Academic literature on the topic 'Truck accidents Australia'

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

Safescape is a Western Australian company that has recently developed a device for improved safety in open-pit mines. Serious accidents can occur when large trucks veer off the roads running around the edge of the mine. The conventional technique to mitigate the risk is to pile waste rock to form a so-called bund on the edge of the road. This method is not fail safe though as vehicles can, and do, drive completely over the bund. In this paper, we describe a new device that consists of a row of filled polyethylene shell units which are linked together and sit on the road side of the rock bund. The vertical front face of the edge protector prevents out of control dump trucks from climbing over the bund and into the pit, so that they push against the barriers and heave the broken rock behind the bund. The models developed here suggest that the primary resistance to an impacting truck is provided by the large heaving force with the barrier simply facilitating this process. The theory indicates that the total resistance is independent of truck speed, meaning that simple barrier pushing experiments are sufficient to validate the analysis. The conclusions of the theory and field tests suggest that in a worst-case scenario involving the normal impact of a 500 tonne filled dump truck, the barriers and bund move a few metres before coming to rest.

Introduction In a period marked by the pervasiveness of new mobile technologies saturating urban areas of the Asia-Pacific region, it can be easy to forget the realities of life in the rural areas. In a location such as Australia, in which 80% of the population lives in urban areas, one must be reminded of the sociotechnological realities of rural existence where often-newer mobile communication devices cease to function. This paper focuses on these black spots – and often forgotten areas – where examples of older, mediated technologies such as UHF Citizen Band (CB) radios can be found as integral to practices of everyday rural life. As Anderson notes, constructs of the nation are formed through contested notions of what individuals and communities imagine and project as a sense of place. In Australia, one of the dominant contested imageries can be found in the urban and rural divide, a divide that is not just social and cultural but technological; it is marked by a digital divide. This divide neatly corresponds to the images of Australia experienced by Australians (predominantly living in urban areas) and exported tourist images of the rugged vast rural landscapes. The remote Australia Outback is a popular destination for domestic tourists. Its sparsely populated and rough terrain attracts tourists seeking a quintessentially Australian experience. Roads are often unmade and in poor condition. Fuel and food supplies and health services are widely separated and there is almost no permanent accommodation. Apart from a small number of regional centres there is no access to mobile phones or radio broadcasts. As a consequence tourists must be largely self sufficient. While the primary roads carry significant road traffic it is possible to drive all day on secondary roads without seeing another person. Isolation and self-sufficiency are both an attraction and a challenge. Travelling in campervans, towing caravans or camper trailers and staying in caravan parks, national parks, roadside stops or alone in the bush, tourists spend extended times in areas where there are few other tourists. Many tourists deal with this isolation by equipping their vehicles with CB radios. Depending on the terrain, they are able to listen to, and participate in conversations with other CB users within a 10-20 kilometre range. In some areas where there are repeater stations, the range of radio transmissions can be extended. This paper examines the role of these CB radios in the daily life of tourists in the Australian Outback. Theoretical Issues The links between travel, the new communications technologies and the diminished spatial-time divide have been explored by John Urry. According to Urry, mobile electronic devices make it possible for people “to leave traces of their selves in informational space” (266). Using these informational traces, mobile communication technologies ‘track’ the movements of travellers, enabling them to communicate synchronously. People become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ (266). Another consequence of readily available communication independent of location is for the meaning of social connections. Social encounters provide tourists with the opportunity to develop and affirm understandings of their shared common occupation of unfamiliar social and cultural landscapes (Harrison). Both transitory and enduring relationships provide information, companionship and resources that allow tourists to create, share and give meaning to their experiences (Stokowski). Communication technology also enables individuals to enter and remain part of social networks while physically absent and distant from them (Johnsen; Makimoto and Manners, Urry). The result is a “nomadic intimacy” in an everyday social and physical environment characterised by extended spaces and individual freedom to move around in these spaces (Fortunati). For travellers in the Australian Outback, this “nomadic intimacy” is both literal and metaphorical. Research has shown that travellers use mobile communications services and a range of other communication strategies to maintain a “symbolic proximity” with family, friends and colleagues (Wurtzel and Turner) and to promote a sense of “presence while absent”, or ‘co-presence’ (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”; White and White, “Home and Away”). Central to the original notion of co-presence was that it was contingent on those involved in a given communication both being and feeling close enough to perceive each other and to be perceived in the course of their activities (Goffman). That is, the notion of co-presence initially referred to physical presence in face-to-face contact and interactions. However, increasing use of mobile phones in particular has meant that this sense of connection can be affirmed at a distance. But what happens when travellers do not have access to mobile phones and the Internet, and as a consequence, do not have access to their networks of family, friends and colleagues? How do they deal with travel and isolation in a harsh environment? These issues are the starting point for the present paper, which examines travellers’ experience of CB radio in the remote Australian Outback. This exploration of how the CB radio has been incorporated into the daily lives of these travellers can be seen as a contribution to an understanding of the domestication of mobile communications (Haddon). Methodology People were included in the study if they used CB radios while travelling in remote parts of Western Australian and the Northern Territory. The participants were approached in caravan parks, camping grounds and at roadside stops. Most were travelling in caravans while others were using camper trailers and campervans. Twenty-four travellers were interviewed, twelve men and twelve women. All were travelling with partners or spouses, and one group of two couples was travelling together. They ranged in age from twenty five to seventy years, and all were Australian residents. The duration of their travels varied from six weeks to eleven months. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. The interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded with respect to regularly articulated points of view. Where points of view were distinctive, they were noted during the coding process as contrasting instances. While the relatively small sample size limits generalizability, the issues raised by the respondents provide insights into the meaning of CB radio use in the daily life of travellers in the Australian Outback. Findings Staying Safe The primary reason given for travelling with a CB radio was personal safety. The tourists interviewed were aware of the risks associated with travelling in the Outback. Health emergencies, car accidents and problems with tyres in a harsh and hot environment without ready access to water were often mentioned. ‘If you call a May Day someone will come out and answer…” (Female, 55). Another interviewee reported that: Last year we helped some folk who were bogged in the sand right at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. The wife just started calling the various channels explaining that they were bogged and asking whether there was anyone out there….We went and towed them out. …. It would have been a long walk for them to get help. (Female, 55) Even though most interviewees had not themselves experienced a personal emergency, many recounted stories about how CB radio had been used to come to the aid of someone in distress. Road conditions were another concern. Travellers were often rightly very concerned about hazards ahead. One traveller noted: You are always going to hear someone who gives you an insight as to what is happening up ahead on the road. If there’s an accident up ahead someone’s going to get on the radio and let people know. Or there could be road works or the road could be shitty. (Male, 50) Safety arose in another context. Tourists share the rough and often dusty roads with road trains towing up to three trailers. These vehicles can be 50 metres long. A road train creates wind turbulence when it passes a car and trailer or caravan and the dust it raises reduces visibility. Because of this car drivers and caravanners need to be extremely careful when they pass or are passed by one. Passing a road train at 100 km can take 2.5km. Interviewees reported that they communicated with road train drivers to negotiate a safe time and place to pass. One caravanner noted: Sometimes you see a road train coming up behind you. You call him up and say ” I’ll pull over for you mate and slow down and you go”. You use it a lot because it’s safer. We are not in a hurry. Road trains are working and they are in a hurry and he (sic.) is bigger, so he has the right of way. (Male, 50) As with the dominant rationale for installing and using a CB radio, Rice and Katz showed that concern about safety is the primary motive for women acquiring a mobile phone, and safety was also important for men. The social contact enabled by CB radio provided a means of tracking the movements of other travellers who were nearby. This tracking ability engendered a sense of comfort and enabled them to communicate and exchange information synchronously in a potentially dangerous environment. As a consequence, a ‘metaworld’ (Suvantola) of ‘informational traces’ (Urry) was created. Making Oneself Known All interactions entail conventions and signals that enable a conversation to commence. These conventions were also seen to apply to CB conversations. Driving in a car or truck involves being physically enclosed with the drivers and passengers being either invisible or only partially visible to other travellers. Caravanners deal with this lack of visibility in a number of ways. Many have their first names, the name of their caravan and the channel they use on the rear of their van. A typical sign was “Bill and Rose, Travelling Everywhere, Channel 18” or “Harry and Mary, Bugger Work, Gone Fishing”, Channel 18” clearly visible to anyone coming from behind. (The male partner’s name was invariably first.) A sign that identified the occupants was seen as an invitation to chat by other travellers. One traveller said that if he saw such a sign he would call up by saying: “Hello Harry and Mary”. From then on who knows where it goes. It depends on the people. If someone comes back really cheery and a bit cheeky I can be cheery and cheeky back. (Male, 50) The names of caravans were used in other more personal ways. One couple from South Africa had given their van a Zulu name and that was seen as a way of identifying their origins and encouraging a specific kind of conversation while they were on the road. This couple reported that People call us up and ask us what it means. We have lots of calls about that. We’ve had more conversations about that than anything else. (Male, 67) Another caravanner reported that he had seen a van with “Nanna and Poppa’ on the back. They used that as a cue to start a conversation about their grandchildren. But caravan names linked to their CB radio channel can have a deeper personal meaning. One couple had their first names and the number 58 on the rear of their van. (The number 58 is beyond the range of CB channels.) On further questioning the number 58 was revealed to be the football club number of a daughter who had died. The sign was an attempt to deal with their grief and its public display a way of entering into a conversation about grief and loss. It has probably backfired because it puts people back into their shell because they think “We don’t want to talk about death”. But because of the sign we’ve met people who’ve lost a child too. (Male, 50) As Featherstone notes, drivers develop competence in switching between a range of communicative modes while they are travelling. These range from body gestures to formal signalling devices on other cars. Signage on caravans designed to invite conversation was a specialised signalling device specific to the CB user. Talking Loneliness was another theme emerging from the interviews. One of the attractions of the Outback is its sparse population. As one interviewee noted ‘You can travel all day and not see another soul’ (Female, 35). But this loneliness can be a challenge. Some of these roads are pretty lonely, the radio lets you know that there’s somebody else out there. (Male, 54) Hearing other travellers talk was comforting. As with previous research showing that travellers use mobile communications services to maintain a “symbolic proximity” (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”) the CB conversations enabled the travellers to feel this sense of connection. These interactions also offered them the possibility of converting mediated relationships into face-to-face encounters along the road. That is, some travellers reported that CB-based chats with people while they were driving would lead to a decision to stop along the road for a shared morning tea or lunch. Conventions governed the use of specific channels. Some of these are government regulated, while others are user generated. For instance, Channels 18 and 40, were seen as ‘working channels’. Some interviewees felt very strongly about people who ‘cluttered up’ these channels and moved to another unused channel when they wanted to have an extended conversation. One couple was unaware of the local convention and could not understand why no one was calling them up. They later discovered that they were on the ‘wrong channel’. Interviewees travelling in a convoy would use the standard channel for travellers and then agree to move to another channel of their choice. When we travelling in a convoy we go off Channel 18 and use another channel to talk. The girls love it to talk about their knitting and work out what they’ve done wrong. We sometimes tell jokes. Also we work out what we are going to do in the next town. (Male, 67) These extended conversations parallel the lengthy conversations between drivers equipped with CB radio in the United States during the 1970’s which Dannaher described as ‘as diverse as those found at a cocktail party’. They also provided a sense of the “nomadic intimacy” described by Fortunati. Eavesdropping While travellers used Channel 18 for conversations they set their radio to automatically scan all forty channels. When a conversation was located the radio would stop scanning and they could listen to what was being said. This meant that travellers would overhear conversations between strangers. We scan all the channels so you can hear anyone coming up behind, especially trucks and you can hear them say “that damn caravan” and you can say ’ that damn caravan will pull over at the first opportunity.” (Female, 44) But the act of listening in to other people’s conversations created moral dilemmas for some travellers. One interviewee described it as “voyeurism for the ears”. While she described listening to farm conversations as giving her an insight into daily life on huge cattle station she was tempted to butt into one conversation that she was listening to. On reflection she decided against entering the conversation. She said: I didn’t want them to know that we were eavesdropping on their conversation. I’d be embarrassed if a third-party knew that we were listening in. I guess that I’ve been taught that you shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversations. It’s not good manners… (Female, 35) When travellers overheard conversations between road train or truck drivers they had mixed responses. These conversations were often sexually loaded and seen as coarse by the middle class travellers. Some were forgiving of the conversational excesses, distinguishing themselves from the rough and tumble world of the ‘truckies’. One traveller noted that the truck drivers use a lot of bad language, but you’ve got to go with that, because that’s the type of people they are. But you have to go with the flow. We know that we are ‘playing’ and the truckies are ‘working’ so you have to be considerate to them. (Female, 50) While the language of the truck drivers was often threatening to middle class travellers, overhearing their conversations was also seen as a comfort. One traveller remarked that sometimes you hear truckies talking about their families and they obviously know each other. It’s kind of nice to see how they think. (Female, 50) Travellers had similar feelings when they overheard conversations from cattle stations. Also, local cattle station workers and their families would use CB radios for their social and working communications. Travellers would often overhear these conversations. One traveller noted that when we are driving through a cattle station we work out which channel they are using, and we lock it on that one. And then we listen until they are out of range. We are city people and listening to the station chatter gives us a bit of an insight into what it must be like as a farmer working land out here. And then we talk about the farmers’ conversations. (Female, 35) Another traveller noted: If you are travelling and there’s nothing you can see you can listen to the farmer talking to his wife or the kids. It’s absolutely awesome to hear conversations on radio. (Female, 67) This empathic listening allows the travellers to imagine the lives of others in settings quite different from those with which they are familiar. Furthermore, hearing farmers talking about fixing the fence in the left paddock or rounding up strays makes ‘you feel that you’re not alone’. The networking of the travellers’ social life arising from listening in to others meant that they were able to learn about the environment in which they found themselves, as well as enabling them to feel that they continued to remain embedded or ‘co-present’ in social relationships in circumstances of considerable physical isolation. Conclusions The accounts provided by tourists illustrated the way communications technologies – in this case, CB radio – enabled people to become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ described by Urry and to maintain ‘co-presence’. The CB radio allowed tourists to remain part of social networks while being physically absent from them (Gergen). Their responses also demonstrated the significance of CB radio in giving meaning to the experience of travel. The CB radio was shown to be an important part of the travel experience in the remote Australian Outback. The use of CB made it possible for travellers in the Australian Outback to obtain information vital for the safe traverse of the huge distances and isolated roads. The technology enabled them to break down the atomism and frontier-like isolation of the highway. Drivers and their passengers could reach out to other travellers and avoid remaining unconnected strangers. Long hours on the road could be dealt with by listening in on others’ conversations, even though some ambivalence was expressed about this activity. Despite an awareness that they could be violating the personal boundaries of others and that their conversations could be overheard, the use of CB radio meant staying safe and enjoying guilty pleasures. Imagined or not. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1983 Dannefer, W. Dale. “The C.B. Phenomenon: A Sociological Appraisal.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 611-19. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4/5 (2004): 1-24. Fortunati, Leopoldina. “The Mobile Phone: Towards New Categories and Social Relations.” Information, Communication and Society 5.2 (2002): 513-28. Gergen, Kenneth. “The Challenge of Absence Presence.” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 227-54. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Haddon, Leslie. “Domestication and Mobile Telephony.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James E. Katz. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 43-55. Harrison, Julia. Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2003. Johnsen, Truls Erik. “The Social Context of Mobile Use of Norwegian Teens.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James Katz. London: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 161-69. Ling, Richard. “One Can Talk about Common Manners! The Use of Mobile Telephones in Inappropiate Situations.” Communications on the Move: The Experience of Mobile Telephony in the 1990s (Report of Cost 248: The Future European Telecommunications User Mobile Workgroup). Ed. Leslie Haddon. Farsta, Sweden: Telia AB, 1997. 97-120. Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel.” Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge, 1997. 75-95. Rice, Ronald E., and James E. Katz. “Comparing Internet and Mobile Phone Usage: Digital Divides of Usage, Adoption and Dropouts.” Telecommunications Policy 27 (2003): 597-623. Short, J., E. Williams, and B. Christie. The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. New York: Wiley, 1976. Stokowski, Patricia. “Social Networks and Tourist Behavior.” American Behavioural Scientist 36.2 (1992): 212-21. Suvantola, Jaakko. Tourist’s Experience of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Urry, John. “Mobility and Proximity.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 255-74. ———. “Social Networks, Travel and Talk.” British Journal of Sociology 54.2 (2003): 155-75. White, Naomi Rosh, and Peter B. White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34. 1 (2007): 88-104. White, Peter B., and Naomi Rosh White. “Keeping Connected: Travelling with the Telephone.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 11.2 (2005): 102-18. Williams, Stephen, and Lynda Williams. “Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone.” The Sociological Review 53.2 (2005): 314-31. Wurtzel, Alan H., and Colin Turner. “Latent Functions of the Telephone: What Missing the Extension Means.” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. 246-61. Citation reference for this article MLA Style White, Peter B., and Naomi White. "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>. APA Style White, P., and N. White. (Mar. 2007) "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>.

Grafting and budding are common horticultural techniques, and similar techniques have been successfully used in the management of tree wounds by bridge and approach grafting. The success of bark grafts raises the possibility of using bark patch grafts to span trunk wounds and pruning cuts. Fifty seedling trees from each of six commonly planted Australian native and exotic species—Acacia dealbata, Banksia integrifolia, Eucalyptus viminalis, Platanus × acerifolia, Quercus robur, and Pinus radiata—had circular plugs of bark removed from their stem using a #3 cork borer (9 mm diameter). The plugs were lifted from the stem and then re-attached at one of four rotations (0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees) to the original cambial orientation in each of the four seasons. While there was no successful re-attachment for Pinus radiata, the data for the successful re-attachment of the other five species showed that the most successful orientation for re-attachment was in the original position (0 degrees); successful attachment did occur at other orientations. The best season for re-attachment was spring, but successful attachment did occur in other seasons; success was lowest when grafting was undertaken in winter. The use of bark patch grafts may provide arborists with an additional method for dealing with large wounds caused by vandalism and accidents, and would be particularly useful if a tree was of special, historic, or environmental significance to the landscape. Covering the wound with a bark patch graft may conceal the removal of a branch, hide obvious scarring, and at the same time reduce the risk of disease and stress to the tree by closing the wound more quickly than would normally occur due to natural callusing.

Introduction Almost all industries in Australia today have adopted digital media in some way. However, uses in large scale activities such as mining may seem to be different from others. This article looks at mining practices with a media studies approach, and concludes that, just as many other industries, mining and media have converged. Many Australian mine sites are adopting new media for communication and control to manage communication, explore for ore bodies, simulate forces, automate drilling, keep records, and make transport and command robotic. Beyond sharing similar digital devices for communication and computation, new media in mining employ characteristic digital media operations, such as numerical operation, automation and managed variability. This article examines the implications of finding that some of the most material practices have become mediated by new media. Mining has become increasingly mediated through new media technologies similar to GPS, visualisation, game remote operation, similar to those adopted in consumer home and mobile digital media. The growing and diversified adoption of digital media championed by companies like Rio Tinto aims not only ‘improve’ mining, but to change it. Through remediating practices of digital mining, new media have become integral powerful tools in prospective, real time and analytical environments. This paper draws on two well-known case studies of mines in the Pilbara and Western NSW. These have been documented in press releases and media reports as representing changes in media and mining. First, the West Angelas mines in the Pilbara is an open cut iron ore mine introducing automation and remote operation. This mine is located in the remote Pilbara, and is notable for being operated remotely from a control centre 2000km away, near Perth Airport, WA. A growing fleet of Komatsu 930E haul trucks, which can drive autonomously, traverses the site. Fitted with radars, lasers and GPS, these enormous vehicles navigate through the open pit mine with no direct human control. Introducing these innovations to mine sites become more viable after iron ore mining became increasingly profitable in the mid-2000s. A boom in steel building in China drove unprecedented demand. This growing income coincided with a change in public rhetoric from companies like Rio Tinto. They pointed towards substantial investments in research, infrastructure, and accelerated introduction of new media technologies into mining practices. Rio Tinto trademarked the term ‘Mine of the future’ (US Federal News Service 1), and publicised their ambitious project for renewal of mining practice, including digital media. More recently, prices have been more volatile. The second case study site is a copper and gold underground mine at Northparkes in Western NSW. Northparkes uses substantial sensing and control, as well as hybrid autonomous and remote operated vehicles. The use of digital media begins with prospecting, and through to logistics of transportation. Engineers place explosives in optimal positions using computer modelling of the underground rock formations. They make heavy use of software to coordinate layer-by-layer use of explosives in this advanced ‘box cut’ mine. After explosives disrupt the rock layer a kilometre underground, another specialised vehicle collects and carries the ore to the surface. The Sandvik loader-hauler-dumper (LHD) can be driven conventionally by a driver, but it can also travel autonomously in and out of the mine without a direct operator. Once it reaches a collection point, where the broken up ore has accumulated, a user of the surface can change the media mode to telepresence. The human operator then takes control using something like a games controller and multiple screens. The remote operator controls the LHD to fill the scoop with ore. The fully-loaded LHD backs up, and returns autonomously using laser senses to follow a trail to the next drop off point. The LHD has become a powerful mediator, reconfiguring technical, material and social practices throughout the mine. The Meanings of Mining and Media Are Converging Until recently, mining and media typically operated ontologically separately. The media, such as newspapers and television, often tell stories about mining, following regular narrative scripts. There are controversies and conflicts, narratives of ecological crises, and the economics of national benefit. There are heroic and tragic stories such as the Beaconsfield mine collapse (Clark). There are new industry policies (Middelbeek), which are politically fraught because of the lobbying power of miners. Almost completely separately, workers in mines were consumers of media, from news to entertainment. These media practices, while important in their own right, tell nothing of the approaching changes in many other sectors of work and everyday life. It is somewhat unusual for a media studies scholar to study mine sites. Mine sites are most commonly studied by Engineering (Bellamy & Pravica), Business and labour and cultural histories (McDonald, Mayes & Pini). Until recently, media scholarship on mining has related to media institutions, such as newspapers, broadcasters and websites, and their audiences. As digital media have proliferated, the phenomena that can be considered as media phenomena has changed. This article, pointing to the growing roles of media technologies, observes the growing importance that media, in these terms, have in the rapidly changing domain of mining. Another meaning for ‘media’ studies, from cybernetics, is that a medium is any technology that translates perception, makes interpretations, and performs expressions. This meaning is more abstract, operating with a broader definition of media — not only those institutionalised as newspapers or radio stations. It is well known that computer-based media have become ubiquitous in culture. This is true in particular within the mining company’s higher ranks. Rio Tinto’s ambitious 2010 ‘Mine of the Future’ (Fisher & Schnittger, 2) program was premised on an awareness that engineers, middle managers and senior staff were already highly computer literate. It is worth remembering that such competency was relatively uncommon until the late 1980s. The meanings of digital media have been shifting for many years, as computers become experienced more as everyday personal artefacts, and less as remote information systems. Their value has always been held with some ambivalence. Zuboff’s (387-414) picture of loss, intimidation and resistance to new information technologies in the 1980s seems to have dissipated by 2011. More than simply being accepted begrudgingly, the PC platform (and variants) has become a ubiquitous platform, a lingua franca for information workers. It became an intimate companion for many professions, and in many homes. It was an inexpensive, versatile and generalised convergent medium for communication and control. And yet, writers such as Gregg observe, the flexibility of networked digital work imposes upon many workers ‘unlimited work’. The office boundaries of the office wall break down, for better or worse. Emails, utility and other work-related behaviours increasingly encroach onto domestic and public space and time. Its very attractiveness to users has tied them to these artefacts. The trail that leads the media studies discipline down the digital mine shaft has been cleared by recent work in media archaeology (Parikka), platform studies (Middelbeek; Montfort & Bogost; Maher) and new media (Manovich). Each of these redefined Media Studies practices addresses the need to diversify the field’s attention and methods. It must look at more specific, less conventional and more complex media formations. Mobile media and games (both computer-based) have turned out to be quite different from traditional media (Hjorth; Goggin). Kirschenbaum’s literary study of hard drives and digital fiction moves from materiality to aesthetics. In my study of digital mining, I present a reconfigured media studies, after the authors, that reveals heterogeneous media configurations, deserving new attention to materiality. This article also draws from the actor network theory approach and terminology (Latour). The uses of media / control / communications in the mining industry are very complex, and remain under constant development. Media such as robotics, computer modelling, remote operation and so on are bound together into complex practices. Each mine site is different — geologically, politically, and economically. Mines are subject to local and remote disasters. Mine tunnels and global prices can collapse, rendering active sites uneconomical overnight. Many technologies are still under development — including Northparkes and West Angelas. Both these sites are notable for their significant use of autonomous vehicles and remote operated vehicles. There is no doubt that the digital technologies modulate all manner of the mining processes: from rocks and mechanical devices to human actors. Each of these actors present different forms of collusion and opposition. Within a mining operation, the budgets for computerised and even robotic systems are relatively modest for their expected return. Deep in a mine, we can still see media convergence at work. Convergence refers to processes whereby previously diverse practices in media have taken on similar devices and techniques. While high-end PCs in mining, running simulators; control data systems; visualisation; telepresence, and so on may be high performance, ruggedised devices, they still share a common platform to the desktop PC. Conceptual resources developed in Media Ecology, New Media Studies, and the Digital Humanities can now inform readings of mining practices, even if their applications differ dramatically in size, reliability and cost. It is not entirely surprising that some observations by new media theorists about entertainment and media applications can also relate to features of mining technologies. Manovich argues that numerical representation is a distinctive feature of new media. Numbers have always already been key to mining engineering. However, computers visualise numerical fields in simulations that extend out of the minds of the calculators, and into visual and even haptic spaces. Specialists in geology, explosives, mechanical apparatuses, and so on, can use plaftorms that are common to everyday media. As the significance of numbers is extended by computers in the field, more and more diverse sources of data provide apparently consistent and seamless images of multiple fields of knowledge. Another feature that Manovich identifies in new media is the capacity for automation of media operations. Automation of many processes in mechanical domains clearly occurred long before industrial technologies were ported into new media. The difference with new media in mine sites is that robotic systems must vary their performance according to feedback from their extra-system environments. For our purposes, the haul trucks in WA are software-controlled devices that already qualify as robots. They sense, interpret and act in the world based on their surroundings. They evaluate multiple factors, including the sensors, GPS signals, operator instructions and so on. They can repeat the path, by sensing the differences, day after day, even if the weather changes, the track wears away or the instructions from base change. Automation compensates for differences within complex and changing environments. Automation of an open-pit mine haulage system… provides more consistent and efficient operation of mining equipment, it removes workers from potential danger, it reduces fuel consumption significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and it can help optimize vehicle repairs and equipment replacement because of more-predictable and better-controlled maintenance. (Parreire and Meech 1-13) Material components in physical mines tend to become modular and variable, as their physical shape lines up with the logic of another of Manovich’s new media themes, variability. Automatic systems also make obsolete human drivers, who previously handled those environmental variations, for better or for worse, through the dangerous, dull and dirty spaces of the mine. Drivers’ capacity to control repeat trips is no longer needed. The Komatsu driverless truck, introduced to the WA iron ore mines from 2008, proved itself to be almost as quick as human drivers at many tasks. But the driverless trucks have deeper advantages: they can run 23 hours each day with no shift breaks; they drive more cautiously and wear the equipment less than human drivers. There is no need to put up workers and their families up in town. The benefit most often mentioned is safety: even the worst accident won’t produce injuries to drivers. The other advantage less mentioned is that autonomous trucks don’t strike. Meanwhile, managers of human labour also need to adopt certain strategies of modulation to support the needs and expectations of their workers. Mobile phones, televisions and radio are popular modes of connecting workers to their loved ones, particularly in the remote and harsh West Angelas site. One solution — regular fly-in-fly out shifts — tends also to be alienating for workers and locals (Cheshire; Storey; Tonts). As with any operations, the cost of maintaining a safe and comfortable environment for workers requires trade-offs. Companies face risks from mobile phones, leaking computer networks, and espionage that expose the site to security risks. Because of such risks, miners tend be subject to disciplinary regimes. It is common to test alcohol and drug levels. There was some resistance from workers, who refused to change to saliva testing from urine testing (Latimer). Contesting these machines places the medium, in a different sense, at the centre of regulation of the workers’ bodies. In Northparkes, the solution of hybrid autonomous and remote operation is also a solution for modulating labour. It is safer and more comfortable, while also being more efficient, as one experienced driver can control three trucks at a time. This more complex mode of mediation is necessary because underground mines are more complex in geology, and working environments to suit full autonomy. These variations provide different relationships between operators and machines. The operator uses a games controller, and watches four video views from the cabin to make the vehicle fill the bucket with ore (Northparkes Mines, 9). Again, media have become a pivotal element in the mining assemblage. This combines the safety and comfort of autonomous operation (helping to retain staff) with the required use of human sensorimotor dexterity. Mine systems deserve attention from media studies because sites are combining large scale physical complexity with increasingly sophisticated computing. The conventional pictures of mining and media rarely address the specificity of subjective and artefactual encounters in and around mine sites. Any research on mining communication is typically within the instrumental frames of engineering (Duff et al.). Some of the developments in mechanical systems have contributed to efficiency and safety of many mines: larger trucks, more rock crushers, and so on. However, the single most powerful influence on mining has been adopting digital media to control, integrate and mining systems. Rio Tinto’s transformative agenda document is outlined in its high profile ‘Mine of the Future’ agenda (US Federal News Service). The media to which I refer are not only those in popular culture, but also those with digital control and communications systems used internally within mines and supply chains. The global mining industry began adopting digital communication automation (somewhat) systematically only in the 1980s. Mining companies hesitated to adopt digital media because the fundamentals of mining are so risky and bound to standard procedures. Large scale material operations, extracting and processing minerals from under the ground: hardly to be an appropriate space for delicate digital electronics. Mining is also exposed to volatile economic conditions, so investing in anything major can be unattractive. High technology perhaps contradicts an industry ethos of risk-taking and masculinity. Digital media became domesticated, and familiar to a new generation of formally educated engineers for whom databases and algorithms (Manovich) were second nature. Digital systems become simultaneously controllers of objects, and mediators of meanings and relationships. They control movements, and express communications. Computers slide from using meanings to invoking direct actions over objects in the world. Even on an everyday scale, computer operations often control physical processes. Anti-lock Braking Systems regulate a vehicle’s braking pressure to avoid the danger when wheels lock-up. Or another example, is the ATM, which involves both symbolic interactions, and also exchange of physical objects. These operations are examples of the ‘asignifying semiotic’ (Guattari), in which meanings and non-meanings interact. There is no operation essential distinction between media- and non-media digital operations. Which are symbolic, attached or non-consequential is not clear. This trend towards using computation for both meanings and actions has accelerated since 2000. Mines of the Future Beyond a relatively standard set of office and communications software, many fields, including mining, have adopted specialised packages for their domains. In 3D design, it is AutoCAD. In hard sciences, it is custom modelling. In audiovisual production, it may be Apple and Adobe products. Some platforms define their subjectivity, professional identity and practices around these platforms. This platform orientation is apparent in areas of mining, so that applications such as the Gemcom, Rockware, Geological Database and Resource Estimation Modelling from Micromine; geology/mine design software from Runge, Minemap; and mine production data management software from Corvus. However, software is only a small proportion of overall costs in the industry. Agents in mining demand solutions to peculiar problems and requirements. They are bound by their enormous scale; physical risks of environments, explosive and moving elements; need to negotiate constant change, as mining literally takes the ground from under itself; the need to incorporate geological patterns; and the importance of logistics. When digital media are the solution, there can be what is perceived as rapid gains, including greater capacities for surveillance and control. Digital media do not provide more force. Instead, they modulate the direction, speed and timing of activities. It is not a complete solution, because too many uncontrolled elements are at play. Instead, there are moment and situations when the degree of control refigures the work that can be done. Conclusions In this article I have proposed a new conception of media change, by reading digital innovations in mining practices themselves as media changes. This involved developing an initial reading of the operations of mining as digital media. With this approach, the array of media components extends far beyond the conventional ‘mass media’ of newspapers and television. It offers a more molecular media environment which is increasingly heterogeneous. It sometimes involves materiality on a huge scale, and is sometimes apparently virtual. The mining media event can be a semiotic, a signal, a material entity and so on. It can be a command to a human. It can be a measurement of location, a rock formation, a pressure or an explosion. The mining media event, as discussed above, is subject to Manovich’s principles of media, being numerical, variable and automated. In the mining media event, these principles move from the aesthetic to the instrumental and physical domains of the mine site. The role of new media operates at many levels — from the bottom of the mine site to the cruising altitude of the fly-in-fly out aeroplanes — has motivated significant changes in the Australian industry. When digital media and robotics come into play, they do not so much introduce change, but reintroduce similarity. This inversion of media is less about meaning, and more about local mastery. Media modulation extends the kinds of influence that can be exerted by the actors in control. In these situations, the degrees of control, and of resistance, are yet to be seen. Acknowledgments Thanks to Mining IQ for a researcher's pass at Mining Automation and Communication Conference, Perth in August 2012. References Bellamy, D., and L. 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Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. 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The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Brien, Donna Lee. “Looking at Death with Writers’ Eyes: Developing Protocols for Utilising Roadside Memorials in Creative Writing Classes.” Roadside Memorials. Ed. Jennifer Clark. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2006. 208–216. Campbell, Elaine. “Public Sphere as Assemblage: The Cultural Politics of Roadside Memorialization.” The British Journal of Sociology 64.3 (2013): 526–547. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. 43 BC. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1903. Clark, Jennifer. “But Statistics Don’t Ride Skateboards, They Don’t Have Nicknames Like ‘Champ’: Personalising the Road Dead with Roadside Memorials.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Roadside Memorials in Northeastern Thailand.” OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 66.4 (2012–13): 343–363. Connolly, John F., Anne Cullen, and Orfhlaith McTigue. “Single Road Traffic Deaths: Accident or Suicide?” Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 16.2 (1995): 85–89. Cornack [Coroner]. Transcript of Proceedings. In The Matter of an Inquest into the Cause and Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Jason John Zupp. Towoomba, Qld.: Coroners Court. 12 Oct. 2007. Davies, Douglas. “Locating Hope: The Dynamics of Memorial Sites.” 6th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. York, UK: University of York, 2002. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government [DITRDLG]. Road Deaths Australia: 2007 Statistical Summary. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Duwe, Grant. “Body-count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media.” Homicide Studies 4 (2000): 364–399. Elder, Bruce. Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. 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IntroductionCatastrophe surrounds us perpetually: from the Queensland floods, Christchurch earthquake, global warming, and Global Financial Crisis to social conflicts, psychological breaking points, relationship failures, and crises of understanding. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of catastrophe, its representation saturates our everyday awareness. On a daily basis we encounter stories of people impacted by and coping with natural, economic, ecological, and emotional disasters of all kinds.But what is the relationship between culture, catastrophe, and creativity? Can catastrophe be an impetus for the creative transformation of societies and individuals? Conversely, how can culture moderate, transform, and re-imagine catastrophe? And in the final analysis, how should we conceive of catastrophe; does catastrophe have a bad name? These questions and others have guided us in editing the “catastrophe” issue of M/C Journal. The word catastrophe has been associated with extreme disaster only since the 1700s. In an earlier etymological sense, catastrophe simply connoted “a reversal of what is expected” or, in Western literary history, a defining turn in a drama (Harper). Catastrophe derives from the Greek katastrophe for “an overturning; a sudden end.” As this issue clearly demonstrates, whilst catastrophes vary in scale, context, and meaning, their outcomes are life-changing inversions of the interpersonal, social, or environmental norm. In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon echoes this definition and argues that catastrophe “can be a source of immense creativity—a shock that opens up political, social, and psychological space for fresh ideas, actions, institutions, and technologies that weren't possible before” (23). According to Homer-Dixon and on a hopeful note, “in any complex adaptive system, breakdown, if limited, can be a key part of that system's long-term resilience and renewal” (308). Indeed, many of the articles in this issue sound a note of hope. Catastrophe and Creativity The impetus for this issue comes from the Catastrophe and Creativity symposium convened at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, in 2012. The symposium brought together artists and researchers from around Australia to engage with the theme “catastrophe.” The organisers encouraged participants to conceptualise catastrophe broadly and creatively: from natural disasters to personal turning points, and from debilitating meltdowns to regenerative solutions. As a result, the topics explored in this issue stretch deeply and widely, and demonstrate the different forms and scales of catastrophe. Many of the 24 articles submitted for possible inclusion in this issue emerged as responses to the symposium theme. Distinct moods and meanings of catastrophe reverberate in the final selection of 12. The articles that shape the issue are intimate, collective, and geographical engagements with and reflections upon cataclysm that move from the highly personal to the global and speak of countries, communities, networks, friends, families, and colleagues. As a collection, the articles re-envision catastrophe as a pathway for creative interventions, artistic responses, community solidarities, social innovations, individual modes of survival and resilience, and environmental justices. In thinking through the relationship between catastrophe and culture, the authors challenge existing discourses and ways of knowing trauma, and offer fresh interpretations and hope. Catastrophe leads to metanoia: a change of perception after a significant crisis. The editors appreciate that there are no hierarchies between interpretations of catastrophe. Instead, the articles represent a dialogue between diverse experiences of pain, disaster, and abuse, as well as different theories about the nature of catastrophe—from the catastrophic loss of millions through genocide to the impact of trauma on an individual’s body and psyche. Part of the challenge of crafting this issue of M/C Journal has been in delineating what constitutes catastrophe. Admittedly we end up with more questions than we started with. Is catastrophe the same as trauma? Is it disaster? When is it apocalypse? Can catastrophe entail all these things? Who is silenced, and who can tell the narratives of catastrophe? How? Despite these unanswerable questions, we can be certain that catastrophe, as described by the authors, foundationally changes the fabric of human and non-human being in the world. The authors leave us with the lingering reverberations and resonances of catastrophe, revealing at the same time how catastrophic events can “reverse the expected” in the true sense of the word. The transformative potential of catastrophe is prominent in the issue. Some authors call for justice, support, inspiration, and resilience—on personal and community levels. The contributions remind us that, after catastrophe, the person, society, or planet will never be the same. Responses to Catastrophe The issue opens with the intimate nature of catastrophes. A feature article by esteemed Canadian academic and poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn takes the form of a lyric essay originally presented as the keynote address at the symposium. Composed of extracts from her book Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry (published here with kind permission of the author and Hagios Press) and reflective interludes, Neilsen combines her acute academic insights with personal experiences of loss to create evocative prose and poetry that, as she says, “grounds our grief in form […] connects us to one another and the worlds.” Her work opens for the reader “complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief.” In this piece, Neilsen speaks of personal catastrophe through lyric inquiry, a method she has described eloquently in the Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. The second feature article is a commentary on Neilsen’s work by the equally esteemed feminist scholar Lekkie Hopkins. In her article, Hopkins explains Neilsen’s journey from literacy researcher to arts-based social science researcher to poet and lyric inquirer. Hopkins uses her reflections on the work of Neilsen in order to draw attention, not only to Neilsen’s “ground-breaking uses of lyric inquiry,” but also to another kind of communal catastrophe which Hopkins calls “the catastrophe of the methodological divide between humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research.” In her article “Casualties on the Road to Ethical Authenticity,” Kate Rice applies a powerful narrative inquiry to the relationship between catastrophe and ethics. As a playwright experienced in projects dealing with personal catastrophe, Rice nevertheless finds her usual research and writing practice challenged by the specific content of her current project—a play about the murder of innocents—and its focus on the real-life perpetrator. Ambivalent regarding the fascinated human response such catastrophe draws, Rice suggests that spectacle creates “comfort” associated with “processing sympathy into a feeling of self-importance at having felt pain that isn’t yours.” She also argues against a hierarchy of grief, noting that, “when you strip away the circumstances, the essence of loss is the same, whether your loved one dies of cancer, in a car accident, or a natural disaster.” In an article tracing the reverberation of catastrophe over the course of 100 years, Marcella Polain explores the impact of the Armenian Genocide’s 1.5 million deaths. Through a purposefully fragmented, non-linear narrative, Polain evokes with exquisite sensitivity the utter devastation the Genocide wreaked upon one family—her own: “When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when ‘everything that could happen has already happened,’ then time is nothing: ‘there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language’” (Nichanian 142).The potentiality that can be generated in the aftermath of catastrophe also resonates in an article co-authored by Brenda Downing and Alice Cummins. (A photograph of Downing’s performance aperture is the issue’s cover image.) In their visceral evocation, the catastrophe of childhood rape is explored and enfleshed with a deft and generous touch. Downing, embodying for the reader her experience as researcher, writer, and performer, and Cummins, as Body-Mind Centering® practitioner and artistic director, explore the reciprocity of their collaboration and the performance aperture that they created together. Their collaboration made possible the realisation that “a performance […] could act as a physical, emotional, and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not.” Maggie Phillips evokes the authoritative yet approachable voice of her 2012 symposium presentation in “Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play;” her meditation on clowns and clowning as not only a discipline and practice, but also “a state of being.” In response to large-scale catastrophe, and the catastrophic awareness of “the utter meaninglessness of human existence,” the clown offers “a tiny gesture.” As Phillips argues, however, “those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.” By inducing “miniscule shifts of consciousness” as they “wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege,” clowns offer “glimpses of the ineffable.” In “Creativity in an Online Community as a Response to the Chaos of a Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” Cynthia Witney, Lelia Green, Leesa Costello, and Vanessa Bradshaw explore the role of online communities, such as the “Click” website, in providing support and information for women with breast cancer. Importantly, the authors show how these communities can provide a forum for the expression of creativity. Through Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (53), the authors suggest that “becoming totally involved in the creative moment, so as to lose all track of time” allows women temporary space to “forget the trials and worries of breast cancer.” By providing a forum for women and their supporters to reach out to others in similar situations, online communities, inspired by notions of creativity and flow, can offer “some remedy for catastrophe.” A different impulse pervades Ella Mudie’s insightful examination of the Surrealist city novel. Mudie argues against the elision of historical catastrophe through contemporary practices; specifically, the current reading in the field of psychogeography of Surrealist city dérives (drifts) as playful city walks, or “an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research.” Mudie revisits the Surrealist city novel, evoking the original “praxis of shock” deployed through innovative experiments in novelistic form and content. Binding the theory and practice of Surrealism to the catastrophic event from which it sprang—the Great War—Mudie argues against “domesticating movements” which “dull the awakening power” of such imaginative and desperate revolts against an increasingly mechanised society. Through discussions of natural disasters, the next three articles bring a distinctive architectural, geographical, and ecological stream to the issue. Michael Levine and William Taylor invoke Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” in conceptualising approaches to urban recovery and renewal after catastrophic events, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The authors are interested explicitly in the “imagination of disaster” and the “psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding,” which they find absent in Sontag’s account of the representation of urban cataclysms in 1950s and 60s science fiction films. Levine and Taylor’s article points to community ethics and social justice issues that—as they outline through different examples from film—should be at the centre of urban reconstruction initiatives. Interpretations of what is meant by reconstruction will vary substantially and, hence, so should community responses be wide-ranging. Extending the geo-spatial emphasis of Levine and Taylor’s article, Rod Giblett theorises the historical and environmental context of Hurricane Katrina using Walter Benjamin’s productive notion of the “Angel of History.” However, Giblett offers the analogous metaphor of the “Angel of Geography” as a useful way to locate catastrophe in both time (history) and space (geography). In particular, Giblett’s reading of the New Orleans disaster addresses the disruption of the city’s ecologically vital habitats over time. As such, according to Giblett, Katrina was the culmination of a series of smaller environmental catastrophes throughout the history of the city, namely the obliteration of its wetlands. Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” thereby, recognises the unity of temporal events and “sees a single, catastrophic history, not just of New Orleans but preceding and post-dating it.” Giblett’s archaeology of the Hurricane Katrina disaster provides a novel framework for reconceptualising the origins of catastrophes. Continuing the sub-theme of natural disasters, Dale Dominey-Howes returns our attention to Australia, arguing that the tsunami is poised to become the “new Australian catastrophe.” Through an analysis of Australian media coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Dominey-Howes asks provocatively: “Has extensive media coverage resulted in an improved awareness of the catastrophic potential of tsunami for Australians?” After speaking with more than 800 Australians in order to understand popular attitudes towards tsunami, the author responds with a definitive “no.” In his view, Australians are “avoiding or disallowing the reality; they normalise and dramaticise the event. Thus in Australia, to date, a cultural transformation about the catastrophic nature of tsunami has not occurred for reasons that are not entirely clear.” As the final article in the issue, “FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophe” gives insights into the real-world experience of managing catastrophes as they occur, in this case, bushfires in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Danielle Brady detail an Australian Research Council funded project that creatively engages with Kimberley residents who “improvise in a creative and intuitive manner” when responding to catastrophe. The authors capture responses from residents in order to redesign an interface that will provide real-time, highly useable information for the management of bushfires in Western Australia. Conclusion This “catastophe” issue of M/C Journal explores, by way of the broad reach of the articles, the relationship between culture, creativity, and catastrophe. Readers will have encountered collective creative responses to bushfire or breast cancer, individual responses to catastrophe, such as childhood rape or genocide, and cultural conceptualisations of catastrophe, for example, in relation to New Orlean’s Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The editors hope that, just like the metanoia that catastrophe can bring about (demonstrated so articulately by Downing and Cummins), readers too will experience a change of their perception of catastrophe, and will come to see catastrophe in its many fascinating iterations. References Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Harper, Douglas. “catastrophe.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 22 Mar. 2013 . Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Melbourne : Text Publishing, 2007. Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47. Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98.

Scenario: You are exhausted after a long day at work and collapse in front of the television for some mindless entertainment. One of your favourite comedy shows is on. You begin to relax. You laugh a couple of times. There's a commercial break. You watch the first ad for a hardware store, giving it only half your attention. And then there's another ad, something about a father and son in a car together and then ". WOOOMPH! A truck slams into the car. The message is "Speed kills!" Or there are people playing and sunbathing on a beach, happy holidays, and then vultures descend and surround them. The message is "Slip! Slop! Slap! Don't die in the sun this summer". Or someone is shown smoking a cigarette and the caption reads : "Give up now. You'll soon stop dying for a cigarette". This might be accompanied by scenes of a post-mortem, dissections of human lungs or brain. Context Threat appeals are used frequently in health and road safety promotion. Many use the threat of death as the consequence of undesirable behaviours, for example, "Quit smoking or you'll die' (Henley and Donovan). ("Non-death threats' appeal to other consequences such as "Quit smoking or your skin will age'.) There is an implicit notion of premature death threat, although this is rarely stated explicitly. When reminded of our risk of premature death, we are reminded by extension of the ultimate inevitability of our death. An understanding of the philosophy of existentialism can help us understand why consumers may, quite reasonably, tune out, or literally switch off health promotion messages that remind them of their own death. This paper explores the effect on consumers of these mass media invocations of the fear of death, or "death threats'. Verbatim comments are included from six focus groups conducted on fear and health promotion. Groups were delineated by age (16-20 years, 21-29 years and 30-49 years), gender, and socio-economic status (blue collar/white collar) (Henley). What is existential dread? Fear is one of the primary human emotions (along with anger, sadness, love, joy and surprise) and "dread' is one of the emotion names associated with fear (Shaver et al. 1067). We do not need to learn how to feel fear. We have to learn what to fear, however. Despite the joke about death and taxes, death is uniquely inevitable. (Some people do manage to avoid taxes!) In his definitive work, Denial of Death, Becker stated his belief that knowledge of our own death is the source of 'man's peculiar and greatest anxiety' (70); it's what makes us human. Existentialists think that knowing about the inevitability of our own death can be overwhelming, arousing the worst fear imaginable, "existential dread' (Bugental 287). Existential philosophers and psychologists believe that part of this anxiety stems from the existential dread of "not being'. Discussing Heidegger's analysis of the meaning of death in Being and Time, Barrett put it this way: The point is that I may die at any moment, and therefore death is my possibility now. It is like a precipice at my feet. It is also the most extreme and absolute of my possibilities: extreme, because it is the possibility of not being and hence cuts off all other possibilities; absolute, because man can surmount all other heartbreaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death puts an end to him (201). The essence of existential philosophy is this idea that we are all deeply, terribly afraid of death. Fear of death can be seen even in very young children (Anthony, The child's; Anthony, The discovery; Nagy) who express considerable anxiety about death, but quickly learn from their parents and others how to deny it (Yalom). Existential psychologists have suggested that the fear of our own death is the cause of much of our psychopathology (Yalom). Existentialists believe that the most common response to existential anxiety is to deny it, creating in oneself a 'state of forgetfulness of being' as far as possible. Weisman described three levels of denial in terminally ill patients: "first-order denial' of the facts of illness; "second-order denial' of the implications of the illness; and "third-order denial' of death itself. He noted that often a patient moves from first and second order denial into "middle knowledge' (i.e., acceptance of near death), but then relapses. Weisman remarked that this relapse is often the signal that the terminal phase has begun. This aspect of denial is a complicated factor in the complex measurement of death anxiety. When people say they are not afraid of death, who can say whether they are denying fear or truly not afraid? In either case, health promotion appeals that threaten death may not be effective, either because the fear is denied or because there is no fear. In focus groups exploring people's concepts of death (Henley 111), few people acknowledged being afraid of their own death and many specifically stated that they were not afraid of their own death. One woman voiced the universal difficulty of truly conceiving what it might be like "not to be' (Kastenbaum and Aisenberg) when she said: 'death seems like such an unrealistic proposition'. People did acknowledge fears about death, such as dying painfully, so health promotion messages that threaten these other dimensions of death anxiety may be more effective. Health promotion practitioners frequently use these related death fears. The fear of causing death, for example, is used in road safety advertisements. However, this discussion on existential fear is limited to threat appeals of death per se. Death threats in health promotion Is arousing existential dread an effective way to market healthy behaviours? At first sight, it seems logical that the threat of death would be more persuasive than lesser threats and yet it may not be the most effective approach. There is some evidence that lesser threats may be more effective for some groups of adolescents and young adults for smoking (Donovan and Leivers), and for road safety behaviours (Donovan et al.). For example, for some 18 year old males, the threat of being caught drinking and driving, of losing their driving licence and, thus, their new-found independence may be a more effective deterrent than the threat of dying in a car accident (Donovan et al.). The humiliation of being arrested and charged for drink-driving may be the most powerful persuader for adults of all ages (Bevins). For men attending the Jerusalem Centre for Impotency and Fertility, impotence was reported a more persuasive threat than death: 78% of men who were told that smoking causes impotence quit smoking, compared to 40% who quit when told that smoking causes heart attacks ("No smoking tip"). One woman in a focus group said, 'you tend to think short-term, "can I afford a $100 fine?" rather than long-term, "this is my life." If I stop to think about it, obviously I'm more afraid of dying than $100 [fine], but that's not what I think about' (Henley 95). This makes sense in the context of forgetfulness, the denial of death. We don't want to be reminded of our death so we switch off the death message. Lesser threats may be more easily internalised. Does arousing existential dread do any harm? Perhaps. Job suggested that fear arousal is likely to be effective only for specific behaviours that successfully reduce the level of fear arousal and that high-fear messages may actually increase behaviours that people employ to reduce anxiety, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. People high in anxiety are hypothesised to be hypersensitive to threats and likely to employ a restricted range of self-soothing coping behaviours to reduce negative affect (Wickramasekera and Price). Death threat appeals such as "Quit smoking or you'll die' may arouse defensive, counter-productive responses, at least in some people, because it is impossible to identify any specific behaviour that could successfully reduce the particular, unique fear of death per se. Firestone identified a number of psychological defences against death anxiety, including self-nourishing and addictive habits, such as smoking and overeating. Ironically, these same behaviours are frequently the subject of health promotion campaigns. If such campaigns arouse death anxiety in an effort to curb defensive responses to death anxiety, there clearly could be an increase rather than a decrease in those defensive responses. Arousing death anxiety might contribute to fatalistic thinking. Job described some people's defenses against very high fear, for example, "...you've got to go sometime' or "...when your number's up, your number's up'. In focus groups, people commented, 'if an accident is going to happen, it's going to happen' and 'what's the point of giving up [unhealthy behaviours] if you get run over by a bus tomorrow?' (Henley 95, 108). Rippetoe and Rogers found that fatalistic thinking occurred when subjects did not believe that the recommended behaviour would avert the threat. That is, people may realise that quitting smoking could avert lung cancer and even some causes of premature death but that nothing can avert death itself. Fatalism may be one of the most maladaptive responses because the threat is acknowledged but rendered ineffective (Rippetoe and Rogers). Social marketers can make some of their persuasive communications more effective if they are more mindful of consumers' existential fears. A sensitivity to consumers' psychological defences against existential fear may result in more effective use of threat appeals in health promotion. Mindfulness Mindful that the title of this paper itself may arouse some existential dread, I end with a comment on the existentialist alternative to denial. Existentialists advocate a state of 'mindfulness of being' or 'ontological mode' (Heidegger, quoted in Yalom 31) in which "one remains mindful of being, not only mindful of the fragility of being but mindful, too ... of one's responsibility for one's own being." (Yalom 31). The existentialist strives to be as mindful, as present in the moment, and therefore as authentic as possible. This involves the acceptance of existential anxiety as an appropriate and reasonable response to the human condition (Bugental). Some focus group participants wanted to know in advance that they were going to die, 'so you can fit things in you'd want to do and say goodbye'. Others thought it was better not to know or 'you'd start having regrets'. One person pointed out that we do know in advance: 'you know you're going to die sometime!'. This last comment was followed by a sober, almost shocked silence suggesting that, even while we are freely discussing death on one level, the full meaning of death may still elude us. As consumers of health promotion messages, we are exposed to many reminders of our finite existence. If we sit mindlessly in front of the television receiving these messages, we may feel some unresolved discomfort. People talk about looking away, or switching channels when particularly shocking ads are shown. The existentialist alternative response would be to embrace these reminders and use them to sustain a state of mindfulness. With this state of mindfulness comes a heightened sense of responsibility for one's own being. It is in this ontological mode that we are most likely to adopt the healthy behaviours recommended in health promotion messages. By hearing the death threat openly, and acting to protect ourselves from at least those causes of premature death that may lie within our control, we may be able to discover a fuller experience of what it means to be alive. References Anthony, Sylvia. The Child's Discovery of Death. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1940. Anthony, Sylvia. The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Education, 1973. Barrett, W. Irrational Man, A Study in Existential Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1958. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973. Bevins, John. "Using Advertising to Sell and Promote Health and Healthy Products". Paper presented at the ACHPER Health Products and Services Marketing Seminar. Kuring-gai College, Sydney, 1987. Bugental, J. F. T. The Search for Authenticity: An Existential-analytic Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Donovan, Robert J., and Sue Leivers. Young Women and Smoking. Report to Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health. Perth: Donovan Research, 1988. Donovan, Robert J., Nadine Henley, Geoffrey Jalleh, and Clive Slater. Road Safety Advertising: An Empirical Study and Literature Review. Canberra: Federal Office of Road Safety, 1995. Firestone, Robert W. "Psychological Defenses against Death Anxiety." Death Anxiety Handbook: Research, Instrumentation, and Application. Series in Death Education, Aging, and Health Care. Ed. Robert A. Neimeyer. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1994. 217-241. Henley, Nadine R. "Fear Arousal in Social Marketing: Death vs Non-death Threats." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Western Australia, Perth, 1997. Henley, Nadine and Robert J. Donovan. "Threat Appeals in Social Marketing: Death as a "Special Case'". International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 4.4 (1999): 300-319. Job, R. F. Soames. "Effective and Ineffective Use of Fear in Health Promotion Campaigns." American Journal of Public Health, 78 (1988): 163-167. Kastenbaum, R., and R. Aisenberg. The Psychology of Death. London: Duckworth, 1974. Nagy, Maria H. "The Child's View of Death." The Meaning of Death. Ed. Herman Feifel. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. 79-98. "No Smoking Tip for Lovers". Daily Telegraph, (1994, September 24): p. 4. Rippetoe, P.A. and Rogers, R.W. "Effects of components of protection-motivation theory on adaptive and maladaptive coping with a health threat." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.3 (1987): 596-604. Shaver, P., J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O'Connor. "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.6 (1987): 1061-1086. Weisman, A.D. On dying and denying: A psychiatric study of terminality. New York: Behavioral Publications, 1972. Wickramasekera, Ian and Daniel C. Price. "Morbid Obesity, Absorption, Neuroticism, and the High Risk Model of Threat Perception." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 39 (1997): 291-301. Yalom, I. D. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Henley, Nadine. "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php>. Chicago Style Henley, Nadine, "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Henley, Nadine. (2002) You will die! . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Currently the loading of cars in car carrier is done manually by the truck drivers. The drivers load car carrier by climbing over the height of 1.5 meters, which is limitation in existing designs. While loading cars on the top of the prime mover, driver needs to reach top of the car carrier to load and strap cars in positions above 1.5 meters. This cause's potential risks on falls from heights; identified as an issue in car carrier sector by OHS authorities. This research focuses on health and safety issues in present car carriers and improvement in designing of a car carrier, which eliminates loading of cars above 1.5 meters from ground level. This research develops a new car carrier with improved design mechanisms to avoid the climbing of the driver over the height of 1.5 meters without compromising on specifications of car carrier, including number of cars, variety of cars like SUV, small cars etc. For the first time in the sector, car carrier is developed which will be capable of loading eight cars and safe by design due to elimination of drivers climbing on identified risk areas. After a short review of historic origin of the sector and identifying problems in present car carriers, research emphasises on development of car carrier to overcome falls related issues. Discussions on different layouts, to resolve problems identified and keeping design complaint with ADR and OHS regulations are presented. Latest techniques in product development including virtual design process (VDP), computer aided design (CAD), product data management (PDM), and finite element analyses (FEA) were used throughout car carrier designs for validation and verifications.

Oil spills can be difficult to manage, with reporting frequently delayed. Too often, by the time responders arrive at the scene, the slick has moved, dissolved, dispersed or sunk. This Oil Spill Monitoring Handbook provides practical advice on what information is likely required following the accidental release of oil or other petroleum-based products into the marine environment. The book focuses on response phase monitoring for maritime spills, otherwise known as Type I or operational monitoring. Response phase monitoring tries to address the questions – what? where? when? how? how much? – that assist responders to find, track, predict and clean up spills, and to assess their efforts. Oil spills often occur in remote, sensitive and logistically difficult locations, often in adverse weather, and the oil can change character and location over time. An effective response requires robust information provided by monitoring, observation, sampling and science. The Oil Spill Monitoring Handbook completely updates the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s 2003 edition of the same name, taking into account the latest scientific advances in physical, chemical and biological monitoring, many of which have evolved as a consequence of major oil spill disasters in the last decade. It includes sections on the chemical properties of oil, the toxicological impacts of oil exposure, and the impacts of oil exposure on different marine habitats with relevance to Australia and elsewhere. An overview is provided on how monitoring integrates with the oil spill response process, the response organisation, the use of decision-support tools such as net environmental benefit analysis, and some of the most commonly used response technologies. Throughout the text, examples are given of lessons learned from previous oil spill incidents and responses, both local and international. General guidance of spill monitoring approaches and technologies is augmented with in-depth discussion on both response phase and post-response phase monitoring design and delivery. Finally, a set of appendices delivers detailed standard operating procedures for practical observation, sample and data collection. The Oil Spill Monitoring Handbook is essential reading for scientists within the oil industry and environmental and government agencies; individuals with responder roles in industry and government; environmental and ecological monitoring agencies and consultants; and members of the maritime sector in Australia and abroad, including officers in ports, shipping and terminals.

Recent modelling of socio-economic costs by the Australian railway industry in 2010 has estimated the cost of level crossing accidents to exceed AU$116 million annually. To better understand causal factors that contribute to these accidents, the Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation is running a project entitled Baseline Level Crossing Video. The project aims to improve the recording of level crossing safety data by developing an intelligent system capable of detecting near-miss incidents and capturing quantitative data around these incidents. To detect near-miss events at railway level crossings a video analytics module is being developed to analyse video footage obtained from forward-facing cameras installed on trains. This paper presents a vision base approach for the detection of these near-miss events. The video analytics module is comprised of object detectors and a rail detection algorithm, allowing the distance between a detected object and the rail to be determined. An existing publicly available Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) based object detector algorithm is used to detect various types of vehicles in each video frame. As vehicles are usually seen from a sideway view from the cabin’s perspective, the results of the vehicle detector are verified using an algorithm that can detect the wheels of each detected vehicle. Rail detection is facilitated using a projective transformation of the video, such that the forward-facing view becomes a bird’s eye view. Line Segment Detector is employed as the feature extractor and a sliding window approach is developed to track a pair of rails. Localisation of the vehicles is done by projecting the results of the vehicle and rail detectors on the ground plane allowing the distance between the vehicle and rail to be calculated. The resultant vehicle positions and distance are logged to a database for further analysis. We present preliminary results regarding the performance of a prototype video analytics module on a data set of videos containing more than 30 different railway level crossings. The video data is captured from a journey of a train that has passed through these level crossings.