Journal articles on the topic 'Residential mobility Victoria Melbourne'

In many suburban parts of Australia the removal of snakes from private property by licenced snake catchers is employed to mitigate perceived risks to humans and their pets. The number of snakes translocated around greater Melbourne, Victoria, each year can be very high (at least many hundreds). However, the effects of translocation on the behaviour and welfare of individual snakes, and the impact on existing snake populations at release sites are unknown. We used radio-telemetry of ‘resident’ and translocated snakes to investigate the consequences of translocation on the spatial ecology of tiger snakes (Notechis scutatus) in a suburban parkland near Melbourne. Fourteen snakes (two female and four male residents, and four female and four male translocated snakes) implanted with radio-transmitters were tracked between spring 2002 and autumn 2003. Translocated snakes exhibited home ranges ~6 times larger than those of residents, although each group maintained core ranges of similar size. Translocated snakes travelled longer distances and were often located in residential areas adjacent to the park, whereas resident snakes were never located outside of the park.

Older people living in the community use complementary medicine (CM) to manage the symptoms of chronic illness; however, little is known about CM use by older people living in care settings. Using focus groups and individual interviews, this study explored the use of CM from the perspective of 71 residents, families, and health professionals from six residential aged-care facilities in Victoria, Australia. Residents used CM to manage pain and improve mobility, often covertly, and only with the financial assistance of their families. Facility policies and funding restrictions constrained CM use at the individual and facility level. An absence of evidence to support safety and efficacy coupled with the risk of interactions made doctors wary of CM use in older people. These findings have relevance for the large number of CM using “baby-boomers” as they move into residential aged-care.

Telehealth can effectively increase access to specialist care and reduce the need for travel. The Geri-Connect service was established in 2017 to support people living in residential aged care facilities in regional Victoria, Australia. Using the Model for the Assessment of Telemedicine, an evaluation of the Geri-Connect service identified service activity patterns and factors associated with uptake. Service activity from 2017 to 2020 and 10 semi-structured, key stakeholder interviews were captured and analysed. Between 2017 and 2020, video consultations were provided to 53 residential aged care facilities. Sustained growth (over 178%) and strong stakeholder acceptance highlight the effectiveness of this telegeriatric service. Four recommendations provide opportunities to further enhance service delivery including: implementation of an integrated health information system; systematic evaluation of service impact on stakeholders and residents, auditing and subsequent provision of targeted training; and regular auditing of software and hardware. Additionally, the need to augment fixed room hardware with mobile telehealth systems would increase access for residents with mobility problems. Dedicated personnel of the centralised team are best suited to implementing the recommendations. Whilst the provision of routine telehealth services into residential aged care facilities is challenging, the Geri-Connect service demonstrates that telehealth can be effectively provided to residential aged care facility residents needing specialist geriatric care.

Objectives: (1) Evaluate the features of purpose-built apartment living on access, environmental control, and home and community mobility of people living with neurotrauma and (2) Examine tenant perceptions of those features.Research design: Observational case series pilot study.Setting:Three apartments within a residential development in Melbourne, Australia.Participants:Three males (aged 30–55 years) with traumatic brain and/or spinal cord injury living in the three separate apartments.Method and procedures:Measures:Two-published measures of user experience of built and technology environments, coupled with customised interdisciplinary post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methods and GPS-enabled mobility tracking.Analysis:Measures completed per manual guidelines and data reported descriptively. Customised measured drawings produced to represent tenants’ physical access and mobility. GPS community mobility data plotted on Google Earth.Results: Built design features which enabled access and mobility included linear paths of travel, well-located furnishings, and joinery design that allowed approach from either side using a wheelchair. Personal home furnishing choices posed barriers to physical access. Home automation technologies positively influenced participants’ sense of control and independence, but posed learning challenges. Close proximity of housing to accessible public transport and services enabled community travel options.Conclusion: Findings from this pilot study indicate the combination of housing location, design and technologies used, together with availability of local community services, provides an acceptable level of environmental control, access, mobility and tenant experience. Further research is required to determine validity of the novel measures used, and deliver rigorous research design to evaluate those features most important in achieving optimal outcomes.

Purpose The process for examining the value of house prices in an urban city has given limited attention, if any, to demographic variables associated with urban geography. Although the disciplines of property/real estate and demography have moved closer, little progress has been made when modelling house prices using population-related data in the field of urban geography to explain the level of house prices. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes an innovative model to examine the influence of population variables on the level of house prices. It used a two-stage approach as follows: principal components analysis (PCA) identified social dimensions from a range of demographic variables, which were then retained for further analysis. This information was sourced from two Australian Bureau of Statistics censuses undertaken involving all Melbourne residents during 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011; multiple regression analysis examined the relationship between the retained factor scores from the PCA (as independent variables) and established residential house prices (as the dependent variable). Findings The findings confirm the demographic profile of each household, which is directly related to their decisions about housing location and house prices. Based on a case study of Melbourne, Victoria, it was demonstrated that households with specific demographic characteristics are closely related to a certain level of house prices at the suburban level. Originality/value This is an innovative study which has not been previously undertaken for an extended period of time to facilitate an analysis of change over time.

The Victorian Government introduced the Better Apartment Design Guidelines in 2017. The introduction of these new regulations is a response to growing criticism over the quality of the large number of apartments recently constructed in Melbourne. This concern is shared in other Australian cities, but until now Victorian planning regulations have been the least prescriptive and most permissive in terms of apartment design parameters of any Australian jurisdiction. Reflecting on these concerns raises several questions in terms of the effectiveness of regulating for quality. Does regulating design in apartments improve quality or stifle innovation? Can the effect be measured, given the large number of exogenous factors involved in apartment production, and what might this tell us about the nature of ‘good-design’ and ‘quality-in-apartments’? This study explores the way in which different development control systems regulating apartment design impact the quality of internal apartment design. The two systems chosen, operating in Victoria and New South Wales, have been considered per Booth’s framework of regulatory and discretionary development control systems with the previous Victorian system seen as discretionary and the New South Wales approach a mix of regulatory-discretionary controls. Ten planning applications for high-rise residential developments were selected from Melbourne and Sydney. These were analysed against a set of good design principles defined by reviewing relevant literature and existing regulations. The results of the paper suggest the intuition of the Victorian Government that some form of intervention in the market is warranted to safeguard quality is likely to be correct.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the causes, the nature and the extent of unneighbourly relations between neighbours living in small multi-owned residential buildings (MOBs, sometimes called strata) in Australian cities, and the effect of these relations on the health and wellbeing of residents. The impact of neighbour relations and conflicts on residents' health and wellbeing has not been explored before in the context of small MOBs in Australia (under 12 units).Design/methodology/approachThe research involved an analysis of secondary data on common problems experienced in MOBs between neighbours, in-depth face-to-face interviews with twenty-six residents and interviews with five managers of management agencies in metropolitan Melbourne (Victoria) and Adelaide (South Australia), Australia.FindingsWhen strata processes and management worked well residents were positive about living in such an arrangement. However, when the strata group was less harmonious residents reported that it impacted negatively on their health and wellbeing.Research limitations/implicationsThe study's findings are subject to the widely acknowledged limitations of small sample-based interview research. Findings indicate that there is a need to explore the benefits and disadvantages of living in small multi-owned residential buildings in Australia on a larger scale.Practical implicationsThere are three policy implications from the findings: a need for better education of prospective buyers regarding the nature of strata living; tighter regulation of rules for small multi-owned apartment buildings is required, (in a similar way to how the regulations operate in large apartment buildings); and a need to include private rental tenants living in strata in the everyday life around the management of the building.Originality/valueThe impact of neighbourly relations and conflicts on the health and wellbeing of residents living in MOBs, particularly small ones, has not been studied adequately, as current research focuses on large apartment buildings. This research addresses a gap in the literature in the study of small living arrangements (town houses, apartment buildings, terraces), with 12 or less apartments, with a focus on residents' health and wellbeing.

PurposeValuers face significant challenges as processes become automated and the role evolves to data handling and processing. To survive and thrive, valuers must respond to a changing market. The purpose of this paper is to examine the issues, threats and challenges facing the Australian profession, though the issues are global.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative research sought a deeper understanding of the threats, challenges and new areas of practice that Australian valuers were experiencing. A focus group approach was designed to collect data from practitioners in Sydney and Melbourne. The research aimed to identify new knowledge and skills for the future and emerging trends and practices.FindingsThe key issues, threats and challenges faced included increasing use of automated valuation models for low-risk residential valuations, valuers being unable to protect themselves against the banks, loss of control of the data and valuations. In total, 12 knowledge domains and skills required in the future were established and ten emerging trends and practices were identified.Research limitations/implicationsThe key limitations were that participants were from Melbourne and Sydney in Australia only and the focus is NSW and Victoria centric, although many participants have international work experience. There was an under representation of rural valuers, of small valuation firms, of young, recently joined or qualified valuers and females.Practical implicationsThe findings inform a manifesto for the future which sets out the practical implications for valuers and the professional body. This action plan sets the new knowledge domains, practices and trends that can be adopted by the profession and its members.Originality/valueThis is the original research and highlights some real threats, issues and challenges facing the Australian valuers. It complements work undertaken by legal and accounting professional bodies, which sense change affecting their membership and services. A manifesto for action has been outlined to address the changes that are coming and those already here.

Issues of language shift (LS) and language maintenance (LM) are inevitable consequences of globalization and increased mobility of human populations. This qualitative case study investigated attitudes of migrant parents from Iran towards Persian community language maintenance (CLM) for their school-age children in Australia. Ten parents residing in Melbourne, Victoria were interviewed in two groups and demographic data were collected. The participants were seven female and three male parents who had at least one school-age child. In this qualitative case study, data were analyzed thematically. Three major themes concerning Persian CLM were identified: parents’ attitudes, strategies adopted for maintenance, and challenges for their children. The parents believed that CLM supported cultural identity, preserved family cohesion, and fostered bilingualism, all of which were considered valuable future skills for their children. Interviewees adopted diverse strategies including the establishment of family language use policies, sending their children to Iranian community language school, frequent contacts with extended family in Iran, and the use of Persian media and literature. The influential role of siblings and peers in their children’s language shift, and a lack of age-appropriate Persian books and visual materials were the main challenges to CLM mentioned by the parents in this research.

Carrum Carrum Swamp was a vast wetland to the south-east of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, at the time that it was first sighted by white colonists in 1803. By 1878, the colonists had commenced converting the swamp to dry land for agricultural and horticultural pursuits, and 100 years later it was predominantly residential land. Shifting values in the 1970s led to environmental concerns about water quality in local creeks and Port Phillip Bay and subsequent residential development on the former swamp included the construction of stormwater treatment wetlands. Perceptions of wetlands are now diverse, including positive perceptions that support their presence in urban settings. In contrast, traditionally, wetlands have been perceived negatively, as waste lands, leading to their drainage. Nevertheless, alternative, perhaps positive, perceptions could have existed, only to be overwhelmed by the negative perceptions driving drainage. Understanding the full range of past perceptions is important to ensure that the historical record is correct and to provide historical context to contemporary perceptions of wetlands. It will better equip natural resource managers and designers and managers of constructed wetlands in urban locations to ensure that wetlands are healthy, functioning and appreciated by their local and wider communities. Thus, the perceptions of Carrum Carrum Swamp by colonists from 1803 to 1878 were examined through qualitative content analysis of historical documents, and a typology was developed. Seven different perceptions were identified: scientific, premodern, exploitative, romantic, aesthetic, medico-mythic and ecological. Most could be traced to the colonists’ predominantly British heritage, but one perception arose in the colony in response to the specific environmental conditions that the colonists encountered. This ecological perception valued wetlands as places of predictable water supply in a land of unpredictable rainfall. It recognised wetlands as part of a broader hydrological system, with influences on the local climate. Its proponents promoted the need for a different approach to the management of wetlands than in Britain and Europe. Nevertheless, a dominant exploitative perception prevailed, leading to the drainage of Carrum Carrum Swamp. The typology developed in this study will be useful for exploring perceptions of other wetlands, both colonial and contemporary.

Background: Acute stroke is a time-critical emergency where diagnosis and acute management are highly dependent upon the accuracy of the patient’s history. We hypothesised that the language barrier is associated with delayed onset time to thrombolysis and poor clinical outcomes. This study aims to evaluate the effect of language barriers on time to thrombolysis and clinical outcomes in acute ischemic stroke. Concerning the method, this is a retrospective study of all patients admitted to a metropolitan stroke unit (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) with an acute ischemic stroke treated with tissue plasminogen activator between 1/2013 and 9/2017. Baseline characteristics, thrombolysis time intervals, length of stay, discharge destination, and in-hospital mortality were compared among patients with and without a language barrier using multivariate analysis after adjustment for age, sex, stroke severity, premorbid modified Rankin Scale (mRS), and Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI). Language barriers were defined as a primary language other than English. A total of 374 patients were included. Our findings show that 76 patients (20.3%) had a language barrier. Mean age was five years older for patients with language barriers (76.7 vs. 71.8 years, p = 0.004). Less non-English speaking patients had premorbid mRS score of zero (p = 0.002), and more had premorbid mRS score of one or two (p = 0.04). There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of stroke severity on presentation (p = 0.06). The onset to needle time was significantly longer in patients with a language barrier (188 min vs. 173 min, p = 0.04). Onset to arrival and door to imaging times were reassuringly similar between the two groups. However, imaging to needle time was 9 min delayed in non-English speaking patients with a marginal p value (65 vs. 56 min, p = 0.06). Patients with language barriers stayed longer in the stroke unit (six vs. four days, p = 0.02) and had higher discharge rates than residential aged care facilities in those admitted from home (9.2% vs. 2.3%, p = 0.02). In-hospital mortality was not different between the two groups (p = 0.8). In conclusion, language barriers were associated with almost 14 min delay in thrombolysis. The delay was primarily attributable to imaging to needle time. Language barriers were also associated with poorer clinical outcomes.

Melbourne’s religious diversity is increasing. This article reveals distinctive new configurations of ethno-religious diversity arising from immigration and residential mobility at a fine spatial level in different parts of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities – Melbourne. Using the lens of super-diversity, we see beyond multicultural groups to intersections of diversities, and identify new types of ethno-religious compound in neighbourhoods that were once defined by religious patterns of solidarity. We can no longer use religious labels to describe these evolving groups because they are not defined by any dominant religion; instead, we describe them in terms reflecting their other increasingly salient characteristics. At the local level in Melbourne, it is now necessary to refer to the existence not only of religious diversity but of a ‘diversity of diversities’ in patterns of religious identification.

Abstract Background Recent rapid growth in urban areas and the desire to create liveable neighbourhoods has brought about a renewed interest in planning for compact cities, with concepts like the 20-minute neighbourhood (20MN) becoming more popular. A 20MN broadly reflects a neighbourhood that allows residents to meet their daily (non-work) needs within a short, non-motorised, trip from home. The 20MN concept underpins the key planning strategy of Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, however the 20MN definition has not been operationalised. This study aimed to develop and operationalise a practical definition of the 20MN and apply this to two Australian state capital cities: Melbourne (Victoria) and Adelaide (South Australia). Methods Using the metropolitan boundaries for Melbourne and Adelaide, data were sourced for several layers related to five domains: 1) healthy food; 2) recreational resources; 3) community resources; 4) public open space; and 5) public transport. The number of layers and the access measures required for each domain differed. For example, the recreational resources domain only required a sport and fitness centre (gym) within a 1.5-km network path distance, whereas the public open space domain required a public open space within a 400-m distance along a pedestrian network and 8 ha of public open space area within a 1-km radius. Locations that met the access requirements for each of the five domains were defined as 20MNs. Results In Melbourne 5.5% and in Adelaide 7.6% of the population were considered to reside in a 20MN. Within areas classified as residential, the median number of people per square kilometre with a 20MN in Melbourne was 6429 and the median number of dwellings per square kilometre was 3211. In Adelaide’s 20MNs, both population density (3062) and dwelling density (1440) were lower than in Melbourne. Conclusions The challenge of operationalising a practical definition of the 20MN has been addressed by this study and applied to two Australian cities. The approach can be adapted to other contexts as a first step to assessing the presence of existing 20MNs and monitoring further implementation of this concept.

Abstract Objective: Morbidity and mortality from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been significant among elderly residents of residential aged-care services (RACS). To prevent incursions of COVID-19 in RACS in Australia, visitors were banned and aged-care workers were encouraged to work at a single site. We conducted a review of case notes and a social network analysis to understand how workplace and social networks enabled the spread of severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) among RACS. Design: Retrospective outbreak review. Setting and participants: Staff involved in COVID-19 outbreaks in RACS in Victoria, Australia, May–October 2020. Methods: The Victorian Department of Health COVID-19 case and contact data were reviewed to construct 2 social networks: (1) a work network connecting RACS through workers and (2) a household network connecting to RACS through households. Probable index cases were reviewed to estimate the number and size (number of resident cases and deaths) of outbreaks likely initiated by multisite work versus transmission via households. Results: Among 2,033 cases linked to an outbreak as staff, 91 (4.5%) were multisite staff cases. Forty-three outbreaks were attributed to multisite work and 35 were deemed potentially preventable had staff worked at a single site. In addition, 99 staff cases were linked to another RACS outbreak through their household contacts, and 21 outbreaks were attributed to staff–household transmission. Conclusions: Limiting worker mobility through single-site policies could reduce the chances of SARS-CoV-2 spreading from one RACS to another. However, initiatives that reduce the chance of transmission via household networks would also be needed.

Abstract Background While the underlying neuropathology of dementia is not curable, interventions and treatment, such as physical activity, can offer physical and functional gains leading to better mobility, independence and quality of life. The Seniors Exercise Park program is an evidence-based physical and social activity program using an innovative design in outdoor exercise equipment specifically designed for older people. This unique program has never been tested with older people living with dementia. This study will evaluate the feasibility of delivering the Seniors Exercise Park program for people living with mild to moderate dementia in residential aged-care. This study will identify the optimal physical activity program, evaluate the safety of equipment usage and determine optimal supervision needs. The potential physical, social, quality of life and cognitive benefits of participation in the Seniors Exercise Park program will also be examined. Methods This is a feasibility pilot randomised controlled design with pre-post evaluation. Adults aged ≥ 60 years who have symptoms of dementia and/or who have been diagnosed with dementia will be recruited from an aged-care facility in Melbourne. Participants allocated to the intervention group will undergo a 12-week structured supervised physical activity program using the outdoor Seniors Exercise Park equipment followed by a 12-week maintenance phase (unstructured physical activity). Participants will be assessed at baseline, 3 and 6 months. Participants allocated to the control group will attend activities provided by the aged-care facility. A sample of 12 participants per group is the targeted sample size. Feasibility will be evaluated in terms of recruitment rate, retention, attendance, overall adherence, dropout rate, adverse events, modifications to the exercise program delivery and supervision needs. A comprehensive suite of cognitive and health-related questionnaires and physical function measures will also be collected. Discussion The ENJOY program for independence in dementia will determine the suitability of the Seniors Exercise Park program for people diagnosed with mild to moderate dementia. Outcomes could inform future design of dementia-friendly built environments to increase physical activity participation for residential aged-care facilities. Trial registration This trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry—Registry Number ACTRN12620000733976. Registered on the 13th of July 2020.

Each year, The Economist magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit” ranks cities based on “healthcare, education, stability, culture, environment and infrastructure”, giving the highest-ranking locale the title of most ‘liveable’ (Wright). For the past six years, The Economist has named Melbourne “the world’s most liveable city” (Carmody et al.). A curious portmanteau, the concept of liveability is problematic: what may feel stable and safe to some members of the community may marginalise others due to several factors such as gender, disability, ethnicity or class.The subjective nature of this term is referred to in the Australian Government’s 2013 State of Cities report, in the chapter titled ‘Liveability’:In the same way that the Cronulla riots are the poster story for cultural conflict, the attack on Jillian Meagher in Melbourne’s Brunswick has resonated strongly with Australians in many capital cities. It seemed to be emblematic of their concern about violent crime. Some women in our research reported responding to this fear by arming themselves. (274)Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Meagher’s abduction, rape, and murder in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick in 2012 disturbs the perception of Melbourne’s liveability. As news of the crime disseminated, it revived dormant cultural narratives that reinforce a gendered public/private binary, suggesting women are more vulnerable to attack than men in public spaces and consequently hindering their mobility. I investigate here how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.I examine two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.The connection is made by me, as I am interested in the affective shift that follows a signal crime such as the Meagher case, and how we can employ literary texts to gauge a psychic landscape, refuting the discourse of fear that is circulated by the media following the event. I wish to look at Melbourne’s inner north as a female literary milieu, a site of boldness despite the public breaking that was Meagher’s murder: a site of female self-determination rather than community trauma.I borrow the terms “boldness”, “bold walk” and “breaking” from Finnish geographer Hille Koskela (and note the thematic resonances in scholarship from a city as far north as Helsinki). Her paper “Bold Walks and Breakings: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence” challenges the idea that “fearfulness is an essentially female quality”, rather advocating for “boldness”, seeking to “emphasise the emancipatory content of … [women’s] stories” (302). Koskela uses the term “breaking” in her research (primarily focussed on experiences of Helsinki women) to describe “situations … that had transformed … attitudes towards their environment”, referring to the “spatial consequences” that were the result of violent crimes, or threats thereof. While Melbourne women obviously did not experience the Meagher case personally, it nevertheless resulted in what Koskela has dubbed elsewhere as “increased feelings of vulnerability” (“Gendered Exclusions” 111).After the Meagher case, media reportage suggested that Melbourne had been irreversibly changed, made vulnerable, and a site of trauma. As a signal crime, the attack and murder was vicariously experienced and mediated. Like many crimes committed against women in public space, Meagher’s death was transformed into a cautionary tale, and this storying was more pronounced due to the way the case played out episodically in the media, particularly online, allowing the public to follow the case as it unfolded. The coverage was visually hyperintensive, and particular attention was paid to Sydney Road, where Meagher had last been seen and where she had met her assailant, Adrian Bayley, who was subsequently convicted of her murder.Articles from media outlets were frequently accompanied by cartographic images that superimposed details of the case onto images of the local area—the mind map and the physical locality both marred by the crime. Yet Koskela writes, “the map of everyday experiences is in sharp contrast to the maps of the media. If a picture of a place is made by one’s own experiences it is more likely to be perceived as a safe ordinary place” (“Bold Walks” 309). How might this picture—this map—be made through genre? I am interested in how memoir might facilitate space for narratives that contest those from the media. Here I prefer the word memoir rather than use the term life-writing due to the former’s etymological adherence to memory. In Vashti and Lee’s texts, memory is closely linked to place and space, and for each of them, Melbourne is a destination, a city that they have come to alone from elsewhere. Lee came to the city after growing up in Canberra, and Vashti from Brisbane. In Dress, Memory, Vashti writes that the move to Melbourne “… makes you feel like a pioneer, one of those dusty and determined characters out of an American history novel trudging west to seek a land of gold and dreams” (83).Deeply engaging with Melbourne, the text eschews the ‘taken for granted’ backdrop idea of the city that scholar Jane Darke observes in fiction. She writes thatmodern women novelists virtually take the city as backdrop for granted as a place where a central female figure can be or becomes self-determining, with like-minded female friends as indispensable support and undependable men in walk-on roles. (97)Instead, Vashti uses memoir to self-consciously examine her relationship with her city, elaborating on the notion of moving from elsewhere as an act of self-determination, building the self through geographical relocation:You’re told you can find treasure – the secret bars hidden down the alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing onto the street. But the true gold that paves Melbourne’s footpaths is the promise that you can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a performer there. People who move there want to be discovered, they want to make a mark. (84)The paths are important here, as Vashti embeds herself on the street, walking through the text, generating an affective cartography as her life is played out in what is depicted as a benign, yet vibrant, urban space. She writes of “walking, following the grid of the city, taking in its grey blocks” (100), engendering a sense of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘topophilia’: “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (4). There is a deep bond between Vashti and Melbourne that is evident in her work that is demonstrated in her discussion of public space. Like her, friends from Brisbane trickle down South, and she lives with them in a series of share houses in the inner North—first Fitzroy, then Carlton, then North Melbourne, where she lives with two female friends and together they “roamed the streets during the day in a pack” (129).Vashti’s boldness not only lies in her willingness to take bodily to the streets, without fear, but also in her fastidious attention to her physical appearance. Her memoir is framed sartorially: chronologically arranged, from age twenty to thirty, each chapter featuring equally detailed reports of the events of that year as well as the corresponding outfits worn. A dress, transformative, is spotlighted in each of these chapters, and the author is photographed in each of these ‘feature’ dresses in a glossy section in the middle of the book. Koskela writes that, “if women dress up to be part of the urban spectacle, like 19th-century flâneurs, and also to mediate their confidence, they oppose their erasure and reclaim urban space”. For Koskela, the appearance of the body in public is an act of boldness:dressing can be seen as a means of reproducing power relations; in Foucaultian terms, it is a way of being one’s own overseer, and regulating even the most intimate spheres … on the other hand, interpreted in another way, dressing up can be seen as a form of resistance against the male gaze, as an opposition to the visual mastery over women, achieved by not being invisible or absent, but by dressing up proudly. (“Bold Walks” 309)Koskela’s affirmation that clothing can enact urban boldness contradicts reportage on the Meagher case that suggested otherwise. Some news outlets focussed on the high heels Meagher was wearing the night she was raped and murdered, as if to imply that she may have been able to elude her fate had she donned flats. The Age quotes witnesses who saw her on Sydney Road the night she was killed; one says she was “a little unsteady on her feet but not too bad”, another that she “seemed to be struggling to walk up the hill in her high heels” (Russell). But Vashti is well aware of the spatial confidence that the right clothing provides. In the chapter “Twenty-three”, she writes of being housebound by heartbreak, that “just leaving the house seemed like an epic undertaking”, so she “picked a dress a dress that would make me feel good … the woman in me emerged when I slid it on. In it, I instantly had shape, form. A purpose” (99). She and her friends don vocational costumes to outplay the competitive inner Melbourne rental market, eventually netting their North Melbourne terrace house by dressing like “young professionals”: “dressed up in smart op-shop blouses and pencil skirts to walk to the real estate office” (129).Michele Lee’s text Banana Girl also delves into the relationship between personal aesthetics and urban space, describing Melbourne as “a town of costumes, after all” (117), but her own style as “indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it” (6). Lee’s world is East Brunswick for much of the book, and she establishes this connection early, introducing herself in the first chapter, as one of the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner North of Melbourne” (6). She describes the women in her local area – “Brunswick Girls”, she dubs them: “no one wears visible make up, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance” (89).Lee displays more of a knowingness than Vashti regarding the inner North’s reputation as the more progressive and creative side of the Yarra, confirmed by the Sydney Morning Herald:The ‘northside’ comprises North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford, Thornbury, Brunswick and Coburg. Bell Street is the boundary for northsiders. It stands for artists, warehouse parties, bicycles, underground music, lightless terrace houses, postmodernity and ‘awareness’. (Craig)As evidenced in late scholar John Maclaren’s book Melbourne: City of Words, the area has long enjoyed this reputation: “After the war, these neighbourhoods were colonized by migrants from Europe, and in the 1960s by the artists, musicians, writers, actors, junkies and layabouts whose stories Helen Garner was to tell” (146). As a young playwright, Lee sees herself reflected in this milieu, writing that she’s “an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member” (7), toeing that line of “awareness” pithily mentioned by the SMH.Like Vashti, there are constant references to Lee’s exact geographical location in Melbourne. She ‘drops pins’ throughout, cultivating a connection to place that blurs home and the street, fostering a sense of belonging beyond one’s birthplace, belonging to a place chosen rather than raised in. She plants herself in this local geography. Returning to the first chapter, she includes “jogger by the Merri Creek” in her introduction (7), and later jokingly likens a friendship with an ex as “no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour” (15), employing Melbourne landmarks as explanatory shorthand. She refers to places by name: one could physically tour inner North and CBD hotspots based on Lee’s text, as it is littered with mentions of bars, restaurants, galleries and theatre venues. She frequents the Alderman in East Brunswick and Troika in the city, as well as a bar that Jill Meagher spent time in on the night she went missing – the Brunswick Green.While offering the text a topographical authenticity, this can sometimes prove distracting: rather than simply stating that she goes to the library, she writes that she visits “the City of Melbourne library” (128), and rather than just going to a pizza parlour, they visit “Bimbo’s” (129) or “Pizza Meine Liebe” (101). Yet when Lee visits family in Canberra, or Laos on an arts grant, business names are forsaken. One could argue that the cultural capital offered by namedropping trendy Melburnian bars, restaurants and nightclubs translates awkwardly on the page, and risks dating the text considerably, but elevates the spatiality of Lee’s work. And these landmarks are important within the text, as Lee’s world is divided spatially. She refers to “Theatre Land” when discussing her work in the arts, and her share house not as ‘home’ but consistently as “Albert Street”. She partitions her life into these zones: zones of emotion, zones of intellect/career, zones of family/heritage – the text offers close insight into Lee’s personal cartography, with her traversing the map “stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming part of Melbourne’s bike culture” (88).While not always walking alone – often accompanied by an ex-boyfriend she nicknames “Husband” – Lee is independently-minded, stating, “I operate solo, I pay my own way” (34), meeting up with various romantic and sexual interests through the text for daytime trysts in empty office buildings or late nights out in the CBD. She is adventurous, yet reminds that she was not always so. She recalls a time when she was still residing in Canberra and visited a boyfriend who was living in Melbourne and felt intimidated by the “alien city”, standing in stark contrast to the familiarity she demonstrates otherwise.Lee and Vashti’s texts both chronicle women who freely occupy public space, comfortable in their surroundings, not engaging on the page with cultural narratives and media reportage that suggest they would be safer off the streets. Both demonstrate what Koskela calls the “pleasure to be able to take possession of space” (“Bold Walks” 308) – yet it could be argued that the writer’s possession of space is so routine, so unremarkable that it transcends pleasure: it is comfortable. They walk the streets alone and catch public transport alone without incident. They contravene advice such as that given by Victorian Police Homicide Squad chief Mick Hughes’s comments that women shouldn’t be “alone in parks” following the fatal stabbing of teenager Masa Vukotic in a Doncaster park in 2015.Like Meagher’s death, Vukotic’s murder was also mobilised by the media – and one could argue, by authorities – to contain women, to further a narrative that reinforces the public/private gender binary. However, as Koskela reminds, the fact that some women are bold and confident shows that women are not only passively experiencing space but actively take part in producing it. They reclaim space for themselves, not only through single occasions such as ‘take back the night’ marches, but through everyday practices and routinized uses of space. (“Bold Walks” 316)These memoirs act as resistance, actively producing space through representation: to assert the right to the city, one must be bold, and reclaim space that is so often overlaid with stories of violence against women. As Koskela emphasises, this is only done through use of the space, “a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the space, … ‘the mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect descriptions, the image of it is constructed through media and the stories heard” (“Bold Walks” 308). Memoir can take back this image through stories told, demonstrating the personal connection to public space. Koskela writes that, “walking on the street can be seen as a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (“Urban Space in Plural” 263). ReferencesAustralian Government. Department of Infrastructure and Transport. State of Australian Cities 2013. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2013. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/files/2013_00_infra1782_mcu_soac_full_web_fa.pdf>.Carmody, Broede, and Aisha Dow. “Top of the World: Melbourne Crowned World's Most Liveable City, Again.” The Age, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://theage.com.au/victoria/top-of-the-world-melbourne-crowned-worlds-most-liveable-city-again-20160817-gqv893.html>.Craig, Natalie. “A City Divided.” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2012. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/a-city-divided-20120202-1quub.html>.Darke, Jane. “The Man-Shaped City.” Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City. Eds. Chris Booth, Jane Darke, and Susan Yeadle. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996. 88-99.Koskela, Hille. “'Bold Walk and Breakings’: Women's Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence.” Gender, Place and Culture 4.3 (1997): 301-20.———. “‘Gendered Exclusions’: Women's Fear of Violence and Changing Relations to Space.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 81.2 (1999). 111–124.———. “Urban Space in Plural: Elastic, Tamed, Suppressed.” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Eds. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager. Blackwell, 2005. 257-270.Lee, Michele. Banana Girl. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013.MacLaren, John. Melbourne: City of Words. Arcadia, 2013.Russell, Mark. ‘Happy, Witty Jill Was the Glue That Held It All Together.’ The Age, 19 June 2013. 30 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/happy-witty-jill-was-the-glue-that-held-it-all-together-20130618-2ohox.html>Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1974.Wright, Patrick, “Melbourne Ranked World’s Most Liveable City for Sixth Consecutive Year by EIU.” ABC News, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city-for-sixth-year/7761642>.

This article uses a case study of a Melbourne-based youth media project called Youthworx to explore the processes at stake in cultural engagement for marginalised young people. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2010, I identify some ways in which the city is implicated in promoting or preventing access to socially valued spaces of creativity and intended social mobility. The ethnographic material presented here has both empirical and theoretical value. It reveals the important relationships between the experience of place, creativity, and social life, demonstrating potentialities and limits of creativity-focused development interventions for marginalised youth. The articulation of these relationships and processes taking place within a particular city setting has theoretical implications. It opens up an opportunity to consider "suburbs" as enacted by specific forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than treating "suburbs" as abstract, analytical constructs. Finally, my empirically grounded discussion draws attention to cultural and social consequences that inhabiting certain social worlds and acts of travelling "to and beyond" them have for young people. Youthworx is a community-based youth media initiative employing pathway-based semi-formal creative practices to re-engage young people who have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or juvenile justice, who have been long disconnected from mainstream education, or who are homeless. The focus on media production allows it to tap into, and in fact leverage, popular creativity, tacit knowledge, and familiar media-based activities that young people bring to bear on their media training and work in this context. Underpinned by social and creative industry policy, Youthworx brings together social service agency The Salvation Army (TSA), educational provider Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), youth community media organisation SYN Media, and researchers at Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University. Its day-to-day operation is run by contractual, part-time media facilitators, social workers (as part of TSA’s in-kind support), as well as media industry experts who provide casual media training. Youthworx is characterised by the diversity of its young demographic. One can differentiate between at least two groups of participants: those who join Youthworx because of the social opportunities, and those who put more value on its skill-development, or vocational creative industries orientation. This social organisation is, however, far from static. Over the two years of research (2008-2010) we observed evolving ideas about the identity of the program, its key social functions, and how they can be best served. This had proceeded with the construction of what the Youthworx staff term "a community of safe belonging" to a more "serious" media work environment, exemplified by the establishment of a social enterprise (Youthworx Productions) in 2010 that offers paid traineeships to the most capable and determined young creators. To accommodate the diversity of literacy levels, needs, and aspirations of its young participants, the project offers a tailored media education program with a mix of diversionary, educational, and commercial objectives. One-on-one media training sessions, accredited courses in Creative Industries (Media), and industry training within Youthworx Productions are provided to help young people develop a range of skills transferable into a variety of personal, social and professional contexts. Its creative studio, where learning occurs, is located in a former jeans factory warehouse in the heart of an industrial area of Melbourne’s northern inner-city suburb of Brunswick. Young people are referred to Youthworx by a range of social agencies, and they travel to Brunswick from across Melbourne. Some participants are known to spend over three hours commuting from outer suburbs such as Frankston or even regional towns such as King Lake. Unlike community-based creative programs reliant on established community structures within local suburbs (for example, ICE in Western Sydney), Youthworx moved into Tinning Street in Brunswick because its industry partner—The Salvation Army—had existing youth service infrastructure there. The program, however, was not tapping into an existing media “community of practice” (Lane and Wenger); it had to forge its own culture of media participation. In the early days of the program, there were necessary material resources and professional expertise (teachers/social workers/a creative venue), but it took a long while, and a high level of dedication, passion, and practical optimism on the part of the project managers and teaching staff, for young people to genuinely engage in media training and production. Now, Youthworx’s creative space is a “practised place” in de Certeau’s sense. As “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (De Certeau 117), so is the Youthworx space produced by practices of media learning and making by professional creative practitioners and young amateur creators (Raffo; for ideas on institutionalised co-creative practice see Spurgeon et al.). The Brunswick location is where our extensive ethnographic research has taken place, including regular participant observation and qualitative interviews with staff and young participants. The ethnographers frequently travelled with young people to other locations within Melbourne, accompanying them on their trips to youth community radio station SYN Media in the CBD, where they produce a weekly radio show, as well as to film shoots and public social events around the city. As an access learning program for marginalised youth from around Melbourne, Youthworx provides an interesting example to explore how the concerns of material and cultural capital, geographic and cultural distance intersect and shape processes of creative participation and social inclusion. I draw on our ethnographic material to illustrate how these metonymic relationships play out in the ways young participants “travel distance” (Dewson et. al.) on the project and across the city, both figuratively and literally. The idea of “distance travelled” is adapted here from evaluation literature (for other relevant references see Dowmunt et al.; Hayes and Edwards; Holdsworth et al.), and builds on the argument made previously (Podkalicka and Staley 5), to encompass both the geographical mobility and cultural transformation that young people are supported to undergo as an intended outcome of their involvement in Youthworx. This paper also takes inspiration from ethnographic approaches that study a productive and transformative relationship between material culture, spatial geography and processes of identity formation (see Miller). What happens to Youthworx young participants as they travel in a trivial, and at first sight perhaps inconsequential, way between the suburbs they live in, the Youthworx Brunswick location and the city is both experientially real and meaningful. “Suburban space” is then a cultural site that simultaneously refers to concrete, literal places as well as “a state of mind”—that is, identification and connections that are generative of a sense of identity and belonging (Ferber et al.). Youthworx is an intermediary point on these young people’s travels, rather than the final destination (Podkalicka and Staley 5). It provides access to various forms of new spatial, social, and creative experiences and modes of expression. Creating opportunities for highly disenfranchised young people to access and develop new social and creative experiences is an important aspect of Youthworx’s developmental agenda, and is played out at both philosophical and practical levels. On the one hand, a strength-based approach to youth work assumes respect for young people’s potential and knowledges—unlike public discourses that deny them agency due to an assumed lack of life experience (e.g., Poletti). In addition to the material provision of "food and shelter" typical of traditional social work, attention is paid the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of human needs, with creativity, self-esteem, and social connectedness at the top of the scale (see also Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas). Former Manager of The Salvation Army’s Brunswick Youth Services (BYS)—one of Youthworx’s partners—Craig Campbell argues: Things like truth and beauty are a higher order of dreams for these kids. And by truth I don’t mean the simple lies that can be told to get them out of trouble [but] is there a greater truth to life than a grinding existence in the impoverished neighbourhood, is there something like beauty and aesthetics that wakes us up in the morning and calls a larger life out of us? Most of those kids only faintly dream of such a thing, and this dream is rapidly being extinguished under the weight of drugs and alcohol, abusive family systems, savage interaction with law and justice system, and education as a toxic environment and experience. (Campbell) Campbell's articulate reflection captures the way the Youthworx project has been conceived. It is also a pertinent example of the many reflections on experience and practice at Youthworx that were recorded in my fieldwork, which illustrate the way these kinds of social projects can be understood, interpreted and evaluated. The following personal narrative and contextual description introduce some of the important issues at stake. (The names and other personal details of young people have been changed.) Nineteen-year-old Dave is temporarily staying in an inner-city refuge. Normally, however, like most Youthworx participants, he lives in Broadmeadows, a far northern suburb of Melbourne. To get to Brunswick, where he does his accredited media course three days a week, he either catches a train or waits for a mini-bus to drive him there. The early-morning pick-up for about ten young people is organised by the program’s partner—The Salvation Army. At the Youthworx creative studio, located in the heart of Brunswick, right next to railway tracks, young people produce an array of media products: live and pre-recorded radio programs, digital storytelling, mini-documentaries, and original music. Once at Youthworx, they share the local neighbourhood with other artists who have adapted warehouses into art workshops, studios and galleries. The suburb of Brunswick is well-known for its multicultural profile, a combination of industrial and residential estates, high rates of tertiary students due to its proximity to universities, and its place in the recent history of urban gentrification. However, Youthworx participants don’t seek out or engage with the existing, physically proximate creative base, even within the same street. On a couple of occasions, the opposite has been the case: Youthworx students have been involved in acts of vandalism of local residents’ property, including nearby parked cars. Their connections to the Brunswick neighbourhood remain poor, often reflecting their low social capital as a result of unstable residential situations, isolation, and fraught relationships with family. From Brunswick, they often travel to the city on their own, wander around, sit on the steps of Flinders Street train station—an inner-city hub and popular meeting place for locals and tourists alike. Youthworx plays an important role in these young people’s lives, as an important access point to not only creative digital media-based experiences and skill development, but also to greater and basic geographical mobility and experiences within the city. As one of the students commented: They are giving us chances that we wouldn’t usually get. Every day you’re getting to a place, where it’s pretty damn easy to get into; that’s what’s good about it. There are so many places where you have to do so much to get there and half the time, some people don’t even have the bloody bus ticket to get a [job] interview. But [at Youthworx/BYS], they will pick you up and drive you around if you need it. They are friends. It is reportedly a common practice for many young people at Youthworx and BYS to catch a train or a tram (rather than bus) without paying for a ticket. However, to be caught dodging a fare a few times has legal consequences and young people often face court as a result. The program responds by offering its young participants tickets for public transport, ready for pick-up after afternoon activities, or, if possible, "driving them around"—as some young people told me. The program’s social workers revealed that girls are particularly afraid to travel on their own, especially when catching trains to the outer northern suburbs, for fear of being harassed or attacked. These supported travels are as practical and necessary as they are meaningful for young people’s identity formation, and as such are recognised and built into the project’s design, co-ordination and delivery. At the most basic level, The Salvation Army’s social workers pick young people up from the Broadmeadows area in the mornings. Youthworx creative practitioners assist young people to make trips to SYN Media in the city. For most participants, this is either the first or sporadic experience of travelling to the city, something they enjoy very much but are also somewhat daunted by. Additionally, as part of the curriculum, Youthworx staff make a point of taking young people to inner-city movie theatres or public media events. The following vignette from the fieldwork highlights another important connection between physical journey and creative expression. There is an excitement in Dave’s voice when he talks about his favourite pastime: hanging out around the city. “Why would you walk around the streets?” a curious female friend interjects. Dave replies: “No, it’s not the streets, man. It’s just Federation Square, everywhere … There is just all these young wannabe criminals and shit. People don’t know what goes on; and I want to do a doco on the city, a little doco of the people there, because I know a lot of it.” Dave’s interest in exploring the city may be interpreted as a rather common, mundane routine shared by mildly adventurous adolescents of all walks. And yet, there is much more at stake in his account, and for Youthworx young participants more generally. As mentioned before, for many of these young people, it is the first opportunity to travel to the city. This experience then is crucial in a sense of self-exploration and self-discovery. As they overcome their fear of venturing out into the city on their own, they also learn that they have knowledge which others might lack. This moment of realisation is significant and empowering, and they want to communicate this knowledge to others. Youthworx assists them in learning how to translate this knowledge in a creative and constructive way, through an expression that weaves between the free individual and the social voice constructed to enable a dialogue or understanding (Podkalicka; Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas; also Soep and Chavez). For an effective communication to occur, a crafted social voice requires skills and a critical awareness of oneself and an audience, which is very different from the modes of expression that these young people might have accessed previously. Youthworx's young participants draw heavily on their life experiences, geographical locations, the suburbs they come from, and places they visit in the city: their cultural productions often reference their homes, music clubs and hang-out venues, inner city streets, Federation Square, and Youthworx’s immediate physical surroundings, with graffiti-covered narrow alleys and railway tracks. The frequent depiction of Youthworx in young people’s creative outputs is often a token of appreciation of the creative, educational and social opportunities it has offered them. Social and professional connections they make there are found to be very valuable. The existing creative industries literature emphasises the importance of social networks to existing communities of interest and practice for human capacity building. Value is argued to lie not only in specific content produced, but in participatory processes that establish a link between personal growth, individual skills and social and professional networks (Hearn and Bridgestock). In a similar vein, Carlo Raffo uses Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties” to suggest that access to “social relations that go beyond the immediate locality and hence their immediate experiences” can provide marginalised young people with “pathways for authentic and informal learning that go beyond the structuring influences of class, gender and ethnicity and into new and emerging economic experiences” (Raffo 11). But higher levels of confidence or social skills are required to make the most of vocational or professional opportunities beyond the supportive context of Youthworx. Connections between Youthworx participants and other creative practitioners within the creative locality of Brunswick have been absent thus far. Transitions into mainstream education and employment have also proven challenging for this group of heavily marginalised youth. As we found during our ongoing fieldwork, even the most talented students find it hard to get into mainstream education courses, or to get or keep jobs. The project serves as a social basis for young people to develop self-agency and determination so they can start engaging with new opportunities and social networks outside the program (Raffo 15). Indeed, the creative practitioners at Youthworx are key facilitators of connections between young people and the external world. They act as positive role models socially, and illustrate what is possible professionally in terms of media excellence and employment (see also Raffo). There are indications that this very supportive, gradual process of social learning is starting to bear fruit for individual students and the Youthworx community as a whole as they grow more confident with themselves, in interactions with others, and the media work they do. Media projects such as Youthworx are examples of what Leadbeater and Wong call “disruptive innovation,” as they provide new ways of learning for those alienated by formal education. The use of digital hands-on media production makes educational processes relevant and engaging for young people. However, as I demonstrate in this paper, there are tangible, material barriers to releasing creativity, or enhancing self-discovery and sociality. There are, as Leadbeater and Wong observe, persistent links between cultural environment, socio-economic status, corresponding attitudes to learning and educational success in the developed world. In the UK, for example, only small percent of those from the lowest socio-economic background go to university (Leadbeater and Wong 10). Youthworx provides an opportunity and motivation for young people to break a cycle of individual self-destructive behaviour (e.g. getting locked up every 6 months), intergenerational reliance on welfare, or entrenched negative attitudes to learning. At the basic level, it encourages and often insists that young people get up in the morning, with social workers often reporting to have to “knock at people’s houses and get them ready.” The involvement in Youthworx is often an important reason to start delineating between day and night, week and weekend. A couple of students commented: I slept a lot. Yeah, I was always sleeping during the day and out at night; I could have still been doing nothing with my life [were it not for Youthworx]. Now people ask if I want to go out during the week, and I just can’t be bothered. I just want to sleep and then go to [Youthworx] and then weekends are when you go out. It also offers a concrete means to begin exploring the city beyond the constraints of their local suburbs. This literal, geographical mobility is interlocked with potential for a changed perception of opportunities, individual transformation and, consequently, social mobility. Dave, as we have seen, is attracted to the idea of exploring the city but also has creative aspirations, and contemplates professional prospects in the creative industries. It is important to note that the participants are resilient in their negotiation between the suburban, Youthworx and inner city worlds they can inhabit. Accessing learning, despite previous negative schooling experiences, is for many of them very important, and reaffirming of life they aspire to. An opportunity to pursue dreams, creative forms of expression, social networks and education is a vital part of human existence. These aspects of social inclusion are recognised in the current articulation of social policy reconceptualised beyond material, economic equality. Creative industry policy, on the other hand, is concerned with fostering creative outputs and skills to generate engagement and employment opportunities in the knowledge-based economies for wide sections of the population. The value is located in human capacity building, involving basic social as well as vocational skills, and links to social networks. The Youthworx project merges these two policy frameworks of the social and creative to test in practice new collaborative approaches to youth development. The spatial and cultural practices of young people described here serve a basis for proposing a theoretical framework that can help understand the term "suburb" in an intrinsically relational, grounded way. The relationships at stake in cultural and social participation for marginalised young people lead me to suggest that the concept of ‘suburb’ takes on two tightly interwoven meanings. The first refers symbolically to a particular locale for popular creativity (Burgess) or even marginal creativity by a group of young people living at the periphery of the social system. The second meaning refers to the interlocked forms of material and cultural capital (and distance), as theorised in Bourdieu’s work (e.g., Bourdieu). It includes physical, spatial conditions and relations, as well as cultural resources and possibilities made available to young participants by the project (e.g., the instituted, supported travel across the city, or the employment of creative practitioners), and interlinked with everyday dispositions, practices, and status of young people (e.g., taste). This empirically-grounded discussion allows to theorise ‘suburbs’ as perceived and socially enacted by concrete, relational forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than analytically pre-conceived, designated spaces within an urban system. The ethnographic material reveals that cultural participation for marginalised youth requires an integrated approach, with a parallel focus on material and creative opportunities made available within creative sites such as Youthworx or even the Brunswick creative area. The important material constraints exemplified in this paper concern socio-economic background, cultural disadvantage and geographical isolation and point to the limits of the creative industries-based interventions to address social inclusion if carried out in isolation. They tap into the very basis of risks for this specific demographic of marginalised youth or "youth at risk." The paper suggests that the productive emphasis on the role of media and communication for (youth) development needs to be contextualised and considered along with the actual realities of everyday existence that often limit young people’s educational and vocational prospects (see Bentley et al.; Leadbeater and Wong). On the other hand, an exclusive focus on material support risks cancelling out the possibilities for positive life transitions, such as those triggered by constructive, non-reductionist engagement with “beauty, aesthetics” (Campbell) and creativity. By exploring how participation in Youthworx engenders both the physical mobility between suburbs and the city, and identity transformation, we are able to gain insights into the nature of social exclusion, its meanings for the youth involved and the project managers and staff. Thinking about Youthworx not just as a hub of creative production but as a cultural site—“a space within a practiced place of identity” (De Certeau 117) in the suburb of Brunswick—opens up a discussion that combines the policy language of opportunity and necessity with concrete creative and material possibilities. Social inclusion objectives aimed at positive youth transitions need to be considered in the light of the connection—or disconnection—between the Youthworx Brunswick site itself, young participants’ suburbs, and, by extension, the trajectory between the inner city and other spaces that young people travel through and inhabit. Acknowledgment I would like to thank all the young participants, staff and industry partners involved in the Youthworx project. I also acknowledge the comments of anonymous peer reviewer which helped to strengthen the argument by foregrounding the value of the empirical material. The paper draws on the larger project funded by the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. Youthworx research team includes: Prof Denise Meredyth (CI); Prof Julian Thomas (CI); Ass/Prof David MacKenzie (CI); Ass/Prof Ellie Rennie; Chris Wilson (PhD candidate), and Jon Staley (Youthworx Manager and PhD candidate). References Bentley, Tom, and Kate Oakley. “The Real Deal: What Young People Think about Government, Politics and Social Exclusion.” Demos. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theRealdeal.pdf›. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987. Burgess, Jean. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201–14. Campbell, Craig. Personal Interview. Melbourne, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Dewson, Sara, Judith Eccles, Nii Djan Tackey and Annabel Jackson. “Guide to Measuring Soft Outcomes and Distance Travelled.” The Institute for Employment Studies. 12 Jan. 2011‹http:// www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/distance.pdf›. Dowmunt, Tom, Mark Dunford, and N. van Hemert. Inclusion through Media. London: Open Mute, 2007. Ferber, Sarah, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. Hayes, Alan, Matthew Gray, and Ben Edwards. “Social Inclusion: Origins, Concepts and Key Themes.” Australian Institute of Family Studies, prepared for the Social Inclusion Unit, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 2008.12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Hearn, Gregory, and Ruth Bridgstock. “Education for the Creative Economy: Innovation, Transdisciplinarity, and Networks. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Ed. Daniel Araya and Michael Peters. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 93–116. Holdsworth, Roger, Murray Lake, Kathleen Stacey, and John Safford. “Doing Positive Things: You Have to Go Out and Do It: Outcomes for Participants in Youth Development Programs.” Australian Youth Research Centre. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/5385FE14-A74C-4B24-98EA-D31EEA8447B2/21803/doing_positive_things1.pdf›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Leadbeater, Charles, and Annika Wong. “Learning from the Extremes.” CISCO. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Podkalicka, Aneta. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of Youthworx Media's Radio Project." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 561–72. ———, and Jon Staley. “Youthworx Media: Creative Media Engagement for ‘at Risk’ Young People.” 3CM 5 (2009). ———, and Julian Thomas. “The Skilled Social Voice: An Experiment in Creative Economy and Communication Rights.’’ International Communication Gazette 72.4–5 (2010): 395–406. ———, and Craig Campbell. “Understanding Digital Storytelling: Beyond the Politics of Voice in Youth Participation Programs.” seminar.net: Media Technology and Lifelong Learning 6.2 (2010). ‹http://www.seminar.net/index.php/home/75-current-issue/150-understanding-digital-storytelling-individual-voice-and-community-building-in-youth-media-programs›. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Raffo, Carlo. "Mentoring Disenfranchised Young People: An Action Research Project on the Development of 'Weak Ties' and Social Capital Enhancement." Education and Industry in Partnership 6.3 (2000): 22–42. Soep, Elizabeth, and Vivian Chavez. Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Spurgeon, Christina, Jean Burgess, Helen Klaebe, Kelly McWilliam, Jo Tacchi, and Mimi Tsai. “Co-Creative Media: Theorising Digital Storytelling as a Platform for Researching and Developing Participatory Culture.” 2009 ANZC Conference Proceedings. 2009. 16 Nov. 2010 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/25811/2/25811.pdf›.

Imagining Sydney’s Sexual Geography through the Gay/Lesbian Media As a cultural geographer I am interested in how the identities of places are imagined in popular culture. Places do not exist a priori, but are constructed through social and cultural processes (Anderson and Gale). This does not simply refer to how built environments are materialized through planning and building, but rather elicits the way places are represented through maps, film, literature, art, and, of crucial importance in contemporary society, a range of media sources, including newspapers, websites and television (Cosgrove and Daniels; Duncan and Ley; May). These representations are what give different localities their identities, and consequently places cannot be experienced and interpreted apart from their circulated images (Shurmer-Smith; da Costa). In this brief paper I explore how Sydney’s King Street precinct is imagined as a gay/lesbian place in the gay/lesbian media – an approach which follows the examples of Forest and Miller, who respectively examine how West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Davie Street, Vancouver, are defined and constructed in the gay/lesbian media as ‘gay places’. At the same time, I also seek to I extend this approach by exploring how different ostensibly gay/lesbian places are infused with different gay/lesbian identities by the gay/lesbian media. Sydney makes an interesting case study here. The city possesses two notable gay/lesbian precincts: the iconic Oxford Street precinct, located in the ‘inner east’, comprising Darlinghurst, Paddington and Surry Hills; and the King Street precinct, located in the ‘inner west’, encompassing Newtown, Erskineville and Enmore. While there is some research on Oxford Street as gay/lesbian space (Wotherspoon; Faro and Wotherspoon; Murphy and Watson), academic literature is silent on the particular position of King Street in Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. McInnes, Hodge, and Costello and Hodge, for instance, bypass King Street, and instead examine the binary between ‘inner Sydney’ and the ‘western suburbs’ generated by the gay/lesbian media. While this work is important in demonstrating how Sydney’s gay/lesbian media imagines the city’s sexual geography – a ‘queer’ inner-city and ‘straight’ suburbia – these authors omit any consideration of differences within the inner-city, and instead focus on the similarities between the various gay/lesbian spaces of inner Sydney. For example, McInnes simply states: Sydney’s two gay spaces are considered to be the area[s] centred on Oxford Street Darlinghurst … and … King Street Newtown. These two places are gay spaces largely because of the presence of gay business … and because a large number of gay men and lesbians live in these two areas. (167) However, it is also possible to examine the differences between how these two discrete spaces are imagined in the gay/lesbian media. This is one of my aims in this paper. Through examining media representations of King Street specifically, rather than the inner-city generally, I seek to advance present understandings of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. Interpreting Media Images of King Street The commentaries analysed are taken from several gay/lesbian media sources widely circulated in Sydney – Sydney Star Observer (SSO), SX, Gay Australia Guide (GAG) and lesbian.com.au. They have been drawn from between 2003 and 2005. 2003 was selected as a suitable start date because of the closure of several gay/lesbian venues on and around Oxford Street during that year, prompting the publication of a number of articles in SSO (12 Dec. 2002, 20 Mar. 2003, 6 Nov. 2003) and SX (16 Oct. 2003, 15 July 2004) raising fears over the ‘de-gaying’ of Oxford Street. These reports signify heightened concern for the integrity of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography by the gay/lesbian media and a concomitant anxiety over the place-identities of gay/lesbian precincts. These commentaries were then subject to various textual analyses (Hannam; Shurmer-Smith). Manifest and latent content analyses were used to extract key themes about the media constructions of King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity. Here, I looked for the descriptors applied to King Street to elicit particular representations. Diverse words, like ‘alternative’ and ‘centre’, recurred over and over again. Since there seemed to be multiple – and somewhat competing – images of King Street in these media commentaries, I then turned to discourse analysis to try to understand how such divergent representations might arise, and what they signify about King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity and the precinct’s place in the gay/lesbian media’s imaginative sexual geography of Sydney (Waitt; Miller). Here I paid close attention to the interpretive context of commentaries concerned with King Street, and the places (and identities) with which King Street was juxtaposed. This closer discursive analysis suggested that where King Street is considered in the gay/lesbian media, it is often juxtaposed with Oxford Street. In other words, the gay/lesbian media seems to have constructed a binary relationship between Oxford and King Streets, so that King Street is typically identified, defined and imagined in relation to Oxford Street. However, the contours of this binary relationship are unstable and shifting, differing across the commentaries. Sometimes Oxford Street is seen as the ‘hub’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography, the symbolic ‘heart’ of the gay/lesbian spatial imaginary, while King Street is perceived as its ‘alternative’. But at other times, Oxford Street is described as ‘old’, and King Street is presented as its ‘successor’, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Either way, what is significant is the way King Street is often made to rely on the image of Oxford Street for its own definition and identity. In the following discussion, I examine each of these imagined place-identities in turn, citing selected examples from the gay/lesbian media. Only the most explicit examples are presented and discussed, but the gay/lesbian media includes various other references juxtaposing and comparing the two street-precincts. King Street as the ‘Alternative’ A number of commentaries represent Oxford Street as the ‘centre’ or ‘heart’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, while King Street is presented as its ‘alternative’ (eg. SX 29 Jan. 2004). Take, for instance, the way they are juxtaposed in the following: Darlinghurst. Welcome to the hub of Sydney’s gay and lesbian community. Darlinghurst is home for some of Sydney’s hottest gay and lesbian clubs, cafes, and bars, and it’s where many community groups are based. The main strip, Oxford Street, is queer central. … Newtown. The edgier alternative to Darlinghurst. … The buzz here is on King Street, home to Sydney’s alternative and grunge crowd. (GAG’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide, 2005, 6, 15) The heart of gay Sydney is Oxford Street. … It’s loud, proud and colourful. … Want something a little more edgier and cosmopolitan? Rock into Newtown. Sydney’s most colourful characters gather around King Street and Enmore Road. (http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm) In both commentaries, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Oxford Street is presented first: the precinct can stand alone as ‘queer central’, ‘the heart of gay Sydney’, drawing on no other places for its definition as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney. Oxford Street simply is gay/lesbian Sydney. Meanwhile, King Street is ‘second choice’ it seems. In both reports, descriptions of King Street appear immediately after Oxford Street, and are drawn in comparison, with King Street identified as Oxford Street’s ‘edger alternative’. Since it is depicted as the ‘hub’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, Oxford Street is also imagined as Sydney’s ‘gay ghetto’, a uniformly gay/lesbian residential-and-commercial space. This is another representation against which King Street is defined in the gay/lesbian media: Since moving from Taylor Square [Oxford Street] to the Newtown/St.Peters border [King Street] … I’ve celebrated being part of a mixed community. … Don’t get me wrong. I love living gay. … But a couple of years spent drowning in the ghetto has made me appreciate the simple things about not being a part of it. (SSO 20 Jan. 2005) Newtown is a culturally diverse suburb and fortunately it is gay-friendly, not a gay ghetto. People can be themselves in Newtown without fear of persecution. (SSO 27 Jan. 2005) I do not believe that Newtown [King Street] is a ‘gay ghetto’ … Granted, it is one of the few places where I can walk hand in and with my (male) partner and feel relatively safe. However, there is a wide diversity of people here, and the LGBT community is only a part of it. (SSO 21 Jan. 2005) Although these commentators are clearly happy to represent King Street as a ‘gay-friendly’ locality rather than a ‘gay ghetto’, this identity is only attained in contrast with Oxford Street, the gay ghetto. Again King Street is depicted as Oxford Street’s alternative, its particular ‘gay-friendly’ place-identity bound to a comparative relationship with Oxford Street. King Street as the ‘New Centre’ But this centre/alternative binary is unstable. In other commentaries, King Street is not presented as the ‘alternative’, but as the ‘successor’ to Oxford Street, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Take the following commentary from GAG (Summer 2003), which now promotes King Street the ‘best gay street in Australia’: King Street, Newtown, is now the best GLBTI street in Sydney and, inevitably, in Oz – no argument. It’s book-ended by Victoria Park at its city end – site of the annual Mardi Gras fair day and poolside pashing all year round – and Sydney Park at its southern end – queer dog off-leash heaven. Without any of Oxford Street’s tackiness, here you’ll find the kissingest, handholdingest fags and dykes, along with hets who aren’t out to hoon or hurt. … Why? Because 24/7 it’s a lived-in street, not an after-hours entertainment strip for the desperate and dateless. King Street’s claim to be the ‘best gay street in Australia’, however, is tellingly made in direct comparison with Oxford Street (and interestingly, not with ‘gay streets’ in other Australian cities): while Oxford Street is a ‘tacky entertainment strip’, King Street is ‘lived-in’. Oxford Street continues to haunt the place-identity of King Street: even in being imagined as the ‘top’ gay precinct, King Street is defined against and through Oxford Street. In a similar vein, another article from SSO (21 Oct. 2004) asserts that ‘Newtown’s King Street is set to overtake Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street as the epicentre of gay Sydney’. The report outlines evidence for the elevation of King Street to the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney, in terms of residential visibility and the number of gay/lesbian organisations moving to the area, which include the New Mardi Gras, Twenty10 (a gay/lesbian youth service), the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service, the Gender Centre and the Metropolitan Community Church. Yet even as King Street succeeds Oxford Street as the ‘epicentre of gay Sydney’, the precinct is imagined through Oxford Street: the article is entitled ‘King Street the new Darlo’. Here, King Street is not acknowledged as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney in its own terms, by virtue of its own identity as a gay/lesbian place, but through replacing Oxford Street. Literally re-placing: King Street is not the ‘new centre’: it is the ‘new Darlo’. It is as if Oxford Street is inherently and synonymously ‘central’, and King Street can only be seen as central through being imagined as Oxford Street. In doing this, rather than asserting King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity, Oxford Street’s identity as the symbolic ‘heart’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian spatial imaginary is confirmed. It is not Oxford Street that has been dis-placed by King Street’s growing gay/lesbian community and identity. Rather, King Street’s identity has been dis-placed by the continued representation of Oxford Street as ‘queer central’. Conclusion The identities of different places are not ‘natural’, but constructed through social and cultural representations. In contemporary western society, the media – print, television, web-based – is a key producer and disseminator of place images and identities. This paper has sought to add to our understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, I have sought to explore how the gay/lesbian media can influence the gay/lesbian identities of certain places. Moreover, by exploring how King Street has been represented in and through the gay/lesbian media vis-à-vis Oxford Street, I have attempted to understand how different gay/lesbian places are imbued with different and multiple gay/lesbian identities in the gay/lesbian media. Consequently, this discussion also augments our understanding of Sydney’s particular gay/lesbian geography, providing a more nuanced understanding of the imaginative sexual identities of different places collectively imagined as gay/lesbian. Several specific conclusions can be drawn here. First, King and Oxford Streets are imagined differently by the gay/lesbian media. Second, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Third, these relational depictions shift between alternative to, and a successor of, Oxford Street. Finally, either way, King Street is often made to rely upon Oxford Street for its place-identity, infrequently imagined apart from Oxford Street. Yet, since place-identities are fluid and unstable, this may change in the future, especially as King Street continues to develop as a locality of gay/lesbian community and identity. And in looking to the future, I hope the claims made here stimulate further enquiry into the nuanced relationship between Sydney’s gay/lesbian precincts. More work remains to be done – not just of media representations – but in-depth interviews and participant observations to understand the experiences of King Street’s residents, and what this particular place means to them and their identities. References Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Chesire, 1992. Anon. “Oxford Hotel in Receivership.” Sydney Star Observer 6 Nov. 2003. 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Fishlock, Gary. “And Then There Were Nine.” SX 16 Oct. 2003. ———. “Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.” SX 29 Jan. 2004. ———. “A Call to Arms.” SX 15 July 2004. Forest, Benjamin. “West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of a Gay Identity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13.2 (1995): 133-157. Hannam, Kevin. “Coping with Archival and Textual Data.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 189-197. Hodge, Stephen. “No Fags Out There: Gay Men, Identity and Suburbia.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 1.1 (1995): 41-48. Lesbian Sydney. 28 Nov. 2005 http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm>. May, Jon. “The View from the Streets: Geographies of Homelessness in the British Newspaper Press.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 23-36. McInnes, David. “Inside the Outside: Politics and Gay and Lesbian Spaces in Sydney.” Queer City: Gay and Lesbian Politics in Sydney. Eds. Craig Johnston and Paul van Reyk. Pluto Press: Annandale, 2001. 164-178. Miller, Vincent. “Intertextuality, the Referential Illusion and the Production of a Gay Ghetto.” Social and Cultural Geography 6.1 (2005): 61-80. Murphy, Peter and Sophie Watson. “Gay Sites and the Pink Dollar.” Written with Iain Bruce. Chapter 4 of Surface City: Sydney at the Millenium. Pluto: Annandale, 1997. O’Grady, Dominic, ed. Gay Australia Guide’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide. Blackheath: Gay Travel Guides, 2005. Reader views. Sydney Star Observer 27 Jan. 2005. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. “Reading Texts.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 123-136. Van Reyk, Paul. “Best Gay Street – King Street Newtown, Sydney.” Gay Australia Guide 9 (Summer 2003): 11. Waitt, Gordon. “Doing Discourse Analysis.” Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. Ed. Iain Hay. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005. 163-191. Wearring, Myles. “King Street the New Darlo.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Oct. 2004. Wotherspoon, Garry. City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew. "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A. (Jul. 2006) "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>.

In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. 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