The ninemsn website is typified by a dominance of written text over graphic images. It is constituted primarily by complex noun phrases (the most commonly occurring utterance type) followed by imperative formations. Less often used are statements and interrogatives. The preponderance of noun phrases is readily explained by the metafunction of these utterances as hypertext anchors. Content analyses conducted by Haas and Grams indicate a typical use of noun phrases as anchor text on websites. But it is the fact that all of the phrase types are used on the ninemsn website as hypertext which renders the distinction between utterance types redundant. Despite their different surface forms, the status of the utterances as hypertext anchors makes them similar in terms of function. All of the utterances become actionable, open to activation and engagement by the consumer, thereby challenging their function as direct commands or statements. By inviting the act of linking, hypertext presupposes that there is ‘something else’ which lies behind those pieces of text. They are, therefore, never merely utterances which can be interpreted solely at their surface but are marked by the immanent existence of what Chomsky calls deep structure, layers of significance beyond that revealed in the surface form. None of the linguistic features previously identified is therefore a simple utterance. Each has an alternative form and function by virtue of the fact that it is constituted within a logic of hypertext. On ninemsn all the utterances have the performative (illocutionary) force (Austin) of offers. The surface forms can be read as the result of a transformation (Chomsky) of this underlying linguistic structure. The base form best associated with a commercial institution operating within a hypertextual medium is the interrogative “would you like …?” Consequently, the noun phrase “Bust-shaping bodysuit” (ninemsn Home Page 12 Aug 2002) is a transformation of the underlying interrogative “Would you like a bust-shaping bodysuit?”, or the humble statement “I [ninemsn] offer you [the user] a bust-shaping bodysuit”. But what is significant is that for the site to make sense and serve as something other than a random collection of statements and imperatives, this underlying form must be recovered by the user. And it would be a naïve user indeed who did not recognise the polite offers of hypertext which underpin the commands appearing at the surface of the ninemsn website. These transformative effects mitigate the power, or control, being obviously exerted by the company over the user’s experience of ninemsn. Firstly they do this by transforming commands and bold declaratives into polite inquiries. But the very nature of hypertext alone works to this end. As Miles has argued, the illocutionary force of hypertext, in this case the act of offering, is contained within the relationship between anchor text and the destination site. “It is not in the nodes that hypertext ‘happens’, but in the causal connections and pathways made between nodes” (Miles “Cinematic Paradigms” n.pag.). Thus, for Miles, what becomes important in a hypertextual document is the ‘event of connection’ (“Hypertext Structure” n.pag.) – an act performed by the user. Thus, hypertext and the performative power it extends to the statements on the ninemsn website, make the user the key active agent in the determination of meaning on the site rather than the company. By denying control of the site, both in the form of user activated hypertext and through the underlying invitational nature of its utterances, ninemsn opens itself to random and chaotic interaction. It becomes a site not for the direct and strict ordering of users – neither in the form of direct imperatives nor in the form of control of practice. Rather it is a site for the de-control of user activity. The interactivity enabled by hypertext here becomes a tool for disorder. The ninemsn Database However thus far we have only examined the surface structures of the site, the user-friendly interface of the corporate entity that is ninemsn. Below this lies the infrastructure of the site: the database. ninemsn is a database in two senses. Firstly it is a collection of sites, pages, and links which cohere under the ninemsn brand umbrella. Pages which are marked with the ninemsn brand, and to which links are directly offered from the site, do not constitute the entire World Wide Web. This occurs despite the site’s description as a portal implying that it functions as a window onto the system. At this level, ninemsn can be conceived as a particular ordering through selection and collation of the information system that is the Web. But it is also an active ordering of the activities of the user. By only offering a limited set of links to strategic partners, and offering paid listings foremost in its Web-wide search function, the site delimits the autonomy which it appears to offer at the hypertextual interface. At the level of the database, it becomes an attenuated autonomy, ordered by strategic hyperlinking (Jackson). But ninemsn is also a database of consumers and consumer traffic patterns which are then onsold to advertisers and strategic partners. The site invites users to personalise the interface by entering preferences which effectively expose their consumer behaviour. They are offered memberships which result in extra rewards but involve filling in a proforma listing personal details remarkably similar to the demographic information the site offers advertisers about its consumers. By entering data into the system in these ways – a voluntary act of choice lured by the personalisation options it enables – the consumer becomes ordered. Online consumer activity here becomes organised into a set of pre-ordained fields which constitute that user for the purposes of that transaction (Poster). They become known, not through the self-directed, disorderly conduct of surfing, but through the pre-defined and orderly fields of the marketing database. This effect can be traced further in the commercial Web. By similarly mapping the behaviours of users, cookies and other forms of more passively activated ‘spyware’ also reduce the behaviour of users to pre-constituted fields of value. As the consumer interacts with the system following the polite invitations of hypertext, the system orders this trail into valuable marketing data. Thus, it is the same hypertext which offers the illusion of autonomy at the site interface which enables the increasing surveillance and ordering of consumers at the lower levels of the database. Interactivity as an Ordering Practice Interactivity and its e-commerce companion, the promise of personalisation, here become disciplining practices, seductively drawing the consumer further into the ordering machinery of the site. They encourage the user to submit more and more of their Self – their interests, the trajectory of their logic – to the ordering gaze of the market. Using Virilio’s terms, we can therefore understand interactivity in e-commerce as both an accelerator and a brake on human movement, in this instance the movement of hypertext as the manifestation of individual choice. It is both a technology which ‘empowers’ the user to move in their personally determined disordered fashion, mimicking the radical potential of dynamic bodies, and a delimiting of that potential into the regimented service of commerce. But this is not to argue that consumers necessarily accept this role, nor to imply any (over)- determining role for hypertextual environments. Foucault himself recognises the immanent potential for resistance within any disciplining practice. It is however, to point to the ordered disordering that constitutes the new media environment, particularly in its commercial forms. Like Featherstone on consumer culture we can read interactive media as a site for the ‘controlled de-control’ of emotion. We can see it as a site where disorder is not necessarily the weapon of the revolutionary or the radical, but is also, and simultaneously, in the service of the order it ostensibly challenges. References Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. 2nd edition. Eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965. Dancer, Helen. “Riding the Storm”. The Bulletin 1 Feb 2000: 64-5. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991. Flamberg, Danny. “Understanding the Empowered E-Consumer”. iMarketing News 1.9 (19 Nov 1999): 32. Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Trans. Robert Hurley. Originally published 1976. Gates, Bill, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. The Road Ahead. Revised edition. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Originally published 1995. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Page and Link Classifications: Connecting Diverse Resources”. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1998: 99-107. 2 Oct 2002 http://portal.acm.org>. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Readers, Authors and Page Structure: A Discussion of Four Questions Arising from a Content Analysis of Web Pages.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51.2 (2000): 181-92. Horton, Matthew. “The Internet and the Empowered Consumer: From the Scarcity of the Commodity to the Multiplicity of Subjectivities.” Media International Australia 91 (May 1999): 111-23. Jackson, Michele H. “Assessing the Structure of Communication on the World Wide Web”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.1 (Jun 1997). 8 Aug 2002 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/> Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 2000. Lynch, Adrian. “Revolution Gives Power to Consumers.” The Australian 30 May 2000: IT section 17. Miles, Adrian. “Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext.” Presented at Digital Arts & Culture conference, Bergen, Norway, 26-28 Nov 1998. 3 Oct 2002 http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/> Miles, Adrian. “Hypertext Structure as the Event of Connection.” Journal of Digital Information 2.3 (2002). Originally presented at ACM Hyperlink 2001 conference in Aarhus, Denmark. 5 Sep 2002 http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk>. Poster, Mark. The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Sullivan, Andrew. “Dotcommo e-Volution”. The Australian 19 Jun 2000: 40. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: Essays on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Originally published 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jarrett, Kylie. "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>. APA Style Jarrett, K. (Jan. 2005) "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>.

Taste and Lively Matter in the Anthropocene This paper is concerned with the role of taste in relation to food produced in backyard or community gardens. Taste, as outlined by Bourdieu, is constructed by many factors driven primarily by one’s economic position as well as certain cultural influences. Such arguments tend to work against a naïve reading of the “natural” attributes of food and the biological impulses and responses humans have to taste. Instead, within these frameworks, taste is positioned as a product of the machinations of human society. Along these lines, it is generally accepted that the economic and, consequently, the social shaping of tastes today have been significantly impacted on by the rise of international agribusiness throughout the twentieth century. These processes have greatly reduced the varieties of food commercially available due to an emphasis on economies of scale that require the production of food that can be grown in monocultures and which can withstand long transport times (Norberg-Hodge, Thrupp, Shiva). Of course, there are also other factors at play in relation to taste that give rise to distinction between classes. This includes the ways in which we perform our bodies and shape them in the face of our social and economic conditions. Many studies in this area focus on eating disorders and how control of food intake cannot be read simply as examples of disciplined or deviant bodies (Bordo, Probyn, Ferreday). Instead, the links between food and subjectivity are much more complex. However, despite the contradictions and nuance acknowledged in relation to understandings of food, it is primarily conceptualised as an economic and symbolic good that is controlled by humans and human informed processes. In line with the above observations, literature on food provisioning choices in the areas of food sociology and human geography tends to focus on efforts to understand food purchasing decisions and eating habits. There is a strong political-economic dimension to this research even when its cultural-symbolic value is acknowledged. This is highlighted by the work of Julie Guthman which, among other things, explores “the conversion of tastes into commodities (as well as the reverse)” (“Commodified” 296). Guthman’s analysis of alternative food networks, particularly the organic sector and farmers markets, has tended to reaffirm a Bourdieuan understanding of class and distinction whereby certain foods become appropriated by elites, driving up price and removing it from the reach of ordinary consumers (“Commodified”, “Fast Food”). There has also been, however, some recognition of the limits of such approaches and acknowledgement of the fragility and porous nature of boundaries in the food arena. For example, Jordan points out in her study of the heirloom tomato that, even when a food is appropriated by elites, thereby significantly increasing its cost, consumption of the food and its cultural-symbolic meaning can continue unchanged by those who have traditionally produced and consumed the food privately in their gardens. Guthman is quite right to highlight the presence of huge inequities in both mainstream and alternative food systems throughout the world. Food may, however, be able to disrupt the dominance of these economic and social representations through its very own agentic qualities. To explore this idea, this paper draws on the work of political theorist, Jane Bennett, and eco-feminist, Val Plumwood, and applies some of their key insights to data gathered through in-depth interviews with 20 community gardeners and 7 Canberra Show exhibitors carried out from 2009 to 2012. These interviews were approximately 1 to 2 hours long in duration and were carried out in, or following, an extensive tour of the gardens of the participants, during which tastings of the produce were regularly offered to the interviewers. Jane Bennett sets out to develop a theoretical approach which she names “thing-power materialism” which is grounded in the idea that objects, including food, have agency (354). Bennett conceptualises this idea through her notion of “lively matter” and the “thing power” of objects which she defines as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (“The force” 351, “Vibrant”). The basic idea here is that if we are willing to read agency into the nonhuman things around us, then we become forced to recognise that humans are simply one more element of a world of things which can act on, with or against others through various assemblages (Deleuze and Guatarri). These assemblages can be made, undone and rebuilt in multiple ways. The power of the elements to act within these may not be equal, but nor are they stable and static. For Bennett, this is not simply a return to previous materialist theories premised on naïve notions of object agency. It is, instead, a theory motivated by attempts to develop understandings and strategies that encourage engaged ecological living practices which seek to avoid ongoing human-inflicted environmental damage caused by the “master rationality” (Plumwood) that has fuelled the era of the anthropocene, the first geological era shaped by human action. Anthropocentric thinking and its assumptions of human superiority and separateness to other elements of our ecological mesh (Morton “Thinking”) has been identified as fuelling wasteful, exploitative, environmentally damaging practices. It acts as a key impediment to the embrace of attitudinal and behavioural changes that could promote more ecologically responsible and sustainable living practices. These ideas are particularly prominent in the fields of ecological humanities, ecological feminism and political theory (Bennett “The force”, “Vibrant”; Morton “Ecological”, “Thinking”, “Ecology”; Plumwood). To redress these issues and reduce further human-inflicted environmental damage, work in these spaces tends to highlight the importance of identifying the interconnections and mutual reliance between humans and nonhumans in order to sustain life. Thus, this work challenges the “master rationality” of the anthropocene by highlighting the agentic (Bennett “The force,” “Vibrant”) or actant (Latour) qualities of nonhumans. In this spirit, Plumwood writes that we need to develop “an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the nonhuman sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the nonhuman world” (3). Food, as a basic human need, and its very gustatory taste, is animated by nonhuman elements. The role of these nonhumans is particularly visible to those who engage in their own gardening practices. As such, the ways in which gardeners understand and speak of these processes may provide insights into how an environmental culture as envisaged by Plumwood could be supported, harnessed and shared. The brevity of this paper means only a quick skim of the murky ontological waters into which its wades can be provided. The overarching aim is to identify how the recent resurgence of cultural materiality can be linked to the ways in which everyday people conceptualise and articulate their food provisioning practices. In so doing, it demonstrates that gardeners can conceptualise their food, and the biological processes as well as the nonhuman labour which bring it to fruition, as having actant qualities. This is most overtly recognised through the gardeners’ discussions of how their daily habits and routines alter in response to the qualities and “needs” of their food producing gardens. The gardeners do not express this in a strict nature/culture binary. Instead, they indicate an awareness of the interconnectedness and mutual reliance of the human and nonhuman worlds. In this way, understandings of “taste,” as produced by human centred relations predicated on exchange of capital, are being rethought. This rethinking may offer ways of promoting a more sustainable engagement with ecological beliefs and behaviours which work against the very notion of human dominance that produced the era of the anthropocene. Local Food, Taste and Nonhuman Agency Recent years have seen an increase in the purchasing, sale and growing of local food. This has materialised in multiple forms from backyard, verge and community gardens to the significant growth of farmers markets. Such shifts are attributed to increasing resistance to the privileging of globalised and industrial-scale agri-business, practices which highlight the “master rationality” underpinning the anthropocene. This backlash has been linked to environmental motivations (Seyfang “Shopping,” “Ecological,” “Growing”); desires to support local economies (particularly the financial well-being of farmers) (Norberg-Hodge); and health concerns in relation to the use of chemicals in food production (Goodman and Goodman). Despite evidence that people grow or buy food based on gustatory taste, this has received less overt attention as a motivator for food provisioning practices in the literature (Hugner). Where it is examined, taste is generally seen as a social/cultural phenomenon shaped by the ideas related to the environmental, economic and health concerns mentioned above. However, when consumers discuss taste they also refer to notions of freshness, the varieties of food that are available, and nostalgia for the “way food used to be”. Taste in its gustatory sense and pleasure from food consumption is alluded to in all of the interviews carried out for this research. While the reasons for gardening are multiple and varied, there is a common desire to produce food that tastes better and, thus, induces greater pleasure than purchased food. As one backyard gardener and successful Royal Canberra Show exhibitor notes: “[e]verything that you put [grow] in the garden [has a] better taste than from the market or from the shop.” The extent of this difference was often a surprise for the gardeners: “I never knew a home grown potato could taste so different from a shop bought potato until I grew [my own] […] and I couldn’t believe the taste.” The gardeners in this research all agreed that the taste of commercially available fruit and vegetables was inferior to self-produced food. This was attributed to the multiple characteristics of industrialised food systems. Participants referred specifically to issues ranging from reduction in the varieties available to the chemical intensive practices designed to lead to high yields in short periods of time. The resulting poor taste of such foods was exemplified by comments such as shop bought tomatoes “don’t taste like tomatoes” and the belief that “[p]otatoes and strawberries from the shop taste the same as each other”. Even when gardeners raised health concerns about mainstream food, emphasising their delight in growing their own because they “knew what had gone into their food” (Turner, “Embodied”), the issue of taste continued to play an important role in influencing their gardening practices. One gardener stated: “I prefer more [food that] is tasty than one that is healthy for me”. The tastiest food for her came from her own community garden plot and this motivated her to travel across town most days to tend the garden. While tasty food was often seen as being more nutritious, this was not the key driver in food production. The superior taste of the fruit and vegetables grown by these gardeners in Canberra calls their bodies and minds into action to avoid poor tasting food. This desire for tasty food was viewed as common to the general population but was strongly identified as only being accessible to people who grow their own. A backyard gardener, speaking of the residents of an aged care facility where he volunteers observes: “[w]hen you…meet these people they've lost that ability to do any gardening and they really express it. They miss the taste, the flavours.” Another backyard gardener and Show exhibitor recounted a story from two years prior when he and his wife invited guests for a New Year’s Day lunch. While eating their meal, a guest asked “did you grow these carrots?” When he confirmed that he had, she declared: “I can taste it.” Others noted that many young people don’t know what they are missing out on because they have never tasted home-grown produce. Through the sense of taste, the tomatoes, potatoes and carrots and myriad of other foodstuffs grown at homes or in community gardens actively encourage resistance to, or questioning of, the industrial agricultural system and its outputs. The gardeners link poor tasting food to a loss of human responsiveness to plants resulting from the spatial characteristics of industrial agriculture. Modern agribusiness requires large-scale, global production and streamlined agricultural processes that aim to limit the need for producers to respond to unique climatic and soil conditions (through genetically modification technology, see Turner, “Reflections”) and removes the need, and capacity, for individual care of plants. This has led to heavy reliance on agricultural chemicals. The gardeners tend to link high-level usage of pesticides and herbicides with poor taste. One highly successful Show exhibitor, states that in his food, “There’s better taste …because they haven’t got the chemicals in them, not much spray, not much fertiliser, for that is better”. However, when chemical use is limited or removed, the gardeners acknowledge that food plants require more intensive and responsive human care. This involves almost daily inspection of individual plants to pick off and squash (or feed to chickens and birds) the harmful bugs. The gardeners need to be vigilant and capable of developing innovative techniques to ensure the survival of their plants and the production of tasty food. They are, of course, not always successful. One organic community gardener lamented the rising populations of slaters and earwigs which could decimate whole beds of newly sprouted seedlings overnight. This was a common issue and, in response, the gardeners research and trial new methods of control (including encouraging the introduction of “good” bugs into the ecosystem through particular plantings). Ultimately, however, the gardeners were resigned to “learn[ing] to live with them [the ‘bad’ bugs]” while exerting regular bodily and mental efforts to reduce their populations and maximise their own food production. The lack of ultimate control over their growing patch, and the food it could produce, was acknowledged by the gardeners. There was an awareness and understanding of the role nonhuman elements play in food production, ranging from weather conditions to soil microbes to bugs. The gardeners talk of how their care-giving is responsive to these elements. As one community gardener asserts: “…we prefer to … garden in a way that naturally strengthens the plant immune system.” This involves regular attention to soil microbes and the practice of what was referred to as “homeopathic” gardening. Through a responsive approach to the “needs” of plants, the soil, and other nonhuman elements, the plants then delivered “vitamins and minerals” to the gardeners, packaged in tasty food. The tastiest foods ensured their survival through seed-saving practices: “[i]f something tastes good, we’ll save the seed from it”. In this way, the plant’s taste encourages gardeners to invest their human labour to secure its future. The production of tasty food was understood to be reliant on collaborative, iterative and ongoing efforts between human and nonhuman elements. While gardening has often been represented as an attempt to bend nature to the will of humans (Power), the gardeners in this study spoke about working with nature in their quest to produce good tasting food. This was particularly evident in the interviews with gardeners who exhibit produce in the Canberra Show (see NMA for further details). However, despite the fact that taste is the key motivator for growing their own food, it is not a factor in Show judging. Instead, fruit and vegetable entries (those not turned into value added goods such as jams or relishes) are judged on appearance. While this focus on appearance tends to perpetuate the myth that the fruits and vegetables we consume should conform to an ideal type that are blemish free and uniform in size (just as is prized in industrialised agriculture), the act of gardening for the Show and the process of selecting produce to enter, contradicted this assumption. Instead, entering the Show seemed to reinforce awareness of the limits of human control over nature and emphasise the very agency of nonhuman elements. This is highlighted by one exhibitor and community gardener who states: I suppose you grow vegetables for the enjoyment of eating them, but there’s also that side of getting enough and perfecting the vegetables and getting… sometimes it’s all down to the day of whether you’ve got three of something, if it’s the right size and colour and so I’ll enter it [in the Show] on the day instead of putting an entry form in before …you just don’t know what you’re going to have, the bugs decide to eat this or the mice get it or something. There’s always something. In this way, where “there’s always something” waiting to disrupt a gardener’s best laid plans, the exhibitors involved in this project seem to be acutely aware of the agency of nonhumans. In these interviews there is evidence that nonhuman elements act on the gardeners, forcing them to alter their behaviours and engage with plants to meet both of their needs. While perfect specimens can sometimes be grown for the Show, the gardeners acknowledge that this can only be done with an element of luck and careful cultivation of the partnership between human and nonhuman elements in the garden. And, even then, you never know what might happen. This lack of ultimate control is part of the challenge and, thus, the appeal, of competing in the Show. Conclusion The era of the anthropocene demonstrates the consequences of human blindness to ecological matters. Myths of human supremacy and a failure to respect nonhuman elements have fuelled a destructive and wasteful mentality that is having serious consequences for our environment. This has prompted efforts to identify new environmental cultures to promote the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles. The resurgence of cultural materialism and the agentic capacity of objects is one key way in which this is being explored as a means of promoting new ethical approaches to how humans live their lives enmeshed with nonhumans. Food, as a basic necessity, provides a key way in which the interconnected relationships between humans and nonhumans can be brought to the fore. Taste, as a biological response and organic attribute of foodstuffs, can induce humans to act. It can cause us to alter our daily habits, behaviours and beliefs. Perhaps a more attentive approach to food, its taste and how it is produced could provide a framework for rethinking human/nature relations by emphasising the very limits of human control. References Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 347–372. ---. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Ferreday, Donna. “Unspeakable Bodies: Erasure, Embodiment and the Pro-Ana Community.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003): 277–295. Goodman, David, and Michael Goodman. “Alternative Food networks.” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Ed. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift. Oxford: Elsevier, 2008. Guthman, Julie. “Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities: Re–thinking Production–Consumption Links through the Organic System of Provision.” Sociologia Ruralis 42.4 (2002): 295–311. ---. “Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘Yuppie Chow’.” Social and Cultural Geography 4.1 (2003): 45–58. Hugner, Renee. S., Pierre McDonagh, Andrea Prothero, Clifford J. Scultz, and Julie Stanton. “Who Are Organic Food Consumers?: A Compilation And Review Of Why People Purchase Organic Food.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 6.2–3 (2007): 94–110. Jordan, Jennifer A. “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space.” Sociologia Ruralis 47.1 (2007): 20–41. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1987. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ---. “Thinking Ecology, the Mesh, the Strange Stranger and the Beautiful Soul.” Collapse VI (2010): 265–293. ---. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. National Museum of Australia Urban Farming and the Agricultural Show. 12 Mar. 2014. ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/urban_farming_agricultural_show/home›. Norberg-Hodge, Helena. “Beyond the Monoculture: Strengthening Local Culture, Economy and Knowledge.” The Journal of Sustainability Education. 19 Mar. 2012. 13 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/beyond-the-monoculture-strengthening-local-culture-economy-and-knowledge_2012_03›. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Power, Emma. “Human-Nature Relations in Suburban Gardens.” Australian Geographer 36.1 (2005): 39–53. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentites. London: Routledge, 2000. Seyfang, Gil. “Shopping for Sustainability: Can Sustainable Consumption Promote Ecological Citizenship?”. Environmental Politics 14.2 (2005): 290–306. -----. “Ecological Citizenship and Sustainable Consumption: Examining Local Organic Food Networks.” Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 383–395. -----. “Growing Sustainable Consumption Communities: The Case Of Local Organic Food Networks.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 27.3/4 (2007): 120–134. Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End P, 2000. Thrupp, Lori Ann. “Linking Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security.” International Affairs 76.2 (2000): 265–282. Turner, Bethaney. “Embodied Connections: Sustainability, Food Systems And Community Gardens.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 16.6 (2011): 509-522. ---. “Reflections On a New Technology”. National Museum of Australia 2012. 12 Mar. 2014. ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/history/pate/objects/collection_reflections/genetically_modified_food_and_farming›. Acknowledgements Thank you to the gardeners who volunteered to be part of this study. The interviews related to the Royal Canberra Show were carried out as part of a collaborative project between the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra (Joanna Henryks and Bethaney Turner) and the People and the Environment team (George Main and Kirsten Wehner) at the National Museum of Australia.

The importance and power of the biomedical approach to health and illness cannot be under-estimated. It has underpinned Western understandings of medical science and technology; it has informed health systems and the training of medical personnel; and arguably it has become articulated in patients' experience of illness and treatment. The roots of this model are traced to the valorization of rational thought in the Enlightenment which, according to Lupton, was accompanied by the increasing professionalisation of medicine through university training of doctors and control over their licences to practice. Further, she argues the discovery of bacterial causes of scourges like tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid in the nineteenth century further increased the power and status of the profession to the extent that excellence in medicine became more closely associated with rigorous scientific knowledge than empathic bedside manner (84). The emerging doctrine of specific aetiology that evolved into biomedicine had replaced the older philosophical understanding of health as a state of equilibrium and disease as a lack of harmony between people and their environment (Dubos, 5-6; Morgan, Calnan and Manning 15). The patient's interpretation of illness and symptoms became reconfigured by the doctor as an identifiable disease state that can be investigated and (usually) treated, pharmacologically or surgically. Engel acknowledged the power of the biomedical model but labelled it reductionistic and dualistic. He said that it reduced illness to chemistry and physics and separated bodies from minds while conceptualising bodies as machines (131). Biochemical or biophysical abnormality becomes the criterion for diagnosis of the disease and the treatment of illness. The authoritative, objective, and scientific approach to medicine that constructs illness as not more than, but also no less than, a biochemical/physical effect of disease, in turn, constructs medical care as interventionist, scientific and empirical, but above all as the privileged domain of the physician. The same approach that defines the role of the physician ascribes a complementary but dependent role for the patient. The ill, after all, are expected to seek and then undergo treatment. Within such a paradigm, Parsons proposed an influential and much quoted set of institutionalised social expectations associated with the "sick role" to distinguish people who are ill from those who are well. Briefly, according to his theory, the sick person has some social privileges but also some social obligations: exemption from other normal social roles depending on the nature and seriousness of the illness; not responsible for the illness; should be motivated to get well; and should seek and co-operate with the treatment offered (436-37). Parsons' functionalism with its assumption of a homogeneous social structure and value system has attracted considerable criticism. At the very least, he did not differentiate between different medical conditions and their social and cultural implications. But, that said, his "sick role" or modified versions of it remains tied up with the biomedical framework of its context. Meanings of Illness or Minds, Emotions and Social Processes Ideas about illness (and wellness for that matter) are culturally dependent. Illness as the opposite of wellness, as non-health, is an impaired sense of well-being and in that sense at least, requires some self-diagnosis before treatment is sought. Individuals make judgements about their health against prevailing implicit standards of what it is to feel well (Eisenberg and Kleinman 13). As the cultural norms of illness change over time, what it means to be sick and what the "sick role" entails changes too (Christopoulos 93). The discursive label of illness, especially if the disease has specific moral connotations surrounding it, can have considerable consequences for the patient and their social identity to the extent that the "clinical label becomes a master status, one that swamps all other identities and compresses the identity of the person into a narrow and constricting mould" (George and Davis, 266) and circumscribes their sick role. Morris sees biomedicine as cultural discourse, specifically as a modernist narrative which is being challenged increasingly by "powerful alternative narratives that view human illness not as the malfunction of a biophysical mechanism but as the unique experience of a meaning-making and embodied cultural being" (7). Arthur Frank, Thomas Couser, Anne Hawkins and others have demonstrated how control of current understandings of illness is indeed moving away from medical practitioners and towards the patients themselves as they challenge the restriction and passivity of their sick role. The work of these researchers charts changing representations of illness as patients who choose to publish their narratives attempt to find meaning in their experience of illness. The narratives these people tell are often at odds with the biomedical accounts of their illness, or at least they are telling a different type of story - one that involves their reaction to and their experience of serious illness rather than just its onset, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. These stories are sometimes triumphal accounts of overcoming illness, designed to inspire others in similar situations; sometimes dark, emotional accounts of overwhelming adversity and suffering. In providing such introspections of the meaning of illness for the patient's life (and even anticipations of death too), these texts re-negotiate the sick role. They are empowering accounts because they disrupt the sense of the sick role as a passive and silent state (Frank 3). The stories can be found in full length autobiographical accounts of encounters with serious illness like those discussed by Frank, Couser, and also Hawkins, but they are evident across a range of the mass media as well. Women's magazines are a particularly rich source where illness experiences of celebrities and ordinary folk are mixed in with other gossip, scandal, features and advice (Bonner and McKay 2000). Reality television shows (for example, those set in hospitals) also occasionally feature patients' experiences and their quest for meaning for their illness. While the internet offers unprecedented access to detailed medical information, dedicated sites also provide spaces for patients to tell their stories and chat rooms give the opportunity for patient-patient access and interaction in the absence of doctors. These electronic "virtual" communities provide new interactive forums for those with chronic conditions to discuss their fears, their needs and their activities (Patsos; Hardey). The texts produced by these media constitute a different version of the sick role and augment the meanings of illness by providing alternative or at least parallel resources to conventional medical interaction for those who are ill, their carers or those with vicarious interest. As Foucault demonstrated, medical knowledge, its associated "clinical gaze" and the representation of illness always need to be seen in its socio-historical context. The understanding of this "provides a perspective which is able to show, as does the cross-cultural perspective offered by anthropology, that the conventions of western biomedicine are no more 'scientific' or 'objective' than medical systems in other cultures or in other times" (Lupton 15). This type of approach does not necessarily call into question the medical definitions of disease, but points out the limitations of biomedicine without due attention to more cultural approaches. In that sense, the proliferation of patients' stories should be seen as a reaction to (rather than a rejection of) biomedicine and its modernist perspective that situates illness more in the professional domain of the doctor than in the experiential domain of the patient. Indeed, as Morris notes, "modernist biomedicine with its dualistic and reductive language of disease mechanisms now co-exists uneasily with a new concern (irreducible to mechanisms) for the role played in illness by minds, emotions, and social processes" (7). References Bonner, F., & S.McKay. "Challenges, Determination and Triumphs: Inspirational Discourse in Women's Magazine Health Stories." Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 133-144. Christopoulos, Katerina. "The Sick Role in Literature and Society." Journal of the American Medical Association 285.1 (3 January 2001): 93. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Dubos, René. "Mirage of Health". Health and Disease. Ed. Nick Black. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984. 4-9. Eisenberg, Leon, and Arthur Kleinman. "Clinical Social Science." The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine. Ed. Leon Eisenberg and Arthur Kleinman. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981. 1-23. Engel, George. "The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine." Science 196.4268 (8 April 1977): 129-36. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic : An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1973. Frank, Arthur. "Reclaiming an Orphan Genre: The First-Person Narrative of Illness." Literature and Medicine 13.1 (Spring 1994): 1-21. George, Janet, and Alan David. States of Health: Health and Illness in Australia 3rd ed. South Melbourne: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Hardey, Michael. "Doctor in the House: The Internet as a Source of Lay Knowledge and the Challenge to Expertise." Sociology of Health and Illness 21.6 (1999): 820-835. Hawkins, Anne. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Layfayette: Purdue University Press, 1993. Lupton, Deborah. Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies. London: Sage, 1994. Morgan, Myfanwy, Michael Calnan, and Nick Manning. Sociological Approaches to Health and Medicine. London: Routledge, 1985. Morris, David. "How to Speak Postmodern: Medicine, Illness, and Cultural Change." The Hastings Center Report 30.6 (2000): 7-11. Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951. Patsos, Mary. "The Internet and Medicine: Building a Community for Patients with Rare Diseases." Journal of the American Medical Association 285.6 (14 February 2001): 805.

IntroductionClowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this paper, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing performances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fiction, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.Diminutive CatastropheI have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small “c.” In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if anything he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus; Stradda). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of "failing better” in the vein of Charles Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala; Coover; Salisbury)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big “C” Catastrophes? Creation and CatastropheTo wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catastrophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological “completeness” of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by “disaster” which changed but ultimately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of species wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance:Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into nothingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 109–10)For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a powerful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evolutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreciated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to western thought which privileges progression—and here evolution is a prime example—Hindu conceptualisation appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdependency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge.To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regeneration through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Territory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role.In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, projections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu time scale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different?Turning the Lens onto the Small-ScaleSmall-scale, clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incompetence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with the virtuosic delicacy—take Charles Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nail-bones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of decorum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” (87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to continue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this continuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongruous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pursuit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage.I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his persona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he intervened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory.Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charles Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri:They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (496) Clowning as a State of Mind/ConsciousnessAnother perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is “to keep on trying even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Le Feuvre 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradictory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: “Failure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power” (Werry & O’Gorman 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theatrical clowning pivots on “finding that basic state of vulnerability and allowing the audience to exist in that state with you” (Butler 64). Butler argues that this “state of clowning” is “a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion” (ibid). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indication of this intricate lineage:Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch's universe to the world of fairy tales. “History invades it like trouble, like summer flies [...] The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe [...] The whole is nothing but children's play”. (Biro 68)Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clownish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Dancing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions side-by-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None are able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.Becoming “Inhuman” or SacrificialA variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the “inhuman” rights of clowns. His premise matches a “grotesque attachment to the world of things” to a clown’s existence that is “victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality” (133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms:Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)The play on a clown’s “undead” propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend "man’s inhumanity to man.” It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and visa versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice.There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns:Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real. (47)Miller’s fictional Auguste’s “special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself” (29). With overtones of a Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes “wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens” (40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imagination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and...—the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction.With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: “Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world” (505).Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devastation. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small “c” catastrophes. They are known otherwise as clowns.ReferencesBala, Michael. “The Clown.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4.1 (2010): 50–71.Bausch, Pina. Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre, 1977.Big Apple Circus. Circopedia. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page›.Biro, Yvette. “Heartbreaking Fragments, Magnificent Whole: Pina Bausch’s New Minimyths.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 68–72.Butler, Lauren. “Everything Seemed New: Clown as Embodied Critical Pedagogy.” Theatre Topics 22.1 (2012): 63–72.Coover, Robert. “Tears of a Clown.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.1 (2000): 81–83.Dancing Dreams. Dirs. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. First Run Features, 2010.Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. “Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns.” SubStance 39.2 (2010): 131–41.Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom.” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 281–302. Ghosh, Oroon. The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India. New York: New American Library, 1965.Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ’65. Dir. Pina Bausch. Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 2007.Le Feuvre, Lisa. “Introduction.” Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Lisa Le Feuvre. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. 12–21.McKnight, Jesse H. “Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.3–4 (2008): 493–506.Miller, Henry. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. New York: New Directions Books, 1974.Raoul. Dir. James Thiérrée. Regal Theatre, Perth, 2012.Salisbury, Laura. “Beside Oneself Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude.” Parallax 11.4 (2005): 81–92.Stradda. Stradda: Le Magazine de la Creation hors les Murs. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.horslesmurs.fr/-Decouvrez-le-magazine-.html›.Weitz, Eric. “Failure as Success: On Clowns and Laughing Bodies.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 79–87.Werry, Margaret, and Róisín O'Gorman. “The Anatomy of Failure: An Inventory.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 105–10.

IntroductionIn late 2016, I undertook a short-term, three-month project to share some of my research through my Instagram account using the categorising hashtag #AustralianBeachspace. Much of this work emerged from my PhD thesis, which is being published in journal articles, but has yet to be published in any accessible or overarching way. I wanted to experiment with the process of using a visual social media tool for research dissemination. I felt that Instagram’s ability to combine text and image allowed for an aesthetically interesting way to curate this particular research project. My research is concerned with representations of the Australian beach, and thus the visual, image-based focus of Instagram seemed ideal. In this article, I briefly examine some of the existing research around academic practices of research dissemination, social media use, and the emerging research around Instagram itself. I then will examine my own experience of using Instagram as a tool for depicting curated, aesthetically-driven, research dissemination and reflect whether this use of Instagram is effective for representing and disseminating research. Research DisseminationResearchers, especially those backed by public funding, are always bound by the necessity of sharing the findings and transferring the knowledge gained during the research process. Research metrics are linked to workload allocations and promotion pathways for university researchers, providing clear motivation to maintain an active research presence. For most academics, the traditional research dissemination strategies involve academic publications: peer-reviewed scholarly books and journal articles.For academics working within a higher education policy climate that centres on measuring impact and engagement, peer-reviewed publications remain the gold standard. There are indicators, however, that research dissemination strategies may need to include methods for targeting non-academic outputs. Gunn and Mintrom (21), in their recent research, “anticipate that governments will increasingly question the value of publicly funded research and seek to evaluate research impact”. And this process, they argue, is not without challenges. Education Minister Simon Birmingham supports their claim by suggesting the Turnbull Government is looking to find methods for more meaningful ways of evaluating value in higher education research outcomes, “rather than only allocating funding to researchers who spend their time trying to get published in journals” (para 5).It therefore makes sense that academics are investigating ways of using social media as a way of broadening their research dissemination, despite the fact social media metrics do not yet count towards traditional citations within the university sector.Research Dissemination via Social MediaThere has been an established practice of researchers using social media, especially blogging (Kirkup) and Twitter, as ways of sharing information about their current projects, their findings, their most recent publications, or to connect with colleagues. Gruzd, Staves, and Wilk (2348) investigated social media use by academics, suggesting “scholars are turning to social media tools professionally because they are more convenient for making new connections with peers, collaboration, and research dissemination”. It is possible to see social media functioning as a new way of representing research – playing an important role in the shaping and developing of ideas, sharing those ideas, and functioning as a dissemination tool after the research has concluded.To provide context for the use of social media in research, this section briefly covers blogging and Twitter, two methods considered somewhat separated from university frameworks, and also professional platforms, such as Academia.edu and The Conversation.Perhaps the tool that has the most history in providing another avenue for academics to share their work is academic blogging. Blogging is considered an avenue that allows for discussion of topics prior to publication (Bukvova, 4; Powell, Jacob, and Chapman, 273), and often uses a more conversational tone than academic publishing. It provides opportunity to share research in long form to an open, online audience. Academic blogs have also become significant parts of online academic communities, such as the highly successful blog, The Thesis Whisperer, targeted for research students. However, many researchers in this space note the stigma attached to blogging (and other forms of social media) as useless or trivial; for instance, in Gruzd, Staves, and Wilk’s survey of academic users of social media, an overwhelming majority of respondents suggested that institutions do not recognise these activities (2343). Because blogging is not counted in publication metrics, it is possible to dismiss this type of activity as unnecessary.Twitter has garnered attention within the academic context because of its proliferation in conference engagement and linking citation practices of scholars (Marht, Weller, and Peters, 401–406). Twitter’s platform lends itself as a place to share citations of recently published material and a way of connecting with academic peers in an informal, yet meaningful way. Veletsianos has undertaken an analysis of academic Twitter practices, and there is a rise in popularity of “Tweetable Abstracts” (Else), or the practice of refining academic abstracts into a shareable Tweet format. According to Powell, Jacob, and Chapman (272), new media (including both Twitter and the academic blog) offer opportunities to engage with an increasingly Internet-literate society in a way that is perhaps more meaningful and certainly more accessible than traditional academic journals. Like blogging, the use of Twitter within the active research phase and pre-publication, means the platform can both represent and disseminate new ideas and research findings.Both academic blogs and Twitter are widely accessible and can be read by Internet users beyond academia. It appears likely, however, that many blogs and academic Twitter profiles are still accessed and consumed primarily by academic audiences. This is more obvious in the increasingly popular specific academic social media platforms such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu.These websites are providing more targeted, niche communication and sharing channels for scholars working in higher education globally, and their use appears to be regularly encouraged by institutions. These sites attempt to mediate between open access and copyright in academic publishing, encouraging users to upload full-text documents of their publications as a means of generating more attention and citations (Academia.edu cites Niyazov et al’s study that suggests articles posted to the site had improved citation counts). ResearchGate and Academia.edu function primarily as article repositories, albeit with added social networking opportunities that differentiate them from more traditional university repositories.In comparison, the success of the online platform The Conversation, with its tagline “Academic rigour, journalistic flair”, shows the growing enthusiasm and importance of engaging with more public facing outlets to share forms of academic writing. Many researchers are using The Conversation as a way of sharing their research findings through more accessible, shorter articles designed for the general public; these articles regularly link to the traditional academic publications as well.Research dissemination, and how the uptake of online social networks is changing individual and institution-wide practices, is a continually expanding area of research. It is apparent that while The Conversation has been widely accepted and utilised as a tool of research dissemination, there is still some uncertainty about using social media as representing or disseminating findings and ideas because of the lack of impact metrics. This is perhaps even more notable in regards to Instagram, a platform that has received comparatively little discussion in academic research more broadly.Instagram as Social MediaInstagram is a photo sharing application that launched in 2010 and has seen significant uptake by users in that time, reaching 700 million monthly active users as of April 2017 (Instagram “700 Million”). Recent additions to the service, such as the “Snapchat clone” Instagram Stories, appear to have helped boost growth (Constine, para 4). Instagram then is a major player in the social media user market, and the emergence of academic research into the platform reflect this. Early investigations include Manikonda, Hu and Kambhampati’s analysis social networks, demographics, and activities of users in which they identified some clear differences in usage compared to Flickr (another photo-sharing network) and Twitter (5). Hochman and Manovich and Hochman and Schwartz examined what information visualisations generated from Instagram images can reveal about the “visual rhythms” of geographical locations such as New York City.To provide context for the use of Instagram as a way of disseminating research through a more curated, visual approach, this section will examine professional uses of Instagram, the role of Influencers, and some of the functionalities of the platform.Instagram is now a platform that caters for both personal and professional accounts. The user-interface allows for a streamlined and easily navigable process from taking a photo, adding filters or effects, and sharing the photo instantly. The platform has developed to include web-based access to complement the mobile application, and has also introduced Instagram Business accounts, which provide “real-time metrics”, “insights into your followers”, and the ability to “add information about your company” (Instagram “Instagram Business”). This also comes with the option to pay for advertisements.Despite its name, many users of Instagram, especially those with profiles that are professional or business orientated, do not only produce instant content. While the features of Instagram, such as geotagging, timestamping, and the ability to use the camera from within the app, lend themselves to users capturing their everyday experience in the moment, more and more content is becoming carefully curated. As such, some accounts are blurring the line between personal and professional, becoming what Crystal Abidin calls Influencers, identifying the practice as when microcelebrities are able to use the “textual and visual narration of their personal, everyday lives” to generate paid advertorials (86). One effect of this, as Abidin investigates in the context of Singapore and the #OOTD (Outfit of the Day) hashtag, is the way “everyday Instagram users are beginning to model themselves after Influences” and therefore generate advertising content “that is not only encouraged by Influences and brands but also publicly utilised without remuneration” (87). Instagram, then, can be a very powerful platform for businesses to reach wide audiences, and the flexibility of caption length and visual content provides a type of viral curation practice as in the case of the #OOTD hashtag following.Considering the focus of my #AustralianBeachspace project on Australian beaches, many of the Instagram accounts and hashtags I encountered and engaged with were tourism related. Although this will be discussed in more detail below, it is worth noting that individual Influencers exist in these fields as well and often provide advertorial content for companies like accommodation chains or related products. One example is user @katgaskin, an Influencer who both takes photos, features in photos, and provides “organic” adverts for products and services (see image). Not all her photos are adverts; some are beach or ocean images without any advertorial content in the caption. In this instance, the use of distinctive photo editing, iconic imagery (the “salty pineapple” branding), and thematic content of beach and ocean landscapes, makes for a recognisable and curated aesthetic. Figure 1: An example from user @katgaskin's Instagram profile that includes a mention of a product. Image sourced from @katgaskin, uploaded 2 June 2017.@katgaskin’s profile’s aesthetic identity is, as such, linked with the ocean and the beach. Although her physical location regularly changes (her profile includes images from, for example, Nicaragua, Australia, and the United States), the thematic link is geographical. And research suggests the visual focus of Instagram lends itself to place-based content. As Hochman and Manovich state:While Instagram eliminates static timestamps, its interface strongly emphasizes physical place and users’ locations. The application gives a user the option to publicly share a photo’s location in two ways. Users can tag a photo to a specific venue, and then view all other photos that were taken and tagged there. If users do not choose to tag a photo to a venue, they can publically share their photos’ location information on a personal ‘photo-map’, displaying all photos on a zoomable word map. (para 14)This means that the use of place in the app is anchored to the visual content, not the uploader’s location. While it is possible to consider Instagram’s intention was to anchor the content and the uploader’s location together (as in the study conducted by Weilenmann, Hillman, and Jungselius that explored how Instagram was used in the museum), this is no longer always the case. In this way, Instagram is also providing a platform for more serious photographers to share their images after they have processed and edited them and connect the image with the image content rather than the uploader’s position.This place-based focus also shares origins in tourism photography practices. For instance, Kibby’s analysis of the use of Instagram as a method for capturing the “tourist gaze” in Monument Valley notes that users mostly wanted to capture the “iconic” elements of the site (most of which were landscape formations made notable through representations in popular culture).Another area of research into Instagram use is hashtag practice (see, for example, Ferrara, Interdonato, and Tagarelli). Highfield and Leaver have generated a methodology for mapping hashtags and analysing the information this can reveal about user practices. Many Instagram accounts use hashtags to provide temporal or place based information, some specific (such as #sunrise or #newyorkcity) and some more generic (such as #weekend or #beach). Of particular relevance here is the role hashtags play in generating higher levels of user engagement. It is also worth noting the role of “algorithmic personalization” introduced by Instagram earlier in 2017 and the lukewarm user response as identified by Mahnke Skrubbeltrang, Grunnet, and Tarp’s analysis, suggesting “users are concerned with algorithms dominating their experience, resulting in highly commercialised experience” (section 7).Another key aspect of Instagram’s functionality is linked to the aesthetic of the visual content: photographic filters. Now a mainstay of other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Instagram popularised the use of filters by providing easily accessible options within the app interface directly. Now, other apps such as VCSO allow for more detailed editing of images that can then be imported into Instagram; however, the pre-set filters have proven popular with large numbers of users. A study in 2014 by Araújo, Corrêa, da Silva et al found 76% of analysed images had been processed in some way.By considering the professional uses of Instagram and the functionality of the app (geotagging; hashtagging; and filters), it is possible to summarise Instagram as a social media platform that, although initially perhaps intended to capture the everyday visual experiences of amateur photographers using their smart phone, has adapted to become a network for sharing images that can be for both personal and professional purposes. It has a focus on place, with its geotagging capacity and hashtag practices, and can include captions The #AustralianBeachspace ProjectIn October 2016, I began a social media project called #AustralianBeachspace that was designed to showcase content from my PhD thesis and ongoing work into representations of Australian beaches in popular culture (a collection of the project posts only, as opposed to the ongoing Instagram profile, can be found here). The project was envisaged as a three month project; single posts (including an image and caption) were planned and uploaded six times a week (every day except Sundays). Although I have occasionally continued to use the hashtag since the project’s completion (on 24 Dec. 2016), the frequency and planned nature of the posts since then has significantly changed. What has not changed is the strong thematic through line of my posts, all of which continue to rely heavily on beach imagery. This is distinct from other academic social media use which if often more focused on the everyday activity of academia.Instagram was my social media choice for this project for two main reasons: I had no existing professional Instagram profile (unlike Twitter) and thus I could curate a complete project in isolation, and the subject of my PhD thesis was representations of Australian beaches in literature and film. As such, my research was appropriate for, and in fact was augmented by, visual depiction. It is also worth noting the tendency reported by myself and others (Huntsman; Booth) of academics not considering the beach an area worthy of focus. This resonates with Bech Albrechtslund and Albrechtslund’s argument that “social media practices associated with leisure and playfulness” are still meaningful and worthy of examination.Up until this point, my research outputs had been purely textual. I, therefore, needed to generate a significant number of visual elements to complement the vast amount of textual content already created. I used my PhD thesis to provide the thematic structure (I have detailed this process in more depth here), and then used the online tool Trello to plan, organise, and arrange the intended posts (image and caption). The project includes images taken by myself, my partner, and other images with no copyright limitations attached as sourced through photo sharing sites like Unsplash.com.The images were all selected because of their visual representation of an Australian beach, and the alignment of the image with the themes of the project. For instance, one theme focused on the under-represented negative aspects of the beach. One image used in this theme was a photo of Bondi Beach ocean pool, empty at night. I carefully curated the images and arranged them according to the thematic schedule (as can be seen below) and then wrote the accompanying textual captions. Figure 2: A sample of the schedule used for the posting of curated images and captions.While there were some changes to the schedule throughout (for instance, my attendance at the 2016 Sculpture by the Sea exhibition prompted me to create a sixth theme), the process of content curation and creation remained the same.Visual curation of the images was a particularly important aspect of the project, and I did use an external photo processing application to create an aesthetic across the collection. As Kibby notes, “photography is intrinsically linked with tourism” (para 9), and although not a tourism project inherently, #AustralianBeachspace certainly engaged with touristic tropes by focusing on Australian beaches, an iconic part of Australian national and cultural identity (Ellison 2017; Ellison and Hawkes 2016; Fiske, Hodge, and Turner 1987). However, while beaches are perhaps instinctively touristic in their focus on natural landscapes, this project was attempting to illustrate more complexity in this space (which mirrors an intention of my PhD thesis). As such, some images were chosen because of their “ordinariness” or their subversion of the iconic beach images (see below). Figures 3 and 4: Two images that capture some less iconic images of Australian beaches; one that shows an authentic, ordinary summer's day and another that shows an empty beach during winter.I relied on captions to provide the textual information about the image. I also included details about the photographer where possible, and linked all the images with the hashtag #AustralianBeachspace. The textual content, much of which emerged from ongoing and extensive research into the topic, was somewhat easier to collate. However, it required careful reworking and editing to suit the desired audience and to work in conjunction with the image. I kept captions to the approximate length of a paragraph and concerned with one point. This process forced me to distil ideas and concepts into short chunks of writing, which is distinct from other forms of academic output. This textual content was designed to be accessible beyond an academic audience, but still used a relatively formal voice (especially in comparison to more personal users of the platform).I provided additional hashtags in a first comment, which were intended to generate some engagement. Notably, these hashtags were content related (such as #beach and #surf; they were not targeting academic hashtags). At time of writing, my follower count is 70. The most liked (or “favourited”) photo from the project received 50 likes, and the most comments received was 6 (on a number of posts). Some photos published since the end of the project have received higher numbers of likes and comments. This certainly does not suggest enormous impact from this project. Hashtags utilised in this project were adopted from popular and related hashtags using the analytics tool Websta.me as well as hashtags used in similar content styled profiles, such as: #seeaustralia #thisisqueensland #visitNSW #bondibeach #sunshinecoast and so on. Notably, many of the hashtags were place-based. The engagement of this project with users beyond academia was apparent: followers and comments on the posts are more regularly from professional photographers, tourism bodies, or location-based businesses. In fact, because of the content or place-based hashtagging practices I employed, it was difficult to attract an academic audience at all. However, although the project was intended as an experiment with public facing research dissemination, I did not actively adopt a stringent engagement strategy and have not kept metrics per day to track engagement. This is a limitation of the study and undoubtedly allows scope for further research.ConclusionInstagram is a platform that does not have clear pathways for reaching academic audiences in targeted ways. At this stage, little research has emerged that investigates Instagram use among academics, although it is possible to presume there are similarities with blogging or Twitter (for example, conference posting and making connections with colleagues).However, the functionality of Instagram does lend itself to creating and curating aesthetically interesting ways of disseminating, and in fact representing, research. Ideas and findings must be depicted as images and captions, and the curatorial process of marrying visual images to complement or support textual information can make for more accessible and palatable content. Perhaps most importantly, the content is freely accessible and not locked behind paywalls or expensive academic publications. It can also be easily archived and shared.The #AustralianBeachspace project is small-scale and not indicative of widespread academic practice. However, examining the process of creating the project and the role Instagram may play in potentially reaching a more diverse, public audience for academic research suggests scope for further investigation. Although not playing an integral role in publication metrics and traditional measures of research impact, the current changing climate of higher education policy provides motivations to continue exploring non-traditional methods for disseminating research findings and tracking research engagement and impact.Instagram functions as a useful platform for sharing research data through a curated collection of images and captions. Rather than being a space for instant updates on the everyday life of the academic, it can also function in a more aesthetically interesting and dynamic way to share research findings and possibly generate wider, public-facing engagement for topics less likely to emerge from behind the confines of academic journal publications. 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Introduction The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5) These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household ‘bubbles’. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the “culture wars” (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the disease. Social Capital and Culture Wars The response to COVID-19 required individuals, families, communities, and other types of groups to refrain from extensive interaction – to stay in their bubble. In these situations, especially given the asymptomatic nature of many COVID-19 infections and the serious imposition lockdowns and social distancing and isolation, the temptation for individuals to breach public health rules in high. From the perspective of policymakers, the response to fighting COVID-19 is a collective action problem. In studying collective action problems, scholars have paid much attention on the role of social and community capital (Ostrom and Ahn 17-35). Ostrom and Ahn comment that social capital “provides a synthesizing approach to how cultural, social, and institutional aspects of communities of various sizes jointly affect their capacity of dealing with collective-action problems” (24). Social capital is regarded as an evolving social type of cultural trait (Fukuyama; Guiso et al.). Adger argues that social capital “captures the nature of social relations” and “provides an explanation for how individuals use their relationships to other actors in societies for their own and for the collective good” (387). The most frequently used definition of social capital is the one proffered by Putnam who regards it as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, “Bowling Alone” 65). All these studies suggest that social and community capital has at least two elements: “objective associations” and subjective ties among individuals. Objective associations, or social networks, refer to both formal and informal associations that are formed and engaged in on a voluntary basis by individuals and social groups. Subjective ties or norms, on the other hand, primarily stand for trust and reciprocity (Paxton). High levels of social capital have generally been associated with democratic politics and civil societies whose institutional performance benefits from the coordinated actions and civic culture that has been facilitated by high levels of social capital (Putnam, Democracy 167-9). Alternatively, a “good and fair” state and impartial institutions are important factors in generating and preserving high levels of social capital (Offe 42-87). Yet social capital is not limited to democratic civil societies and research is mixed on whether rising social capital manifests itself in a more vigorous civil society that in turn leads to democratising impulses. Castillo argues that various trust levels for institutions that reinforce submission, hierarchy, and cultural conservatism can be high in authoritarian governments, indicating that high levels of social capital do not necessarily lead to democratic civic societies (Castillo et al.). Roßteutscher concludes after a survey of social capita indicators in authoritarian states that social capital has little effect of democratisation and may in fact reinforce authoritarian rule: in nondemocratic contexts, however, it appears to throw a spanner in the works of democratization. Trust increases the stability of nondemocratic leaderships by generating popular support, by suppressing regime threatening forms of protest activity, and by nourishing undemocratic ideals concerning governance (752). In China, there has been ongoing debate concerning the presence of civil society and the level of social capital found across Chinese society. If one defines civil society as an intermediate associational realm between the state and the family, populated by autonomous organisations which are separate from the state that are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values, it is arguable that the PRC had a significant civil society or social capital in the first few decades after its establishment (White). However, most scholars agree that nascent civil society as well as a more salient social and community capital has emerged in China’s reform era. This was evident after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government welcomed community organising and community-driven donation campaigns for a limited period of time, giving the NGO sector and bottom-up social activism a boost, as evidenced in various policy areas such as disaster relief and rural community development (F. Wu 126; Xu 9). Nevertheless, the CCP and the Chinese state have been effective in maintaining significant control over civil society and autonomous groups without attempting to completely eliminate their autonomy or existence. The dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1978 Opening have unsurprisingly engendered numerous conflicts across the society. In response, the CCP and State have adjusted political economic policies to meet the changing demands of workers, migrants, the unemployed, minorities, farmers, local artisans, entrepreneurs, and the growing middle class. Often the demands arising from these groups have resulted in policy changes, including compensation. In other circumstances, where these groups remain dissatisfied, the government will tolerate them (ignore them but allow them to continue in the advocacy), or, when the need arises, supress the disaffected groups (F. Wu 2). At the same time, social organisations and other groups in civil society have often “refrained from open and broad contestation against the regime”, thereby gaining the space and autonomy to achieve the objectives (F. Wu 2). Studies of Chinese social or community capital suggest that a form of modern social capital has gradually emerged as Chinese society has become increasingly modernised and liberalised (despite being non-democratic), and that this social capital has begun to play an important role in shaping social and economic lives at the local level. However, this more modern form of social capital, arising from developmental and social changes, competes with traditional social values and social capital, which stresses parochial and particularistic feelings among known individuals while modern social capital emphasises general trust and reciprocal feelings among both known and unknown individuals. The objective element of these traditional values are those government-sanctioned, formal mass organisations such as Communist Youth and the All-China Federation of Women's Associations, where members are obliged to obey the organisation leadership. The predominant subjective values are parochial and particularistic feelings among individuals who know one another, such as guanxi and zongzu (Chen and Lu, 426). The concept of social capital emphasises that the underlying cooperative values found in individuals and groups within a culture are an important factor in solving collective problems. In contrast, the notion of “culture war” focusses on those values and differences that divide social and cultural groups. Barry defines culture wars as increases in volatility, expansion of polarisation, and conflict between those who are passionate about religiously motivated politics, traditional morality, and anti-intellectualism, and…those who embrace progressive politics, cultural openness, and scientific and modernist orientations. (90) The contemporary culture wars across the world manifest opposition by various groups in society who hold divergent worldviews and ideological positions. Proponents of culture war understand various issues as part of a broader set of religious, political, and moral/normative positions invoked in opposition to “elite”, “liberal”, or “left” ideologies. Within this Manichean universe opposition to such issues as climate change, Black Lives Matter, same sex rights, prison reform, gun control, and immigration becomes framed in binary terms, and infused with a moral sensibility (Chapman 8-10). In many disputes, the culture war often devolves into an epistemological dispute about the efficacy of scientific knowledge and authority, or a dispute between “practical” and theoretical knowledge. In this environment, even facts can become partisan narratives. For these “cultural” disputes are often how electoral prospects (generally right-wing) are advanced; “not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure … is constantly at risk of extinction” (Malik). This “zero-sum” social and policy environment that makes it difficult to compromise and has serious consequences for social stability or government policy, especially in a liberal democratic society. Of course, from the perspective of cultural materialism such a reductionist approach to culture and political and social values is not unexpected. “Culture” is one of the many arenas in which dominant social groups seek to express and reproduce their interests and preferences. “Culture” from this sense is “material” and is ultimately connected to the distribution of power, wealth, and resources in society. As such, the various policy areas that are understood as part of the “culture wars” are another domain where various dominant and subordinate groups and interests engaged in conflict express their values and goals. Yet it is unexpected that despite the pervasiveness of information available to individuals the pool of information consumed by individuals who view the “culture wars” as a touchstone for political behaviour and a narrative to categorise events and facts is relatively closed. This lack of balance has been magnified by social media algorithms, conspiracy-laced talk radio, and a media ecosystem that frames and discusses issues in a manner that elides into an easily understood “culture war” narrative. From this perspective, the groups (generally right-wing or traditionalist) exist within an information bubble that reinforces political, social, and cultural predilections. American and Chinese Reponses to COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially unprepared and unwilling to accept the seriousness of the infection, the Chinese government regrouped from early mistakes and essentially controlled transmission in about three months. This positive outcome has been messaged as an exposition of the superiority of the Chinese governmental system and society both domestically and internationally; a positive, even heroic performance that evidences the populist credentials of the Chinese political leadership and demonstrates national excellence. The recently published White Paper entitled “Fighting COVID-19: China in Action” also summarises China’s “strategic achievement” in the simple language of numbers: in a month, the rising spread was contained; in two months, the daily case increase fell to single digits; and in three months, a “decisive victory” was secured in Wuhan City and Hubei Province (Xinhua). This clear articulation of the positive results has rallied political support. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 89 percent of citizens are satisfied with the government’s information dissemination during the pandemic (C Wu). As part of the effort, the government extensively promoted the provision of “political goods”, such as law and order, national unity and pride, and shared values. For example, severe publishments were introduced for violence against medical professionals and police, producing and selling counterfeit medications, raising commodity prices, spreading ‘rumours’, and being uncooperative with quarantine measures (Xu). Additionally, as an extension the popular anti-corruption campaign, many local political leaders were disciplined or received criminal charges for inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and corruption during the pandemic (People.cn, 2 Feb. 2020). Chinese state media also described fighting the virus as a global “competition”. In this competition a nation’s “material power” as well as “mental strength”, that calls for the highest level of nation unity and patriotism, is put to the test. This discourse recalled the global competition in light of the national mythology related to the formation of Chinese nation, the historical “hardship”, and the “heroic Chinese people” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). Moreover, as the threat of infection receded, it was emphasised that China “won this competition” and the Chinese people have demonstrated the “great spirit of China” to the world: a result built upon the “heroism of the whole Party, Army, and Chinese people from all ethnic groups” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). In contrast to the Chinese approach of emphasising national public goods as a justification for fighting the virus, the U.S. Trump Administration used nationalism, deflection, and “culture war” discourse to undermine health responses — an unprecedented response in American public health policy. The seriousness of the disease as well as the statistical evidence of its course through the American population was disputed. The President and various supporters raged against the COVID-19 “hoax”, social distancing, and lockdowns, disparaged public health institutions and advice, and encouraged protesters to “liberate” locked-down states (Russonello). “Our federal overlords say ‘no singing’ and ‘no shouting’ on Thanksgiving”, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican of Arizona, wrote as he retweeted a Centers for Disease Control list of Thanksgiving safety tips (Weiner). People were encouraged, by way of the White House and Republican leadership, to ignore health regulations and not to comply with social distancing measures and the wearing of masks (Tracy). This encouragement led to threats against proponents of face masks such as Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases, who required bodyguards because of the many threats on his life. Fauci’s critics — including President Trump — countered Fauci’s promotion of mask wearing by stating accusingly that he once said mask-wearing was not necessary for ordinary people (Kelly). Conspiracy theories as to the safety of vaccinations also grew across the course of the year. As the 2020 election approached, the Administration ramped up efforts to downplay the serious of the virus by identifying it with “the media” and illegitimate “partisan” efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. It also ramped up its criticism of China as the source of the infection. This political self-centeredness undermined state and federal efforts to slow transmission (Shear et al.). At the same time, Trump chided health officials for moving too slowly on vaccine approvals, repeated charges that high infection rates were due to increased testing, and argued that COVID-19 deaths were exaggerated by medical providers for political and financial reasons. These claims were amplified by various conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. The result of this “COVID-19 Denialism” and the alternative narrative of COVID-19 policy told through the lens of culture war has resulted in the United States having the highest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, the underlying social consensus and social capital that have historically assisted in generating positive public health outcomes has been significantly eroded. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults who say public health officials such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak decreased from 79% in March to 63% in August, with an especially sharp decrease among Republicans (Pew Research Center 2020). Social Capital and COVID-19 From the perspective of social or community capital, it could be expected that the American response to the Pandemic would be more effective than the Chinese response. Historically, the United States has had high levels of social capital, a highly developed public health system, and strong governmental capacity. In contrast, China has a relatively high level of governmental and public health capacity, but the level of social capital has been lower and there is a significant presence of traditional values which emphasise parochial and particularistic values. Moreover, the antecedent institutions of social capital, such as weak and inefficient formal institutions (Batjargal et al.), environmental turbulence and resource scarcity along with the transactional nature of guanxi (gift-giving and information exchange and relationship dependence) militate against finding a more effective social and community response to the public health emergency. Yet China’s response has been significantly more successful than the Unites States’. Paradoxically, the American response under the Trump Administration and the Chinese response both relied on an externalisation of the both the threat and the justifications for their particular response. In the American case, President Trump, while downplaying the seriousness of the virus, consistently called it the “China virus” in an effort to deflect responsibly as well as a means to avert attention away from the public health impacts. As recently as 3 January 2021, Trump tweeted that the number of “China Virus” cases and deaths in the U.S. were “far exaggerated”, while critically citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's methodology: “When in doubt, call it COVID-19. Fake News!” (Bacon). The Chinese Government, meanwhile, has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy across the South China Sea, on the frontier in the Indian sub-continent, and against states such as Australia who have criticised the initial Chinese response to COVID-19. To this international criticism, the government reiterated its sovereign rights and emphasised its “victimhood” in the face of “anti-China” foreign forces. Chinese state media also highlighted China as “victim” of the coronavirus, but also as a target of Western “political manoeuvres” when investigating the beginning stages of the pandemic. The major difference, however, is that public health policy in the United States was superimposed on other more fundamental political and cultural cleavages, and part of this externalisation process included the assignation of “otherness” and demonisation of internal political opponents or characterising political opponents as bent on destroying the United States. This assignation of “otherness” to various internal groups is a crucial element in the culture wars. While this may have been inevitable given the increasingly frayed nature of American society post-2008, such a characterisation has been activity pushed by local, state, and national leadership in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration (Vogel et al.). In such circumstances, minimising health risks and highlighting civil rights concerns due to public health measures, along with assigning blame to the democratic opposition and foreign states such as China, can have a major impact of public health responses. The result has been that social trust beyond the bubble of one’s immediate circle or those who share similar beliefs is seriously compromised — and the collective action problem presented by COVID-19 remains unsolved. Daniel Aldrich’s study of disasters in Japan, India, and US demonstrates that pre-existing high levels of social capital would lead to stronger resilience and better recovery (Aldrich). Social capital helps coordinate resources and facilitate the reconstruction collectively and therefore would lead to better recovery (Alesch et al.). Yet there has not been much research on how the pool of social capital first came about and how a disaster may affect the creation and store of social capital. Rebecca Solnit has examined five major disasters and describes that after these events, survivors would reach out and work together to confront the challenges they face, therefore increasing the social capital in the community (Solnit). However, there are studies that have concluded that major disasters can damage the social fabric in local communities (Peacock et al.). The COVID-19 epidemic does not have the intensity and suddenness of other disasters but has had significant knock-on effects in increasing or decreasing social capital, depending on the institutional and social responses to the pandemic. In China, it appears that the positive social capital effects have been partially subsumed into a more generalised patriotic or nationalist affirmation of the government’s policy response. Unlike civil society responses to earlier crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, there is less evidence of widespread community organisation and response to combat the epidemic at its initial stages. This suggests better institutional responses to the crisis by the government, but also a high degree of porosity between civil society and a national “imagined community” represented by the national state. The result has been an increased legitimacy for the Chinese government. Alternatively, in the United States the transformation of COVID-19 public health policy into a culture war issue has seriously impeded efforts to combat the epidemic in the short term by undermining the social consensus and social capital necessary to fight such a pandemic. Trust in American institutions is historically low, and President Trump’s untrue contention that President Biden’s election was due to “fraud” has further undermined the legitimacy of the American government, as evidenced by the attacks directed at Congress in the U.S. capital on 6 January 2021. As such, the lingering effects the pandemic will have on social, economic, and political institutions will likely reinforce the deep cultural and political cleavages and weaken interpersonal networks in American society. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated global public health and impacted deeply on the world economy. Unsurprisingly, given the serious economic, social, and political consequences, different government responses have been highly politicised. Various quarantine and infection case tracking methods have caused concern over state power intruding into private spheres. The usage of face masks, social distancing rules, and intra-state travel restrictions have aroused passionate debate over public health restrictions, individual liberty, and human rights. Yet underlying public health responses grounded in higher levels of social capital enhance the effectiveness of public health measures. In China, a country that has generally been associated with lower social capital, it is likely that the relatively strong policy response to COVID-19 will both enhance feelings of nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism and help create and increase the store of social capital. 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Although I'm a rich white guy, I'm also a feminist anti-racism activist who fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed. (Carl Kenner)Systemic bias is a scourge to the pillar of neutrality. (Cerejota)Count me in. Let's leave the bias to the mainstream media. (Orcar967)Because this is so important. (CuttingEdge)These are a handful of comments posted by online editors who have banded together in a virtual coalition to combat Western bias on the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This collective action by Wikipedians both acknowledges the inherent inequalities of a user-controlled information project like Wikpedia and highlights the potential for progressive change within that same project. These community members are taking the responsibility of social change into their own hands (or more aptly, their own keyboards).In recent years much research has emerged on Wikipedia from varying fields, ranging from computer science, to business and information systems, to the social sciences. While critical at times of Wikipedia’s growth, governance, and influence, most of this work observes with optimism that barriers to improvement are not firmly structural, but rather they are socially constructed, leaving open the possibility of important and lasting change for the better.WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) considers one such collective effort. Close to 350 editors have signed on to the project, which began in 2004 and itself emerged from a similar project named CROSSBOW, or the “Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias on Wikipedia.” As a WikiProject, the term used for a loose group of editors who collaborate around a particular topic, these editors work within the Wikipedia site and collectively create a social network that is unified around one central aim—representing the un- and underrepresented—and yet they are bound by no particular unified set of interests. The first stage of a multi-method study, this paper looks at a snapshot of WP:CSB’s activity from both content analysis and social network perspectives to discover “who” geographically this coalition of the unrepresented is inserting into the digital annals of Wikipedia.Wikipedia and WikipediansDeveloped in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and academic Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia hosting articles in nearly 250 languages (Cohen). The English-language Wikipedia contains over 3.2 million articles, each of which is created, edited, and updated solely by users (Wikipedia “Welcome”). At the time of this study, Alexa, a website tracking organisation, ranked Wikipedia as the 6th most accessed site on the Internet. Unlike the five sites ahead of it though—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube (owned by Google), and live.com (owned by Microsoft)—all of which are multibillion-dollar businesses that deal more with information aggregation than information production, Wikipedia is a non-profit that operates on less than $500,000 a year and staffs only a dozen paid employees (Lih). Wikipedia is financed and supported by the WikiMedia Foundation, a charitable umbrella organisation with an annual budget of $4.6 million, mainly funded by donations (Middleton).Wikipedia editors and contributors have the option of creating a user profile and participating via a username, or they may participate anonymously, with only an IP address representing their actions. Despite the option for total anonymity, many Wikipedians have chosen to visibly engage in this online community (Ayers, Matthews, and Yates; Bruns; Lih), and researchers across disciplines are studying the motivations of these new online collectives (Kane, Majchrzak, Johnson, and Chenisern; Oreg and Nov). The motivations of open source software contributors, such as UNIX programmers and programming groups, have been shown to be complex and tied to both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, including online reputation, self-satisfaction and enjoyment, and obligation to a greater common good (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann; Osterloh and Rota). Investigation into why Wikipedians edit has indicated multiple motivations as well, with community engagement, task enjoyment, and information sharing among the most significant (Schroer and Hertel). Additionally, Wikipedians seem to be taking up the cause of generativity (a concern for the ongoing health and openness of the Internet’s infrastructures) that Jonathan Zittrain notably called for in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Governance and ControlAlthough the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia is built to support and perhaps encourage an equal distribution of power on the site, Wikipedia is not a land of “anything goes.” The popular press has covered recent efforts by the site to reduce vandalism through a layer of editorial review (Cohen), a tightening of control cited as a possible reason for the recent dip in the number of active editors (Edwards). A number of regulations are already in place that prevent the open editing of certain articles and pages, such as the site’s disclaimers and pages that have suffered large amounts of vandalism. Editing wars can also cause temporary restrictions to editing, and Ayers, Matthews, and Yates point out that these wars can happen anywhere, even to Burt Reynold’s page.Academic studies have begun to explore the governance and control that has developed in the Wikipedia community, generally highlighting how order is maintained not through particular actors, but through established procedures and norms. Konieczny tested whether Wikipedia’s evolution can be defined by Michels’ Iron Law of Oligopoly, which predicts that the everyday operations of any organisation cannot be run by a mass of members, and ultimately control falls into the hands of the few. Through exploring a particular WikiProject on information validation, he concludes:There are few indicators of an oligarchy having power on Wikipedia, and few trends of a change in this situation. The high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making, the ease of communication, and the high dedication to ideals of contributors succeed in making Wikipedia an atypical organization, quite resilient to the Iron Law. (189)Butler, Joyce, and Pike support this assertion, though they emphasise that instead of oligarchy, control becomes encapsulated in a wide variety of structures, policies, and procedures that guide involvement with the site. A virtual “bureaucracy” emerges, but one that should not be viewed with the negative connotation often associated with the term.Other work considers control on Wikipedia through the framework of commons governance, where “peer production depends on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized rather than hierarchically assigned. Individuals make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (Viegas, Wattenberg and McKeon). The need for quality standards and quality control largely dictate this commons governance, though interviewing Wikipedians with various levels of responsibility revealed that policies and procedures are only as good as those who maintain them. Forte, Larco, and Bruckman argue “the Wikipedia community has remained healthy in large part due to the continued presence of ‘old-timers’ who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideals with them into every WikiProject, committee, and local process in which they take part” (71). Thus governance on Wikipedia is a strong representation of a democratic ideal, where actors and policies are closely tied in their evolution. Transparency, Content, and BiasThe issue of transparency has proved to be a double-edged sword for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. The goal of a collective body of knowledge created by all—the “expert” and the “amateur”—can only be upheld if equal access to page creation and development is allotted to everyone, including those who prefer anonymity. And yet this very option for anonymity, or even worse, false identities, has been a sore subject for some in the Wikipedia community as well as a source of concern for some scholars (Santana and Wood). The case of a 24-year old college dropout who represented himself as a multiple Ph.D.-holding theology scholar and edited over 16,000 articles brought these issues into the public spotlight in 2007 (Doran; Elsworth). Wikipedia itself has set up standards for content that include expectations of a neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and the publishing of no original research, but Santana and Wood argue that self-policing of these policies is not adequate:The principle of managerial discretion requires that every actor act from a sense of duty to exercise moral autonomy and choice in responsible ways. When Wikipedia’s editors and administrators remain anonymous, this criterion is simply not met. It is assumed that everyone is behaving responsibly within the Wikipedia system, but there are no monitoring or control mechanisms to make sure that this is so, and there is ample evidence that it is not so. (141) At the theoretical level, some downplay these concerns of transparency and autonomy as logistical issues in lieu of the potential for information systems to support rational discourse and emancipatory forms of communication (Hansen, Berente, and Lyytinen), but others worry that the questionable “realities” created on Wikipedia will become truths once circulated to all areas of the Web (Langlois and Elmer). With the number of articles on the English-language version of Wikipedia reaching well into the millions, the task of mapping and assessing content has become a tremendous endeavour, one mostly taken on by information systems experts. Kittur, Chi, and Suh have used Wikipedia’s existing hierarchical categorisation structure to map change in the site’s content over the past few years. Their work revealed that in early 2008 “Culture and the arts” was the most dominant category of content on Wikipedia, representing nearly 30% of total content. People (15%) and geographical locations (14%) represent the next largest categories, while the natural and physical sciences showed the greatest increase in volume between 2006 and 2008 (+213%D, with “Culture and the arts” close behind at +210%D). This data may indicate that contributing to Wikipedia, and thus spreading knowledge, is growing amongst the academic community while maintaining its importance to the greater popular culture-minded community. Further work by Kittur and Kraut has explored the collaborative process of content creation, finding that too many editors on a particular page can reduce the quality of content, even when a project is well coordinated.Bias in Wikipedia content is a generally acknowledged and somewhat conflicted subject (Giles; Johnson; McHenry). The Wikipedia community has created numerous articles and pages within the site to define and discuss the problem. Citing a survey conducted by the University of Würzburg, Germany, the “Wikipedia:Systemic bias” page describes the average Wikipedian as:MaleTechnically inclinedFormally educatedAn English speakerWhiteAged 15-49From a majority Christian countryFrom a developed nationFrom the Northern HemisphereLikely a white-collar worker or studentBias in content is thought to be perpetuated by this demographic of contributor, and the “founder effect,” a concept from genetics, linking the original contributors to this same demographic has been used to explain the origins of certain biases. Wikipedia’s “About” page discusses the issue as well, in the context of the open platform’s strengths and weaknesses:in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, etc.) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, while others may be covered in great depth. No educated arguments against this inherent bias have been advanced.Royal and Kapila’s study of Wikipedia content tested some of these assertions, finding identifiable bias in both their purposive and random sampling. They conclude that bias favoring larger countries is positively correlated with the size of the country’s Internet population, and corporations with larger revenues work in much the same way, garnering more coverage on the site. The researchers remind us that Wikipedia is “more a socially produced document than a value-free information source” (Royal & Kapila).WikiProject: Countering Systemic BiasAs a coalition of current Wikipedia editors, the WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) attempts to counter trends in content production and points of view deemed harmful to the democratic ideals of a valueless, open online encyclopedia. WP:CBS’s mission is not one of policing the site, but rather deepening it:Generally, this project concentrates upon remedying omissions (entire topics, or particular sub-topics in extant articles) rather than on either (1) protesting inappropriate inclusions, or (2) trying to remedy issues of how material is presented. Thus, the first question is "What haven't we covered yet?", rather than "how should we change the existing coverage?" (Wikipedia, “Countering”)The project lays out a number of content areas lacking adequate representation, geographically highlighting the dearth in coverage of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. WP:CSB also includes a “members” page that editors can sign to show their support, along with space to voice their opinions on the problem of bias on Wikipedia (the quotations at the beginning of this paper are taken from this “members” page). At the time of this study, 329 editors had self-selected and self-identified as members of WP:CSB, and this group constitutes the population sample for the current study. To explore the extent to which WP:CSB addressed these self-identified areas for improvement, each editor’s last 50 edits were coded for their primary geographical country of interest, as well as the conceptual category of the page itself (“P” for person/people, “L” for location, “I” for idea/concept, “T” for object/thing, or “NA” for indeterminate). For example, edits to the Wikipedia page for a single person like Tony Abbott (Australian federal opposition leader) were coded “Australia, P”, while an edit for a group of people like the Manchester United football team would be coded “England, P”. Coding was based on information obtained from the header paragraphs of each article’s Wikipedia page. After coding was completed, corresponding information on each country’s associated continent was added to the dataset, based on the United Nations Statistics Division listing.A total of 15,616 edits were coded for the study. Nearly 32% (n = 4962) of these edits were on articles for persons or people (see Table 1 for complete coding results). From within this sub-sample of edits, a majority of the people (68.67%) represented are associated with North America and Europe (Figure A). If we break these statistics down further, nearly half of WP:CSB’s edits concerning people were associated with the United States (36.11%) and England (10.16%), with India (3.65%) and Australia (3.35%) following at a distance. These figures make sense for the English-language Wikipedia; over 95% of the population in the three Westernised countries speak English, and while India is still often regarded as a developing nation, its colonial British roots and the emergence of a market economy with large, technology-driven cities are logical explanations for its representation here (and some estimates make India the largest English-speaking nation by population on the globe today).Table A Coding Results Total Edits 15616 (I) Ideas 2881 18.45% (L) Location 2240 14.34% NA 333 2.13% (T) Thing 5200 33.30% (P) People 4962 31.78% People by Continent Africa 315 6.35% Asia 827 16.67% Australia 175 3.53% Europe 1411 28.44% NA 110 2.22% North America 1996 40.23% South America 128 2.58% The areas of the globe of main concern to WP:CSB proved to be much less represented by the coalition itself. Asia, far and away the most populous continent with more than 60% of the globe’s people (GeoHive), was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented compared to both their real-world populations (15% and 9% of the globe’s population respectively) and the aforementioned dominance of the advanced Westernised areas. However, while these percentages may seem low, in aggregate they do meet the quota set on the WP:CSB Project Page calling for one out of every twenty edits to be “a subject that is systematically biased against the pages of your natural interests.” By this standard, the coalition is indeed making headway in adding content that strategically counterbalances the natural biases of Wikipedia’s average editor.Figure ASocial network analysis allows us to visualise multifaceted data in order to identify relationships between actors and content (Vego-Redondo; Watts). Similar to Davis’s well-known sociological study of Southern American socialites in the 1930s (Scott), our Wikipedia coalition can be conceptualised as individual actors united by common interests, and a network of relations can be constructed with software such as UCINET. A mapping algorithm that considers both the relationship between all sets of actors and each actor to the overall collective structure produces an image of our network. This initial network is bimodal, as both our Wikipedia editors and their edits (again, coded for country of interest) are displayed as nodes (Figure B). Edge-lines between nodes represents a relationship, and here that relationship is the act of editing a Wikipedia article. We see from our network that the “U.S.” and “England” hold central positions in the network, with a mass of editors crowding around them. A perimeter of nations is then held in place by their ties to editors through the U.S. and England, with a second layer of editors and poorly represented nations (Gabon, Laos, Uzbekistan, etc.) around the boundaries of the network.Figure BWe are reminded from this visualisation both of the centrality of the two Western powers even among WP:CSB editoss, and of the peripheral nature of most other nations in the world. But we also learn which editors in the project are contributing most to underrepresented areas, and which are less “tied” to the Western core. Here we see “Wizzy” and “Warofdreams” among the second layer of editors who act as a bridge between the core and the periphery; these are editors with interests in both the Western and marginalised nations. Located along the outer edge, “Gallador” and “Gerrit” have no direct ties to the U.S. or England, concentrating all of their edits on less represented areas of the globe. Identifying editors at these key positions in the network will help with future research, informing interview questions that will investigate their interests further, but more significantly, probing motives for participation and action within the coalition.Additionally, we can break the network down further to discover editors who appear to have similar interests in underrepresented areas. Figure C strips down the network to only editors and edits dealing with Africa and South America, the least represented continents. From this we can easily find three types of editors again: those who have singular interests in particular nations (the outermost layer of editors), those who have interests in a particular region (the second layer moving inward), and those who have interests in both of these underrepresented regions (the center layer in the figure). This last group of editors may prove to be the most crucial to understand, as they are carrying the full load of WP:CSB’s mission.Figure CThe End of Geography, or the Reclamation?In The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells writes that “the Internet Age has been hailed as the end of geography,” a bold suggestion, but one that has gained traction over the last 15 years as the excitement for the possibilities offered by information communication technologies has often overshadowed structural barriers to participation like the Digital Divide (207). Castells goes on to amend the “end of geography” thesis by showing how global information flows and regional Internet access rates, while creating a new “map” of the world in many ways, is still closely tied to power structures in the analog world. The Internet Age: “redefines distance but does not cancel geography” (207). The work of WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias emphasises the importance of place and representation in the information environment that continues to be constructed in the online world. This study looked at only a small portion of this coalition’s efforts (~16,000 edits)—a snapshot of their labor frozen in time—which itself is only a minute portion of the information being dispatched through Wikipedia on a daily basis (~125,000 edits). Further analysis of WP:CSB’s work over time, as well as qualitative research into the identities, interests and motivations of this collective, is needed to understand more fully how information bias is understood and challenged in the Internet galaxy. The data here indicates this is a fight worth fighting for at least a growing few.ReferencesAlexa. “Top Sites.” Alexa.com, n.d. 10 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.alexa.com/topsites>. Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. 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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

This paper will discuss the way in which the creative component of my thesis Hannah’s Place uses a style of neo-historical fiction to find ‘good’ narratives in (once) ‘bad’ women, keeping with the theme, here paraphrased as: The work of any researcher in the humanities is to…challenge what is simply thought of as bad or good, to complicate essentialist categories and question passively accepted thinking. As a way of expanding this statement, I would like to begin by considering the following quote from Barthes on the nature of research. I believe he identifies the type of research that I have been involved with as a PhD candidate producing a ‘creative’ thesis in the field of Communications. What is a piece of research? To find out, we would need to have some idea of what a ‘result’ is. What is it that one finds? What is it one wants to find? What is missing? In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning brought out, the statistical discovery be placed? No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent. Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier. (Barthes 198) My thesis sits within the theoretical framework of postmodern literature as a new form of the genre that has been termed ‘historical fiction’. Although the novel breaks away from and challenges the concept of the traditional ‘saga’ style of narrative, or ‘grand narrative’ within historical fiction, it is no less concerned with events of the past and the idea of past experience. It departs from traditional historical fiction in that it foregrounds not only an imagined fictional past world created when the novel is read, but also the actual archival documents, the pieces of text from the past from which traditional history is made, and which here have been used to create that world–‘sparking points’ for the fictional narrative. These archival documents are used within the work as intertextual elements that frame, and, in turn, are framed by the transworld characters’ homodiegetic narrations. The term ‘transworld character’ has been attributed to Umberto Eco and refers to any real world personages found within a fictional text. Eco defines it as the ‘identity of a given individual through worlds (transworld identity)…where the possible world is a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of relevant propositions [either true or untrue which] outlines a set of possible individuals along with their properties’ (219). Umberto Eco also considers that a problem of transworld identity is ‘to single out something as persistent through alternative states of affairs’ (230). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale also puts forward a number of definitions for ‘transworld identity’. For my purposes, I take it to mean both that defined by Eco but also the literary device, as defined by McHale, of ‘borrowing a character from another text’ (57). It is McHale who elaborates on the concept as it relates to historical fiction when he states: All historical novels, even the most traditional, typically involve some violation of ontological boundaries. For instance they often claim ‘transworld identity’ between characters in their projected worlds and real-world historical figures (16-17). Interestingly for the type of fiction that I am attempting to write, McHale also takes the idea into another area when he discusses the ontological levels of the historical dimension that transworld identities may undergo. Entities can change their ontological status in the course of history, in effect migrating from one ontological realm or level to another. For instance, real world entities and happenings can undergo ‘mythification’, moving from the profane realm to the realm of the sacred (36). For transworld identities, such as those within my novel, this may mean a change in status between the past, where they were stereotyped and categorised as ‘bad’ in contemporary newspapers (my intertext elements), to something in the present approaching ‘good’, or at least a more rounded female identity within a fictional world. The introduced textual elements which I foreground in my novel are those things most often hidden from view within the mimetic and hermeneutic worlds of traditional historical fiction. The sources re-textualised within my novel are both ‘real’ items from our past, and representations and interpretations of past events. The female transworld characters’ stories in this novel are imaginative re-interpretations. Therefore, both the fictional stories, as well as their sources, are textual interpretations of prior events. In this way, the novel plays with the idea of historical ‘fact’ and historical ‘fiction’. It blurs their boundaries. It gives textual equality to each in order to bring a form of textual agency to those marginalised groups defined by PF Bradley as the ‘host of jarring witnesses, [of history] a chaos of disjoined and discrepant narrations’ (Bradley in Holton 11): In the past in Australia these were lower class women, Aboriginals, the Irish, the illiterate, and poor agricultural immigrants whose labour was excess to Britain’s needs. Hannah’s Place – A Brief Synopsis Six individual women’s stories, embedded in or ‘framed’ by a fictional topographic artist’s journal, recount ‘real’ events from Australia’s colonial past. The journal is set in 1845; a few years after convict transportation to Australia’s eastern states ceased, and the year of the first art exhibition held in the colony. That same year, Leichhardt’s expedition arrived at Port Essington in Australia’s far north, after 12 months inland exploration, while in the far south the immigrant ship Cataraqui was wrecked one day short of arrival at Melbourne’s Port Phillip with the drowning of all but one of the 369 immigrants and 38 of the 46 sailors on board. Each chapter title takes the form of the title of a topographic sketch as a way of placing the text ‘visually’ within the artist’s journal narrative. The six women’s stories are: New South Wales at Last (Woman on a Boat): A woman arrives with a sick toddler to tent accommodation for poor immigrants in Sydney, after a three month sea voyage and the shipboard birth, death, and burial at sea of her baby daughter. Yarramundi Homestead, as Seen from the East: An ill-treated Irish servant girl on a squatter’s run awaits the arrival of her fiancée, travelling on board the immigrant ship Cataraqui. In the Vale of Hartley: In the Blue Mountains, an emancipist sawyer who previously murdered three people, violently beats to death his lover, Caroline Collitts, the seventeen-year-old sister of Maria, his fifteen-year-old wife. She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: In Goulburn, Annie Brownlow, a pretty 24-year-old mother of three is executed by a convict executioner for the accidental ‘murder’, while drunk, of her adulterous husband. The Eldest Daughter: The isolated wife of a small settler gives birth, assisted by Lottie, her eldest daughter, and Merrung, an Aboriginal midwife. On Wednesday Last, at Mr Ley’s Coach and Horses Hotel: In Bathurst, a vagrant alcoholic, Hannah Simpson, dies on the floor of a dodgy boarding house after a night and a day of falling into fits and ranting about her lifetime of 30 years migration. Historiographic Metafiction Has been defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘Fiction which keeps distinct its formal auto-representation from its historical context and in so doing problematises the very possibility of historical knowledge… There is no reconciliation, no dialectic…just unresolved contradiction’ (106). Unresolved contradiction is one of the themes that surfaces in my novel because of the juxtaposition of archival documents (past text ‘facts’) alongside fictional narrative. Historiographic metafiction can usefully be employed as a means of challenging prior patriarchal narratives written about marginalised women. It allows the freedom to create a space for a new understanding of silenced women’s lives. My novel seeks to illuminate and problematise the previously ‘seamless’ genre of hical fiction by the use of (narrative) techniques such as: collage and juxtaposition, intertextuality, framing, embedded narrative, linked stories, and footnote intertext of archival material. Juxtaposition of the fiction against elements from prior non-fiction texts, clearly enunciated as being those same actual historical sources upon which the fiction is based, reinforces this novel as a work of fiction. Yet this strategy also reminds us that the historical narrative created is provisional, residing within the fictional text and in the gaps between the fictional text and the non-fictional intertext. At the same time, the clear narrativity, the suspenseful and sensationalised text of the archival non-fiction, brings them into question because of their place alongside the fiction. A reading of the novel questions the truthfulness or degree of reliability of past textual ‘facts’ as accurate records of real women’s life events. It does this by the use of a parallel narrative, which articulates characters whose moments of ‘breaking frame’ challenge those same past texts. Their ‘fiction’ as characters is reinforced by their existence as ‘objects’ of narration within the archival texts. Both the archival texts and the fiction can be seen as ‘unreliable’. The novel uses ex-centric transworld characters and embedded intertextual ‘fragments’ to create a covert self-reflexivity. It also confuses and disrupts narrative temporality and linearity of plot in two ways. It juxtaposes ‘real’ (intertextual element) dates alongside conflicting or unknown periods of time from the fictional narrative; and, within the artist’s journal, it has a minimal use of expected temporal ‘signposts’. These ‘signposts’ of year dates, months, or days of the week are those things that would be most expected in an authentic travel narrative. In this way, the women’s stories subvert the idea, inherent in previous forms of ‘historical’ fiction, of a single point of view or ‘take’ on history that one or two main characters may hold. The use of intertext results in a continued restating of multiple, conflicting (gender, race, and class) points of view. Ultimately no one ‘correct’ reading of the past gains in supremacy over any other. This narrative construct rearticulates the idea that the past, as does the present, comprises different points of view, not all of which conform to the ‘correct’ view created by the political, social and economic ‘factors’ dominant at the time those events happen. For colonial Australia, this single point of view gave us the myth of heroic (white male) pioneers and positioned women such as some of those within my fiction as ‘bad’. The fictional text challenges that of the male ‘gaze’, which constructed these women as ‘objects’. Examples of this from the newspaper articles are: A younger sister of Caroline Collit, married John Walsh, the convict at present under sentence of death in Bathurst gaol, and, it appears, continued to live with him up till the time of her sister’s murder; but she, as well as her sister Caroline, since the trial, have been ascertained to have borne very loose characters, which is fully established by the fact, that both before and after Walsh had married the younger sister, Caroline cohabited with him and had in fact been for a considerable time living with him, under the same roof with her sister, and in a state of separation from her own husband (Collit). Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder. About twelve months after her marriage, her mother who was a notorious drunkard hanged herself in her own house… Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder. And when we further reflect that the perpetrator of that deed of blood was a woman our horror is, if possible, much augmented. Yes! A woman and one who ought to have been in as much as the means were assuredly in the power of her family-an ornament to her sex and station. She has been cut off in the midst of her days by the hands of the common executioner. And to add to our distress at this sad event she to whose tragic end I am referring was a wife and a mother. It was her hand which struck the blow that rendered her children orphans and brought her to an ignominious end… The Goulburn Herald, October 20, 1855, Funeral sermon on Mary Ann Brownlow. His wife had been drinking and created an altercation on account of his having sold [her] lease; she asked him to drink, but he refused, when she replied “You can go and drink with your fancywoman”. She came after him as he was going away and stabbed him…..she did it from jealousy, although he had never given her any cause for jealousy. The Goulburn Herald, Saturday, September 15, 1855, Tuesday, September 11, Wilful Murder. She was always most obedient and quiet in her conduct, and her melancholy winning manners soon procured her the sympathy of all who came in contact with her. She became deeply impressed with the sinfulness of her previous life… The Goulburn Herald, October 13, 1855, Execution of Mary Ann Brownlow. [Police] had known the deceased who was a confirmed drunkard and an abandoned woman without any home or place of abode; did not believe she had any proper means of support…The Bathurst Times, November 1871. It is the oppositional and strong narrative ‘voice’ that elicits sympathies for and with the women’s situations. The fictional narratives were written to challenge unsympathetic pre-existing narratives found within the archival intertexts. This male ‘voice’ was one that narrated and positioned women such that they adhered to pre-existing notions of morality; what it meant to be a ‘good’ woman (like Mary Ann Brownlow, reformed in gaol but still sentenced to death) or a ‘bad’ woman (Mary Ann again as the murdering drunken vengeful wife, stabbing her husband in a jealous rage). ‘Reading between the lines’ of history in this way, creating fictional stories and juxtaposing them against the non-fiction prior articulations of those same events, is an opportunity to make use of narrative structure in order to destabilise established constructs of our colonial past. For example, the trope of Australia’s colonial settler women as exampled in the notion of Anne Summers of colonial women as either God’s police or damned whores. ‘A Particularly rigid dualistic notion of women’s function in colonial society was embodied in two stereotypes….that women are either good [God’s police] or evil [Damned whores]’ (67). With this dualism in mind, it is also useful here to consider the assumption made by Veeser in laying the ground work for New Historicism, that ‘no discourse imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature’ (2). In a discussion of the ideas of Brian McHale, Middleton and Woods acknowledge McHale’s point of view that readers do recognise the degree to which all knowledge of the past is a construction. They make the claim that ‘the postmodern novelist answers that sense of dislocation and loss…by wrapping ruins of earlier textualities around the narrative’ (66). This to my mind is a call for the type of intertextuality that I have attempted in my thesis. The senses of dislocation and loss found when we attempt to narrativise history are embodied in the structure of the creative component of my thesis. Yet it could also be argued that the cultural complexity of colonial Australia, with women as the subjugated ‘other’ of a disempowered voice has only been constructed by and from within the present. The ‘real’ women from whose lives these stories are imagined could not have perceived their lives within the frames (class, gender, post coloniality) that we now understand in the same way that we as educated westerners cannot totally perceive a tribal culture’s view of the cosmos as a real ‘fact’. However, a fictional re-articulation of historical ‘facts’, using a framework of postmodern neo-historical fiction, allows archival documents to be understood as the traces of women to whom those documented facts once referred. The archival record becomes once again a thing that describes a world of women. It is within these archival micro-histories of illiterate lower-class women that we find shards of our hidden past. By fictionally imagining a possible narrative of their lives we, as the author/reader nexus which creates the image of who these transworld characters were, allow for things that existed in the past as possibility. The fictionalised stories, based on fragments of ‘facts’ from the past, are a way of invoking what could have once existed. In this way the stories partake of the Bernstein and Morson concept of ‘sideshadowing’. Sideshadowing admits, in addition to actualities and impossibilities, a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not. Things could have been different from the way they were, there are real alternatives to the present we know, and the future admits of various possibilities… sideshadowing deepens our sense of the openness of time. It has profound implications for our understanding of history and of our own lives (Morson 6). The possibilities that sideshadowing their lives invokes in these stories ‘alters the way that we think about earlier events and the narrative models used to describe them’ (Morson 7). We alter our view of the women, as initially described in the archival record, because we now perceive the narrative through which these events and therefore ‘lives’ of the women were written, as merely ‘one possibility’ of many that may have occurred. Sideshadowing alternate possibilities gives us a way out of that patriarchal hegemony into a more multi-dimensional and non-linear view of female lives in 19th Century Australia. Sideshadowing allows for the ‘non-closure’ within female narratives that these fragments of women’s lives represent. It is this which is at the core of the novel—an historiographic metafictional challenging by the fictional ‘voices’ of female transworld characters. In this work, they narrate from a female perspective the might-have-been alternative of that previously considered as an historical, legitimate account of the past. Barthes and Bakhtin Readers of this type of historiographic metafiction have the freedom to recreate an historical fictional world. By virtue of the use of self-reflexivity and intertext they participate in a fictional world constructed by themselves from the author(s) of the text(s) and the intertext, and the original women’s voices used as quotations by the intertext’s (male) author. This world is based upon their construction of a past created from the author’s research, the author’s subjectivity (from within and by disciplinary discourse), by the author(s) choice of ‘signifiers’ and the meanings that these choices create within the reader’s subjectivity (itself formed out of their individual cultural and social milieu). This idea echoes Barthes concept of the ‘death of the author’, such that: As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself; this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (142) When entering into the world created by this style of historical fiction the reader also enters into a world of previous ‘texts’ (or intertexts) and the multitude of voices inherent in them. This is the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, that ‘every utterance contains within it the trace of other utterances, both in the past and in the future’ (263). The narrative formed thus becomes one of multiple ‘truths’ and therefore multiple histories. Once written as ‘bad’, the women are now perceived as ‘good’ characters and the ‘bad’ events that occurred around them and to them make up ‘good’ elements of plot, structure, characterisation and voice for a fictionalised version of a past possibility. Bad women make good reading. Conclusion This type of narrative structure allows for the limits of the silenced ‘voice’ of the past, and therefore an understanding of marginalised groups within hegemonic grand narratives, to be approached. It seems to me no surprise that neo-historical fiction is used more when the subjects written about are members of marginalised groups. Silenced voices need to be heard. Because these women left no written account of their experiences, and because we can never experience the society within which their identities were formed, we will never know their ‘identity’ as they experienced it. Fictional self-narrated stories of transworld characters allows for a transformation of the women away from an identity created by the moralising, stereotyped descriptions in the newspapers towards a more fully developed sense of female identity. Third-hand male accounts written for the (then) newspaper readers consumption (and for us as occupiers of the ‘future’) are a construct of one possible identity only. They do not reflect the women’s reality. Adding another fictional ‘identity’ through an imagined self-narrated account deconstructs that limited ‘identity’ formed through the male ‘gaze’. It does so because of the ability of fiction to allow the reader to create a fictional world which can be experienced imaginatively and from within their own subjectivity. Rather than something passively recorded, literature offers history as a permanent reactivation of the past in a critique of the present, and at the level of content offers a textual anamnesis for the hitherto ignored, unacknowledged or repressed pasts marginalised by the dominant histories. (Middleton and Woods 77) References Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Michael Holquist. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath, eds. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1979. Holton, Robert. Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Ringwood Vic: Penguin Books, 1994. Veeser, H. Aram. The New Historicism. London: Routledge, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lowes, Elanna Herbert. "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>. APA Style Lowes, E. (Feb. 2005) "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>.

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

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). Instead of being demolished, Brutalist objects that are no longer considered appropriate as residences could be repurposed for creative, cultural, or academic use, where their challenging corporeal effects could contribute to a stimulating or even thrilling environment.ReferencesAllen, Edward, and Joseph Iano. Fundamentals of Building Construction: Materials and Methods. 6th ed. 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IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof). Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring. There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video. As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities. It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages. The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner). In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier). In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009. The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18. Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment. Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications. Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan? Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs? Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue? How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue? As an alternative to signing? Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels. This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”. The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux. The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films). The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive. While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde). Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people. During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making. In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past. The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web. There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives. These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined. It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7). The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’. As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating. Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse. This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527). In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"). The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however. Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12). They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents. They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place. They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11). As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication. Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.Bakken, F. “SMS Use among Deaf Teens and Young Adults in Norway.” In R. Harper, L. Palen, and A. Taylor (eds.), The Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives on SMS. Netherlands: Springe, 2005. 161-74. Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. London: Orion Business, 1999.Bertolucci, Jeff. “YouTube Offers Auto-Captioning to All Users.” PC World 5 Mar. 2010. 5 Mar. 2010 < http://www.macworld.com/article/146879/2010/03/YouTube_captions.html >.Breivik, Jan Kare. Deaf Identities in the Making: Local Lives, Transnational Connections. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2005.———. “Deaf Identities: Visible Culture, Hidden Dilemmas and Scattered Belonging.” In H.G. Sicakkan and Y.G. Lithman (eds.), What Happens When a Society Is Diverse: Exploring Multidimensional Identities. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. 75-104.Brueggemann, B.J. (ed.). Literacy and Deaf People’s Cultural and Contextual Perspectives. Washington, DC: Gaudellet University Press, 2004. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Byrnes, Linda, Jeff Sigafoos, Field Rickards, and P. Margaret Brown. “Inclusion of Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing in Government Schools in New South Wales, Australia: Development and Implementation of a Policy.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7.3 (2002): 244-257.Cahill, Martin, and Scott Hollier. Social Media Accessibility Review 1.0. Media Access Australia, 2009. Cavender, Anna, and Richard Ladner. “Hearing Impairments.” In S. Harper and Y. Yesilada (eds.), Web Accessibility. London: Springer, 2008.Ellis, Katie. “A Purposeful Rebuilding: YouTube, Representation, Accessibility and the Socio-Political Space of Disability." Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.2 (2010): 1.1-21.12.Fajardo, Inmaculada, Elena Parra, and Jose J. Canas. “Do Sign Language Videos Improve Web Navigation for Deaf Signer Users?” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 15.3 (2009): 242-262.Harper, Phil. “Networking the Deaf Nation.” Australian Journal of Communication 30.3 (2003): 153-166.Hyde, M., D. Power, and K. Lloyd. "W(h)ither the Deaf Community? Comments on Trevor Johnston’s Population, Genetics and the Future of Australian Sign Language." Sign Language Studies 6.2 (2006): 190-201. Keating, Elizabeth, and Gene Mirus. “American Sign Language in Virtual Space: Interactions between Deaf Users of Computer-Mediated Video.” Language in Society 32.5 (Nov. 2003): 693-714.Krentz, Christopher. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Leigh, Irene. A Lens on Deaf Identities. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2009.Marshall Gentry, M., K.M. Chinn, and R.D. Moulton. “Effectiveness of Multimedia Reading Materials When Used with Children Who Are Deaf.” American Annals of the Deaf 5 (2004): 394-403.Mather, S., and E. Winston. "Spatial Mapping and Involvement in ASL Storytelling." In C. Lucas (ed.), Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1998. 170-82.Metzger, M. "Constructed Action and Constructed Dialogue in American Sign Language." In C. Lucas (ed.), Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1995. 255-71.Power, Des, and G. Leigh. "Principles and Practices of Literacy Development for Deaf Learners: A Historical Overview." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 5.1 (2000): 3-8.Power, Des, and Merv Hyde. “The Characteristics and Extent of Participation of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in Regular Classes in Australian Schools.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7.4 (2002): 302-311.Power, M., and D. Power “Everyone Here Speaks TXT: Deaf People Using SMS in Australia and the Rest of the World.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9.3 (2004). Power, M., D. Power, and L. Horstmanshof. “Deaf People Communicating via SMS, TTY, Relay Service, Fax, and Computers in Australia.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 12.1 (2007): 80-92. Rayman, J. "Storytelling in the Visual Mode: A Comparison of ASL and English." In E. Wilson (ed.), Storytelling & Conversation: Discourse in Deaf Communities. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002. 59-82.Schonfeld, Eric. "ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent of All Google Searches." Tech Crunch 18 Dec. 2008. 14 May 2009 < http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/18/comscore-YouTube-now-25-percent-of-all-google-searches/?rss >.Smith, Chad. “Where Is It? How Deaf Adolescents Complete Fact-Based Internet Search Tasks." American Annals of the Deaf 151.5 (2005-6).Swanwick, R., and S. Gregory (eds.). Sign Bilingual Education: Policy and Practice. Coleford: Douglas McLean Publishing, 2007.Tane Akamatsu, C., C. Mayer, and C. Farrelly. “An Investigation of Two-Way Text Messaging Use with Deaf Students at the Secondary Level.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 11.1 (2006): 120-131.Valentine, Gill, and Tracy Skelton. “Changing Spaces: The Role of the Internet in Shaping Deaf Geographies.” Social and Cultural Geography 9.5 (2008): 469-85.———. “‘An Umbilical Cord to the World’: The Role of the Internet in D/deaf People’s Information and Communication Practices." Information, Communication and Society 12.1 (2009): 44-65.Vogel, Jennifer, Clint Bowers, Cricket Meehan, Raegan Hoeft, and Kristy Bradley. “Virtual Reality for Life Skills Education: Program Evaluation.” Deafness and Education International 61 (2004): 39-47.Wilson, J. "The Tobacco Story: Narrative Structure in an ASL Story." In C. Lucas (ed.), Multicultural Aspects of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1996. 152-80.Winston (ed.). Storytelling and Conversation: Discourse in Deaf Communities. Washington, D.C: Gallaudet University Press. 59-82.Woods, Denise. “Communicating in Virtual Worlds through an Accessible Web 2.0 Solution." Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.2 (2010): 19.1-19.16YouTube Most Viewed. Online video. YouTube 2009. 23 May 2009 < http://www.YouTube.com/browse?s=mp&t=a >.

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

As Earth heats up and water vapourises, “Adapt” is a word that is frequently invoked right now, in a world seething with change and challenge. Its Oxford English Dictionary definitions—“to fit, to make suitable; to alter so as to fit for a new use”—give little hint of the strangely divergent moral values associated with its use. There is, of course, the word’s unavoidable Darwinian connotations which, in spite of creationist controversy, communicate a cluster of positive values linked with progress. By contrast, the literary use of adapt is frequently linked with negative moral values. Even in our current “hyper-adaptive environment” (Rizzo)—in which a novel can become a theme park ride can become a film can become a computer game can become a novelisation—an adaptation is seen as a debasement of an original, inauthentic, inferior, parasitic (Hutcheon, 2-3). A starting point from which to explore the word’s “positive”—that is, evolutionary—use is the recently released Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, which argues the necessity of adapting in order to survive. Indeed, an entire section is titled “Policy responses for adaptation,” outlining—among other things—“an economic framework for adaptation”; “barriers and constraints to adaptation”; and “how developing countries can adapt to climate change” (403). Although evolution is not directly mentioned, it is evoked through the review’s analysis of a dire situation which compels humans to change in response to their changing environment. Yet the mere existence of the review, and its enumeration of problems and solutions, suggests that human adaptive abilities are up to the task, drawing on positive traits such as resilience, flexibility, agility, innovation, creativity, progressiveness, appropriateness, and so on. These values, and their connection to the evolutionary use of “adapt”, infuse 21st-century life. “Adapt,” “evolution”, and that cluster of values are entwined so closely that recalling effort is required to remind oneself that “adapt” existed before evolutionary theory. And whether or not one accepts the premise of evolution—or even understands it beyond the level of reductive popular science—it provides an irresistible metaphor that underlies areas as diverse as education, business, organisational culture, politics, and law. For example, Judith Robinson’s article “Education as the Foundation of the New Economy” quotes Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley: “The future holds nothing but change. … Charles Darwin said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.’” Robinson adds: “Education is how we equip our people with the ability to adapt to change.” Further examples show “adapt” as a positive metaphor for government. A study into towns in rural Queensland discovered that while some towns “have reinvented themselves and are thriving,” others “that are not innovative or adaptable” are in decline (Plowman, Ashkanasy, Gardner and Letts, 8). The Queensland Government’s Smart State Strategy also refers to the desirability of adapting: “The pace of change in the world is now so rapid—and sometimes so unpredictable—that our best prospects for maintaining our lead lie in our agility, flexibility and adaptability.” The Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, in setting national research priorities, identifies “An Environmentally Sustainable Australia” and in that context specifically mentions the need to adapt: “there needs to be an increased understanding of the contributions of human behaviour to environmental and climate change, and on [sic] appropriate adaptive responses and strategies.” In the corporate world, the Darwinian allusion is explicit in book titles such as Geoffrey Moore’s 2005 Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution: “Moore’s theme is innovation, which he sees as being necessary to the survival of business as a plant or animal adapting to changes in habitat” (Johnson). Within organisations, the metaphor is also useful, for instance in D. Keith Denton’s article, “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success:” “In order to understand how to create and manage adaptability, we need to look first at how nature uses it. … Species that fail to adapt have only one option left.” That option is extinction, which is the fate of “over 99% of all species that have ever existed.” However, any understanding of “adapt” as wholly positive and forward-moving is too simplistic. It ignores, for example, aspects of adaptation that are dangerous to people (such as the way the avian influenza virus or simian AIDS can adapt so that humans can become their hosts). Bacteria rapidly adapt to antibiotics; insects rapidly adapt to pesticides. Furthermore, an organism that is exquisitely adapted to a specific niche becomes vulnerable with even a small disturbance in its environment. The high attrition rate of species is breathtakingly “wasteful” and points to the limitations of the evolutionary metaphor. Although corporations and education have embraced the image, it is unthinkable that any corporation or educational system would countenance either evolution’s tiny adaptive adjustments over a long period of time, or the high “failure” rate. Furthermore, evolution can only be considered “progress” if there is an ultimate goal towards which evolution is progressing: the anthropocentric viewpoint that holds that “the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual,” as Rizzo puts it. This suggests that the “positive” values connected with this notion of “adapt” are a form of self-congratulation among those who consider themselves the “survivors”. A hierarchy of evolution-thought places “agile,” “flexible” “adaptors” at the top, while at the bottom of the hierarchy are “stagnant,” “atrophied” “non-adaptors”. The “positive” values then form the basis for exclusionary prejudices directed at those human and non-human beings seen as being “lower” on the evolutionary scale. Here we have arrived at Social Darwinism, the Great-Chain-of-Being perspective, Manifest Destiny—all of which still justify many kinds of unjust treatment of humans, animals, and ecosystems. Literary or artistic meanings of “adapt”—although similarly based on hierarchical thinking (Shiloh)—are, as mentioned earlier, frequently laden with negative moral values. Directly contrasting with the evolutionary adaptation we have just discussed, value in literary adaptation is attached to “being first” rather than to the success of successors. Invidious dichotomies that actually reverse the moral polarity of Darwinian adaptation come into play: “authentic” versus “fake”, “original” versus “copy”, “strong” versus “weak”, “superior” versus “inferior”. But, as the authors collected in this issue demonstrate, the assignment of a moral value to evolutionary “adapt”, and another to literary “adapt”, is too simplistic. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)—discussed in three articles in this issue—deals with both these uses of the word, and provides the impetus to these authors’ explorations of possible connections and contrasts between them. Evidence of the pervasiveness of the concept is seen in the work of other writers, who explore the same issues in a range of cultural phenomena, such as graffiti, music sampling, a range of activities in and around the film industry, and several forms of identity formation. A common theme is the utter inadequacy of a single moral value being assigned to “adapt”. For example, McMerrin quotes Ghandi in her paper: “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.” Shiloh argues: “If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid.” Furnica, citing Rudolf Arnheim, points out that an adaptation “increases our understanding of the adapted work.” All of which suggests that the application of “adapt” to circumstances of culture and nature suggests an “infinite onion” both of adaptations and of the “core samples of difference” that are the inevitable corollary of this issue’s theme. To drill down into the products of culture, to peel back the “facts” of nature, is only ever to encounter additional and increasingly minute variations of the activity of “adapt”. One never hits the bottom of difference and adaptation. Still, why would you want to, when the stakes of “adapt” might be little different from the stakes of life itself? At least, this is the insight that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—in all its rhizomatic variations—seems constantly to be leading us towards: “Life” (capitalised) is a continual germination that feeds on a thousand tiny adaptations of open-ended desire and of a ceaselessly productive mode of difference. Besides everything else that they do, all of the articles in this issue participate—in one way or another—in this notion of “adapt” as a constant impetus towards new configurations of culture and of nature. They are the proof (if such proof were to be requested or required) that the “infinite onion” of adaptation and difference, while certainly a mise en abyme, is much more a positive “placing into infinity” than a negative “placing into the abyss.” Adaptation is nothing to be feared; stasis alone spells death. What this suggests, furthermore, is that a contemporary ethics of difference and alterity might not go far wrong if it were to adopt “adapt” as its signature experience. To be ever more sensitive to the subtle nuances, to the evanescences on the cusp of nothingness … of adaptation … is perhaps to place oneself at the leading edge of cultural activity, where the boundaries of self and other have, arguably, never been more fraught. Again, all of the contributors to this issue dive—“Alice-like”—down their own particular rabbit holes, in order to bring back to the surface something previously unthought or unrecognised. However, two recent trends in the sciences and humanities—or rather at the complex intersection of these disciplines—might serve as useful, generalised frameworks for the work on “adapt” that this issue pursues. The first of these is the upwelling of interest (contra Darwinism) in the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). For Lamarck, adaptation takes a deviation from the Darwinian view of Natural Selection. Lamarckism holds, in distinction from Darwin, that the characteristics acquired by individuals in the course of their (culturally produced) lifetimes can be transmitted down the generations. If your bandy-legged great-grandfather learnt to bend it like Beckham, for example, then Manchester United would do well to sign you up in the cradle. Lamarck’s ideas are an encouragement to gather up, for cultural purposes, ever more refined understandings of “adapt”. What this pro-Lamarckian movement also implies is a new “crossing-over point” of the natural/biological with the cultural/acquired. The second trend to be highlighted here, however, does more than merely imply such a refreshed configuration of nature and culture. Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work directly calls the bluff of the traditional Darwinian (not to mention Freudian) understanding of “biology as destiny”. In outline form, we propose that she does this by running together notions of biological difference (the male/female split) with the “ungrounded” difference of Deleuzean thinking and its derivatives. Adaptation thus shakes free, on Grosz’s reading, from the (Darwinian and Freudian) vestiges of biological determinism and becomes, rather, a productive mode of (cultural) difference. Grosz makes the further move of transporting such a “shaken and stirred” version of biological difference into the domains of artistic “excess”, on the basis that “excessive” display (as in the courting rituals of the male peacock) is fundamentally crucial to those Darwinian axioms centred on the survival of the species. By a long route, therefore, we are returned, through Grosz, to the interest in art and adaptation that has, for better or for worse, tended to dominate studies of “adapt”, and which this issue also touches upon. But Grosz returns us to art very differently, which points the way, perhaps, to as yet barely recognised new directions in the field of adaptation studies. We ask, then, where to from here? Responding to this question, we—the editors of this issue—are keen to build upon the groundswell of interest in 21st-century adaptation studies with an international conference, entitled “Adaptation & Application”, to be held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia in early 2009. The “Application” part of this title reflects, among other things, the fact that our conference will be, perhaps uniquely, itself an example of “adapt”, to the extent that it will have two parallel but also interlocking strands: adaptation; application. Forward-thinking architects Arakawa and Gins have expressed an interest in being part of this event. (We also observe, in passing, that “application”, or “apply”, may be an excellent theme for a future issue of M/C Journal…) Those interested in knowing more about the “Adaptation and Application” conference may contact either of us on the email addresses given in our biographical notes. There are several groups and individuals that deserve public acknowledgement here. Of course, we thank the authors of these fourteen articles for their stimulating and reflective contributions to the various debates around “adapt”. We would also like to acknowledge the hugely supportive efforts of our hard-pressed referees. Equally, our gratitude goes out to those respondents to our call for papers whose submissions could not be fitted into this already overflowing issue. What they sent us kept the standard high, and many of the articles rejected for publication on this occasion will, we feel sure, soon find a wider audience in another venue (the excellent advice provided by our referees has an influence, in this way, beyond the life of this issue). We also wish to offer a very special note of thanks to Linda Hutcheon, who took time out from her exceptionally busy schedule to contribute the feature article for this issue. Her recent monograph A Theory of Adaptation is essential reading for all serious scholars of “adapt”, as is her contribution here. We are honoured to have Professor Hutcheon’s input into our project. Special thanks are also due to Gold-Coast based visual artist Judy Anderson for her “adaptation of adaptation” into a visual motif for our cover image. This inspiring piece is entitled “Between Two” (2005; digital image on cotton paper). Accessing experiences perhaps not accessible through words alone, Anderson’s image nevertheless “speaks adaptation”, as her Artist’s Statement suggests: The surface for me is a sensual encounter; an event, shifting form. As an eroticised site, it evokes memories of touch. … Body, object, place are woven together with memory; forgetting and remembering. The tactility and materiality of touching the surface is offered back to the viewer. These images are transitions themselves. As places of slippage and adaptation, they embody intervals on many levels; between the material and the immaterial, the familiar and the strange. Their source remains obscure so that they might represent spaces in-between—overlooked places that open up unexpectedly. If we have learned just one thing from the experience of editing the M/C Journal ‘adapt’ issue, it is that our theme richly rewards the sort of intellectual and creative activity demonstrated by our contributors. Much has been done here; much remains to be done. Some of this work will take place, no doubt, at the “Adaptation and Application” conference, and we hope to see many of you on the Gold Coast in 2009. But for now, it’s over to you, to engage with what you might encounter here, and to work new “adaptations” upon it. References Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training. Environmentally Sustainable Australia. 2005. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews /key_issues/national_research_priorities/priority_goals /environmentally_sustainable_australia.htm>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Denton, D Keith. “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success.” Development and Learning in Organizations 20.1 (2006): 7ff. Furnica, Ioana. “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’: Carlos Saura’s Carmen Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 . Grosz, Elizabeth. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sensation”. Plenary III Session. 9th Annual Comparative Literature Conference. Gilles Deleuze: Texts and Images: An International Conference. University of South Carolina, Columbia. 7 April 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Johnson, Cecil. “Darwinian Notions of Corporate Innovation,” Boston Globe, 15 Jan. 2006: L.2. McMerrin, Michelle. “Agency in Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03 mcmerrin.php mcmerrin.php>. Neimanis, Astrida. “A Feminist Deleuzian Politics? It’s About Time.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 154-8. Plowman, Ian, Neal M. Ashkanasy, John Gardner, and Malcolm Letts. Innovation in Rural Queensland: Why Some Towns Thrive while Others Languish: Main Report. University of Queensland/Department of Primary Industries. Queensland, Dec. 2003. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/business/14778.html>. Queensland Government. Smart State Strategy 2005-2015 Timeframe. 2007. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.smartstate.qld.gov.au/strategy/strategy05_15/timeframes.shtm>. Rizzo, Sergio. “Adaptation and the Art of Survival.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. Shiloh, Ilana. “Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. 2006. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_ economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delamoir, Jeannette, and Patrick West. "Editorial." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Delamoir, J., and P. West. (May 2007) "Editorial," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>.