Journal articles on the topic 'University extension Australia'

Objectives The major purpose for this study is to explore the national criteria for early childhood teachers’ eligibility in USA, England, Canada, and Australia along with comparing and analyzing the existing curriculum of Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Cambridge University, University of Toronto, Australian college of teachers’ aides and children. Methods The study thoroughly analyzed the curriculum based on core course, method course and elective courses, duration of teaching practicum, type of course, way of course conduction: online or offline, inclusion of courses on special child and option of bilingual extension. Results National criteria for early childhood teachers’ eligibility in these countries are found to be distinctive. The curriculums of the selected universities also differ from one another in terms of duration, degree type and courses. Conclusions The study provides implications for early childhood educators training in Korea providing recommendation for instructors and practitioners on choosing courses for generating a well fitted curriculum for better teachers training.

Extension gained strength from its inception in the early 1900s until the early 1980s. Then things changed—trends led to the notion that extension should get out of social programs and let producers pay their own way. These were the Reagan/Thatcher years. England, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada largely dismantled their extension services. This was supposedly due to financial reasons. They let the private sector take up whatever was released. In the U.S. during the 1980s the Extension Service came under similar attacks and some erosion of the services took place in various states. This has led to a reorganization of the extension service at the federal level, bringing the ARS and Extension Service closer together. I believe that this is the future for Extension—to bind and to build with research to improve and promote continued transfer of new technology. I see this as very difficult for the private sector to do. The ARS and university researchers have to be intimately involved with extension personnel. Program development must be two-fold and must begin to cross state lines both at the state and county levels. Extension workers are doing many of the research jobs of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, our Florida county agents are now doing demonstration and applied research studies that the experiment station personnel did up until 1980. For survival, county operations will need further combining and refining. The basis of the future lies in accountability of extension programs to the public and continued public relationships to express the good job that extension does for all Americans.

Making peoples: a history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. By James Belich. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. 497. ISBN 0-14-100639-0. £9.99.Paradise reforged: a history of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000. By James Belich. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 606. ISBN 0-7139-9172-0. £25.00.The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia. By John Gascoigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+233. ISBN 0-521-80343-80. £45.00.Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840–1918. By Pat Jalland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Pp. vi+378. ISBN 0-19-550754-1. £15.99.White flour, white power: from rations to citizenship in central Australia. By Tim Rowse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+255. ISBN 0-521-62457-6. £40.00.The five books covered here might seem a random sample: antipodean oddments from the edge of a review editor's desk. Their subject matter – from ‘ways of death’ in Australia to rationing policies for indigenous Australians – is diverse, as are their approaches: a scholarly assessment of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies through to a massive two-volume general history of New Zealand to 2000. Yet even in this eclectic mix there are common themes, reflecting current interests and models in the writing of history in both countries. For some time, Australia and New Zealand have been productively positioned in relation to European social change as ‘born modern’ experiments, or at least as colonies which forced or anticipated aspects of the modernity shaping metropolitan centres. There have been several phases of historiography advancing this thesis, each reflecting a desire on the part of historians ‘down under’ to relate their account to wider dynamics, or to incorporate models that redress or refute the ‘isolation’ of their history by exploring categories extending beyond the national chronicle. More recently, historians of post-colonialism have returned the interest. They have traced in the extension of colonialism many of the crucial factors shaping core elements of nineteenth-century European nationalism, even the concept of Europe itself. In complex patterns of interdependence within ‘empire’, these historians have also identified several themes of ‘modernity’: reflexive approaches to ‘self’ and identity; discursive matrices of liberal government; the application and testing of the Enlightenment project of ‘reason’ and the ‘disenchantment’ of scientific knowledge and classification.

This account of the development and achievements of the animal sciences in Australia is prefaced by a brief history of the livestock industries from 1788 to the present. During the 19th century, progress in industry development was due more to the experience and ingenuity of producers than to the application of scientific principles; the end of the century also saw the establishment of departments of agriculture and agricultural colleges in all Australian colonies (later states). Between the two world wars, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research was established, including well supported Divisions of Animal Nutrition and Animal Health, and there was significant growth in research and extension capability in the state departments. However, the research capacity of the recently established university Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Science was limited by lack of funding and opportunity to offer postgraduate research training. The three decades after 1945 were marked by strong political support for agricultural research, development and extension, visionary scientific leadership, and major growth in research institutions and achievements, partly driven by increased university funding and enrolment of postgraduate students. State-supported extension services for livestock producers peaked during the 1970s. The final decades of the 20th century featured uncertain commodity markets and changing public attitudes to livestock production. There were also important Federal Government initiatives to stabilise industry and government funding of agricultural research, development and extension via the Research and Development Corporations, and to promote efficient use of these resources through creation of the Cooperative Research Centres program. These initiatives led to some outstanding research outcomes for most of the livestock sectors, which continued during the early decades of the 21st century, including the advent of genomic selection for genetic improvement of production and health traits, and greatly increased attention to public interest issues, particularly animal welfare and environmental protection. The new century has also seen development and application of the ‘One Health’ concept to protect livestock, humans and the environment from exotic infectious diseases, and an accelerating trend towards privatisation of extension services. Finally, industry challenges and opportunities are briefly discussed, emphasising those amenable to research, development and extension solutions.

AbstractUsing data from three provinces as part of a joint study by Monash University in Australia and China's Institute of Labour Science, an affiliate body of the national Ministry of Labour and Social Security, this article examines the extension of social rights and social security coverage to intra-national migrants in China as a public governance issue. More specifically, it analyses how central government regulations on improving the situation of migrant workers are being interpreted and implemented by local governments. In this regard, it offers a unique case study of difficulties encountered in the local implementation of policy directives issued by the central government.

Just over fifty years ago, on 29 November 1967 at 2:19 pm (local time), a small scientific satellite named the Weapons Research Establishment SATellite (WRESAT) was launched from Woomera, South Australia. It had been designed and constructed by engineers, scientists and technicians from the Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury, South Australia; it had a payload of scientific instruments put together by the Physics Department at Adelaide University; and it was sent into orbit at the sharp end of a modified Redstone rocket, a gift from the United States. All of this was achieved in less than 12 months; and it made Australia the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space from its own territory, after the USSR and the USA. This paper is the author's personal account of his part in the project, where he was involved first with the satellite's telemetry system and then with a temporary extension to Oodnadatta of Woomera's flight safety system. The paper goes on to describe events following the successful launch, and the celebration of the 50th anniversary in 2017. Finally, there is a discussion of the politics and technologies behind WRESAT.

Just over fifty years ago, on 29 November 1967 at 2:19 pm (local time), a small scientific satellite named the Weapons Research Establishment SATellite (WRESAT) was launched from Woomera, South Australia. It had been designed and constructed by engineers, scientists and technicians from the Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury, South Australia; it had a payload of scientific instruments put together by the Physics Department at Adelaide University; and it was sent into orbit at the sharp end of a modified Redstone rocket, a gift from the United States. All of this was achieved in less than 12 months; and it made Australia the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space from its own territory, after the USSR and the USA. This paper is the author's personal account of his part in the project, where he was involved first with the satellite's telemetry system and then with a temporary extension to Oodnadatta of Woomera's flight safety system. The paper goes on to describe events following the successful launch, and the celebration of the 50th anniversary in 2017. Finally, there is a discussion of the politics and technologies behind WRESAT.

Universities throughout Australia are increasingly investing significant amounts of time and money in efforts to improve the quality of first year students’ experiences and, by extension, increase retention, performance and student satisfaction. This paper reports upon a pilot research project conducted at a Queensland university that investigates student understandings of, and reactions to, a range of initiatives put in place to enhance their “first year experience”. The research showed that students had mixed reactions to the initiatives put in place to support them and that staff played a vital role in terms of how students responded to various forms of institutional support. In analysing the results the paper demonstrates the need for ongoing research into how a diverse cohort of students make sense of the first year experience they are offered.

Scientists readily suggest that research and development is not complete until findings and conclusions are reported in the peer-reviewed literature. The authors suggest that industry-specific relevant research and development is actually not complete until the key outputs are extended to primary stakeholder groups. In the case of ‘Making Better Fertiliser Decisions for Cropping Systems in Australia’ (BFDC), this meant training key members of the grains and fertiliser industries, where nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur recommendations are derived from soil tests and provided to farmers. The BFDC project applied a two-part cascading approach to extension and training to reach the grains and fertiliser industries. The train-the-trainer program (Level 1) was undertaken and targeted at influential and experience persons such as technical leaders and those who influenced crop-nutrition decision support systems (DSS) within interested organisations. Level 2 activities targeted individuals within organisations who had direct discussion with farmers about soil testing, and their training was facilitated by a Level 1 trained colleague. Development of extension plans, training course structure, and training resources was conducted in parallel with the development of the BFDC National Database and BFDC Interrogator from the commencement of the project. In so doing, it was agreed that controlled access to the information should be established to maintain a consistent standard of use and to provide a platform for gathering feedback to guide future developments (e.g. of the BFDC Interrogator or prioritising future experimental investment). The BFDC extension approach targeted 100 individuals from the Level 1 audience and 30 individuals from the Level 2 audience through seven train-the-trainer level workshops conducted across Australia. As a result of reaching this audience, it was expected that the cumulative effect of the cascading extension strategy and input of BFDC Interrogator critical nutrient concentrations in commercial soil analysis interpretation software would indirectly and directly influence the crop nutrient management decisions of up to 5000 Australian grain farmers in the year after the commencement of training activities. Exit survey results, conducted as part of the BFDC train-the-trainer workshops, were aggregated across all Level 1 workshops. These survey results showed that the most significant benefit of the training was the usefulness of the BFDC Interrogator training manual and the additional teaching aids supplied. The importance and significance to the industry of the collation of data through BFDC was also highlighted as a benefit. Reflecting industry knowledge gaps (e.g. crop × nutrient × geographic region interactions), the lowest ranking survey results focused on the ability of the BFDC National Database to provide usable critical soil test criteria for several situations. Yet despite this reported shortcoming, participants recognised the significance of the structure, tools, skills, and knowledge gained through the training workshop and the importance of the established critical levels. While face-to-face training enables robust discussion, the ‘time-poor’ nature of roles for agricultural professionals appeared to limit the uptake of training opportunities. Therefore, training materials are being developed into an online course focused particularly on university requirements and the development of agricultural professionals.

The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate training requirement for human capital needed in the emerging field of Islamic Finance (IF) industry in Australisian region. It proposes the structure of the curriculum which can build bridges among multi-culture/faith communities based on sound understanding of finance and Shariah in the western democratic societies where Muslims are in minorities. It presents a case study of La Trobe University’s pioneering Master of Islamic Banking and Finance (MIBF) degree structure and an online six week’s e-learning short course on Islamic Finance Professional Development (IFPD) jointly with Ethica Institute in UAE. The course is then linked with various components of the professional bodies, like Masters’ in professional accounting (MPA), financial analysis (MFA), and MBA (restricted to electives only), CFA, GARP and then extension to PhD level education in IF. The paper addresses various aspects of IF education such as the significance of knowledge, curriculum design, procedures in acquiring support from within the University academic community, challenges in marketing the course and the needed research backing. It also reviews some illustrating statistics to support the need for the course in Australasian region and highlight statistical finding of our MIBF alumni. The paper closes with final remarks and recommendations to industry and policy makers.

Abstract Cooperative Extension education continues to maintain a strong foothold in educating people in the agricultural industry. To connect with the next generation of agriculturalists, Extension needs to investigate alternative methods to disseminate educational material. Developing and maintaining a webpage that provides relevant and scientific based sheep production information is critical as interest in the small ruminant industry continues to rise. The Ohio State University Extension Sheep Team webpage provides shepherds across the nation with the latest information regarding sheep production from daily management to industry outreach. In addition, a unique highlight of the webpage includes research summaries of sheep research conducted at Ohio State that are simplified to illustrate real-world application to improve on-farm production efficiencies. Over the past year alone, the OSU Extension Sheep Team webpage has recorded over 90,000 page views with an average visit duration time of approximately two minutes. Of these page views, approximately 9,000 originate from locations beyond the United States including Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. According to the web servers’ descriptive statistic analysis, the top referral search engine is Google, representing 58% of all page visits. Interestingly, due the OSU Extension Sheep Team’s presence on social media, Facebook accounts for approximately 18% of all page visits whereas direct subscription of the weekly newsletter only accounts for 15% of all page visits. Furthermore, top article topics include those that relate to basic sheep management practices, health and disease, parasite control methods, and common poisonous plants. Due to the unusual weather patterns of 2019, an article related to poisonous plants accounted for 16% of the webpage’s total visits, which surpassed the number of homepage visits. In order to continue providing relevant Extension information, universities should consider utilizing web-based articles to efficiently reach a larger audience and provide timely articles based upon viewer interest.

Abstract Hardening Soil model with the small strain extension (HSS) is lately one of the most popular constitutive models to describe soil behaviour. It is versatile – includes the phenomena of shear strength, stress history, dilatancy, volumetric and shear hardening, hyperbolic stress-strain relationship in axial compression, stiffness dependency on stress and its degradation with strain, as well as the regain of the high stiffness after sharp loading reversals. Even though the model is advanced and complex, accordingly to its authors, it is relatively easy to calibrate based on results of standard tests and empirical formulas. In this paper an attempt was undertaken to estimate the parameters of untypical anthropogenic soils – mixtures of sand and scrap tyre rubber in order to build a database for future numerical analyses. A literature review was conducted and, eventually, the material parameters were determined based on results of a series of laboratory tests (cyclic and monotonic triaxial with bender elements, direct shear) published by researchers of Wollongong University of Australia.

The Cicerone Project was a partnership between livestock producers, researchers and extension specialists on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia that investigated several complex grazing enterprise issues between 1998 and 2006. It was conducted as a Participatory Action Research project, which first surveyed livestock producers to learn of their problems and then carried out investigations according to the Project’s chosen motto of ‘compare – measure – learn – adopt’. The Project included research into footrot diagnosis and an investigation of whole-farmlet livestock and pasture management systems complemented by a multi-faceted extension and education component, which delivered findings to a wide array of stakeholders across the Northern Tablelands and adjacent regions. This paper describes the extension and education methods and outcomes and reflects on how successful the engagement of livestock producers was through a partnership, which focussed on co-learning by all participants. Several different communication approaches were used including the production of 40 newsletters and the delivery of 61 field days. Collaborators also held two symposia, which presented comprehensive overviews of the research results. In the final year of the Project, a roadshow was held to communicate results to a wider audience in neighbouring districts. The results of the two footrot trials, which were conducted as Participatory Action Research projects, led to rapid and substantial changes in the testing regime for virulent footrot, resulting in large savings for livestock producers through more accurate detection of the disease. Other valued extension and industry outcomes were the ability to compare the biophysical and economic performance of different whole farmlets, an appreciation of the value of the whole-farm system approach, the trustworthiness of the results and the stimulation of livestock producers to think more deeply about their management systems, stocking rate and risk. The Project benefited from the research efforts of four postgraduate students and was of benefit to ~300 high school and technical college students and also some 500 university undergraduate students who undertook learning projects in conjunction with Project members and collaborators. This Special Issue of 24 journal papers represents a substantial delivery of the findings from this complex agroecosystem Project, which broke new ground in terms of securing much closer working relationships between livestock producers, scientists and extension specialists. Ultimately, this volume will allow extension of the results of the Cicerone Project to reach a wider audience than has typically been achieved through other Participatory Action Research projects.

For nearly two decades (1994–2012) a series of three consecutive Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) dealing with cotton production provided the impetus and financial support for a substantial body of soil science research in eastern and northern Australia. Focusing on the most commonly utilised soil for irrigated crop production, the Vertosol, CRC-affiliated soil researchers undertook detailed soil inventories of cotton-growing valleys in New South Wales, and tackled a range of applied soil research questions that faced the entire Australian cotton industry. Across the broad categories of soil mapping and characterisation, soil physical condition, salinity and sodicity, soil chemical fertility, and soil carbon and biota, some 120 CRC-affiliated research papers were published in peer-reviewed journals during the years of the CRC. Findings from this body of research were fed back to the industry through conferences, extension workshops and materials, and to a lesser extent, the peer-reviewed publications. In certain cases, underpinning basic research was carried out concurrently with the more applied research, meaning that the cotton CRC were effectively supporting advances in the discipline of soil science, as well as in sustainable cotton production. A feature of the soil research portfolio over the span of the three cotton CRC was that priorities shifted according to the interplay of three factors; the natural maturation of research topics and the concomitant evolution of cotton farming systems, the rising importance of environmental implications of agricultural land use, and the emergence of carbon as a national research priority. Furthermore, the commitment of the CRC to education resulted in the involvement of undergraduate and postgraduate university students in all aspects of the soil research effort. A legacy of the triumvirate of cotton CRC is a wide-ranging body of both applied and basic knowledge regarding the physical, chemical and biological attributes of Australian Vertosols used for irrigated agriculture.

The first significant cases of herbicide-resistant weed populations were to the triazines in the 1970s. In the last 10 years there has been an increase in the number of weed populations that have become resistant to an array of herbicides. In some of these cases, like rigid ryegrass in Australia, a multitude of resistant biotypes has evolved with different mechanisms of resistance. If the present trend continues, the number of herbicides effective on certain weed species may diminish rapidly. To counteract this trend, industry has organized a number of intercompany working groups to specifically address the development of resistance and to implement plans to manage resistance. University and extension along with industry personnel across the world have begun educating growers on resistance management. However, this effort needs to be intensified to find new solutions for controlling weeds through the use of integrated weed management practices that incorporate new and established herbicides with cultural, mechanical, and biological control methods. The challenge is to develop cost effective, environmentally sustainable programs for weed control while maintaining the present efficiency in food and fiber production so that needs of an ever expanding human population can be met.

Abstract This is a contribution to the special issue honoring the late John R. Blake of the University of Birmingham. All three authors had the pleasure of extensive technical interactions with John Blake during his career in the UK, USA and Australia and benefited both professionally and personally from his friendship. John’s work in developing fundamental mathematical solutions for Stokes’ flows and his application of those mathematical tools to analyses of microorganism locomotion led to special new insights into the world of small-scale swimming. This special issue devoted to John’s memory seems an appropriate occasion to present another fluid mechanical challenge associated with microorganisms, namely the dynamics of algal blooms. Though it is a special reduced-order model that is of limited practical value, John would have particularly enjoyed the analytical solution to the dynamics of algae that was presented by Rutherford Aris (1997, Reflections on Keats’ equation. Chem. Eng. Sci., 52, 2447–2455) in a somewhat eccentric paper. We revisit that solution in this paper and present an extension to Aris’ solution that includes sedimentation of the algae. We think that John would have enjoyed this solution and would, in all likelihood, have been able to expand upon it to include other features such as microorganism buoyancy variations (see, e.g. Kromkamp & Walsby 1990; Belov & Giles, 1997, Dynamical model of buoyant cyanobacteria. Hydrobiologia, 349, 87–97; Brookes & Ganf, 2001, Variations in the buoyancy response of Microcystis aeruginosa to nitrogen, phosphorus and light. J. Plankton Res., 23, 1399–1411), the death of algae (see, e.g. Serizawa et al., 2008a, Computer simulations of seasonal outbreak and diurnal vertical migration of cyanobacteria. Limnology, 9, 185–194; Reynolds, 1984, The Ecology of Freshwater Phytoplankton. Cambridge University Press), the swimming of algae (see, e.g. Pedley, 2016, Spherical squirmers: models for swimming micro-organisms. IMA J. Appl. Math., 81, 488–521) and other relevant hydrodynamic matters.

Sansevieria, Sansevieria trifasciata Prain, is cultivated in greenhouses and is used as a potted interior foliage plant in Korea. In April 2012, several plants (cv. Moonshine) exhibiting typical anthracnose symptoms from a local nursery were sent to the plant clinic of Gyeonggi-Do Agricultural Research and Extension Services for diagnosis. The leaf lesions began as round, partly water-soaked, pale greenish to grayish spots, which enlarged and ultimately coalesced, resulting in severe leaf blight. Concentric rings of blackish acervuli were formed in the expanding lesions of mostly 2 to 4 cm in diameter. Acervuli were mostly epiphyllous, circular to ellipsoid. Setae were aseptate to 3-septate, dark brown at the base, paler upwards, acicular, and up to 180 μm long. Conidia (n = 30) were oblong-elliptical to obovate, sometimes fusiform-elliptical, guttulate, hyaline, and 14 to 24 × 5 to 7.5 μm (mean 18.6 × 6.4 μm). Hyphopodial appressoria were dark brown to blackish, globose to clavate in outline, and 5 to 12 × 4 to 8 μm. Colonies on potato dextrose agar (PDA) were grayish-white, felted with cottony-white aerial mycelium on a gray to olivaceous gray background in culture. Gelatinous salmon- to orange-colored conidial masses were produced abundantly after one week's incubation. The morphological and cultural characteristics of the fungus were consistent with the description of Colletotrichum sansevieriae M. Nakamura & M. Ohzono (2,3). A voucher specimen was deposited in the Korea University herbarium (KUS-F26637). An isolate was deposited in the Korean Agricultural Culture Collection (Accession No. KACC46835). Fungal DNA was extracted with DNeasy Plant Mini DNA Extraction Kits (Qiagen Inc., Valencia, CA). The complete internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of rDNA was amplified with the primers ITS1/ITS4 and sequenced. The resulting 569-bp sequences were deposited in GenBank (Accession No. KC847065). A BLAST search in GenBank exhibited 100% nucleotide identity with sequence of C. sansevieriae (JF911349) from the United States and >99% similarity with that of HQ433226 from Australia. To confirm pathogenicity, inoculum was prepared by harvesting conidia from 3-week-old cultures on PDA. A conidial suspension (2 × 106 conidia/ml) was sprayed over the five leaves of sansevieria ‘Moonshine’ wounded with a fine needle. Five leaves sprayed with sterile water served as controls. Plants were covered with plastic bags to maintain 100% relative humidity for 48 h and then kept in a greenhouse (22 to 28°C and 70 to 80% RH). Within 12 days, symptoms identical to those observed in originally infected leaf developed on all inoculated leaves. No symptoms were observed on control plants. C. sansevieriae was reisolated from the lesions of inoculated plants, fulfilling Koch's postulates. Sansevieria anthracnose associated with C. sansevieriae has been reported in Japan (2), Australia (1), and the United States (3). To our knowledge, this is the first report of sansevieria anthracnose in Korea. Our observations in sansevieria nurseries suggest that preventing wound infection as well as maintaining good plant hygiene in greenhouses might be main strategies for this disease. References: (1) R. Aldaoud et al. Australas. Plant Dis. Notes 6:60, 2011. (2) M. Nakamura et al. J. Gen. Plant Pathol. 72:253, 2006. (3) A. J. Palmateer et al. Plant Dis. 96:293, 2012.

The Orthopaedic Unit of the Repatriation General Hospital (RGH) in Adelaide, South Australia has implemented a quality care management system for patients with arthritis of the hip and knee. The system not only optimises conservative management but ensures that joint replacement surgery is undertaken in an appropriate and timely manner. This new service model addresses identified barriers to service access and provides a comprehensive, coordinated strategy for patient management. Over 4 years the model has reduced waiting times for initial outpatient assessment from 8 to 3 months and surgery from 18 to 8 months, while decreasing length of stay from 6.3 to 5.3 days for hips and 5.8 to 5.3 days for knees. The service reforms have been accompanied by positive feedback from patients and referring general practitioners in relation to the improved coordination of care and enhanced efficiency in service delivery. What is known about the topic? Several important initiatives both overseas and within Australia have contributed significantly to the development of this model of care. These include the UK National Health Service ‘18 weeks’ Project, the Western Canada Waiting List Project, the New Zealand priority criteria project, the Queensland Health Orthopaedic Physiotherapy Screening Clinic, and most importantly the Melbourne Health–University of Melbourne Orthopaedic Waiting List Project where a wide range of models were explored across Victorian hospitals from 2005 and the Multi-Attribute Prioritisation Tool (MAPT) was developed, validated and tested. This project became the Osteoarthritis Hip and Knee Service (OAHKS) and was operationalised in the Victorian healthcare system from 2012. These initiatives examined and addressed various aspects of management systems for patients with arthritis of the hip and knee in their particular setting. What does this paper add? The development of this system is an extension of what is already known and is the first to encompass a comprehensive and coordinated strategy across all stages of the care management pathway for this patient group. Their management extends from the initial referral to development and implementation of a management plan, including surgery if assessed as necessary and organisation of long-term post operative follow up as required. By detailing the elements, key processes and measurable outcomes of the service redesign this paper provides a model for other institutions to implement a similar initiative. What are the implications for practitioners? An important aspect of the design process was practitioner acceptance and engagement and the ability to improve their capacity to deliver services within an efficient and effective model. Intrinsic to the model’s development was assessment of practitioner satisfaction. Data obtained including practitioner surveys indicated an increased level of both satisfaction with the redesigned management service, and confidence in it to deliver its intended improvements.

The Department of Forestry at The University of Melbourne with the financial support of the Myer Foundation, the RIRDC/LWRRDC/FWPRDC Joint Venture Agroforestry Program (JVAP) and the National Farm Forestry Program (AFFA) have developed and are delivering a unique and innovative participatory outreach and extension program for farmers active in revegetation, farm forestry and remnant forest management. Since the first program in 1996, 25 regional Australian Master Tree Grower (MTG) programs have been conducted involving more than 500 landholders across Australia.By acknowledging and drawing on the commitment and experience of locally selected tree growers, the MTG program aims to instil confidence through knowledge, provide farmers with a support network and encourage them to truly aspire to be ‘master tree growers’ in their own right. By starting with the landholders' motivations, rather than ending with them, the program allows participants to investigate and farm forestry projects. This is leading to the full potential of multipurpose tree growing to be realised for economic, social and environmental outcomes for farmers and their rural communities.

Purpose This paper aims to examine a chain of relationships running from self-congruity with a brand – that can stem from the actual, ideal or social self – to brand attachment and from there to consumer engagement on social networking sites (SNS), specifically liking, sharing and commenting. It further advances self-extension tendency (SET) as a moderator affecting the self-congruity -> brand attachment link. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were conducted to test four hypotheses. Study 1 (n = 282) engaged a self-administered survey with students at a large Australian university. Study 2 (n = 342) was conducted amongst the members of an Australian online panel and thus, enhances generalizability. Findings Activated self-congruity orientations are brand-specific. Both studies reveal that two of the three self-congruity orientations affect brand attachment, which, in turn, influences consumers’ proclivity to like, share and comment on Facebook. Moreover, the self-congruity -> brand attachment relationship is moderated by SET. When SET is high, it strengthens the relationship between a self-congruity orientation and brand attachment. Research limitations/implications Accepted methodological approaches were used to improve the veracity of the findings. Nevertheless, further research should consider a wider area of focal brands (e.g. store brands, mundane brands, luxury brands) and other SNS. Practical implications SNS are widely acknowledged as a key marketing channel affecting both pre- and post-purchasing behaviours. Discussed here are means to trigger pro-brand advocacy behaviours. Originality/value These findings extend existing theory in three ways as follows: they show social self-congruity affects brand attachment in online contexts, brand attachment is a mediating variable affecting pro-brand social networking behaviours and SET moderates the self-congruity -> brand attachment relationship. SNS are widely acknowledged as a key marketing channel affecting both pre- and post-purchase behaviours; hence, these insights have theoretical and practical relevance.

Suggestions that psychology lacks academic substance are common. Recently, in an article in the Australian newspaper, Emeritus Professor John Sutcliffe described it as a “dicky-shirt” discipline -- all form and no substance (Sutcliffe, 1994). He wrapped his observation into a general attack on the Dawkins education reforms which he correctly blames for eroding the intellectual core of Australian academic life. Many academics share Sutcliffe's concerns.The Dawkins reforms are an uneasy blend of populism and commercialism aimed at achieving the Labour government's economic goal of a “clever country”. Most conspicuously, they have involved the incorporation of former technical institutes into large multi-campus universities. The result has been the physical extension of a university presence across the country into some improbable rural backwaters. Inevitably these dramatic changes in the size and spread of universities have been accompanied by a change in the definition of the role of universities. Topics of study which were once the domain of lower tier tertiary institutions now find a place in the core academic centres. The result has been a shift in the balance of academic interest from abstract to applied research and teaching.Feeding into these changes has been what Sutcliffe describes as a “money-driven” ethos. After decades of intervention to redress inequalities and irrationalities stemming from the operation of free markets, Labour governments in various parts of the West have capitulated to historical forces and pre-emptively embraced the free enterprise policies of the traditional right.

Teaching new marketing concepts to international students (from non-native speaking backgrounds) often poses challenges for lecturers. Past assessment results show that brand development strategies are poorly understood by international students studying a marketing principles course at an Australian tertiary institution. Students find difficulties in conceptualising the various brand development strategies via purely written and verbal description even when many examples are given. Therefore alternative pedagogical strategies are required to enhance students’ learning of particular concepts An empirical study, drawing upon cognitive psychology theory, was undertaken to determine whether an intervention strategy of using greater visual cues enhances international students’ understanding and recall of the brand extension concept. The study was conducted with two business diploma classes undertaking a first year university marketing principles course. The intervention class was taught the concept with diagrams using relevant pictorial cues. The control class was taught the same concept with diagrams alone. Both groups were tested for understanding and recall of the concept after one week. Participant test results and survey questionnaires support the hypothesis that the addition of picture cues enhances students’ comprehension as they mitigate the cognitive load caused by English vocabulary deficits. Picture cues prompted greater connections with students’ prior knowledge increasing meaning construction and the verbal and visual encoding enabled elaborate processing resulting in higher recall of the concepts. Additionally participants’ metacognitive reports proved the brand extension concept easier to recall when taught with imagery. These results indicate increased use of imagery can be a cost-effective strategy to enhance student learning when demonstrating new concepts to international students.

Keynote paper presented at the International Leucaena Conference, 1‒3 November 2018, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.Leucaena has been fed to cattle by the Balinese community in Sumbawa and West Sumbawa districts on Sumbawa Island since the 1980s. However, prior to 2011, this practice was not adopted by the local Sumbawanese farmers. Since then, a model leucaena-based cattle fattening system was developed in Sumbawa and West Sumbawa districts in a collaborative research project between the Assessment Institute for Agricultural Technology (BPTP), University of Mataram and The University of Queensland (UQ) funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), followed by a scaling-out project involving collaboration between the University of Mataram and CSIRO (Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture - ARISA project) funded by DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) promoting public-private partnerships. Further promotion of leucaena-based fattening systems occurred in Dompu, Sumbawa, through a project with the University of Mataram and Massey University funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). By the end of October 2018, more than 2,500 farmers on Sumbawa Island were practicing leucaena-based cattle fattening. The main drivers of adoption of cattle fattening with leucaena were: (1) The high growth rates achieved (0.4–0.6 kg/d for bulls fed 100% leucaena and 0.66 kg/d when maize grain was added to the leucaena basal diet) compared with 0.16 kg/d for the traditional system, combined with high profitability; (2) the needs of farmers being met in terms of relevance and cultural appropriateness; (3) field extension staff being well trained and mentored, and respected by the farmers; (4) the local government being highly supportive of leucaena-based cattle fattening; and (5) additional benefits being increased dressing percentage and high carcass quality. The rapid increase in the use of leucaena for cattle fattening in eastern Indonesia is expected to have a significant positive impact on household incomes as well as on regional economic growth.

As recent scholarship has amply demonstrated, medieval writers were thoroughly engaged with nature and reflected upon its many features and properties. We have learned to understand the great significance of mountains and of the forest, of animals and birds, for example, and James L. Smith now brings to our attention the great role of rivers especially for twelfth-century Cistercian authors. The fairly slim volume, based on his 2017 Ph.D. thesis (University of Western Australia, Perth), explores how the imagery of rivers and their extensions into side arms and estuaries apparently profoundly appealed to theological writers because a river lent itself exceedingly well to explain the concept of the growth and flow of ideas and understanding. Considering the great emphasis placed on water in <?page nr="416"?>Cistercian monasteries, it does not come as a surprise that Cistercian authors drew so much on the natural phenomenon of rivers. In Smith’s own words: “water as a metaphor for intellection, and its role in creating spaces for thought mapped oout through aqueous imagery” (11). This makes very good sense both in medieval and modern terms, which allows Smith and others to pursue this ecocritical approach further in a very productive fashion.

Relatively benign or mildly pathogenic strains of bovine Theileria, an intraerythrocytic protozoan parasite, have been reported in many parts of the world including T. mutans in Africa, T. buffeli in Australia, T. orientalis in Britain, and a Theileria sp. from the Southwestern United States (US). Although the Theileria found in the US has not been specifically speciated, it has been referred to as T. mutans-like and as T. orientalis (USA). Although cattle in the US infected with these Theileria spp. usually have a circulating parasitemia of less than 1% and are asymptomatic, recently an animal suffering from severe anemia was admitted to the Large Animal Clinic at Texas A&M University with a circulating parasitemia of over 50%.Parasites in Giemsa stained blood films were pleomorphic in shape, with some parasites apparently connected to the erythrocyte membrane (Fig. 1) by structures which appeared similar to the bar structure found within eland (Taurotragus oryx) erythrocytes parasitized by T. taurotragi. Examination by TEM revealed that in addition to the main body of the parasite, parasitized erythrocytes contained parasites which possessed cytoplasmic extensions and an interaction between the parasite and the erythrocyte membrane which involved invaginations of the erythrocyte membrane which appeared to be surrounded by parasite cytoplasm (Fig. 2).

University of California Extension field staff are well educated and highly trained to conduct sound applied research. Part of this training includes statistical classes. Data that fail to attain a 95% confidence level are considered “risky.” This is inconsistent with “risk” assumed in almost every other aspect of our lives. There are ample examples of people willingly taking “high” risks. Examples include legalized gambling, marriage, insurance actuarial tables, etc. Most of us are willing to take calculated risks, depending on the importance and cost of making an incorrect assumption. This is directly applicable to agricultural production enterprises. While the comfortable level of risk will vary among producers, there is interest in technologies that have confidence levels below 95%. Australian processing tomato researchers have developed a Residual Maximum Likelihood (REML) analysis tool to address this issue. REML was designed to simplify interpretation of a relatively complex data set, including statistics, so a farmer can make choices at a risk level they find appropriate. The model incorporates pairwise t tests, an interactive computer program, and a gambling analogy in its analyses. Multiple variables can be entered and the model provides odds that the desired result will be attained. The user can determine the relative importance of each variable as part of the determination. This model, and implications for adoption by producer clientele, will form the basis for the presentation.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate examiner reactions to doctorate of business administration (DBA) theses at an Australian university applying Perry’s structured approach to thesis presentation, which had its origin in the marketing discipline, but is now widely applied to other business disciplines. Design/methodology/approach This paper examines 49 DBA examiner reports relating to 19 DBA theses using the structured Perry approach, with emphasis paid to comments relating to thesis structure and presentation. Only those theses that acknowledged Perry or demonstrated Perry-like characteristics were interrogated. Findings The use of Perry’s structured approach can lead to DBA theses that place excessive emphasis on description rather than practical outcomes, as should occur with a professional doctorate, and also fosters excessive repetition and scaffolding that unduly interferes with the candidate’s “story telling”. Many examiners found theses using Perry’s structured approach problematic, particularly with respect to a lack of integration with the literature and reflection on the findings in relation to previous studies. Research limitations/implications The use of Perry’s structured approach potentially acts as a further barrier to DBA theses, and other professional doctorates by extension, sufficiently differentiating themselves from PhDs. This has implications for the examination of such theses, which are sometimes viewed as lower-quality PhDs instead of professional doctorates. Originality/value Applying a traditional PhD thesis structure, such as the model advocated by Perry with its use of five chapters, to DBA theses potentially exacerbates existing professional doctorate “image” issues, thereby leading to ambiguity for examiners and the candidates themselves.

This article details Cultural DeCoding, a humanities based high school extension program for gifted and talented Year 11 and 12 students in Western Australia. The brainchild of Dr Annette Pedersen (UWA & John XXIII College) and Dr Angela McCarthy (UNDA), the program runs for four days across the summer holidays before the start of the school term. The program fills a gap that exists in the education of gifted and talented secondary students who are interested in the humanities. It is comprised of sessions run by academics who facilitate discussion and activities based on their area of research and teaching expertise. The group is deliberately kept small in order to give students a chance to engage deeply and respectfully with like-minded others. The intention is to give these students an experience of what university will be like, and to have a chance to think philosophically; namely, critically, creatively and morally, in collaboration with others.

Viruses in the genus Tospovirus cause significant worldwide crop losses. The genus name is derived from the name of its first member, Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV). Initially observed in Australia in 1915, the spotted wilt disease of tomato was later shown to be of viral origin. The causal agent was designated TSWV, and considered to be the sole member of the tomato spotted wilt group of plant viruses until the early 1990s. At this time, the identification and characterization of several similar viruses, including Impatiens necrotic spot virus (INSV), led to the creation of the plant-infecting Tospovirus genus within the Bunyaviridae family, a large group of predominantly animal-infecting viruses. More than a dozen tospoviruses have since been identified and characterized and previously unknown species of the genus continue to be described on a regular basis. Three tospoviruses, TSWV, INSV and Iris yellow spot virus (IYSV), are known to occur in the US. This document is Fact Sheet PP-212, one of a series of the Plant Pathology Department, Florida Cooperative Extension Services, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Published October 2005.

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Researchers have become accustomed to online access to data about specimens held in natural history collections. Over several decades, metadata standards have been developed to facilitate the sharing and aggregation of this data, notably Darwin Core and ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) developed under the auspices of TDWG but other standards developed in other communities, have also proved useful notably EML (Ecological Metadata Language) and GML (Geography Markup Language). Data aggregators have arisen to both, drive standards development and take advantage of the vast number of records made available through this community effort. Examples include Atlas of Living Australia and spin off Atlas projects, EoL (Encyclopedia of Life), iDigBio, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), WFO (World Flora Online). There are still many “dark specimens” that are not visible to the web and efforts continue to digitise metadata on these objects and make them available. The vast majority of the data that has been liberated so far, has therefore been text based and the standards reflect this, although many institutions and projects are also producing large numbers of images and other media. There have been media extensions to some standards to accommodate the sharing of images and other multimedia formats. However, these are restricted to metadata about media objects rather than the exchange of media objects themselves. For example, two extensions to Darwin Core are Audubon Core, which is designed to “determine whether a particular resource or collection will be fit for some particular biodiversity science application before acquiring the media.” and the Simple Multimedia extension, which is a “simple extension for exchanging metadata about multimedia resources”. Therefore image exchange, in particular, has not used open standards. Projects have relied on transferring high resolution versions of images (e.g. submission of type specimen images to JSTOR) or cut down compressed versions (e.g. many herbarium specimens submitted to GBIF or Europeana). The network has not allowed access to high resolution versions of images as curated by the host institutions themselves beyond basic links to web pages. If high resolution images have been published in online catalogues, they have been made available using a hotchpotch of different technologies including the now defunct Java Applets and Adobe Flash player. The network has not supported different views of the same specimen or annotations of those views, or integration of audio and moving images. In an ideal world a researcher should be able to view and annotate images of specimens held across multiple collections in a unified way, and the host institutions should have access to those annotations and statistics on how their specimens are being used. How can we achieve this? The sharing of multimedia representations of objects online is not a problem unique to the biodiversity community. Scholars in museums and archives of all kinds are facing the same issues. In 2011 the British Library, Stanford University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and Cornell University came together to develop an exchange standard called IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). This framework now consists of six APIs (Application Programming Interface), four stable and two in beta, to publish and integrate image and other multimedia resources in a uniform manner and has been adopted by many institutions and commercial partners in the digital humanities. Applications based on IIIF enable many of the features desired by biodiversity researchers. The notion of sharing and annotating specimen images is not new to the natural history community. MorphBank, founded in 1998, has grown to allow much of this desirable functionality but at the cost and fragility of being a centralised database. The question we should perhaps be asking is: how can we make the biodiversity data sharing network as a whole more like MorphBank? From 2019 to 2021, part of the EU-funded Synthesys+ programme will support the adoption of IIIF as a unified way to publish images of natural history specimens. We aim to have a set of exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifests for some millions of specimens by the end of the project and one or more demonstration applications in place. We hope this will act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. A key goal is to integrate image data served using IIIF with metadata available via CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) specimen identifiers. If IIIF were ubiquitous in the natural history community, building tools that implemented this functionality would be feasible. A brief demonstration of a herbarium specimen browser, Herbaria Mundi, will be given. It will illustrate how specimens hosted in different institutions can be manipulated in a single interface. The architecture that supports this behaviour will be explained and its challenges, by implementing the institutions discussed.

In Australia the “intimacy” of citizenship (Berlant 2), is often used to reinforce subscription to heteronormative romantic and familial structures. Because this framing promotes discourses of moral failure, recent political attention to sexuality and same-sex couples can be filtered through insights into coalitional affiliations. This paper uses contemporary shifts in Australian politics and culture to think through the concept of coalition, and in particular to analyse connections between sexuality and governmentality (or more specifically normative bias and same-sex relationships) in what I’m calling post-coalitional Australia. Against the unpredictability of changing parties and governments, allegiances and alliances, this paper suggests the continuing adherence to a heteronormatively arranged public sphere. After the current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard deposed the previous leader, Kevin Rudd, she clung to power with the help of independents and the Greens, and clichés of a “rainbow coalition” and a “new paradigm” were invoked to describe the confused electorate and governmental configuration. Yet in 2007, a less confused Australia decisively threw out the Howard–led Liberal and National Party coalition government after eleven years, in favour of Rudd’s own rainbow coalition: a seemingly invigorated party focussed on gender equity, Indigenous Australians, multi-cultural visibility, workplace relations, Austral-Asian relations, humane refugee processing, the environment, and the rights and obligations of same-sex couples. A post-coalitional Australia invokes something akin to “aftermath culture” (Lambert and Simpson), referring not just to Rudd’s fall or Howard’s election loss, but to the broader shifting contexts within which most Australian citizens live, and within which they make sense of the terms “Australia” and “Australian”. Contemporary Australia is marked everywhere by cracks in coalitions and shifts in allegiances and belief systems – the Coalition of the Willing falling apart, the coalition government crushed by defeat, deposed leaders, and unlikely political shifts and (re)alignments in the face of a hung parliament and renewed pushes toward moral and cultural change. These breakdowns in allegiances are followed by swift symbolically charged manoeuvres. Gillard moved quickly to repair relations with mining companies damaged by Rudd’s plans for a mining tax and to water down frustration with the lack of a sustainable Emissions Trading Scheme. And one of the first things Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister was to change the fittings and furnishings in the Prime Ministerial office, of which Wright observed that “Mr Howard is gone and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has moved in, the Parliament House bureaucracy has ensured all signs of the old-style gentlemen's club… have been banished” (The Age, 5 Dec. 2007). Some of these signs were soon replaced by Ms. Gillard herself, who filled the office in turn with memorabilia from her beloved Footscray, an Australian Rules football team. In post-coalitional Australia the exile of the old Menzies’ desk and a pair of Chesterfield sofas works alongside the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and renewed pledges for military presence in Afghanistan, apologising to stolen generations of Indigenous Australians, the first female Governor General, deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister (the last two both Gillard), the repealing of disadvantageous workplace reform, a focus on climate change and global warming (with limited success as stated), a public, mandatory paid maternity leave scheme, changes to the processing and visas of refugees, and the amendments to more than one hundred laws that discriminate against same sex couples by the pre-Gillard, Rudd-led Labor government. The context for these changes was encapsulated in an announcement from Rudd, made in March 2008: Our core organising principle as a Government is equality of opportunity. And advancing people and their opportunities in life, we are a Government which prides itself on being blind to gender, blind to economic background, blind to social background, blind to race, blind to sexuality. (Rudd, “International”) Noting the political possibilities and the political convenience of blindness, this paper navigates the confusing context of post-coalitional Australia, whilst proffering an understanding of some of the cultural forces at work in this age of shifting and unstable alliances. I begin by interrogating the coalitional impulse post 9/11. I do this by connecting public coalitional shifts to the steady withdrawal of support for John Howard’s coalition, and movement away from George Bush’s Coalition of the Willing and the War on Terror. I then draw out a relationship between the rise and fall of such affiliations and recent shifts within government policy affecting same-sex couples, from former Prime Minister Howard’s amendments to The Marriage Act 1961 to the Rudd-Gillard administration’s attention to the discrimination in many Australian laws. Sexual Citizenship and Coalitions Rights and entitlements have always been constructed and managed in ways that live out understandings of biopower and social death (Foucault History; Discipline). The disciplining of bodies, identities and pleasures is so deeply entrenched in government and law that any non-normative claim to rights requires the negotiation of existing structures. Sexual citizenship destabilises the post-coalitional paradigm of Australian politics (one of “equal opportunity” and consensus) by foregrounding the normative biases that similarly transcend partisan politics. Sexual citizenship has been well excavated in critical work from Evans, Berlant, Weeks, Richardson, and Bell and Binnie’s The Sexual Citizen which argues that “many of the current modes of the political articulation of sexual citizenship are marked by compromise; this is inherent in the very notion itself… the twinning of rights with responsibilities in the logic of citizenship is another way of expressing compromise… Every entitlement is freighted with a duty” (2-3). This logic extends to political and economic contexts, where “natural” coalition refers primarily to parties, and in particular those “who have powerful shared interests… make highly valuable trades, or who, as a unit, can extract significant value from others without much risk of being split” (Lax and Sebinius 158). Though the term is always in some way politicised, it need not refer only to partisan, multiparty or multilateral configurations. The subscription to the norms (or normativity) of a certain familial, social, religious, ethnic, or leisure groups is clearly coalitional (as in a home or a front, a club or a team, a committee or a congregation). Although coalition is interrogated in political and social sciences, it is examined frequently in mathematical game theory and behavioural psychology. In the former, as in Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, it refers to people (or players) who collaborate to successfully pursue their own self-interests, often in the absence of central authority. In behavioural psychology the focus is on group formations and their attendant strategies, biases and discriminations. Experimental psychologists have found “categorizing individuals into two social groups predisposes humans to discriminate… against the outgroup in both allocation of resources and evaluation of conduct” (Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides 15387). The actions of social organisation (and not unseen individual, supposedly innate impulses) reflect the cultural norms in coalitional attachments – evidenced by the relationship between resources and conduct that unquestioningly grants and protects the rights and entitlements of the larger, heteronormatively aligned “ingroup”. Terror Management Particular attention has been paid to coalitional formations and discriminatory practices in America and the West since September 11, 2001. Terror Management Theory or TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon) has been the main framework used to explain the post-9/11 reassertion of large group identities along ideological, religious, ethnic and violently nationalistic lines. Psychologists have used “death-related stimuli” to explain coalitional mentalities within the recent contexts of globalised terror. The fear of death that results in discriminatory excesses is referred to as “mortality salience”, with respect to the highly visible aspects of terror that expose people to the possibility of their own death or suffering. Naverette and Fessler find “participants… asked to contemplate their own deaths exhibit increases in positive evaluations of people whose attitudes and values are similar to their own, and derogation of those holding dissimilar views” (299). It was within the climate of post 9/11 “mortality salience” that then Prime Minister John Howard set out to change The Marriage Act 1961 and the Family Law Act 1975. In 2004, the Government modified the Marriage Act to eliminate flexibility with respect to the definition of marriage. Agitation for gay marriage was not as noticeable in Australia as it was in the U.S where Bush publicly rejected it, and the UK where the Civil Union Act 2004 had just been passed. Following Bush, Howard’s “queer moral panic” seemed the perfect decoy for the increased scrutiny of Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. Howard’s changes included outlawing adoption for same-sex couples, and no recognition for legal same-sex marriages performed in other countries. The centrepiece was the wording of The Marriage Amendment Act 2004, with marriage now defined as a union “between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. The legislation was referred to by the Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown as “hateful”, “the marriage discrimination act” and the “straight Australia policy” (Commonwealth 26556). The Labor Party, in opposition, allowed the changes to pass (in spite of vocal protests from one member) by concluding the legal status of same-sex relations was in no way affected, seemingly missing (in addition to the obvious symbolic and physical discrimination) the equation of same-sex recognition with terror, terrorism and death. Non-normative sexual citizenship was deployed as yet another form of “mortality salience”, made explicit in Howard’s description of the changes as necessary in protecting the sanctity of the “bedrock institution” of marriage and, wait for it, “providing for the survival of the species” (Knight, 5 Aug. 2003). So two things seem to be happening here: the first is that when confronted with the possibility of their own death (either through terrorism or gay marriage) people value those who are most like them, joining to devalue those who aren’t; the second is that the worldview (the larger religious, political, social perspectives to which people subscribe) becomes protection from the potential death that terror/queerness represents. Coalition of the (Un)willing Yet, if contemporary coalitions are formed through fear of death or species survival, how, for example, might these explain the various forms of risk-taking behaviours exhibited within Western democracies targeted by such terrors? Navarette and Fessler (309) argue that “affiliation defences are triggered by a wider variety of threats” than “existential anxiety” and that worldviews are “in turn are reliant on ‘normative conformity’” (308) or “normative bias” for social benefits and social inclusions, because “a normative orientation” demonstrates allegiance to the ingroup (308-9). Coalitions are founded in conformity to particular sets of norms, values, codes or belief systems. They are responses to adaptive challenges, particularly since September 11, not simply to death but more broadly to change. In troubled times, coalitions restore a shared sense of predictability. In Howard’s case, he seemed to say, “the War in Iraq is tricky but we have a bigger (same-sex) threat to deal with right now. So trust me on both fronts”. Coalitional change as reflective of adaptive responses thus serves the critical location of subsequent shifts in public support. Before and since September 11 Australians were beginning to distinguish between moderation and extremism, between Christian fundamentalism and productive forms of nationalism. Howard’s unwavering commitment to the American-led war in Iraq saw Australia become a member of another coalition: the Coalition of the Willing, a post 1990s term used to describe militaristic or humanitarian interventions in certain parts of the world by groups of countries. Howard (in Pauly and Lansford 70) committed Australia to America’s fight but also to “civilization's fight… of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”. Although Bush claimed an international balance of power and influence within the coalition (94), some countries refused to participate, many quickly withdrew, and many who signed did not even have troops. In Australia, the war was never particularly popular. In 2003, forty-two legal experts found the war contravened International Law as well as United Nations and Geneva conventions (Sydney Morning Herald 26 Feb. 2003). After the immeasurable loss of Iraqi life, and as the bodies of young American soldiers (and the occasional non-American) began to pile up, the official term “coalition of the willing” was quietly abandoned by the White House in January of 2005, replaced by a “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” (ABC News Online 22 Jan. 2005). The coalition and its larger war on terror placed John Howard within the context of coalitional confusion, that when combined with the domestic effects of economic and social policy, proved politically fatal. The problem was the unclear constitution of available coalitional configurations. Howard’s continued support of Bush and the war in Iraq compounded with rising interest rates, industrial relations reform and a seriously uncool approach to the environment and social inclusion, to shift perceptions of him from father of the nation to dangerous, dithery and disconnected old man. Post-Coalitional Change In contrast, before being elected Kevin Rudd sought to reframe Australian coalitional relationships. In 2006, he positions the Australian-United States alliance outside of the notion of military action and Western territorial integrity. In Rudd-speak the Howard-Bush-Blair “coalition of the willing” becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “willingness of the heart”. The term coalition was replaced by terms such as dialogue and affiliation (Rudd, “Friends”). Since the 2007 election, Rudd moved quickly to distance himself from the agenda of the coalition government that preceded him, proposing changes in the spirit of “blindness” toward marginality and sexuality. “Fix-it-all” Rudd as he was christened (Sydney Morning Herald 29 Sep. 2008) and his Labor government began to confront the legacies of colonial history, industrial relations, refugee detention and climate change – by apologising to Aboriginal people, timetabling the withdrawal from Iraq, abolishing the employee bargaining system Workchoices, giving instant visas and lessening detention time for refugees, and signing the Kyoto Protocol agreeing (at least in principle) to reduce green house gas emissions. As stated earlier, post-coalitional Australia is not simply talking about sudden change but an extension and a confusion of what has gone on before (so that the term resembles postcolonial, poststructural and postmodern because it carries the practices and effects of the original term within it). The post-coalitional is still coalitional to the extent that we must ask: what remains the same in the midst of such visible changes? An American focus in international affairs, a Christian platform for social policy, an absence of financial compensation for the Aboriginal Australians who received such an eloquent apology, the lack of coherent and productive outcomes in the areas of asylum and climate change, and an impenetrable resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage are just some of the ways in which these new governments continue on from the previous one. The Rudd-Gillard government’s dealings with gay law reform and gay marriage exemplify the post-coalitional condition. Emulating Christ’s relationship to “the marginalised and the oppressed”, and with Gillard at his side, Rudd understandings of the Christian Gospel as a “social gospel” (Rudd, “Faith”; see also Randell-Moon) to table changes to laws discriminating against gay couples – guaranteeing hospital visits, social security benefits and access to superannuation, resembling de-facto hetero relationships but modelled on the administering and registration of relationships, or on tax laws that speak primarily to relations of financial dependence – with particular reference to children. The changes are based on the report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements (HREOC) that argues for the social competence of queer folk, with respect to money, property and reproduction. They speak the language of an equitable economics; one that still leaves healthy and childless couples with limited recognition and advantage but increased financial obligation. Unable to marry in Australia, same-sex couples are no longer single for taxation purposes, but are now simultaneously subject to forms of tax/income auditing and governmental revenue collection should either same-sex partner require assistance from social security as if they were married. Heteronormative Coalition Queer citizens can quietly stake their economic claims and in most states discreetly sign their names on a register before becoming invisible again. Mardi Gras happens but once a year after all. On the topic of gay marriage Rudd and Gillard have deferred to past policy and to the immoveable nature of the law (and to Howard’s particular changes to marriage law). That same respect is not extended to laws passed by Howard on industrial relations or border control. In spite of finding no gospel references to Jesus the Nazarene “expressly preaching against homosexuality” (Rudd, “Faith”), and pre-election promises that territories could govern themselves with respect to same sex partnerships, the Rudd-Gillard government in 2008 pressured the ACT to reduce its proposed partnership legislation to that of a relationship register like the ones in Tasmania and Victoria, and explicitly demanded that there be absolutely no ceremony – no mimicking of the real deal, of the larger, heterosexual citizens’ “ingroup”. Likewise, with respect to the reintroduction of same-sex marriage legislation by Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young in September 2010, Gillard has so far refused a conscience vote on the issue and restated the “marriage is between a man and a woman” rhetoric of her predecessors (Topsfield, 30 Sep. 2010). At the same time, she has agreed to conscience votes on euthanasia and openly declared bi-partisan (with the federal opposition) support for the war in Afghanistan. We see now, from Howard to Rudd and now Gillard, that there are some coalitions that override political differences. As psychologists have noted, “if the social benefits of norm adherence are the ultimate cause of the individual’s subscription to worldviews, then the focus and salience of a given individual’s ideology can be expected to vary as a function of their need to ally themselves with relevant others” (Navarette and Fessler 307). Where Howard invoked the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”, Rudd chose to cite a “Christian ethical framework” (Rudd, “Faith”), that saw him and Gillard end up in exactly the same place: same sex relationships should be reduced to that of medical care or financial dependence; that a public ceremony marking relationship recognition somehow equates to “mimicking” the already performative and symbolic heterosexual institution of marriage and the associated romantic and familial arrangements. Conclusion Post-coalitional Australia refers to the state of confusion borne of a new politics of equality and change. The shift in Australia from conservative to mildly socialist government(s) is not as sudden as Howard’s 2007 federal loss or as short-lived as Gillard’s hung parliament might respectively suggest. Whilst allegiance shifts, political parties find support is reliant on persistence as much as it is on change – they decide how to buffer and bolster the same coalitions (ones that continue to privilege white settlement, Christian belief systems, heteronormative familial and symbolic practices), but also how to practice policy and social responsibility in a different way. Rudd’s and Gillard’s arguments against the mimicry of heterosexual symbolism and the ceremonial validation of same-sex partnerships imply there is one originary form of conduct and an associated sacred set of symbols reserved for that larger ingroup. Like Howard before them, these post-coalitional leaders fail to recognise, as Butler eloquently argues, “gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy” (31). To make claims to status and entitlements that invoke the messiness of non-normative sex acts and romantic attachments necessarily requires the negotiation of heteronormative coalitional bias (and in some ways a reinforcement of this social power). As Bell and Binnie have rightly observed, “that’s what the hard choices facing the sexual citizen are: the push towards rights claims that make dissident sexualities fit into heterosexual culture, by demanding equality and recognition, versus the demand to reject settling for heteronormativity” (141). The new Australian political “blindness” toward discrimination produces positive outcomes whilst it explicitly reanimates the histories of oppression it seeks to redress. The New South Wales parliament recently voted to allow same-sex adoption with the proviso that concerned parties could choose not to adopt to gay couples. The Tasmanian government voted to recognise same-sex marriages and unions from outside Australia, in the absence of same-sex marriage beyond the current registration arrangements in its own state. In post-coalitional Australia the issue of same-sex partnership recognition pits parties and allegiances against each other and against themselves from within (inside Gillard’s “rainbow coalition” the Rainbow ALP group now unites gay people within the government’s own party). Gillard has hinted any new proposed legislation regarding same-sex marriage may not even come before parliament for debate, as it deals with real business. Perhaps the answer lies over the rainbow (coalition). As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those that will not see”. References ABC News Online. “Whitehouse Scraps Coalition of the Willing List.” 22 Jan. 2005. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1286872.htm›. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2000. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives 12 Aug. 2004: 26556. (Bob Brown, Senator, Tasmania.) Evans, David T. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. “The Causes and Consequences of the Need for Self-Esteem: A Terror Management Theory.” Public Self, Private Self. Ed. Roy F. Baumeister. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. 189-212. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html›. Kaplan, Morris. Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1997. Knight, Ben. “Howard and Costello Reject Gay Marriage.” ABC Online 5 Aug. 2003. Kurzban, Robert, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. "Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98.26 (2001): 15387–15392. Lambert, Anthony, and Catherine Simpson. "Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland." M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). 20 Oct. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/81›. Lax, David A., and James K. Lebinius. “Thinking Coalitionally: Party Arithmetic Process Opportunism, and Strategic Sequencing.” Negotiation Analysis. Ed. H. Peyton Young. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991. 153-194. Naverette, Carlos, and Daniel Fessler. “Normative Bias and Adaptive Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology and a Critique of Terror Management Theory.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 297-325. Pauly, Robert J., and Tom Lansford. Strategic Preemption: US Foreign Policy and Second Iraq War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Randall-Moon, Holly. "Neoliberal Governmentality with a Christian Twist: Religion and Social Security under the Howard-Led Australian Government." Eds. Michael Bailey and Guy Redden. Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio- Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century. Farnham: Ashgate, in press. Richardson, Diane. Rethinking Sexuality. London: Sage, 2000. Rudd, Kevin. “Faith in Politics.” The Monthly 17 (2006). 31 July 2007 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics--300›. Rudd, Kevin. “Friends of Australia, Friends of America, and Friends of the Alliance That Unites Us All.” Address to the 15th Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The Australian, 24 Aug. 2007. 13 Mar. 2008 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/kevin-rudds-address/story-e6frg6xf-1111114253042›. Rudd, Kevin. “Address to International Women’s Day Morning Tea.” Old Parliament House, Canberra, 11 Mar. 2008. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5900›. Sydney Morning Herald. “Coalition of the Willing? Make That War Criminals.” 26 Feb. 2003. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/25/1046064028608.html›. Topsfield, Jewel. “Gillard Rules Out Conscience Vote on Gay Marriage.” The Age 30 Sep. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/gillard-rules-out-conscience-vote-on-gay-marriage-20100929-15xgj.html›. Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Sexual Citizen." Theory, Culture and Society 15.3-4 (1998): 35-52. 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“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times” (Freud 37-39).Introduction and Background Self-tracking is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, people have used self-examination and monitoring as a means to attain knowledge and understanding about themselves. People would often record their daily activities (like food consumption, sleep and physical exercise) and write down accompanying thoughts and reflections. However, the advent of digital technology in the past decades has drastically changed the self-tracking sphere. In fact, the popularisation of self-tracking technology (STT) in mobile applications and wearable devices has allowed users to track daily activities on a closer and more accurate scale than previously affordable. Gary Wolf, the founder of a niche movement called the ‘Quantified Self’, suggested that “if you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them” (Wolf). This reveals that STT has the capacity to guide users by virtue of the data collected and insights provided by the technology. Thus, instead of using intuition, which is potentially unreliable and subjective, data – finite and objective by nature – can be used to guide the process by providing definitive facts, figures and patterns. Arguably, this technologises users, allowing them to enhance their performance and capabilities by using STTs to regulate and monitor their behaviour. Hence, in this article, I position self-tracking technology (STT) as an interactive media technology, a tool for surveillance and regulation, and an “extension of man”. However, the use of and reliance on STT can compromise personal autonomy, and this journal article will investigate how users’ personal autonomy has been affected due to STT’s function as an extension of man, or a “prosthetic”. I use case study vignettes to investigate impacts on personal autonomy in three spheres: the workspace, relationships and the physical environment. Extending ManSTTs reconfigure our bodies in data form and implicate our personhood and autonomy. Human physicality has changed now that technology and data have become so integral to how we experience and view our bodies. STTs technologise human bodies, transforming them into data bodies, augmented and reliant on digital media. As Marshall McLuhan (63) put it: “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness”. With the integration of STT into our daily lives, consumers increasingly rely on cues from their devices and applications to inform them about their bodies. This potentially affects the autonomy of an individual – since STT becomes an extension of the human body. In the 1960s, when the mass media was burgeoning, Marshal McLuhan proposed the idea that the media acted as an extension of man. STTs similarly act as an extension of users’ embodied capabilities and senses, since the data collected by these technologies is shared with users, allowing them to alter their bodies and minds, aiming to be as productive and effective as possible. In Understanding Media, McLuhan’s interpretation of electronic media was prescient. He anticipated the development of so-called “smart” devices, noting that, in the information age man “wears [his] brain outside [his] skull and [his] nerves outside [his] hide” (63). This is reflective of STT’s heavy reliance on sensor technology and smart technology. Simply examining how a Fitbit – a popular wearable self-tracking device – operates is illustrative. For instance, some Fitbits have an altimeter sensor that detects when the wearer is elevated, and hence counts floors. Fitbits also count steps using a three-axis accelerometer, which turns the wearer’s movements into data. Furthermore, Fitbit devices are capable of analysing and interpreting this acceleration data to provide insights about “frequency, duration, intensity, and patterns of movement to determine [users’] steps taken, distance travelled, calories burned, and sleep quality” (“Fitbit”). Fitbit relies on sensor technologies (“nerves”) to detect and interpret activities, and such insights are then transmitted to users’ smart devices (“brains”) for storage, to be analysed at a time of convenience. This modus operandi is not exclusive to Fitbit, and in fact, is the framework for many STTs. Hence, STTs have the potential to extend the natural capabilities of the human body to regulate behaviour.The WorkplaceThis notion of STT as a regulatory prosthetic is seen in its ability to enforce standardised norms on individuals by using surveillance as a disciplinary measure. STTs can enforce norms on users by transforming the workplace into a panopticon, which is an institutional structure that allows a watchman to observe individuals without them knowing whether they are being watched or not. STTs are used to gather data about performance and behaviour, and users are monitored constantly. As a result, they adjust their behaviouraccordingly. US retail titan Amazon has repeatedly raised concerns over the past years because of its use of wearables to survey workers during shifts. Adam Littler, an Amazon employee, came forward in 2013 accusing his employers of forcing him to walk 11 miles during a single work shift. His distance travelled was measured and tracked using a pedometer, while a handheld scanner guided him around the warehouse and notified him if he was meeting his targets (Aspinall). Amazon also recently designed and patented a wristband that is capable of tracking wearers’ (employees’) movements, including hand placement (Kelly). The reliance on such tracking technology to guide actions and supplement users with information to increase productivity reveals how STT can serve as a prosthetic that is used to enhance man’s abilities and performance However, the flipside of such enhancement is exploitation – employers augment users with technology and force them to adhere to standards of performance that are difficult to achieve. For instance, documents have recently surfaced that suggest Amazon terminates employees based on productivity statistics. It was reported that around 300 full-time employees were fired for “failing to meet productivity quotas”. According to the documents, “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors” (Lecher). This is reflective of how actors that are in power, like employers, can impose self-tracking practises onto employees that compromise their personal autonomy. Foucault finds that the panopticon’s utility and potency as a discipline mechanism lies in its efficiency as enforcers do not have to constantly survey people to ensure they conform. Thus, it manoeuvres existing power structures to achieve a particular goal – for instance, higher productivity or economic growth. Foucault also notes: The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts and losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. (210) STTs in the workspace (or workshop) can act as prostheses, allowing employers to enhance their employee’s capabilities. Such technology creates an environment in which workers feel pressured to perform in adherence to certain set standards. Thus, employees are disciplined by STTs, and by the surveillance of their employers that follows. Arguably, such surveillance is detrimental to personal autonomy, as the surveyed feel that they have to behave in compliance to standards enforced by those in power (ie. their employers). Physical Environment With the aim of productivity and efficiency in mind, users grow dependant on devices to augment their realities with helpful technology. As mentioned earlier, McLuhan (90) ideates that “technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed” is particularly significant. The iPhone is an example that illustrates this point very clearly as they are inbuilt with complex technology that includes a variety of sensors. The iPhone 7, for example, has a range of sensors including an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a GPS, a barometer, and an ambient light sensor (Nield). These gather information about users’ surroundings and feed it back to them, and they are then able to make informed decisions. Hence, if a user wants to travel to a certain place, the phone has the ability to point out the quickest route possible, or which route to take if they would like to stop by a certain location along the way. This cultivates a reliance on navigational technologies that use automated self-tracking to direct users’ daily lives, functioning as an extension and enhancement of their geographical memory and sense of direction. However, using these technologies may in fact be dulling our body’s abilities. For instance, anthropologist Tim Ingold posits that relying on navigation technology has reduced humans’ inborn wayfaring capabilities (Ingold). These satellite navigation technologies are one of the most popular ways in which people track their movements and move through space; for instance, a whole market of rideshare applications like Uber and OlaCabs rely on this technology. Using this technology has allowed people to navigate and travel with ease. However, this can be seen to lead to a lack of “spatial awareness and cartographic literacy”. Essentially, traditional maps skills are viewed as redundant and it can encourage an over-reliance on technology (Speake and Axon). According to McKinlay navigation is a “use-it-or-lose-it skill” and “automatic wayfinding” was reducing natural navigation abilities. A UCL neuroscience study found that licensed London taxi drivers have a larger than average hippocampus in their brains, as they are capable of storing a mental map of the city in their minds, by learning street layouts and locations of places of interest. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is linked to spatial memory and navigation skills (Maguire, Woollett and Spiers 1093). Dr Eleanor Maguire, the neuroscientist who led the study, noted that if the taxi drivers started “using GPS, that knowledge base will be less and possibly affect the brain changes we are seeing” (Dobson). In turn, an increasing reliance on GPS and navigation technologies in self-tracking devices may result in a diminishing hippocampus, according to neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot of McGill University. The atrophy of the hippocampus has also been linked to the risk of dementia (Weeks), which reveals how the technologies that augment space may atrophy the “natural abilities” (McKinlay) and thus, the autonomy of users. RelationshipsAs with areas like the workspace and spatial environments, sociality and intimacy are increasingly being mediated by technology – the digital capabilities of new media have expanded users’ options and provided a variety of technological tools that allow us to streamline and reflect on social interactions and behaviour, serving as a social prosthetic. This is especially significant in the sphere of self-tracking. However, relying on STT to gain insight into sociality may alter the ways in which we think of intimacy and communication, and may also have an impact on users’ independence and trust. Hasinoff (497-98) notes that using tracking technologies within families and intimate relationships can have potentially harmful effects, such as a loss of trust. In particular, children who are pushed into self-tracking by their families may suffer from a loss of independence as well as an inability to perceive and react to risk. In such a situation, STT serves as a prosthetic that aims to ensure safety, however, surveillance through STTs enforces power disparities and simultaneously creates a dependency between the watched and watchers, and this would affect users’ personal autonomy as they are viewed under a panoptic lens. In fact, Hasinoff finds that “[family tracking and monitoring apps] exaggerate risks, offer illusory promises of safety, and normalize surveillance and excessive control in familial relationships”. I argue that this is the consequence of pushed self-tracking in the sphere of sociality and intimacy. Users may feel pressure from their families or partners to participate in self-tracking and allow their data to be accessed by them. However, the process of participating in such a mediated and monitored relationship could create “asymmetrical relations of visibility” (Trottier 320), as this sharing of information may not always be two sided. For instance, on the app Life360, parents can enforce that their children share their locations at all times, while they are able to conceal their own locations. This intensifies the watcher’s control and diminishes the watched’s privacy and autonomy. Quite ironically, Life360’s tagline is “feel free, together”. As an app geared at family safety, Life360 assumes that the family is a safe space – however, families too may pose a significant risk to vulnerable users’ (such as young children and women) autonomy and privacy. User complaints about inaccurate location information reveal “controlling, asymmetrical, and potentially abusive uses of the app” that can aggravate dysfunctional power dynamics in intimate and familial relationships. For instance, jealous partners or overprotective parents could grow increasingly suspicious or even aggressive (Hasinoff 504). Critical users who reviewed the app claimed that the app “ruined [their] social life” and enabled their “family to stalk [them] 24/7”. In another case, a user claimed the app was “toxic”, noting it would “destroy their [children’s] trust” (App Store; Life360). While the app asserts that each user does have control over the extent of location sharing, they may feel the need to remain visible because of familial pressure and expectations, since their family relies visibility on the app as an indicator of safety. This too, is problematic – self-tracking one’s locations provides just that – a geolocation pin, which is not a clear measure or indicator of the well-being or safety of the user. Simpson argues that constructing location information as safety information is not reliable because it could “promote a false sense of security based on the sense that if you know where your child is then that means they are safe” (277). Additionally, this also sets an imperative that users need to be monitored or monitor themselves at all times to ensure safety, and such a use of surveillance technology could result in users being hyperalert and anxious (Hasinoff 497). Extending man’s awareness to this degree and engaging in such surveillance may create a false sense of security and dependency, that ultimately puts everyone’s autonomy at risk.ConclusionSTT performs as an informational prosthetic for man. We conventionally tend to think of prostheses as extensions of our physical and sensory abilities, used to enhance or replace missing functions. In the case of STT, they have inbuilt decision-making and guidance capabilities, enhancing humans’ ability to process and understand information. This is a new type of digital prosthetic that has not existed before. It thus seems that the new generation of prostheses are no longer just physical and material – they operate as intellectual and cognitive extensions of our bodies. However, when users’ decision-making processes are increasingly displaced by informational prostheses, it is important to determine the extent to which they are impairing our organic capacity for orienting, sense-making and intimacy. ReferencesApp Store. Mobile app. Apple Inc. 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IntroductionThis paper explores the different meanings that individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds associate with being authentic. It builds on previous research (Menendez 11) that found quantitative differences in terms of the meanings individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds tend to associate with being authentic. Using qualitative analysis, it describes in more detail how individuals from these two backgrounds construct their different meanings of authenticity.Authenticity has become an overriding moral principle in contemporary Western societies and has only recently started to be contested (Feldman). From cultural products to individuals’ discourses, authenticity pervades Western culture (Lindholm; Potter; Vannini and Williams). On an individual level, the ideal of authenticity is reflected in the maxim “be true to yourself.” The social value of authenticity has a relatively recent history in the Western world of approximately 200 years (Trilling). It started to develop alongside the notion of individuality during modernity (Taylor, Sources; Trilling). The Romantic movement consolidated its cultural influence (Taylor, Sources). In the 1960s, the Hippy movement revived authenticity as a countercultural discourse, although it has progressively become mainstream through consumer culture and therapeutic discourses (Binkley).Most of the studies in the literature on authenticity as a cultural phenomenon are theoretical, conducted from a philosophical perspective (Ferrara; Guignon; Taylor, Ethics), but few of them are empirical, mostly from sociology (Erickson; Franzese, Thine; Turner, Quest; Vannini, Authenticity). Part of this dearth of empirical research on authenticity is due to the difficulties that researchers encounter in attempting to define what it means to be authentic (Franzese, Authenticity 87). Sociologists study the phenomenological experience of being true to oneself, but are less attentive to the metaphysical notion of being a “true self” (Vannini, Dead 236–37). Trying to preserve this open approach, without judging individuals on how “authentic” they are, is what makes defining authenticity difficult. For this reason, sociologists have defined being authentic in a broad sense as “an individual’s subjective sense that their behaviour, appearance, self, reflects their sense of core being. One’s sense of core being is composed of their values, beliefs, feelings, identities, self-meanings, etc.” (Franzese, Authenticity 87); this is the definition of authenticity that I use here. Besides being scarce, the sociological empirical studies on authenticity have been conducted with individuals from Western backgrounds and, thus, have privileged authenticity as a Western cultural construct. This paper tries to contribute to this field of research by: (1) contributing more empirical investigation and (2) providing cross-cultural comparison between individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds.The literature on cross-cultural values associates Eastern societies with collective (Hofstede, Hofstede and Mirkov 95–97; 112–17) and material or survival (Inglehart and Welzel 51–57; 61–65) values, while Western societies tend to be linked to the opposite kind of values: individual, post-material or self-expression (WVS). For example, societies that score high in survival values are likely to be African (e.g., Zimbabwe) Middle Eastern (e.g., Morocco and Jordan) or Asian (e.g., Bangladesh) countries, while societies that score high in self-expression values tend to be European (e.g., Sweden) or English speaking (e.g., Australia) countries. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions, the case of Japan, for example, which tends to score high in self-expression values despite being an “Eastern” society (WVS). These differences also tend to be reflected among Eastern minorities living in Western countries (Chua and Rubenfeld). Collective values emphasise harmony in relations and prioritise the needs of the group over the individual; on the other hand, individual values emphasise self-expression. Material or survival values accentuate the satisfaction of “basic” needs, in Abraham Maslow’s terms (21), such as physiological or security needs, and imply practising thrift and delaying immediate gratification; by contrast, post-material or self-expression values stress the satisfaction of “higher” needs, such as freedom of speech, equality, or aesthetic needs.The sociologist Ralph Turner (Real) created a theoretical framework to organize individuals’ discourses around authenticity: the “impulsive” and “institutional” categories. One of Turner’s assumptions is particularly important in understanding the differences between these two categories: individuals tend to consider the self as an objective entity that, despite only existing in their minds, feels “real” to them. This can have consequences for the meanings they ascribe to certain internal subjective states, such as cognitions or emotions, which can be interpreted as indicators of their authentic selves (990–91).The institutional and impulsive categories are two different ways of understanding authenticity that present several differences (991–95). Two among them are most relevant to understand the differences that I discuss in this paper. The first one has to do with the individual’s locus of the self, whether the self is conceptualized as located “outside” or “inside” the individual. Impulsive interpretations of authenticity have an internal sense of authenticity as “being,” while institutional conceptualizations have an external sense of authenticity as “becoming.” For “impulsives,” the authentic self is something that must be searched for. Impulsives look within to discover their “true self,” which is often in opposition to society’s roles and its expectations of the individual. On the other hand, for “institutionals” authentic is achieved through external effort (Turner, Quest 155); it is something that individuals achieve through regular practice, often aligned with society’s roles and their expectations of the individual (Turner, Real 992).The second difference has to do with the management of emotions. For an institutional understanding of authenticity, individuals are true to their own authentic selves when they are in full control of their capacities and emotions. By contrast, from an impulsive point of view, individuals are true to themselves when they are spontaneous, accepting and freely expressing their emotions, often by breaking the internal or external controls that society imposes on them (Turner, Real 993).Although individuals can experience both types of authenticity, previous research on this topic (Menendez) has shown that institutional experiences tend to happen more frequently among Easterners, and impulsive experiences tend to occur more frequently among Westerners. In this paper, I show how Easterners and Westerners construct institutional and impulsive meanings of authenticity respectively; what kind of authenticity work individuals from these two backgrounds do when they conceptualize their authentic selves; how they interpret internal subjective states as expressions of who they are; and what stories they tell themselves about who they are.I suggest that these stories, although they may look purely individual, can also be social. Individuals from Western backgrounds tend to interpret impulsive experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they are informed by the individual and post-material values of Western societies. In contrast, individuals from Eastern backgrounds tend to interpret institutional experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they have been socialized in the more collective and material values of Eastern societies.Finally, and before I proceed to the analysis, I would like to acknowledge a limitation of this study. The dichotomies that I use to explain my argument, such as the Western and Eastern or the impulsive and institutional categories, can constitute a limitation for this paper because they cannot reflect nuances. They can be easily contested. For example, the division between Eastern and Western societies is often seen as ideological and Turner’s distinction between institutional and impulsive experiences of authenticity can create artificial separations between the notions of self and society or reason and passion (Solomon 173). However, these concepts have not been used for ideological or simplifying purposes, but to help explain distinguishable cultural orientations towards authenticity in the data.MethodologyI completed 20 interviews (from 50 minutes to 2 hours in length) with 20 students at La Trobe University (Australia), between September 2012 and April 2013. The 20 interviewees (9 females and 11 males), ranged from 18 to 58 years old (the median age was 24 years old). The sample was theoretically designed to cover as many diverse cultural backgrounds as possible. I asked the interviewees questions about: moments they had experienced that felt either authentic and inauthentic, what constitutes a life worth-living, and the impact their cultural backgrounds might have had on their conceptions of their true selves.The 20 interviewees were born in 13 different countries. According to the extensive dataset on cultural values, the World Values Survey (WVS), these 13 countries have different percentages of post-materialists—individuals who choose post-material instead of material values (Inglehart and Welzel 54–56). Table 1 shows the percentages of post-materialists in each of the interviewees’ countries of birth. Table 1: Percentages of post-materialists in the interviewees’ countries of birth Country % of post-materialists WVS Wave United Kingdom 22.8 2005 – 2009 Australia 20.5 2010 – 2014 United States 16.7 2010 – 2014 Israel 11.6 2000 – 2004 Finland 11.3 2005 – 2009 Greece (Turkey) 10.7 2010 – 2014 South Africa 7.7 2005 – 2009 Malaysia 5.6 2010 – 2014 Ghana 4.2 2010 – 2014 India 4 2005 – 2009 China 2.5 2010 – 2014 Egypt 1.1 2010 – 2014 Note: These data are based on the 4-item post-materialism index question (Y002) of World Values Survey (WVS). I use three different waves of data (2000–2004, 2005–2009, and 2010–2014). Greece did not have any data in World Values Survey, so its data have been estimated considering the results from Turkey, which is the most similar country in geographical and cultural terms that had data available.In my model, I consider “Western” societies as those that have more than 10% post-materialists, while “Eastern” societies have less than 10% post-materialists. As shown in Table 1 and mentioned earlier, Western countries (English speaking or European) tend to have higher percentages of post-materialists than Eastern societies (African, Asian and Middle Eastern).Thus, as Table 2 shows, the interviewees who were born in a Western society are ascribed to one group, while individuals born in an Eastern society are ascribed to another group. Although many overseas-born interviewees have lived in Australia for periods that range from 6 months to 10 years, they were ascribed to the “East” and “West” groups solely based on their country of birth. Even though these individuals may have had experiences of socialization in Australia, I assume that they have been primarily socialized in the values of their ethnic backgrounds and the countries where they were born, via their parents’ educational values or through direct experience, during the time that they lived in their countries of birth. According to my definition of authenticity, individuals’ values inform their understanding of authenticity, therefore, the values from their ethnic backgrounds can also influence their understanding of authenticity.In the first phase of the analysis, I used Grounded Theory (Charmaz), with categories directly emerging from the data, to analyse my interviewees’ stories. In the second stage, I reviewed these categories in combination with Turner’s categories of impulsive and institutional, applying them to classify the stories.Table 2: Distribution of participants between “East” and “West” West (n=11) East (n=9) Australia (n=5) China (n=2) United Kingdom (n=2) India (n=2) United States (n=1) South Korea (n=1) Greece (n=1) South Africa (n=1) Finland (n=1) Egypt (n=1) Israel (n=1) Ghana (n=1) Malaysia (n=1) ResultsAlthough I interviewed 20 participants, due to space-constraints, I illustrate my argument with only 4 interview extracts from 4 of the interviewees: 2 interviewees from Western backgrounds and 2 from Eastern backgrounds. However, these stories are representative of the trends found for the whole sample. I show how Easterners and Westerners construct their authentic selves in institutional and impulsive senses respectively through the two key characteristics that I presented in the introduction: locus of the self and management of emotions.In the first instance, Rachel (from Australia, 24 years old), a Western respondent, shows an impulsive locus of the self as “being.” Authenticity is discovered through self-acceptance of an uncomfortable emotion, like a “bad mood:”I think the times when I want to say, ‘oh, I wasn’t myself’, I usually was. My bad moods are more ‘me’. My bad moods are almost always the ‘real me’. [So you consider that your authentic self is something that is there, inside you, that you have to discover, or it is something outside yourself, that you can achieve?] I think it is something that you have to discover for yourself. I think it is different for everyone. [But would you say that it is something that is there already or it is something that you become?] No, I think it is something that is there already.On the other hand, Rani (from China, 24 years old), an Eastern respondent, interprets authenticity as “becoming;” authenticity does not pre-exist—as in the case of Rachel—but is something “external” to her idea of self. Rani becomes herself by convincing herself that she conforms to society’s ideals of physical beauty. Unlike the process of self-acceptance that Rachel described, Rani develops authentic selfhood by “lying” to herself or, as she says, “through some lies”:I have heard this sentence, like ‘you have to be yourself to others’, but I think it is really hard to do this. I think people still need some ‘acting’ things in their life. You need to act, not to say to act as another person, but sometimes like let’s say to be polite or make other people like you, you need acting. And sometimes if you are doing the ‘acting things’ a lot, you are going to believe this is true (she laughs). [Like others will believe that you are something that you are not?] I think at the beginning, maybe that’s not, but… because some people wake up every morning and say to the mirror, ‘you are very beautiful, you are the most beautiful girl in the world’, then, you will be happy and you will actually become beautiful. I think it is not like lie to yourself, but it is just being confident. Maybe at the beginning you are not going to believe that you are beautiful… like, what is this sentence? ‘Being true to yourself’, but actually doing this everyday, then that’s true, you will become, you will be confident. [So that means you can be yourself also through…] Through some lies. [So you don’t think that there is something inside you that you have to kind of discover?] No.Eastern and Western respondents also tend to interpret emotions differently. Westerners are more likely to interpret them in more impulsive terms than Easterners, who interpret them in a more institutional light. As we can see in the following extract, Sean, a Western respondent (born in Australia, but raised in England, 41 years old), feels inauthentic because he could not express his dislike of a co-worker he did not get along with:In a six months job I had before I came to Australia, I was an occupational therapist in a community. There was a girl in the administration department who was so rude. I wanted to say: ‘look darling you are so rude. It is really unpleasant talking to you. Can you just be nice? It would be just so much better and you will get more done and you will get more from me’. That’s what I should have said, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t, why? Maybe it is that sort of culture of not saying things or maybe it is me not being assertive enough. I don’t think I was being myself. Because my real self wanted to say: ‘look darling, you are not helping matters by being a complete bitch’. But I didn’t say that. I wasn’t assertive enough.In a similar type of incident, Ben, an Eastern respondent (from Ghana, 32 years old), describes an outburst he had with a co-worker who was annoying him. Unlike Sean, Ben expressed his anger to the co-worker, but he does not consider this to be a manifestation of his authentic self. For Ben, to act authentically one must control their emotions and try help others:I don’t know if that is myself or if that is not myself, but sometimes I get angry, I get upset, and I am the open type. I am the type that I can’t keep something in me, so sometimes when you make me annoyed, I just response. There is this time about this woman, in a class, that I was in Ghana. She was an older woman, a respected woman, she kept annoying me and there was one day that I couldn’t take it any longer, so I just burst up and I just… I don’t know what I said, I just… said a lot of bad things to her. The woman, she was shocked. I also felt shocked because I thought I could control myself, so that’s me… I don’t want to hide my feelings, I just want to come out with what I think when you make me annoyed, but those times, when I come out, I don’t like them, because I think it contradicts who I really am, someone who is supposed to help or care. I don’t like that aspect. You know somebody could be bossy, so he or she enjoys shouting everybody. I don’t enjoy that, but sometimes it is something that I cannot even control. Someone pushes me to the limit, and I just can’t keep that anger, and it comes out. I won’t say that is ‘me,’ I wouldn’t say that that is me. I don’t think that is a ‘true me’. [Why?] Because the true me would enjoy that experience the way I enjoy helping people instead.Unlike the two accounts from Rachel and Rani, these two last passages from Sean and Ben describe experiences of inauthenticity, where the authentic self cannot be expressed. What is important in these two passages is not their behaviour, but how they attribute their own emotions to their sense of authentic selfhood. Sean identifies his authentic self with the “impulsive” self who expresses his emotions, while Ben identifies his authentic self with the “institutional” self who is in control of his emotions. Sean feels inauthentic because he could not express his angry feelings to the co-worker, whereas Ben feels inauthentic because he could not control his outburst. Ben still hesitates about which side of himself can be attributed to his authentic self, for example, he says that he is “the open type” or that he does not want to “hide [his] feelings”, but he eventually identifies his authentic self with his institutional self.The choices that Sean and Ben make about the emotions that they attribute to their authentic selves could be motivated by their respective ethnic backgrounds. Like Rachel, Sean identifies his authentic self with a socially unacceptable emotion: anger. Consistent with his Western background, Sean’s sense of authenticity emphasizes the needs of the individual over the group and sees suppression of emotions as repressive. On the other hand, Ben reasons that since he does not enjoy being angry as much as he enjoys helping others, expressing anger is not a manifestation of authenticity. His authentic self is linked to his institutional self. Ben’s values are infused with altruism, which reflects the collective values that tend to be associated with his Eastern background. For him, suppression of emotions might not mean repression, but can foster authenticity instead.DiscussionBoth ways of interpreting authenticity, impulsive and institutional, look for self-consistency and the need to tell a coherent story to ourselves about who we are. The results section of this paper showed how Easterners and Westerners conceptualize authenticity. Easterners understand authenticity differently to Western discourses of the authentic. These alternative understandings offer viable solutions to the self-consistency problem. They present external, rather than internal, ways of conceiving the authentic self, and regulative, rather than expressive, approaches to emotions. As I mentioned earlier, Eastern societies are associated with collective and material values, while Western ones are related to individual and post-material values. These divisions in terms of values are reflected in individuals’ self-constructs. Individuals in Western societies tend to have a more independent idea of the self, whereas individuals in Eastern societies are more likely to have an interdependent one (Kitayama). An interdependent idea of the self values connectedness and conceptualizes the self in relation to others, so it can generate an institutional approach to authenticity, where the idea of the authentic self is not something that individuals search for inside themselves, but something that individuals become through their participation in social roles. This was evident in the example of Rani, whose idea of being authentic as “becoming” seemed to be an extension of her more interdependent self-construct and the need to fit in society.A regulative approach to emotions has also been associated with Easterners (Cheung and Park), on the basis of their collective values and interdependent self-constructs. For individuals from a Western background, with a more independent sense of self, as in the case of Sean, suppressing emotions tends to be seen negatively as being inauthentic, a form of repression. However, for individuals with interdependent self-constructs, this can be not only less harmful (feeling less inauthentic), but can even be beneficial because they tend to prioritize the needs of others (Le and Impett). This is evident in the example of Ben, for whom suppressing aanger does not make him feel inauthentic because he identifies his authentic self with the self that is in control of his emotions and helps others. This understanding of authenticity is aligned with the collective values of his ethnic background.In sum, ideas of authenticity seem to vary culturally according to the repertoires and values systems that inform them. Thus, even what we think might be our most intimate or individual experiences, like our experiences of authenticity and ideas of who we are, can also be socially constructed. This paper has tried to demonstrate the importance of sociology for the study of authenticity as a cultural phenomenon.ReferencesBinkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage, 2013.Cheung, Rebecca and Irene Park. “Anger Supression, Interdependent Self-Construal, and Depression among Asian American and European American College Students”. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16.4 (2010): 517–25.Chua, Amy, and Jed Rubenfeld. The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. New York: The Penguin P, 2014.Erickson, Rebecca J. When Emotion Is the Product: Self, Society, and (In)Authenticity in a Postmodern World. Ph.D. Thesis, Washington: Whasington State U, 1991.Feldman, Simon. Against Authenticity: Why You Shouldn't Be Yourself. Kentucky: Lexington Books, 2014.Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflective Authenticity Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2002.Franzese, Alexis D. To Thine Own Self Be True? An Exploration of Authenticity. Ph.D. Thesis, Durham: Duke University, 2007.———. “Authenticity: Perspectives and Experiences.” Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Eds. Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 87–101.Guignon, Charles B. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004.Hofstede, Geert, and Michael Minkov. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. USA: McGraw Hill, 2010.Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel. Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.Kitayama, Shinobu, and Hazel R. 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Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circumstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and resist gender relations and inequality between men and women in Australian society through four themes prevalent in the narratives: the kitchen, landscape, language, and sexuality. I wrote my thesis in standard Australian English and I complied with expected forms, formatting, referencing, structuring etc. My thesis also included the Buginese translations of some of Garner’s work. However, the theoretical approaches that informed my analysis cannot be separated from the personal. In the title, I use the term ‘dancing’ to indicate a dialogue with white Australian women by moving back and forth between Australian culture and Buginese culture. I use the term ‘dancing’ as an extension of Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading but employ it as a signifier of my movement between insider and outsider (of Australian feminism), that is, I extend it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. According to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, the “essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms” (83). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia add how through music, particularly the work of pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulated a way of reading imperial and postcolonial texts contrapuntally. Such a reading acknowledges the hybridity of cultures, histories and literatures, allowing the reader to move back and forth between an internal and an external standpoint of cultural references and attitudes in “an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 66). While theorising about the potential dance between Australian and Buginese feminisms in my work, I was living the dance in my day-to-day Australian university experience. Trying to accommodate the expected requirements of a PhD thesis, while at the same time ensuring that I maintained my own personal, cultural and professional dignity, that is ade’, and siri’, required some fancy footwork. Siri’ is central to my Buginese worldview and had to be positioned as such in my PhD thesis. Also, the realities that women are still marginalized and that gender inequality and disparities persist in Indonesian society become a motivation to carry out my PhD study. The opportunity to study Australian culture and literature in that country, allowed me to increase my global and local complexity as an individual, what Pieterse refers to as “ a process of hybridization” and to become as Beck terms an “actor” and “manager’’ of my life (as cited in Edmunds 1). Gaining greater autonomy and reconceptualising both masculinity and femininity, while dominant themes in Garner’s work, are also issues I address in my personal and professional goals. In other words, this study resulted in hybridized knowledge of Australian concepts of feminism and Buginese societies that offers a reference for students to understand and engage with different feminist thought. By learning how feminism is understood differently by Australians and Buginese, my Indonesian students can decide what aspects of feminist ideas from a Western perspective can be applied to Buginese culture without transgressing Buginese customs and habits.There are few Australian literary works that have been translated into Indonesian. Those that have include Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2007) and My Life is a Fake (2009), James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout (1957), Emma Darcy’s The Billionaire Bridegroom (2010) , Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), and Colleen McCullogh’s The Thorn Birds (1978). My translation of five short stories from Postcards from Surfers complemented these works and enriched the diversity of Indonesian translations of world literary works, the bulk of which tends to come from the United Kingdom, America, the Middle East, and Japan. However, actually getting through the process of PhD research followed by examination required my supervisor and I to negotiate cross-cultural terrain, academic agendas and Western expectations of what legitimate thesis writing should look like. Employing Said’s contrapuntal pedagogy and Warrior’s notion of subaltern dancing became my illegitimate methodological frame.Said points out that contrapuntal analysis means that students and teachers can cross-culturally “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (318). He adds that “we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (32). Contrapuntal is a metaphor Said derived from musical theory, meaning to counterpoint or add a rhythm or melody, in this case, Buginese and Anglo-Australian feminisms. Warrior argues for an indigenous critique of how power and knowledge is read and in doing so he writes that “the subaltern can dance, and so sometimes can the intellectual” (85). In his rereading of Spivak, he argues that subaltern and intellectual positions can meet “and in meeting, create the possibility of communication” (86). He refers to this as dancing partly because it implicitly acknowledges without silencing the voices of the subaltern (once the subaltern speaks it is no longer the subaltern, so the notion of dancing allows for communication, “a movement from subalternity to something else” (90) which can mark “a new sort of non-complicitous relationship to a family, community or class of origin” (91). By “non-complicit” Warrior means that when a member of the subaltern becomes a scholar and therefore a member of those who historically silence the subaltern, there are other methods for communicating, of moving, between political and cultural spaces that allow for a multiplicity of voices and responses. Warrior uses a traditional Osage in-losh-ka dance as an example of how he physically and intellectually interacts with multiple voices and positions:While the music plays, our usual differences, including subalternity and intellectuality, and even gender in its own way, are levelled. For those of us moving to the music, the rules change, and those who know the steps and the songs and those who can keep up with the whirl of bodies, music and colours hold nearly every advantage over station or money. The music ends, of course, but I know I take my knowledge of the dance away and into my life as a critic, and I would argue that those levelled moments remain with us after we leave the drum, change our clothes, and go back to the rest of our lives. (93)For Warrior, the dance becomes theory into practice. For me, it became not only a way to soundly and “appropriately” present my methodology and purpose, but it also became my day to day interactions, as a female Buginese scholar, with western, Australian academic and cultural worldviews and expectations.One of the biggest movements I had to justify was my use of the first person “I”, in my thesis, to signify my identity as a Buginese woman and position myself as an insider of my community with a hybrid western feminism with Australia in mind. Perrault argues that “Writing “I” has been an emancipatory project for women” (2). In the context of my PhD thesis, uttering ‘I’ confirmed my position and aims. However, this act of explicitly situating my own identity and cultural position in my research and thesis was considered one of the more illegitimate acts. In one of the examiner reports, it was stated that situating myself centrally was fraught but that I managed to avoid the pitfalls. Judy Long argues that writing in the female first person challenges patriarchal control and order (127). For me, writing in the first person was essential if I had any chance of maintaining my Buginese identity and voice, in both my thesis and in my Australian tertiary experience. As Trinh-Minh writes, “S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given permission to do so or not” (8).Van Dijk, cited in Hamilton, notes that the west and north are bound by an academic ethnocentrism and this is a particular area my own research had to negotiate. Methodologically I provided a comparative rather than a universalising perspective, engaging with middle-class, heterosexual, western, white women feminism but not privileging them. It is important for Buginese to use language discourses as a weapon to gain power, particularly because as McGlynn claims, “generally Indonesians are not particularly outspoken” (38). My research was shaped by a combination of ongoing dedication to promote women’s empowerment in the Buginese context and my role as an academic teaching English literature at the university level. I applied interpretive principles that will enable my students to see how the ideas of feminism conveyed through western literature can positively improve the quality of women’s lives and be implemented in Buginese culture without compromising our identity as Indonesians and Buginese people. At the same time, my literary translation provides a cultural comparison with Australia that allows a space for further conversations to occur. However, while attempting to negotiate western and Indonesian discourses in my thesis, I was also physically and emotionally trying to negotiate how to do this as a Muslim Buginese female PhD candidate in an Anglo-Australian academic institution. The notion of ‘dancing’ was employed as a signifier of movement between insider and outsider knowledge. Throughout the research process and my thesis I ‘danced’ with Australian feminism, traditional patriarchal Buginese society, Western academic expectations and my own emerging Indonesian feminist perspective. To ensure siri’ remained the pedagogical and ethical basis of my approach I applied Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s employment of a traditional Osage dance as a self-reflexive, embodied praxis, that is, I extended it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. The notion of ‘dance’ allows for movement, change, contact, tension, touch and distance: it means that for those who have historically been marginalised or confined, they are no longer silenced. The metaphoric act of dancing allowed me to legitimise my PhD work – it was successfully awarded – and to negotiate a western tertiary institute in Australia with my own Buginese knowledge, culture and purpose.ReferencesAshcroft., B., and P. Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 1999.Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel. Random House LLC, 2007.Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake: A NNovel. Random House LLC, 2009.Darcy, Emma. Billionaire Bridegroom 2319. Harlequin, 2010.Endang, Fransisca. "Disseminating Indonesian Postcoloniality into English Literature (a Case Study of 'Clara')." Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8.2: 2008.Edmunds, Kim. "The Impact of an Australian Higher Education on Gender Relations in Indonesia." ISANA International Conference "Student Success in International Education", 2007Garner, Helen. Postcards from Surfers. Melbourne: McPhee/Gribble, 1985.Hamilton, Deborah, Deborah Schriffrin, and Heidi E. Tannen, ed. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Victoria: Balckwll, 2001.Long, Judy. 1999. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999.McGlynn, John H. "Silent Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today." Manoa 12.1 (2000): 38-44.Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Press, 1987.Pelras, Christian. The Bugis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995.Pieterse, J.N. Globalisation as Hybridisation. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.Marshall, James V. Walkabout. London: Puffin, 1957.McCullough, C. The Thorn Birds Sydney: Harper Collins, 1978.Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.Novera, Isvet Amri. "Indonesian Postgraduate Students Studying in Australia: An Examination of Their Academic, Social and Cultural Experiences." International Education Journal 5.4 (2004): 475-487.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Book, 1993. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois, 1988. 271-313.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.Warrior, Robert. ""The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 85-94.

The Atlas of Living Costa Rica (www.crbio.cr) is a biodiversity data portal based on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and managed by the Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio) and the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio). It currently shares nearly eight million occurrence records and more than 5000 species pages about Costa Rican vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, nematodes, plants, and fungi. These pages contain information elements pertaining to, for instance, morphological descriptions, distribution, habitat, conservation status, management, nomenclature, and multimedia (Vargas et al. 2018). In order to fully integrate species pages into the ALA architecture, CRBio is working in the adoption of the Biodiversity Information Explorer (BIE), an ALA module which manages taxonomic and species contents by integrating global resources like EOL or Wikipedia. This adoption includes the required modifications to use the data model of the Plinian Core (https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore), a TDWG draft standard registered as an IPT extension, oriented to share species level information from local and regional sources too (Pando 2018). The advancement of Plinian Core has been lead by INBio, the Spanish Node of GBIF (GBIF Spain), the University of Granada (UG, Spain), the Alexander von Humboldt Institute (IAvH, Colombia), the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio, Mexico) and the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil). This group reviewed the existing data standards to reuse as many elements as possible and avoid redundancy. Besides the aforementioned, Plinian Core is currently used by other institutions like the Chilean Ministry of Environment. Plinian Core was designed to be easy to use, self-contained, able to support data integration from multiple databases, and having the ability to handle different levels of granularity. These requirements are the result of actual needs from content creators that, through an iterative process, have yielded a more complete and flexible exchange standard to aggregate biological and non-biological species information, used by others like IBIN, the Indian Bioresource Information Network (Saran et al. 2018). Plinian Core aims to be a component in producing multiple species catalogues developed under specific constraints to serve specific purposes, instead of focusing on a unified platform while facilitating consistent aggregation and re-utilization of information (GBIF.org 2015). We will present our implementation of the BIE module in the Atlas of Living Costa Rica, following the documented best practices when sharing species level information using Plinian Core. Our demonstration will detail our lessons learned from merging the aforementioned 5000 species pages provided by INBio with several thousand of species pages assembled from the information provided by the World Flora Online through the aggregation of different Flora resources, like Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica (Hammel et al. 2003) that provides 5,000 plants descriptions and 350 vernacular names (http://www.worldfloraonline.org/resource?query=Manual+de+Plantas+de+Costa+Rica).

Introduction: The Creative Arts and Regional Well-BeingThe relationship between regionalism, well-being, and the creative arts has enjoined significant attention from community activists, commercial entrepreneurs, policy analysts, artists, and researchers over recent years (Australia Council for the Arts, “Living Culture”; Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia;” Drummond, Keane, and West; Elg; Warren, and West; Woodward, Bremner, and Cahalan). Underpinning most of the activity and research in this area is the understanding (occasionally bordering on an un-critical presumption) that the creative arts make a positive contribution to regional well-being. Commenting on the Live. Love. Life. creative-arts wellness festival in Daylesford, Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas (Member of Parliament for the state seat of Macedon) stated that the festival will “reinforce Daylesford and the Macedon Ranges’ status as one of the nation’s leading wellness destinations” (Elg). For Thomas, it would appear that the linkage of the creative arts to regional well-being is never in doubt; which is to say, always already available for reinforcement. According to university-based researchers Margaret Woodward, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan, writing in a more scholarly and critical register, “there is a growing body of research which shows that thriving creative industries and cultural activities are crucial for the health and vitality of a region and its communities” (3). Qualifying this, they add that: “Achieving high levels of community well being through thriving creative activity is not however without its challenges in regional Australia” (3). Similarly, Rozaline Drummond, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West present their work as a test of the efficacy of the creative arts in aiding regional well-being: The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac [Victoria] provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. (n.p.)Deleuzean philosophy aside, quantitative data indicates that people in regional Australia are increasingly optimistic about the positive impact of the creative arts on their well-being. In 2016, 57% believed the arts impacted their sense of well-being and happiness, up from 52% in 2013 (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Given this article’s emphasis on place and well-being in relation to located creative-arts production, it is worth citing another dataset from the same Australia Council for the Arts publication, which details the “Location of Professional Artists”:There continues to be a concentration of artists in urban areas. Three quarters (74%) live in cities, compared to two thirds of the Australian population. This urban concentration […] may in part be related to concentration of cultural infrastructure in cities.1 in 6 Australian artists live in regional cities or towns (16%) and around 1 in 10 live in rural, remote or very remote areas (11%). (n.p.)Regional artists are a minority voice in the Australian creative arts. But the ways in which a minority voice is constructed, and the (potential) impact a minoritarian position has within the wider debate about regional well-being and the creative arts, requires careful unpacking. Ironically, creative artists themselves have been relatively neglected actors in this space. Working with Tony Birch’s short story, “The Red House”, as a neglected text of regionalism, this article exposes oversights in current understandings of the connection between well-being and regionalism. The Voice of the Regional Artist and “Resistant Speech” It is important to recognise that the “concentration of artists in urban areas” may sometimes lead to situations where non-regional artists, in the undoubtedly well-meaning pursuit of regional well-being, drown out the voices of regional artists in regional places (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Drummond, Keane, and West, all city-based artists, show sensitivity to this problem in their observation that: “It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a [regional] community.” Certainly, regional artists and communities should take the lead in the development of regional well-being through the creative arts. The problem of (not) speaking for the other is, however, not so easily dealt with (Spivak). While urban artists might adopt the strategy of consciously allowing regional artists a voice, making such allowance could itself be viewed as a play of privilege and power by the city-based practitioner, resourced by their greater “concentration of cultural infrastructure” (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). It is notoriously difficult to give the slip to the relatively invisible operations of entitlement. Furthermore, even if the regional artist is given a voice, there are many different ways of being heard or not heard. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between “speaking” and “talking” is useful here. Discussing “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak notes that: “It was not about talking. It was about: when the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech. That’s what it means.” In this crucial move, Spivak refines understanding of the issues at stake around the minoritarian position of regional artists. It is not enough for regional artists merely to “talk”; rather, they must be heard with the full impact of “resistant speech” (Lahiri). Obviously, what Spivak means by the “infrastructure” of “resistant speech” differs from the meaning the word “infrastructure” has in the Australia Council for the Arts publication referred to above, which employs the term as part of a governmental and technocratic discourse (“The Arts in Regional Australia”). The distance separating these two usages of “infrastructure” indicates the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. Working with Spivak, this article’s focus is on the gap or failing in the infrastructure of qualitative research that has led to the relative neglect of Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” as a significant text of regionalism. The Australia Council for the Arts, with its quantitative and empirical methodology, would not count Birch as a regional writer (to the best of the author’s knowledge, Birch lives and works in Melbourne). Its definition of a regional artist undermines the possibilities of a qualitative research infrastructure. However, recognizing the powerful regional concerns within a text by a primarily city-based writer like Birch is a key move, not only in expanding the definition of who counts as a minoritarian regional writer, but in giving voice to the “resistant speech” of women and children, subalterns on Spivak’s terms, within the regional-urban flux (Lahiri). The aim of this article is to give voice to Tony Birch as a regional writer, at least insofar as he is the author of “The Red House”, while also addressing the issue of well-being (as linked to the curse of domestic violence), through attention to Birch’s artistic re-creation of regionalism. In this way, working with Spivak’s reference to “infrastructure,” the aim is to nurture the growth of a research infrastructure open to a more productive engagement with regionalism, which begins by nuancing the definition of regional. It is not that regional artists, defined either by their demography or (as with Birch) by their creative concerns, are not “talking” rather, what they are saying is not being recognised in Spivak’s strong sense of “speaking”. Indeed, the very fact that Birch is not a regional writer in an empirical sense, and that, as will be explored later in this article, “The Red House” is not even primarily set in a regional location, has at least one important consequence. Potentially, it increases the value of Birch’s short story to an engagement with regionalism, given that “The Red House” unfolds regionalism as a concept always already in productive dialogue with other frameworks of place (such as the urban and the international). To the extent that Birch is a city-based writer of regionalism, and thus on the (urban) margin of the (regional) margin, he enlivens an exquisite position of minoritarian power. Furthermore, “The Red House” contains a diversity of acute insights into the nexus of regionalism and well-being that, to date, critics have overlooked. “The Red House” and the Well-Being of Places Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to creative work that itself dramatises and interrogates the issue of regional well-being. Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” (2006), from his collection of linked stories (which is sometimes referred to as a novel) Shadowboxing, is a particularly interesting candidate to fill this gap in the literature, given how delicately it ranges across, and problematises, the division between the urban and the regional.“The Red House” is the opening story of Shadowboxing. Covering a period of close to a decade, loosely overlapping with the 1960s, and set in different parts of Victoria and Melbourne, it is told in the voice of Michael, who recounts the story of a peripatetic family under stress and struggling to survive. The first sentence reads: “We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis” (1). The first page also establishes the place-based coordinates of the story: “In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood” (1). Birch’s interrogation of regionalism will henceforth operate largely along the Clunes-Fitzroy axis. Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne while Clunes is a small regional town (present population: approximately 2000) about 140 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Clunes). A flashback section of three pages or so, early on in the story, fills in the events leading up to the return to Melbourne after May’s death in Clunes. Apart from this, the story has a linear structure. The various spatial shifts of “The Red House”, both within Melbourne and between Clunes and Melbourne, are all triggered by threats against, or the pursuit of, multiple modes of well-being. The first move reflects the promise of a fresh romantic union: “It was only after he [Michael’s father] had met my mother and moved with her to my [maternal] grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life” (4–5). This move from Fitzroy to Carlton is followed by a much bigger one: Carlton to Clunes. Implicated in this move are at least two modes of well-being: “The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from [his] asthma” (5); however, “My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink” (5). The context is the husband’s assault of “his six months’ pregnant wife” with “a straight right on the end of her nose” (5). The decision to move to Clunes is made by Michael’s mother: “He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time […]. They appeared happy” (6). This part of “The Red House” unpacks the complexities of how well-being and (physical and mental) health are linked in a social matrix; a physical ailment (asthma) elides an addiction to alcohol, until a doctor’s discourse (validated by the authority of a medical establishment) is subverted by the subalternate voice of Michael’s grandmother. This passage also dramatises the abject scenario of a victim (Michael’s mother) attending to the well-being of her persecutor (Michael’s father) by moving to Clunes “for both their sakes” (6).Subsequently, May is born in Clunes, “a ‘special baby’. She was magical even…” (6). Indeed, “My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her” (6). Just before what would have been her second birthday, May dies. “My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born” (6). This is the most powerful enduring connection of Michael’s family to regional Clunes. Significantly, well-being (in the sense of survival and the rebuilding of happiness after the tragic death of a daughter) is dispersed differently, through place, by mother and father, along gendered lines. While the mother wants her daughter’s birthplace and place of death to coincide, the father wants to possess his daughter, almost as if she were an object, by returning her to the city for burial. (Space restrictions preclude further exploration here of the many issues raised by May’s death, including those around the gendered nexus between well-being [happiness] and the proximity or otherwise to a child’s burial place.) After May’s death, Michael’s father’s behaviour deteriorates once more. The domestic violence continues: “It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him […]. She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs” (7). The decision to return to Melbourne is made by Michael’s father, against his wife’s wishes: And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘Fuck all this fresh-air bullshit, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm. ‘We’re fucken going. That’s it. We’re going.’ And that was it.She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city. (7)In this passage, well-being (even if only imagined rather than real) is explicitly linked to place. Shortly afterwards, the family moves into the red house, where they will remain. The flashback section of the text has already sketched out the chain of events that leads to the return to the city, while also commenting on the agency Michael’s mother exercises in dealing with what, to her, is an unwelcome situation: “Mum […] had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into” (4). Specifically, Michael’s mother turns her Fitzroy house into the regional house left behind in Clunes. Under her influence, “It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes” (11). Again: she brings a portrait of May, along with assorted baby belongings, into the Fitzroy house, keeping this secret from her husband. Thus, Michael’s mother infiltrates regional place into urban place as a strategy of (subalternate) well-being. In summary, “The Red House” unpacks well-being as an expansive category shaped by domestic violence, in a negative sense, but also more positively by the actuality or promise of happiness. It also interrogates the fine-grained links between well-being in its incarnations as medical and emotional health. At the same time, it maps the rise and fall of well-being against a human geography of regional and urban places, refusing any simplistic connection of place to well-being (more faintly, there is even the problematising presence of international place, in the character of the Italian landlord, Mr Carboni, and the reference to “the local Italian community [2]). Thus, the text’s regionalism suggests a strategic model, reliant on human intervention in the (re-)creation of place; this is most evident in Michael’s mother’s actions. “The Red House” rewards interpretation as a text of how regional place (Clunes) is re-made in urban place (Fitzroy) through the rehabilitation of a house in the interests of well-being. Well-Being and Domestic Violence across Places It is hard to imagine a greater threat to the well-being of women and children than domestic violence. This makes it all the more surprising that “The Red House” is one of relatively few texts (to the author’s knowledge) to offer a detailed outline of the territory of well-being, in its many forms stretching from the health-based to the emotional, while also including a direct and unflinching consideration of domestic violence. (One cognate text is Kathryn Heyman’s novel The Breaking, which merges medical disability and domestic violence within a broader consideration of regional well-being.) Even more unusual is the way Birch’s story of well-being and domestic violence is mapped in relation to regional and non-regional places. “The Red House” is rare and valuable for its triangulation of well-being, domestic violence, and place; above all, in its refusal to resort to any comforting notion that regional places have essential qualities that make them necessarily better for well-being than the experience of cities. This is perhaps the meaning of the colour of the red house, a colour Michael’s father hates. According to a local know-all, Emu Bailey, the red was originally a form of protest by Ettie Rogers, “‘some sort of communist’” (10). “‘Most everyone around here back then was DLP [Democratic Labour Party]. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red’” (10). When Michael’s mother responds to her husband’s injunction to re-paint the house “‘any colour but that fucken red’” (13) by preparing to re-paint it, subversively, “a deep red splash of colour” (19) it is not difficult to discern a silent protest, passed down from woman to woman, against the domestic violence suffered by Michael and his mother. Indeed, Birch comes very close to describing the red of the house as blood-like, labelling it “a rich congealed red” (2). “Congealed” is often used to describe blood. In this way, through a colour that evokes the body, a house becomes a visible and metaphorical protest against the bodily violence (but also emotional and mental torment) that is domestic violence. As Meg Mundell argues, “the body is integral to how literary sense of place is produced” (8). This bodily, coloured protest folds back into the special sort of place the Fitzroy home becomes. If Michael’s mother cannot keep living in Clunes, she can at least paint her city house red. Perhaps attesting to the success of this female protest, there is, towards the end of “The Red House”, a fascinating moment when, as if influenced by the domestic circumstances of transplanted place (from regional Clunes) created by Michael’s mother, domestic violence threatens, but is thwarted. Michael’s mother has just told her husband that she is going to have another baby: “He spun around and moved towards her. I thought that maybe he was going to hit her. But he didn’t. He stopped in front of her. They were toe to toe” (17). Place and (pregnant) body, in an intensified combination (or even, to riff on Spivak’s terminology, as an “infrastructure”), allow the subaltern to “speak” against her oppression. Conclusion: Re-Defining Regionalism through the Literary Creative Arts Tony Birch’s “The Red House” re-creates the regional as something other than a pre-determined place. Regionalism is “activated,” in a strategic mode, within the flux of the urban and the regional. This is particularly evident in the actions of Michael’s mother. She preserves her well-being (located in Clunes, as it were, where her daughter is buried) even after she is forced by her husband to return to Melbourne (the place she left to escape from his domestic violence). The picture of May acts as a talisman of well-being (aptly, given Clunes is described by Michael as “a town where old superstitions held sway over logic” [6]), which Michael’s mother smuggles from regional Clunes into her Melbourne house. “The Red House” is thus a vital literary rejoinder to the conceptualisation of well-being, and regional areas employed by government bodies and commercial entities, which instrumentalizes a binary opposition of the regional/non-regional. By extension, it contests the naïve linkage of regional place to well-being through a nuanced investigation into the complex links between place (regional, urban, even international) and multi-faceted well-being. Birch’s story is a valuable, fine-grained creative analysis of well-being (extending from happiness, comfort and security through to what might be called the “ill-being” of domestic violence), which is matched to an equally fine-grained engagement with multiple modalities of place. It challenges the reader to creatively re-think how regionalism and well-being might align. References Australia Council for the Arts. “Living Culture: First Nations Arts Participation and Wellbeing.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/>.———. “The Arts in Regional Australia: A Research Summary.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/regional-arts-summary/>.Birch, Tony. “The Red House.” Shadowboxing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2006. 1–19. Clunes, Victoria. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunes,_Victoria>.Drummond, Rozalind, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West. “Zones of Practice: Embodiment and Creative Arts Research.” M/C Journal 15.4 (2012). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/528>.Elg, Hayley. “New Wellness Festival for Daylesford.” The Advocate 22 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/5182322/the-live-love-life-festival-is-coming-to-daylesford-this-november/>.Heyman, Kathryn. “When I First Wrote about Domestic Violence, No One Talked about It. Now the Shame has Lifted.” The Guardian. 21 May 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/when-i-first-wrote-about-domestic-violence-no-one-talked-about-it-now-the-shame-has-lifted>.Lahiri, Bulan. “In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.” The Hindu 5 Feb. 2011. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.thehindu.com/books/In-Conversation-Speaking-to-Spivak/article15130635.ece>.Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.1 (2018): 1–17. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12375>.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 66–111. Warren, Brad, and Patrick West. “From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo.” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 5.2 (2013): 1–15. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss2/21/>.Woodward, Margaret, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan. “Defining the Geography of Creativity in a Regional Australian University.” Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference: Region and Isolation: The Changing Function of Art & Design Education within Diasporic Cultures and Borderless Communities. Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2012. Perth: Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2012: 1–13. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/defining-the-geography-of-creativity-in-a-regional-australian-university/>.

IntroductionI work at a regional campus of La Trobe University, Australia. More precisely, I work at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University. At Bendigo, we are often annoyed when referred to and addressed as ‘regional’ students and staff. Really, we should not be. After all, Bendigo campus is an outpost of La Trobe’s metropolitan base. It is funded, run, and directed from Bundoora (Melbourne). The word ‘regional’ simply describes the situation. A region is an “administrative division of a city or a district [… or …] a country” (Brown 2528). And the Latin etymology of region (regio, regere) includes “direction, line”, and “rule” (Kidd 208, 589). Just as the Bendigo campus of La Trobe is a satellite of the metropolitan campus, the town of Bendigo is an outpost of Melbourne. So, when we are addressed and interpellated (Althusser 48) as regional, it is a reminder of the ongoing fact that Australia is (still) a colony, an outpost of empire, a country organised on the colonial model. From central administrative hubs, spokes of communication, and transportation spread to the outposts. When Bendigo students and staff are addressed as regional, in a way we are also being addressed as colonial.In this article, the terms ‘region’ and ‘regional’ are deployed as inextricably associated with the Australian version of colonialism. In Australia, in the central metropolitan hubs, where the colonial project is at its most comprehensive, it is hard to see what remains, to see what has escaped that project. The aim of this article is to explore how different aspects of the country escape the totalising project of Australian colonialism. This exploration is undertaken primarily through a discussion of the ways in which some places on this continent remain not regional (and thus, not colonial) how they keep the metropolis at bay, and how they, thus, keep Europe at bay. This discussion includes a general overview of the Australian colonial project, particularly as it pertains to First Nations Peoples, their knowledge and philosophies, and the continent’s unique ecologies. Then the article becomes more speculative, imagining different ways of seeing and experiencing time and place in this country, ways of seeing the remains and refuges of pre-1788, not-regional, and not-colonial Australia. In these remains and refuges, there persist the flourishing and radical difference of this continent’s ecologies and, not surprisingly, the radical suitedness of tens of thousands of years of First Nations Peoples’ culture and thinking to that ecology, as Country. In what remains not regional, I argue, are answers to the question: How will we live here in the Anthropocene?A Totalising ProjectSince 1788, in the face of the ongoing presence and resistance of First Nations cultures, and the continent’s radically unique ecologies, the Australian colonial project has been to convert the continent into a region of Europe. As such, the imposed political, administrative, scientific, and economic institutions are largely European. This is also so, to a lesser extent, of social and cultural institutions. While the continent is not Europe geologically, the notion of the Anthropocene suggests that this is changing (Crutzen and Stoermer). This article does not resummarise the vast body of scholarship on the effects of colonisation, from genocide to missionary charity, to the creation of bureaucratic and comprador classes, and so on. Suffice to say that the different valences of colonisation—from outright malevolence to misguided benevolence–produce similar and common effects. As such, what we experience in metropolitan and regional Australia, is chillingly similar to what people experience in London. Chilling, because this experience demonstrates how the effects of the project tend towards the total.To clarify, when I use the name ‘Australia’ I understand it as the continent’s European name. When I use the term ‘Europe’ or ‘European’, I refer to both the European continent and to the reach and scope of the various colonial and imperial projects of European nations. I take this approach because I think it is necessary to recognise their global effects and loads. In Australia, this load has been evident and present for more than two centuries. On one hand, it is evident in the social, cultural, and political institutions that come with colonisation. On another, it is evident in the environmental impacts of colonisation: impacts that are severely compounded in Australia. In relation to this, there is vital, ongoing scholarship that explores the fact that, ecologically, Australia is a radically different place, and which discusses the ways in which European scientific, aesthetic, and agricultural assumptions, and the associated naturalised and generic understandings of ‘nature’, have grounded activities that have radically transformed the continent’s biosphere. To name but a few, Tim Flannery (Eaters, “Ecosystems”) and Stephen Pyne, respectively, examine the radical difference of this continent’s ecology, geology, climate, and fire regimes. Sylvia Hallam, Bill Gammage, and Bruce Pascoe (“Bolt”, Emu) explore the relationships of First Nations Peoples with that ecology, climate, and fire before 1788, and the European blindness to the complexity of these relationships. For instance, William Lines quotes the strikingly contradictory observations of the colonial surveyor, Thomas Mitchell, where the land is simultaneously “populous” and “without inhabitants” and “ready for the immediate reception of civilised man” and European pastoralism (Mitchell qtd. in Lines 71). Flannery (Eaters) and Tim Low (Feral, New) discuss the impacts of introduced agricultural practices, exotic animals, and plants. Tom Griffiths tells the story of ‘Improving’ and ‘Acclimatisation Societies’, whose explicit aims were to convert Australian lands into European lands (32–48). The notion of ‘keeping Europe at bay’ is a response to the colonial assumptions, practices, and impositions highlighted by these writers.The project of converting this continent and hundreds of First Nations Countries into a region of Europe, ‘Australia’, is, in ambition, a totalising one. From the strange flag-plantings, invocations and incantations claiming ownership and dominion, to legalistic conceptions such as terra nullius, the aim has been to speak, to declare, to interpellate the country as European. What is not European, must be made European. What cannot be made European is either (un)seen in a way which diminishes or denies its existence, or must be made not to exist. These are difficult things to do: to not see, to unsee, or to eradicate.One of the first acts of administrative division (direction and rule) in the Port Phillip colony (now known as Victoria) was that of designating four regional Aboriginal Protectorates. Edward Stone Parker was appointed Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Loddon District, a district which persists today for many state and local government instrumentalities as the Loddon-Mallee region. In the 1840s, Parker experienced the difficulty described above, in attempting to ‘make European’ the Dja Dja Wurrung people. As part of Parker’s goal of Christianising Dja Dja Wurrung people, he sought to learn their language. Bain Attwood records his frustration:[Parker] remarked in July 1842. ‘For physical objects and their attributes, the language readily supplies equivalent terms, but for the metaphysical, so far I have been able to discover scarcely any’. A few years later Parker simply despaired that this work of translation could be undertaken. ‘What can be done’, he complained, ‘with a people whose language knows no such terms as holiness, justice, righteousness, sin, guilt, repentance, redemption, pardon, peace, and c., and to whose minds the ideas conveyed by those words are utterly foreign and inexplicable?’ (Attwood 125)The assumption here is that values and concepts that are ‘untranslatable’ into European understandings mark an absence of such value and concept. Such assumptions are evident in attempts to convince, cajole, or coerce First Nations Peoples into abandoning traditional cultural and custodial relationships with Country in favour of individual private property ownership. The desire to maintain relationships with Country are described by conservative political figures such as Tony Abbott as “lifestyle choices” (Medhora), effectively declaring them non-existent. In addition, processes designed to recognise First Nations relationships to Country are procedurally frustrated. Examples of this are the bizarre decisions made in 2018 and 2019 by Nigel Scullion, the then Indigenous Affairs Minister, to fund objections to land claims from funds designated to alleviate Indigenous disadvantage and to refuse to grant land rights claims even when procedural obstacles have been cleared (Allam). In Australia, given that First Nations social, cultural, and political life is seamlessly interwoven with the environment, ecology, the land–Country, and that the colonial project has always been, and still is, a totalising one, it is a project which aims to sever the connections to place of First Nations Peoples. Concomitantly, when the connections cannot be severed, the people must be either converted, dismissed, or erased.This project, no matter how brutal and relentless, however, has not achieved totality.What Remains Not Regional? If colonisation is a totalising project, and regional Australia stands as evidence of this project’s ongoing push, then what remains not regional, or untouched by the colonial? What escapes the administrative, the institutional, the ecological, the incantatory, and the interpellative reach of the regional? I think that despite this reach, there are such remains. The frustration, the anger, and antipathy of Parker, Abbott, and Scullion bear this out. Their project is unfinished and the resistance to it infuriates. I think that, in Australia, the different ways in which pre-1788 modes of life persist are modes of life which can be said to be ‘keeping Europe at bay’.In Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Deborah Bird Rose compares Western/European conceptualisations of time, with those of the people living in the communities around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory. Rose describes Western constructions of time as characterised by disjunction (for example, the ‘birth’ of philosophy, the beginnings of Christianity) and by irreversible sequence (for example, concepts of telos, apocalypse, and progress). These constructions have become so naturalised as to carry a “seemingly commonsensical orientation toward the future” (15). Orientation, in an Australian society “built on destruction, enables regimes of violence to continue their work while claiming the moral ground of making a better future” (15). Such an orientation “enables us to turn our backs on the current social facts of pain, damage, destruction and despair which exist in the present, but which we will only acknowledge as our past” (17).In contrast to this ‘future vision’, Rose describes what she calls the ‘canonical’ time-space conceptualisation of the Victoria River people (55). Here, rather than a temporal extension into an empty future, orientation is towards living, peopled, and grounded origins, with the emphasis on the plural, rather than a single point of origin or disjunction:We here now, meaning we here in a shared present, are distinct from the people of the early days by the fact that they preceded us and made our lives possible. We are the ‘behind mob’—those who come after. The future is the domain of those who come after us. They are referred to as […] those ‘behind us’. (55)By way of illustration, when we walk into a sheep paddock, even if we are going somewhere (even the future), we are also irrevocably walking behind ancestors, predecessor ecologies, previous effects. The paddock, is how it is, after about 65,000 years of occupation, custodianship, and management, after European surveyors, squatters, frontier conflict and violence, the radical transformation of the country, the destruction of the systems that came before. Everything there, as Freya Mathews would put it, is of “the given” (“Becoming” 254, “Old” 127). We are coming up behind. That paddock is the past and present, and what happens next is irrevocably shaped by it. We cannot walk away from it.What remains not regional is there in front of us. Country, language, and knowledge remain in the sheep paddock, coexisting with everyone and everything else that everyone in this country follows (including the colonial and the regional). It is not gone. We have to learn how to see it.By the Fox or the Little EagleFigure 1: A Scatter of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Feathers at Wehla. Image Credit: Terry Eyssens.As a way of elaborating on this, I will tell you about a small, eight hectare, patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Depending on the day, or the season, or your reason, it could take fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other or it might take four hours, from the time you start walking, to the time when you get back to where you started. At this place, I found a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers (Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo—Cacatua galerita). There was no body, just the feathers, but it was clear that the Cockatoo had died, had been caught by something, for food. The scatter was beautiful. The feathers, their sulphur highlights, were lying on yellow-brown, creamy, dry grass. I dwelled on the scatter. I looked. I looked around. I walked around. I scanned the horizon and squinted at the sky. And I wondered, what happened.This small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country is in an area now known as Wehla. In the Dja Dja Wurrung and many other Victorian languages, ‘Wehla’ (and variants of this word) is a name for the Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula). In the time I spend there/here, I see all kinds of animals. Of these, two are particularly involved in this story. One is the Fox (Vulpes vulpes), which I usually see just the back of, going away. They are never surprised. They know, or seem to know, where everyone is. They have a trot, a purposeful, cocky trot, whether they are going away because of me or whether they are going somewhere for their own good reasons. Another animal I see often is the Little Eagle (Hieraaetus morphnoides). It is a half to two-thirds the size of a Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax). It soars impressively. Sometimes I mistake a Little Eagle for a Wedge-tail, until I get a better look and realise that it is not quite that big. I am not sure where the Little Eagle’s nest is but it must be close by.I wondered about this scatter of White Cockatoo feathers. I wondered, was the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers by the Fox or by the Little Eagle? This could be just a cute thought experiment. But I think the question matters because it provokes thinking about what is regional and what remains not regional. The Fox is absolutely imperial. It is introduced and widespread. Low describes it as among Australia’s “greatest agent[s] of extinction” (124). It is part of the colonisation of this place, down to this small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Where the Fox is, colonisation, and everything that goes with it, remains, and maintains. So, that scatter of feathers could be a colonial, regional happening. Or maybe it is something that remains not regional, not colonial. Maybe the scatter is something that escapes the regional. The Little Eagles and the Cockatoos, who were here before colonisation, and their dance (a dance of death for the Cockatoo, a dance of life for the Little Eagle), is maybe something that remains not regional.But, so what if the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers, this few square metres of wind-blown matter, is not regional? Well, if it is ‘not regional’, then, if Australia is to become something other than a colony, we have to look for these things that are not regional, that are not colonial, that are not imperial. Maybe if we start with a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers that was by the Little Eagle, and then build outwards again, we might start to notice more things that are not regional, that still somehow escape. For example, the persistence of First Nations modes of land custodianship and First Nations understandings of time. Then, taking care not to fetishise First Nations philosophies and cultures, take the time and care to recognise the associations of all of those things with simply, the places themselves, like a patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which is now known as Wehla. Instead of understanding that place as something that is just part of the former Aboriginal Protectorate of Loddon or of the Loddon Mallee region of Victoria, it is Wehla.The beginning of decolonisation is deregionalisation. Every time we recognise the not regional (which is hopefully, eventually, articulated in a more positive sense than ‘not regional’), and just say something like ‘Wehla’, we can start to keep Europe at bay. Europe’s done enough.seeing and SeeingChina Miéville’s The City and The City (2009) is set in a place, in which the citizens of two cities live. The cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same space, are culturally and politically different. Their relationship to each other is similar to that of border-sharing Cold War states. Citizens of the two cities are forbidden to interact with each other. This prohibition is radically policed. Even though the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma live in adjoining buildings, share roads, and walk the same streets, they are forbidden to see each other. The populations of each city grow up learning how to see what is permitted and to not see, or unsee, the forbidden other (14).I think that seeing a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers and wondering if it was by the Fox or by the Little Eagle is akin to the different practices of seeing and not seeing in Besźel and Ul Qoma. The scatter of feathers is regional and colonial and, equally, it is not. Two countries occupy the same space. Australia and a continent with its hundreds of Countries. What remains not regional is what is given and Seen as such. Understanding ourselves as walking behind everything that has gone before us enables this. As such, it is possible to see the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers as by the Fox, as happening in ‘regional Australia’, as thus characterised by around 200 years of carnage, where the success of one species comes at the expense of countless others. On the other hand, it is possible to See the feathers as by the Little Eagles, and as happening on a small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, as a dance that has been happening for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It is a way of keeping Europe at bay.I think these Cockatoo feathers are a form of address. They are capable of interpellating something other than the regional, the colonial, and the imperial. A story of feathers, Foxes, and Little Eagles can remind us of our ‘behindness’, and evoke, and invoke, and exemplify ways of seeing and engaging with where we live that are tens of thousands of years old. This is both an act of the imagination and a practice of Seeing what is really there. When we learn to see the remains and refuges, the persistence of the not regional, we might also begin to learn how to live here in the Anthropocene. But, Anthropocene or no Anthropocene, we have to learn how to live here anyway.References Allam, Lorena. “Aboriginal Land Rights Claims Unresolved Despite All-Clear from Independent Review.” The Guardian 29 Mar. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/29/aboriginal-land-rights-claims-unresolved-despite-all-clear-from-independent-review>.Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” On Ideology. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, [1971] 2008.Attwood, Bain. The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers and the Protectors. Clayton: Monash UP, 2017.Brown, Lesley. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles: Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.Crutzen, Paul, J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18.Flannery, Timothy F. “The Fate of Empire in Low- and High-Energy Ecosystems.” Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Eds. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin. Edinburgh: Keele UP, 1997. 46–59.———. The Future Eaters. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1994.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.Griffiths, Tom. Forests of Ash. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Hallam, Sylvia. Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia. Rev. ed. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2014.Kidd, D.A. Collins Gem Latin-English, English-Latin Dictionary. London: Collins, 1980.Lines, William. Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2003.———. Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1999.Mathews, Freya. “Becoming Native: An Ethos of Countermodernity II.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 243–71.———. “Letting the World Grow Old: An Ethos of Countermodernity.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 119–37.Medhora, Shalailah. “Remote Communities Are Lifestyle Choices, Says Tony Abbott.” The Guardian 10 Mar. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/10/remote-communities-are-lifestyle-choices-says-tony-abbott>.Miéville, China. The City and the City. London: Pan MacMillan, 2009.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.———. “Andrew Bolt’s Disappointment.” Griffith Review 36 (Winter 2012): 226–33.Pyne, Stephen. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992.Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2004.

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References ABC. “A Jihad for Love.” Life Matters (Radio National), 21 Feb. 2008. 11 March 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2167874.htm >.Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php >.Aly, Anne, and David Walker. “Veiled Threats: Recurrent Anxieties in Australia.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27.2 (2007): 203-14.Brasted, Howard.V. “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000.” Muslim Communities in Australia. Eds. Abdullah Saeed and Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. Washington, 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html >.Charney, Evan. “Political Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and the Public Sphere.” The American Political Science Review 92.1 (1998): 97- 111.Costello, Peter. “Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It.” Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2006/004.htm &pageID=05&min=phc&Year=2006&DocType=1 >.Dallmayr, Fred. “Rethinking Secularism.” The Review of Politics 61.4 (1999): 715-36.Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. “‘War on Terrorism’ as Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualisation of G. W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html >.Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 < http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf >.Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

‘Every space has become ad space’. Steve Hayden, Wired Magazine, May 2003. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) dictum that media technologies constitute a sensory extension of the body shares a conceptual affinity with Ernst Jünger’s notion of ‘“organic construction” [which] indicates [a] synergy between man and machine’ and Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the mimetic correspondence between the organic and the inorganic, between human and non-human forms (Bolz, 2002: 19). The logo or brand is co-extensive with various media of communication – billboards, TV advertisements, fashion labels, book spines, mobile phones, etc. Often the logo is interchangeable with the product itself or a way or life. Since all social relations are mediated, whether by communications technologies or architectonic forms ranging from corporate buildings to sporting grounds to family living rooms, it follows that there can be no outside for sociality. The social is and always has been in a mutually determining relationship with mediating forms. It is in this sense that there is no outside. Such an idea has become a refrain amongst various contemporary media theorists. Here’s a sample: There is no outside position anymore, nor is this perceived as something desirable. (Lovink, 2002a: 4) Both “us” and “them” (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all always situated in this same virtual geography. There’s no outside …. There is nothing outside the vector. (Wark, 2002: 316) There is no more outside. The critique of information is in the information itself. (Lash, 2002: 220) In declaring a universality for media culture and information flows, all of the above statements acknowledge the political and conceptual failure of assuming a critical position outside socio-technically constituted relations. Similarly, they recognise the problems inherent in the “ideology critique” of the Frankfurt School who, in their distinction between “truth” and “false-consciousness”, claimed a sort of absolute knowledge for the critic that transcended the field of ideology as it is produced by the culture industry. Althusser’s more complex conception of ideology, material practices and subject formation nevertheless also fell prey to the pretence of historical materialism as an autonomous “science” that is able to determine the totality, albeit fragmented, of lived social relations. One of the key failings of ideology critique, then, is its incapacity to account for the ways in which the critic, theorist or intellectual is implicated in the operations of ideology. That is, such approaches displace the reflexivity and power relationships between epistemology, ontology and their constitution as material practices within socio-political institutions and historical constellations, which in turn are the settings for the formation of ideology. Scott Lash abandons the term ideology altogether due to its conceptual legacies within German dialectics and French post-structuralist aporetics, both of which ‘are based in a fundamental dualism, a fundamental binary, of the two types of reason. One speaks of grounding and reconciliation, the other of unbridgeability …. Both presume a sphere of transcendence’ (Lash, 2002: 8). Such assertions can be made at a general level concerning these diverse and often conflicting approaches when they are reduced to categories for the purpose of a polemic. However, the work of “post-structuralists” such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and the work of German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann is clearly amenable to the task of critique within information societies (see Rossiter, 2003). Indeed, Lash draws on such theorists in assembling his critical dispositif for the information age. More concretely, Lash (2002: 9) advances his case for a new mode of critique by noting the socio-technical and historical shift from ‘constitutive dualisms of the era of the national manufacturing society’ to global information cultures, whose constitutive form is immanent to informational networks and flows. Such a shift, according to Lash, needs to be met with a corresponding mode of critique: Ideologycritique [ideologiekritik] had to be somehow outside of ideology. With the disappearance of a constitutive outside, informationcritique must be inside of information. There is no outside any more. (2002: 10) Lash goes on to note, quite rightly, that ‘Informationcritique itself is branded, another object of intellectual property, machinically mediated’ (2002: 10). It is the political and conceptual tensions between information critique and its regulation via intellectual property regimes which condition critique as yet another brand or logo that I wish to explore in the rest of this essay. Further, I will question the supposed erasure of a “constitutive outside” to the field of socio-technical relations within network societies and informational economies. Lash is far too totalising in supposing a break between industrial modes of production and informational flows. Moreover, the assertion that there is no more outside to information too readily and simplistically assumes informational relations as universal and horizontally organised, and hence overlooks the significant structural, cultural and economic obstacles to participation within media vectors. That is, there certainly is an outside to information! Indeed, there are a plurality of outsides. These outsides are intertwined with the flows of capital and the imperial biopower of Empire, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued. As difficult as it may be to ascertain the boundaries of life in all its complexity, borders, however defined, nonetheless exist. Just ask the so-called “illegal immigrant”! This essay identifies three key modalities comprising a constitutive outside: material (uneven geographies of labour-power and the digital divide), symbolic (cultural capital), and strategic (figures of critique). My point of reference in developing this inquiry will pivot around an analysis of the importation in Australia of the British “Creative Industries” project and the problematic foundation such a project presents to the branding and commercialisation of intellectual labour. The creative industries movement – or Queensland Ideology, as I’ve discussed elsewhere with Danny Butt (2002) – holds further implications for the political and economic position of the university vis-à-vis the arts and humanities. Creative industries constructs itself as inside the culture of informationalism and its concomitant economies by the very fact that it is an exercise in branding. Such branding is evidenced in the discourses, rhetoric and policies of creative industries as adopted by university faculties, government departments and the cultural industries and service sectors seeking to reposition themselves in an institutional environment that is adjusting to ongoing structural reforms attributed to the demands by the “New Economy” for increased labour flexibility and specialisation, institutional and economic deregulation, product customisation and capital accumulation. Within the creative industries the content produced by labour-power is branded as copyrights and trademarks within the system of Intellectual Property Regimes (IPRs). However, as I will go on to show, a constitutive outside figures in material, symbolic and strategic ways that condition the possibility of creative industries. The creative industries project, as envisioned by the Blair government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) responsible for the Creative Industry Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and 2001, is interested in enhancing the “creative” potential of cultural labour in order to extract a commercial value from cultural objects and services. Just as there is no outside for informationcritique, for proponents of the creative industries there is no culture that is worth its name if it is outside a market economy. That is, the commercialisation of “creativity” – or indeed commerce as a creative undertaking – acts as a legitimising function and hence plays a delimiting role for “culture” and, by association, sociality. And let us not forget, the institutional life of career academics is also at stake in this legitimating process. The DCMS cast its net wide when defining creative sectors and deploys a lexicon that is as vague and unquantifiable as the next mission statement by government and corporate bodies enmeshed within a neo-liberal paradigm. At least one of the key proponents of the creative industries in Australia is ready to acknowledge this (see Cunningham, 2003). The list of sectors identified as holding creative capacities in the CITF Mapping Document include: film, music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts, arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘... activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (CITF: 1998/2001). The CITF’s identification of intellectual property as central to the creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the creative industries within informational and knowledge economies. Unlike material property, intellectual property such as artistic creations (films, music, books) and innovative technical processes (software, biotechnologies) are forms of knowledge that do not diminish when they are distributed. This is especially the case when information has been encoded in a digital form and distributed through technologies such as the internet. In such instances, information is often attributed an “immaterial” and nonrivalrous quality, although this can be highly misleading for both the conceptualisation of information and the politics of knowledge production. Intellectual property, as distinct from material property, operates as a scaling device in which the unit cost of labour is offset by the potential for substantial profit margins realised by distribution techniques availed by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their capacity to infinitely reproduce the digital commodity object as a property relation. Within the logic of intellectual property regimes, the use of content is based on the capacity of individuals and institutions to pay. The syndication of media content ensures that market saturation is optimal and competition is kept to a minimum. However, such a legal architecture and hegemonic media industry has run into conflict with other net cultures such as open source movements and peer-to-peer networks (Lovink, 2002b; Meikle, 2002), which is to say nothing of the digital piracy of software and digitally encoded cinematic forms. To this end, IPRs are an unstable architecture for extracting profit. The operation of Intellectual Property Regimes constitutes an outside within creative industries by alienating labour from its mode of information or form of expression. Lash is apposite on this point: ‘Intellectual property carries with it the right to exclude’ (Lash, 2002: 24). This principle of exclusion applies not only to those outside the informational economy and culture of networks as result of geographic, economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints. The very practitioners within the creative industries are excluded from control over their creations. It is in this sense that a legal and material outside is established within an informational society. At the same time, this internal outside – to put it rather clumsily – operates in a constitutive manner in as much as the creative industries, by definition, depend upon the capacity to exploit the IP produced by its primary source of labour. For all the emphasis the Mapping Document places on exploiting intellectual property, it’s really quite remarkable how absent any elaboration or considered development of IP is from creative industries rhetoric. It’s even more astonishing that media and cultural studies academics have given at best passing attention to the issues of IPRs. Terry Flew (2002: 154-159) is one of the rare exceptions, though even here there is no attempt to identify the implications IPRs hold for those working in the creative industries sectors. Perhaps such oversights by academics associated with the creative industries can be accounted for by the fact that their own jobs rest within the modern, industrial institution of the university which continues to offer the security of a salary award system and continuing if not tenured employment despite the onslaught of neo-liberal reforms since the 1980s. Such an industrial system of traditional and organised labour, however, does not define the labour conditions for those working in the so-called creative industries. Within those sectors engaged more intensively in commercialising culture, labour practices closely resemble work characterised by the dotcom boom, which saw young people working excessively long hours without any of the sort of employment security and protection vis-à-vis salary, health benefits and pension schemes peculiar to traditional and organised labour (see McRobbie, 2002; Ross, 2003). During the dotcom mania of the mid to late 90s, stock options were frequently offered to people as an incentive for offsetting the often minimum or even deferred payment of wages (see Frank, 2000). It is understandable that the creative industries project holds an appeal for managerial intellectuals operating in arts and humanities disciplines in Australia, most particularly at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which claims to have established the ‘world’s first’ Creative Industries faculty (http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/). The creative industries provide a validating discourse for those suffering anxiety disorders over what Ruth Barcan (2003) has called the ‘usefulness’ of ‘idle’ intellectual pastimes. As a project that endeavours to articulate graduate skills with labour markets, the creative industries is a natural extension of the neo-liberal agenda within education as advocated by successive governments in Australia since the Dawkins reforms in the mid 1980s (see Marginson and Considine, 2000). Certainly there’s a constructive dimension to this: graduates, after all, need jobs and universities should display an awareness of market conditions; they also have a responsibility to do so. And on this count, I find it remarkable that so many university departments in my own field of communications and media studies are so bold and, let’s face it, stupid, as to make unwavering assertions about market demands and student needs on the basis of doing little more than sniffing the wind! Time for a bit of a reality check, I’d say. And this means becoming a little more serious about allocating funds and resources towards market research and analysis based on the combination of needs between students, staff, disciplinary values, university expectations, and the political economy of markets. However, the extent to which there should be a wholesale shift of the arts and humanities into a creative industries model is open to debate. The arts and humanities, after all, are a set of disciplinary practices and values that operate as a constitutive outside for creative industries. Indeed, in their creative industries manifesto, Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley (2002) loath the arts and humanities in such confused, paradoxical and hypocritical ways in order to establish the arts and humanities as a cultural and ideological outside. To this end, to subsume the arts and humanities into the creative industries, if not eradicate them altogether, is to spell the end of creative industries as it’s currently conceived at the institutional level within academe. Too much specialisation in one post-industrial sector, broad as it may be, ensures a situation of labour reserves that exceed market needs. One only needs to consider all those now unemployed web-designers that graduated from multi-media programs in the mid to late 90s. Further, it does not augur well for the inevitable shift from or collapse of a creative industries economy. Where is the standing reserve of labour shaped by university education and training in a post-creative industries economy? Diehard neo-liberals and true-believers in the capacity for perpetual institutional flexibility would say that this isn’t a problem. The university will just “organically” adapt to prevailing market conditions and shape their curriculum and staff composition accordingly. Perhaps. Arguably if the university is to maintain a modality of time that is distinct from the just-in-time mode of production characteristic of informational economies – and indeed, such a difference is a quality that defines the market value of the educational commodity – then limits have to be established between institutions of education and the corporate organisation or creative industry entity. The creative industries project is a reactionary model insofar as it reinforces the status quo of labour relations within a neo-liberal paradigm in which bids for industry contracts are based on a combination of rich technological infrastructures that have often been subsidised by the state (i.e. paid for by the public), high labour skills, a low currency exchange rate and the lowest possible labour costs. In this respect it is no wonder that literature on the creative industries omits discussion of the importance of unions within informational, networked economies. What is the place of unions in a labour force constituted as individualised units? The conditions of possibility for creative industries within Australia are at once its frailties. In many respects, the success of the creative industries sector depends upon the ongoing combination of cheap labour enabled by a low currency exchange rate and the capacity of students to access the skills and training offered by universities. Certainly in relation to matters such as these there is no outside for the creative industries. There’s a great need to explore alternative economic models to the content production one if wealth is to be successfully extracted and distributed from activities in the new media sectors. The suggestion that the creative industries project initiates a strategic response to the conditions of cultural production within network societies and informational economies is highly debateable. The now well documented history of digital piracy in the film and software industries and the difficulties associated with regulating violations to proprietors of IP in the form of copyright and trademarks is enough of a reason to look for alternative models of wealth extraction. And you can be sure this will occur irrespective of the endeavours of the creative industries. To conclude, I am suggesting that those working in the creative industries, be they content producers or educators, need to intervene in IPRs in such a way that: 1) ensures the alienation of their labour is minimised; 2) collectivising “creative” labour in the form of unions or what Wark (2001) has termed the “hacker class”, as distinct from the “vectoralist class”, may be one way of achieving this; and 3) the advocates of creative industries within the higher education sector in particular are made aware of the implications IPRs have for graduates entering the workforce and adjust their rhetoric, curriculum, and policy engagements accordingly. Works Cited Barcan, Ruth. ‘The Idleness of Academics: Reflections on the Usefulness of Cultural Studies’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (forthcoming, 2003). Bolz, Norbert. ‘Rethinking Media Aesthetics’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 18-27. Butt, Danny and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Blowing Bubbles: Post-Crash Creative Industries and the Withering of Political Critique in Cultural Studies’. Paper presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture and the Uses of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Melbourne, 5-7 December, 2002. Posted to fibreculture mailing list, 10 December, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), London, 1998/2001. http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html Cunningham, Stuart. ‘The Evolving Creative Industries: From Original Assumptions to Contemporary Interpretations’. Seminar Paper, QUT, Brisbane, 9 May, 2003, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf Cunningham, Stuart; Hearn, Gregory; Cox, Stephen; Ninan, Abraham and Keane, Michael. Brisbane’s Creative Industries 2003. Report delivered to Brisbane City Council, Community and Economic Development, Brisbane: CIRAC, 2003. http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/bccreportonly.pdf Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Frank, Thomas. One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Hartley, John and Cunningham, Stuart. ‘Creative Industries: from Blue Poles to fat pipes’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed.) The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers. Canberra: DEST, 2002. Hayden, Steve. ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling: Ad Space – Will Advertisers Learn the Hard Lesson of Over-Development?’. Wired Magazine 11.06 (June, 2003), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002a. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002b. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-31. Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark. The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002. Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Rossiter, Ned. ‘Processual Media Theory’, in Adrian Miles (ed.) Streaming Worlds: 5th International Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) Conference. 19-23 May. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2003, 173-184. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Wark, McKenzie. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘Hack’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds). Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory. Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, 3-7, 99-102. Wark, McKenzie. ‘The Power of Multiplicity and the Multiplicity of Power’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 314-325. Links http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/ http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/bccreportonly.pdf http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rossiter, Ned. "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>. APA Style Rossiter, N. (2003, Jun 19). Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>

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. 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Special Care Notice This paper discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the process of colonisation. Content within this paper may be distressing to some readers. Introduction The decimation of the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was systematic and swift. First Contact was an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters for the Indigenous inhabitants. There were, according to some early records, a few examples of peaceful interactions (Morris 84). Yet, the inevitable competition over resources, and the intensity with which colonists pursued their “claims” for food, land, and water, quickly transformed amicable relationships into hostile rivalries. Jennifer Gall has written that, as “European settlement expanded in the late 1820s, violent exchanges between settlers and Aboriginal people were frequent, brutal and unchecked” (58). Indeed, the near-annihilation of the original custodians of the land was, if viewed through the lens of time, a process that could be described as one that was especially efficient. As John Morris notes: in 1803, when the first settlers arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, the Aborigines had already inhabited the island for some 25,000 years and the population has been estimated at 4,000. Seventy-three years later, Truganinni, [often cited as] the last Tasmanian of full Aboriginal descent, was dead. (84) Against a backdrop of extreme violence, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), there were some, admittedly dubious, efforts to contain the bloodshed. One such effort, in the late 1820s, was the production, and subsequent distribution, of a set of Proclamation Boards. Approximately 100 Proclamation Boards (the Board) were introduced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur (after whom Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula is named). The purpose of these Boards was to communicate, via a four-strip pictogram, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony that all people—black and white—were considered equal under the law. “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). This is reflected in the narrative of the Boards. The first image presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second, and central, image shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth images depict the repercussions for committing murder, with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man also hanged for shooting an Aborigine. Both men executed under “gubernatorial supervision” (Turnbull 53). Image 1: Governor Davey's [sic - actually Governor Arthur's] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic - actually c. 1828-30]. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Call Number: SAFE / R 247). The Board is an interesting re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of images on the bark of trees. Such trees, often referred to as scarred trees, are rare in modern-day Tasmania as “the expansion of settlements, and the impact of bush fires and other environmental factors” resulted in many of these trees being destroyed (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania online). Similarly, only a few of the Boards, inspired by these trees, survive today. The Proclamation Board was, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of a different Governor: Lieutenant Governor Davey (after whom Port Davey, on the south-west coast of Tasmania is named). This re-imagining of the Board’s creator was so effective that the Board, today, is popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines. This paper outlines several other re-imaginings of this Board. In addition, this paper offers another, new, re-imagining of the Board, positing that this is an early “pamphlet” on crime, justice and punishment which actually presents as a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. In doing so this work connects the Proclamation Board to the larger genre of crime fiction. One Proclamation Board: Two Governors Labelled Van Diemen’s Land and settled as a colony of New South Wales in 1803, this island state would secede from the administration of mainland Australia in 1825. Another change would follow in 1856 when Van Diemen’s Land was, in another process of re-imagining, officially re-named Tasmania. This change in nomenclature was an initiative to, symbolically at least, separate the contemporary state from a criminal and violent past (Newman online). Tasmania’s violent history was, perhaps, inevitable. The island was claimed by Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales, in the name of His Majesty, not for the purpose of building a community, but to “prevent the French from gaining a footing on the east side of that island” and also to procure “timber and other natural products, as well as to raise grain and to promote the seal industry” (Clark 36). Another rationale for this land claim was to “divide the convicts” (Clark 36) which re-fashioned the island into a gaol. It was this penal element of the British colonisation of Australia that saw the worst of the British Empire forced upon the Aboriginal peoples. As historian Clive Turnbull explains: the brutish state of England was reproduced in the English colonies, and that in many ways its brutishness was increased, for now there came to Australia not the humanitarians or the indifferent, but the men who had vested interests in the systems of restraint; among those who suffered restraint were not only a vast number who were merely unfortunate and poverty-stricken—the victims of a ‘depression’—but brutalised persons, child-slaughterers and even potential cannibals. (Turnbull 25) As noted above the Black War of Tasmania saw unprecedented aggression against the rightful occupants of the land. Yet, the Aboriginal peoples were “promised the white man’s justice, the people [were] exhorted to live in amity with them, the wrongs which they suffer [were] deplored” (Turnbull 23). The administrators purported an egalitarian society, one of integration and peace but Van Diemen’s Land was colonised as a prison and as a place of profit. So, “like many apologists whose material benefit is bound up with the systems which they defend” (Turnbull 23), assertions of care for the health and welfare of the Aboriginal peoples were made but were not supported by sufficient policies, or sufficient will, and the Black War continued. Colonel Thomas Davey (1758-1823) was the second person to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land; a term of office that began in 1813 and concluded in 1817. The fourth Lieutenant Governor of the island was Colonel Sir George Arthur (1784-1854); his term of office, significantly longer than Davey’s, being from 1824 to 1836. The two men were very different but are connected through this intriguing artefact, the Proclamation Board. One of the efforts made to assert the principle of equality under the law in Van Diemen’s Land was an outcome of work undertaken by Surveyor General George Frankland (1800-1838). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 and suggested the Proclamation Board (Morris 84), sometimes referred to as a Picture Board or the Tasmanian Hieroglyphics, as a tool to support Arthur’s various Proclamations. The Proclamation, signed on 15 April 1828 and promulgated in the The Hobart Town Courier on 19 April 1828 (Arthur 1), was one of several notices attempting to reduce the increasing levels of violence between Indigenous peoples and colonists. The date on Frankland’s correspondence clearly situates the Proclamation Board within Arthur’s tenure as Lieutenant Governor. The Board was, however, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of Davey. The Clerk of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, Hugh M. Hull, asserted that the Board was the work of Davey and not Arthur. Hull’s rationale for this, despite archival evidence connecting the Board to Frankland and, by extension, to Arthur, is predominantly anecdotal. In a letter to the editor of The Hobart Mercury, published 26 November 1874, Hull wrote: this curiosity was shown by me to the late Mrs Bateman, neé Pitt, a lady who arrived here in 1804, and with whom I went to school in 1822. She at once recognised it as one of a number prepared in 1816, under Governor Davey’s orders; and said she had seen one hanging on a gum tree at Cottage Green—now Battery Point. (3) Hull went on to assert that “if any old gentleman will look at the picture and remember the style of military and civil dress of 1810-15, he will find that Mrs Bateman was right” (3). Interestingly, Hull relies upon the recollections of a deceased school friend and the dress codes depicted by the artist to date the Proclamation Board as a product of 1816, in lieu of documentary evidence dating the Board as a product of 1828-1830. Curiously, the citation of dress can serve to undermine Hull’s argument. An early 1840s watercolour by Thomas Bock, of Mathinna, an Aboriginal child of Flinders Island adopted by Lieutenant Governor John Franklin (Felton online), features the young girl wearing a brightly coloured, high-waisted dress. This dress is very similar to the dresses worn by the children on the Proclamation Board (the difference being that Mathinna wears a red dress with a contrasting waistband, the children on the Board wear plain yellow dresses) (Bock). Acknowledging the simplicity of children's clothing during the colonial era, it could still be argued that it would have been unlikely the Governor of the day would have placed a child, enjoying at that time a life of privilege, in a situation where she sat for a portrait wearing an old-fashioned garment. So effective was Hull’s re-imagining of the Board’s creator that the Board was, for many years, popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with even the date modified, to 1816, to fit Davey’s term of office. Further, it is worth noting that catalogue records acknowledge the error of attribution and list both Davey and Arthur as men connected to the creation of the Proclamation Board. A Surviving Board: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales One of the surviving Proclamation Boards is held by the Mitchell Library. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73). The work was mass produced (by the standards of mass production of the day) by pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75-76). The images, once outlined, were painted in oil. Of approximately 100 Boards made, several survive today. There are seven known Boards within public collections (Gall 58): five in Australia (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney; Museum Victoria, Melbourne; National Library of Australia, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston); and two overseas (The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of Cambridge). The catalogue record, for the Board held by the Mitchell Library, offers the following details:Paintings: 1 oil painting on Huon pine board, rectangular in shape with rounded corners and hole at top centre for suspension ; 35.7 x 22.6 x 1 cm. 4 scenes are depicted:Aborigines and white settlers in European dress mingling harmoniouslyAboriginal men and women, and an Aboriginal child approach Governor Arthur to shake hands while peaceful soldiers look onA hostile Aboriginal man spears a male white settler and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks onA hostile white settler shoots an Aboriginal man and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks on. (SAFE / R 247) The Mitchell Library Board was purchased from J.W. Beattie in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86), which is approximately $2,200 today. Importantly, the title of the record notes both the popular attribution of the Board and the man who actually instigated the Board’s production: “Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30].” The date of the Board is still a cause of some speculation. The earlier date, 1828, marks the declaration of martial law (Turnbull 94) and 1830 marks the Black Line (Edmonds 215); the attempt to form a human line of white men to force many Tasmanian Aboriginals, four of the nine nations, onto the Tasman Peninsula (Ryan 3). Frankland’s suggestion for the Board was put forward on 4 February 1829, with Arthur’s official Conciliator to the Aborigines, G.A. Robinson, recording his first sighting of a Board on 24 December 1829 (Morris 84-85). Thus, the conception of the Board may have been in 1828 but the Proclamation project was not fully realised until 1830. Indeed, a news item on the Proclamation Board did appear in the popular press, but not until 5 March 1830: We are informed that the Government have given directions for the painting of a large number of pictures to be placed in the bush for the contemplation of the Aboriginal Inhabitants. […] However […] the causes of their hostility must be more deeply probed, or their taste as connoisseurs in paintings more clearly established, ere we can look for any beneficial result from this measure. (Colonial Times 2) The remark made in relation to becoming a connoisseur of painting, though intended to be derogatory, makes some sense. There was an assumption that the Indigenous peoples could easily translate a European-styled execution by hanging, as a visual metaphor for all forms of punishment. It has long been understood that Indigenous “social organisation and religious and ceremonial life were often as complex as those of the white invaders” (McCulloch 261). However, the Proclamation Board was, in every sense, Eurocentric and made no attempt to acknowledge the complexities of Aboriginal culture. It was, quite simply, never going to be an effective tool of communication, nor achieve its socio-legal aims. The Board Re-imagined: Popular Media The re-imagining of the Proclamation Board as a construct of Governor Davey, instead of Governor Arthur, is just one of many re-imaginings of this curious object. There are, of course, the various imaginings of the purpose of the Board. On the surface these images are a tool for reconciliation but as “the story of these paintings unfolds […] it becomes clear that the proclamations were in effect envoys sent back to Britain to exhibit the ingenious attempts being applied to civilise Australia” (Carroll 76). In this way the Board was re-imagined by the Administration that funded the exercise, even before the project was completed, from a mechanism to assist in the bringing about of peace into an object that would impress colonial superiors. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll has recently written about the Boards in the context of their “transnational circulation” and how “objects become subjects and speak of their past through the ventriloquism of contemporary art history” (75). Carroll argues the Board is an item that couples “military strategy with a fine arts propaganda campaign” (Carroll 78). Critically the Boards never achieved their advertised purpose for, as Carroll explains, there were “elaborate rituals Aboriginal Australians had for the dead” and, therefore, “the display of a dead, hanging body is unthinkable. […] being exposed to the sight of a hanged man must have been experienced as an unimaginable act of disrespect” (92). The Proclamation Board would, in sharp contrast to feelings of unimaginable disrespect, inspire feelings of pride across the colonial population. An example of this pride being revealed in the selection of the Board as an object worthy of reproduction, as a lithograph, for an Intercolonial Exhibition, held in Melbourne in 1866 (Morris 84). The lithograph, which identifies the Board as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines and dated 1816, was listed as item 572, of 738 items submitted by Tasmania, for the event (The Commissioners 69-85). This type of reproduction, or re-imagining, of the Board would not be an isolated event. Penelope Edmonds has described the Board as producing a “visual vernacular” through a range of derivatives including lantern slides, lithographs, and postcards. These types of tourist ephemera are in addition to efforts to produce unique re-workings of the Board as seen in Violet Mace’s Proclamation glazed earthernware, which includes a jug (1928) and a pottery cup (1934) (Edmonds online). The Board Re-imagined: A True Crime Tale The Proclamation Board offers numerous narratives. There is the story that the Board was designed and deployed to communicate. There is the story behind the Board. There is also the story of the credit for the initiative which was transferred from Governor Arthur to Governor Davey and subsequently returned to Arthur. There are, too, the provenance stories of individual Boards. There is another story the Proclamation Board offers. The story of true crime in colonial Australia. The Board, as noted, presents through a four-strip pictogram an idea that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Advocating for a society of equals was a duplicitous practice, for while Aborigines were hanged for allegedly murdering settlers, “there is no record of whites being charged, let alone punished, for murdering Aborigines” (Morris 84). It would not be until 1838 that white men would be punished for the murder of Aboriginal people (on the mainland) in the wake of the Myall Creek Massacre, in northern New South Wales. There were other examples of attempts to bring about a greater equity under the rule of law but, as Amanda Nettelbeck explains, there was wide-spread resistance to the investigation and charging of colonists for crimes against the Indigenous population with cases regularly not going to trial, or, if making a courtroom, resulting in an acquittal (355-59). That such cases rested on “legally inadmissible Aboriginal testimony” (Reece in Nettelbeck 358) propped up a justice system that was, inherently, unjust in the nineteenth century. It is important to note that commentators at the time did allude to the crime narrative of the Board: when in the most civilized country in the world it has been found ineffective as example to hang murderers in chains, it is not to be expected a savage race will be influenced by the milder exhibition of effigy and caricature. (Colonial Times 2) It is argued here that the Board was much more than an offering of effigy and caricature. The Proclamation Board presents, in striking detail, the formula for the modern true crime tale: a peace disturbed by the act of murder; and the ensuing search for, and delivery of, justice. Reinforcing this point, are the ideas of justice seen within crime fiction, a genre that focuses on the restoration of order out of chaos (James 174), are made visible here as aspirational. The true crime tale does not, consistently, offer the reassurances found within crime fiction. In the real world, particularly one as violent as colonial Australia, we are forced to acknowledge that, below the surface of the official rhetoric on justice and crime, the guilty often go free and the innocent are sometimes hanged. Another point of note is that, if the latter date offered here, of 1830, is taken as the official date of the production of these Boards, then the significance of the Proclamation Board as a true crime tale is even more pronounced through a connection to crime fiction (both genres sharing a common literary heritage). The year 1830 marks the release of Australia’s first novel, Quintus Servinton written by convicted forger Henry Savery, a crime novel (produced in three volumes) published by Henry Melville of Hobart Town. Thus, this paper suggests, 1830 can be posited as a year that witnessed the production of two significant cultural artefacts, the Proclamation Board and the nation’s first full-length literary work, as also being the year that established the, now indomitable, traditions of true crime and crime fiction in Australia. Conclusion During the late 1820s in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) a set of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards were produced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur. The official purpose of these items was to communicate, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony, that all—black and white—were equal under the law. Murderers, be they Aboriginal or colonist, would be punished. The Board is a re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of drawings on the bark of trees. The Board was, in the 1860s, in time for an Intercolonial Exhibition, re-imagined as the output of Lieutenant Governor Davey. This re-imagining of the Board was so effective that surviving artefacts, today, are popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with the date modified, to 1816, to fit the new narrative. The Proclamation Board was also reimagined, by its creators and consumers, in a variety of ways: as peace offering; military propaganda; exhibition object; tourism ephemera; and contemporary art. This paper has also, briefly, offered another re-imagining of the Board, positing that this early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment actually presents a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. The Proclamation Board tells many stories but, at the core of this curious object, is a crime story: the story of mass murder. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The author acknowledges, too, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands this paper was researched and written. The author extends thanks to Richard Neville, Margot Riley, Kirsten Thorpe, and Justine Wilson of the State Library of New South Wales for sharing their knowledge and offering their support. The author is also grateful to the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and for making valuable suggestions. ReferencesAboriginal Heritage Tasmania. “Scarred Trees.” Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, 2012. 12 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/aboriginal-cultural-heritage/archaeological-site-types/scarred-trees›.Arthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur’s] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30]. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, c. 1828-30.Bock, Thomas. Mathinna. Watercolour and Gouache on Paper. 23 x 19 cm (oval), c. 1840.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clark, Manning. History of Australia. Abridged by Michael Cathcart. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997 [1993]. Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, Qld.: U of Queensland P, 2014.Colonial Times. “Hobart Town.” Colonial Times 5 Mar. 1830: 2.The Commissioners. Intercolonial Exhibition Official Catalogue. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Blundell & Ford, 1866.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14. Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.———. “The Proclamation Cup: Tasmanian Potter Violet Mace and Colonial Quotations.” reCollections 5.2 (2010). 20 May 2015 ‹http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_2/papers/the_proclamation_cup_›.Felton, Heather. “Mathinna.” Companion to Tasmanian History. Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2006. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Mathinna.htm›.Gall, Jennifer. Library of Dreams: Treasures from the National Library of Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011.Hull, Hugh M. “Tasmanian Hieroglyphics.” The Hobart Mercury 26 Nov. 1874: 3.James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.Mace, Violet. 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IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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Prelude: 2020 in Words Each year the Australian National Dictionary Centre, based at the Australian National University (ANU), selects “a word or expression that has gained prominence in the Australian social landscape”. In 2020, “iso” took out first place, with “bubble” following close behind. On the Centre’s website, Senior Researcher Mark Gywnn explains that “iso” was selected not only for its flexibility, merrily combining with other words to create new compound words (for instance “being in iso”, doing “iso baking” and putting on “iso weight”), but also because it “stood out as a characteristically Aussie abbreviation” (Australian National Dictionary Centre). Alongside the flexibility of the word “iso” and its affinity with the Australian English tradition of producing and embracing diminutives, iso’s appeal might well be that it does not carry the associations that the word “bubble” has acquired in the time of COVID. While COVID-19 has put many of us in various forms of “iso”, the media imagery—and indeed experiences—of many older people living in residential aged care during COVID has shifted some of the associations of the word “bubble”, heightening its associations with fragility and adding vulnerability and helplessness into the mix. 2020 was not the first time “bubble” has appeared in the Australian word of the year list. In 2018 “Canberra bubble” took out the first spot. What interests us about bubble’s runner-up position behind “iso” in 2020’s word of the year is what this might also reveal about the way ideas of independence vs dependence, and youthfulness vs aged underlie and inflect new usages of these words. In the era of COVID-19, the buoyancy of “iso” is tied to its association with a particular kind of Aussie-youth-speak, while the sense of heaviness and negative resonances that now accompany the word bubble are tied to its associations with the experiences of those in aged care. In 2020 “bubble”—a word that has primarily been associated with children and the child-like (bubble baths, bubble tea)—took on new associations and overtones. As the pandemic unfolded, “bubble” also became intertwined with media depictions of and popular discourses around those in later life, many of whom experienced “iso” much more brutally than the easy-Aussie-speak of “iso” would convey. There is much less play—and a lot less mingling—in the Australian National Dictionary Centre description of new uses of the word “bubble”: “a district, region, or a group of people viewed as a closed system, isolating from other districts, regions, or groups as a public health measure to limit the spread of Covid-19”. There have been various kinds of “closed system[s]”, isolated groups and regions constructed in the management of the pandemic, but there is one group—and one kind of location—that has been “bubbled” in quite specific ways. While the sectioning off and isolating of older age people in the name of protecting their health has often been ineffectively—and in some places, disastrously—managed in terms of disease prevention, it has been very effective in reducing the rights and voices of those it acts in the name of. Speaking from Ireland but commenting on the situation in the UK and parts of Europe, Anne Fuchs and colleagues write that “the discursive homogenization and ‘frailing’ of the over 65s meant that people in this category were an object of public discourse rather than participants in the debate” (2). In many instances the “bubbling” of older people, particularly those in aged care residences, has served to both isolate and render largely voiceless the residents of these care homes. Although the global impact of COVID-19 on the aged has been significant, including across many affluent societies, it has been particularly disastrous in Australia. At the time of writing (1 January 2021), of the 909 COVID-related deaths in Australia to date, 693 have been of people aged 80 or over: in other words, more than 75% of COVID-related deaths in Australia have been of people over 80. According to the federal government’s records of COVID-19 deaths by age group and sex, 685 of these deaths have been of aged care residents. It is not surprising therefore that many speak of the heavy impact of COVID-19 on older people as a form of genocide. Public discourse and government policies and priorities around COVID-19 have thrown into relief and exacerbated some of the deeply troubling ways that older people, particularly those living in aged care residences, are not recognised or treated as “equal partners in our future” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). Both the management of and public discourse around COVID-19 have highlighted and escalated the forms of ageism, especially ageism around later life, that have become embedded in Australian culture. In late 2019 the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety released its Interim Report, titled simply Neglect. In the Foreword, the commissioners write: the Australian community generally accepts that older people have earned the chance to enjoy their later years, after many decades of contribution and hard work. Yet the language of public discourse is not respectful towards older people. Rather, it is about burden, encumbrance, obligation and whether taxpayers can afford to pay for the dependence of older people. (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1) Written and released before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Interim Report highlighted the “fundamental fact that our aged care system essentially depersonalises older people” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 6) and identified many ways “the aged care system fails to meet the needs of our older, often very vulnerable, citizens” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). In 2020 we saw some of the effects of these failures in the often disastrous mismanagement of disease transmission prevention in many aged care residences in Australia. Equally troubling, the resulting deaths have at times been accompanied by a general acceptance of the loss of so many in later life to COVID-19. The fact that these deaths are often regarded as somehow more inevitable, or as less significant than the deaths of others, is an indication of how deeply “Australia has drifted into an ageist mindset that undervalues older people and limits their possibilities” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). It assumes that one’s later-life years are of less significance and value (to oneself, to the community) than one’s younger years. At various times in the pandemic, sizable parts of the global population have been variously asked, advised, or required by their governments to remain within their household or residential “bubble”. These COVID-related “bubbles” are more buoyant for some. Jackie Gulland has written a feminist analysis of the ways that the UK COVID-19 lockdown rules are premised on “neo-liberal assumptions about the family as autonomous and sufficient for the provision of reproductive labour” (330). In many places the requirement to stay within one’s “household bubble” both assumes that the home is safe for all, and that most care and dependency requirements are provided and received within a household. As Gulland’s essay demonstrates, the idea of the household bubble constructs an image or idea of who and what constitutes a household, and which relationships “count”. Drawing on critiques of neo-liberal and able-ist ideas about autonomy by feminist and disability scholars, Gulland “shows how the failure of policymakers to take account of interdependency has made lockdown more difficult for carers and those in receipt of care” (330). In this essay we look at some of the ways that the required and/or imagined COVID-19 bubbles for people in later life are thought of differently to the COVID-19 bubbles that younger, and mixed age, households are imagined as forming. This is particularly the case, we argue, for those in aged care residences. Younger and mixed age COVID bubbles often include extended or linked households (as we will discuss below in relation to the idea of the compassionate bubble) and function as a bubble that can link and enclose. In contrast, COVID bubbles in and for aged care and those in later life, work to isolate and separate. They function as bubbles that close off and shut out, as if placing the older person and older people behind glass (in some cases, quite literally). Likewise, while the COVID-19 bubbles for the “general” population (a category from which those in later life are often excluded) are regarded as temporary structures that will in time be dissolved to re-allow social movement and intermingling, the later life and aged care COVID-19 bubble is imagined very differently. This is because it is overlaid upon a pre-existing conception of later life—and in particular the fourth age—as itself a kind of bubbled existence, a fragile state held somewhat separate and apart from the general population and moving inexorably toward death—a bubble that pops. Bubbling the Fourth Age The idea that later life can be divided into different stages and ages has a long history, although the shape, meaning and valuing of different ages in later life is historically specific. Back in the late 1980s the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett proposed that rather than falling into three main stages—childhood, adulthood and old age—there are in fact four stages and that “later life can be divided into a ‘third age’ and a ‘fourth age’” (Gilleard and Higgs, “The Fourth Age” 368). Laslett’s distinction between a third age (active and characterised by personal fulfillment) and a fourth age (for Laslett an age of infirmity) has become increasingly significant in both age studies and in the provision and imagining of aged care. While the third age is increasingly depicted as something that, when managed “successfully”, can expand and fill with rich experiences and rewards (assuming one has the economic and social privilege and mobility to embrace these rich offerings—see Katz and McHugh cited in Zeilig, “Critical Use of Narrative”), the fourth age, on the other hand, is associated with frailty, increased dependence, vulnerability, precarity (see Lloyd; Gilleard and Higgs; and Morganroth Gullette on the fourth age). Of course, experiences of vulnerability, dependency and precarity run throughout the life course and cannot be reduced to chronological age. However, the distinction between a third and fourth age tends to assume that once one “leaves” the third age, it is a one-way path to “the three ‘Ds’: decrepitude, dependence, and death” (Laslett). The fourth age becomes associated with those aspects of ageing that are culturally rejected and pushed aside—in particular physical dependence which, as in much able-ist thinking, is rendered abject. As Morganroth Gullette has argued, a “savage contradiction” underlies and fuels this distinction, as “fantasies of the longevity bonanza proliferate alongside growing terrors of living too long” and becoming a “‘burden’” (21). In other words, those aspects of ageing—indeed those aspects of being human—that are seen as undesirable and/or abject are associated with the fourth age and imagined as somehow exclusive to it: they are placed elsewhere, contained in a fourth age “bubble”. The understanding of the fourth age as a kind of bubble is evident in and enabled by various kinds of cultural representations and institutional discourses around later life, including the kind of language used (particularly language connoting precarity and fragility and liminality) and recurrent media imagery in which people in their “fourth age” are depicted as mentally and physically out of reach (for instance isolated behind glass). Legislation around the movements of residents, visitors, and staff in aged care residence does not simply create “protective” bubbles around aged care residences but also constructs and imagines these residences and their inhabitants as “bubbled”, removed, and voiceless. Vulnerability, ephemerality, precarity and decline have become increasingly significant in representations of and discourses around ageing. Much of the media coverage of those in later life, particularly those living in aged care residences, has further fuelled what Sally Chivers has called the “nursing home specter” and delivered, in heightened and often spectacularised form, the “life-course narrative that dominant culture provides—an unliveable mind and unrecognizable body, mountainous expense” (Morganroth Gullette, 24). The discourse on ageing is characterised by the use of metaphor and metonymy, of which “the bubble” or “bubbling” is only one notable example. The culture of fear that surrounds the fourth age stems from the presumption that ageing inevitably leads to decay and decline in quality of life, and that the experience of ageing is characterised by various forms of physical and cognitive deterioration, such as dementia. Cultural gerontologist Hannah Zeilig has drawn attention to the pervasive use of metaphors—in both medical journals and mass media reports—to describe the experience of living with dementia. These metaphors attempt to capture and simplify the complexities of being, speaking, and knowing experienced by people with dementia. They are frequently used to communicate these experiences to people who do not live with dementia. The cultural metaphors of dementia are potent examples of ageism. They are not neutral in their connotations or implicit value judgements. These metaphors reveal wider social anxieties around ageing, despite the fact that people in their 40s and 50s can have dementia (Dementia Australia). As Zeilig has pointed out, many of these metaphors have presented a negative framing of dementia, describing the rising numbers of dementia diagnoses in apocalyptic, biblical terms such as “plague”, “crisis”, and “epidemic” (“Cultural Metaphor” 260). While this hyperbole may be grounded in statistics and the realities of an ageing population, it has nevertheless been alarming. This rhetoric has often been a necessary tactic for dementia organisations as part of their efforts to secure media coverage, raise public awareness of dementia, and lobby for increased government and private investment in funding research and support services. Despite these noble intentions, this rhetoric can risk excluding or marginalising the voices of people living with dementia. Some of the metaphors that have been used to describe dementia are particularly dehumanising and stigmatising, such as the perception of Alzheimer’s disease as a form of “living death”. This conception of Alzheimer’s, which Susan M. Behuniak has observed in both scholarly and popular discourse, elicits strong negative emotional responses of revulsion and fear. It constructs people with Alzheimer’s as abject zombie-like figures living a half-life or twilight existence. These trends in dementia discourse that Zeilig and Behuniak identified in the first half of the 2010s are also apparent in media imagery and discourse about older people in the COVID-19 pandemic. Much like the cultural narratives of dementia, these representations often reinforce the fourth age’s association with forms of vulnerability, decline and decay that are rendered abject. In contrast to this negative framing of both dementia and the fourth age, the trope of “living in a bubble” can also present a more ambivalent conception of both living with dementia and, by extension, the sociocultural experience of living in the fourth age during the time of COVID-19. “Bubbling” can serve a protective function for the person living with dementia by reducing sensory overload and cognitive confusion that may lead to anxiety and emotional distress. In dementia care, bubble wands and bubble wrap are two of the most commonly used tools in sensory therapy for reducing anxiety and agitation, and providing comfort (DailyCaring). These examples remind us of the materiality of the bubble, which functions as both cultural trope and material condition that affects people’s lives (to borrow from Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, cited in Vivian Sobchack’s essay on metaphor and materiality). Within the diversity and range of caring practices encompassed by the trope of “bubbling”, there is clear potential for the bubble to be enabling, rather than disabling, if it is used to enhance quality of life and wellbeing for older people, rather than to separate, marginalise and isolate. Despite the multivalent possibilities of the bubble for enhancing quality of life for people with dementia, the bubble’s association with precarity has been heightened by its deployment to protect older people during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a source of ambivalence around the COVID-19 bubble, a public health response that is acknowledged as having both protective and harmful effects. It involves “bubbling” older people, especially those living in residential care, by physically isolating them and limiting their contact with family and friends to conversations mediated by digital technology or a windowpane. By restricting physical and direct contact with the outside world in order to reduce and contain transmission of the virus, the COVID-19 bubble is intended to protect the physical health of older adults. But as Karra Harrington and Martin J. Sliwinski caution, this can also risk the cognitive health and mental wellbeing of older people by creating social isolation. These concerns about the negative health impacts of the COVID-19 bubble compound the existing popular understanding of late life as isolated and isolating, perpetuating the ageist assumptions that characterise the social imaginary around the fourth age. Creating Compassionate Bubbles The distress of separation caused by COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions is felt by all generations, not just older people. Recognising the costs to our emotional and mental wellbeing of living in isolation to protect our bodies and our communities from viral invasion, Australian epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws has called for “a compassionate germ bubble”, modelled on New Zealand’s concept of an extended bubble that allows close contacts beyond one household. This alternative approach to “bubbling” is designed to strike a better balance between physical and mental health. Writing during Melbourne’s strict and prolonged lockdown following a second wave of cases in the winter of 2020, McLaws argued that “a compassionate germ bubble may foster resilience by reducing a sense of isolation for people living alone and friends, extended family and partners distressed by the separation”. There have been a number of creative and compassionate responses to the necessity of the COVID-19 bubble for protecting those most vulnerable to the virus. Aged care residences have developed innovative ways to safely maintain in-person visits and provide opportunities for face-to-face contact between residents and their families and friends. One example reported in the Australian media (Steger) is “The Window of Love” in Perth, which demonstrates the positive potential of the bubble—represented here as a pane of glass bordered by a painted frame—for facilitating social connection and supporting wellbeing despite restrictions on physical contact. The media reporting of these innovations tends to spectacularise the residents of these homes, reinforcing their fragility and vulnerability as they are framed behind plastic or glass. In December 2020, international media outlets The Guardian, RTE News, and Star Media posted a Reuters video story on their respective YouTube channels about a “hug bubble” created in an aged care home in Jeumont, France. This inflatable plastic tunnel allows physical touch between those living in the home and those outside it through hermetically sealed sleeves. Separating the resident from their visitors is a clear plastic sheet, which is disinfected by staff in between each visit. Recognising the importance of physical contact for wellbeing, nursing staff reported that the hug bubble has brought comfort to the residents, whose previous contact with family and friends since the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 had been limited to video calls or talking through a window. Viewer comments reveal divergent responses to this media story across all three YouTube channels. Some viewers applaud the innovation while others disparage the hug bubble as “cruel” and “disgraceful”. Other comments register viewers’ ambivalence, recognising the good intentions behind the idea while despairing at the need for it. Several comments offer a snapshot of the cynical, often incoherent views about the pandemic commonly found on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while also demonstrating the persistence of ageist attitudes that regard the elderly as a burden. These negative responses are striking in contrast with the positive framing of the original media report, which is presented as a “feel good” human interest story through brief interviews with family members and nursing home staff, reflecting on the residents’ experiences using the hug bubble. This positive framing is reinforced by the gentle music track accompanying the video posted on the RTE News channel. Beyond the institutional context of aged care residences, many families and communities have also engineered solutions to reduce the stress of separation. Craving physical contact after months of isolation, they have embraced the materiality and tactility inherent in the bubble trope. People have improvised using household objects, such as plastic sleeves attached to transparent shower curtains, to build “cuddle curtains”, and “hug machines” to enable safe—and playful—physical contact. These innovations and adaptations tap into the bubble’s playful qualities, while also “going viral” as families document their creativity, delight and joy through their own video stories shared on YouTube. As we move into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with case numbers and the death toll continuing to climb globally, the concept of the COVID-19 bubble and its role in protecting the community will continue to be debated, refined and reconfigured in both public health responses and media discourse. Despite Australia’s relatively good fortune in terms of total number of COVID-related deaths compared to other Western nations such as the US and the UK, the disproportionately high number of deaths among Australians in aged care is a sobering reminder of the systemic failures in Australia’s aged care residences. As we move in and out of periods of social isolation, restrictions and lockdowns, it will become increasingly important to address the mental health impacts of “living in a bubble” and to consider creative, compassionate alternatives that challenge ageism and maintain quality of life for fourth age Australians. *** As COVID-19 and its management continue to reshape our world(s) and our relations to each other, its impacts continue to be unevenly felt, particularly for those in later life. For this reason, it becomes increasingly important to be alert to the ways in which “bubbling” the fourth age in response to COVID-19 risks reinforcing a homogenising view of older people as vulnerable and isolated, defenceless against viral invasion and voiceless in expressing agency and maintaining social connection. This essay responds to Hannah Zeilig’s earlier call to “radically rethink the ways in which age and ageing have been culturally configured” (“Critical Use of Narrative” 16). One of the purposes of this essay has been to critically assess some of the ways that the relatively new discourse of a fourth age—as somehow both qualitatively and quantifiably different to and separate from the third age—entails a homogenising view of older people. This view has enabled forms of ageism that have often been particularly brutal in their impact during the pandemic. In this essay we have argued that popular conceptions of and public health discourse and policy around the fourth age have often enabled—or, at the very least, supported—forms of ageism. This ageism has been further heightened through both the discourse and the imagery of the COVID-19 bubble. The fourth age, we argued, has often been understood as bubble-like: as a “stage” of life when one is somehow separated from the larger community and culture. The fourth age is configured as physically fragile and precarious, transient and temporary, ephemeral, and enclosed in—and as—its own world. Created in the name of protecting “our most vulnerable”, the bubble in the time of COVID-19 has heightened these pre-existing social anxieties around the fourth age. The challenge, as we move into the second year of the pandemic in Australia, is to find new ways of protecting the health and wellbeing of people in later life, while creating opportunities for connection, agency and play that are supported, rather than hindered, by the COVID-19 bubble. References Australian National Dictionary Centre. “2020 Word of the Year.” Canberra: School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University. 17 Nov. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/news/2020-word-year>. Behuniak, Susan M. “The Living Dead? The Construction of People with Alzheimer’s Disease as Zombies.” Ageing & Society 21 (2011): 70–92. Chivers, Sally. “‘Blind People Don’t Run’: Escaping the ‘Nursing Home Specter’ in Children of Nature and Cloudburst.” Journal of Aging Studies 34 (2015): 134–41. “COVID-19 Deaths by Age Group and Sex.” Australian Government Department of Health: Coronovirus (COVID-19) Current Situation and Case Numbers. 1 Jan. 2021 <https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers#cases-and-deaths-by-age-and-sex>. DailyCaring. “6 Alzheimer’s Sensory Activities Reduce Anxiety without Medication.” 12 Jan. 2021 <https://dailycaring.com/6-alzheimers-sensory-activities-reduce-anxiety-without-medication/>. Dementia Australia. “What Is Dementia?” 12 Jan. 2021 <https://www.dementia.org.au/about-dementia/what-is-dementia>. Fuchs, Anne, Desmond O'Neill, Mary Cosgrove, and Julia Langbein. “Report on COVID-19 – Reframing Ageing Webinar 12 June 2020.” Preprint. Aug. 2020. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34508.44161. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “Aging without Agency: Theorizing the Fourth Age.” Aging and Mental Health 14.2 (2010): 121–28. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “Ageing Abjection and Embodiment in the Fourth Age.” Journal of Aging Studies 25.2 (2011): 135–42. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “The Fourth Age and the Concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’: A Theoretical Excursus.” Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013): 368–76. Gulland, Jackie. “Households, Bubbles, and Hugging Grandparents: Caring and Lockdown Rules during COVID-19.” Feminist Legal Studies 28 (2020): 329–39. Harrington, Karra, and Martin J. Sliwinski. “The Loneliness of Social Isolation Can Affect Your Brain and Raise Dementia Risk in Older Adults.” The Conversation 4 Aug. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/the-loneliness-of-social-isolation-can-affect-your-brain-and-raise-dementia-risk-in-older-adults-141752>. Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Lloyd, Liz. “The Fourth Age.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Eds. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. London: Routledge, 2015. 20 Dec. 2020 <https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203097090.ch33>. McLaws, Mary-Louise. “What Is the COVID ‘Bubble’ Concept, and Could It Work in Australia?” The Conversation 1 Sep. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-covid-bubble-concept-and-could-it-work-in-australia-144938>. Morganroth Gullette, Margaret. “Aged by Culture.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Eds. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. London: Routledge, 2015. 28 Dec. 2020 <https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203097090.ch3>. Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Neglect. Interim Report Volume 1. Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia, 31 Oct. 2019. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://agedcare.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/interim-report>. Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 17–41. Steger, Sarah. “Coronavirus Crisis: Oryx Communities Aged Care Home Creates ‘Window of Love’ to Help Residents Stay Connected to Families.” The West Australian 5 Apr. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://thewest.com.au/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-crisis-oryx-communities-aged-care-home-creates-window-of-love-to-help-residents-stay-connected-to-families-ng-b881510245z>. Zeilig, Hannah. “The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6.2 (2011): 7-37. ———. “Dementia as a Cultural Metaphor.” The Gerontologist 54.2 (2013): 258–67. ———. “What Do We Mean When We Talk about Dementia? Exploring Cultural Representations of ‘Dementia’.” Working with Older People 19.1 (2015): 12–20.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. 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Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 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(Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof). Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring. There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video. As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities. It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages. The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner). In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier). In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009. The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18. Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment. Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications. Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan? Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs? Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue? How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue? As an alternative to signing? Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels. This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”. The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux. The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films). The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive. While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde). Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people. During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making. In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past. The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web. There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives. These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined. It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7). The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’. As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating. Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse. This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527). In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"). The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however. Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12). They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents. They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place. They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11). As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication. Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. 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This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. 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