Journal articles on the topic 'Verdicts Australia'

We examined whether specialist training can have an immediate and lasting impact on investigators’ attitudes in sexual offense cases. Australian police officers participated in a 4-week training program that focused on the dynamics of sexual offending. Officers completed questionnaires before, immediately after, and 9 to 12 months following training. They were presented with scenarios involving adult and child complainants with varying levels of evidence (strong, weak, or ambiguous) and rated their confidence that the case would be approved for prosecution, the likelihood of a guilty verdict, and the level of responsibility attributed to the victim. Following training, investigators became more confident in case approvals and guilty verdicts, less likely to attribute responsibility to victims, and demonstrated better understanding of sexual offense dynamics. Ratings of victim responsibility and guilty verdicts were maintained 9 to 12 months post-training; however, confidence in case approvals decreased after working in the field. Implications for police training programs are discussed.

Juries in many Western countries are being asked to make decisions about defendants charged with terrorist-related offences, in situations where heightened anxieties and hostility to outgroups may make a fair trial difficult. What impact can deliberation have in addressing any such prejudice? This study estimates the impact of several forms of prejudice on juror verdicts in a mock terrorism trial. The study provides a more realistic setting than most previous studies, with an authentic heritage courtroom, actual jury assembly room and jury deliberation rooms in the NSW Supreme Court, a one-hour live trial and one-hour deliberation. Strong relationships are found between conviction rates and prior attitudes before jury discussion, consistent with other literature. Deliberation significantly reduces the proportion of guilty verdicts; it also reduces the impact on verdict of two forms of prejudice – fear of terrorism and punitiveness. On the other hand it tends to increase the impact of cognitive prejudice, measured both by a modified version of the Jury Bias Scale and a terrorism-specific scale based on attitudes to Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks.

In twentieth-century Australian criminal law a distinctive departure from the M’Naghten Rules developed as a critique of the discourse of reasoning and verdicts applying in the relevant English trials from the 1880s. The English verdict of ‘guilty but insane’ was criticized by the leading jurists as contradictory. In a sequence of influential judgments, the jurist Owen Dixon articulated an approach to the insanity defence that made room for a medico-legal discourse which broadened the possible referents of what it meant to ‘know’ the legality of an act, and also acknowledged the complex behavioural factors that might determine an act of homicide. This paper explores the shaping and significance of this departure and its comparative judicial, medical and social contexts. A concluding discussion considers whether the more flexible interpretation of the insanity defence implied by the direction of Dixon’s decisions made as much of a difference to frequency of use of the defence as the contemporaneous decline and eventual abolition of capital punishment.

When the PhD was introduced in England, consideration was also being given to its introduction in Australia. The University of Melbourne first discussed the idea in 1918, and again in 1924, but other Australian universities were opposed. Arguments ran along lines familiar in England — some foresaw the PhD competing with other doctoral degrees, and others saw difficulties in providing resources. Others wished to continue the system whereby Australian graduates went to Britain for research training. Faced with a unanimous verdict by its sister institutions, Melbourne withdrew its proposal, and the idea of the PhD went underground, not to surface again until 1944 when Melbourne again led the way, this time successfully, in its introduction.

Background Previous studies have reported a high prevalence of chronic otitis media (OM) and hearing impairment (HI) in Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. Children affected by these disorders are believed to be at increased risk for adverse outcomes in early childhood development, school attendance, academic performance, and child maltreatment and youth offending. However, to date, there have been no studies quantifying the association between HI and these outcomes in this population. Objective This study will investigate the association between HI and the 5 outcomes in Aboriginal children living in remote NT communities. Methods Individual-level information linked across multiple administrative datasets will be used to conduct a series of retrospective observational studies on selected developmental and school outcomes. The predictor variables for all studies are the results from audiometric hearing assessments. The outcome measures are as follows: Australian Early Development Census results, representing developmental readiness for school, assessed around 5 years of age; Year 1 school attendance rates; Year 3 school-based academic performance, assessed in the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy; incidence of child maltreatment events (including both notifications and substantiated cases); and incidence of a first guilty verdict for youth offenders. Confounding and moderating factors available for the analysis include both community-level factors (including school fixed effects, socioeconomic status, level of remoteness, and housing crowdedness) and individual-level factors (including maternal and perinatal health and hospital admissions in early childhood). Results The study commenced in 2018, with ethics and data custodian approvals for data access and linkage. This has enabled the completion of data linkage and the commencement of data analysis for individual component studies, with findings expected to be published in 2019 and 2020. Conclusions This study will provide first evidence of the impact of OM-related HI on the developmental, educational, and social outcomes of Australian Aboriginal children. The findings are expected to have significant implications for policy development, service design, and resource allocation. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) RR1-10.2196/15464

This paper presents the results of the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study which aimed to measure jurors’ views on sentencing. The study asked jurors who had returned a guilty verdict to propose a sentence for the offender, to comment on the sentence given by the judge in their case and to give their opinions on general sentencing levels for different offence types. A total of 987 jurors from 124 criminal trials in the County Court of Victoria participated in this mixed-method and multi-phased study in 2013–2015. The results are based on juror responses to the Stage One and Stage Two surveys and show that the views of judges and jurors are much more closely aligned than mass public opinion surveys would suggest.

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>[</span><span>Preventive detention laws authorize courts to order the continued detention in prison of a person who has served their allocated term of imprisonment, but who are thought to be at risk of re-offending if released. They raise fun- damental issues about the separation of powers, the purpose of incarcera- tion, and the standard of proof which is/should be required to authorize detention. They assume that it is possible to predict, with a satisfactory rate of success, whether or not a past offender would if released commit further offences. Recently, a majority of the High Court of Australia validated such legislation. The author in this article explains his reasons for disagreeing with the verdict of the Court in this matter.</span><span>] </span></p></div></div></div>

COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, contributes significantly to the morbidity and mortality in humans worldwide. In the absence of specific vaccines or therapeutics available, COVID-19 cases are managed empirically with the passive immunity approach and repurposing of drugs used for other conditions. Recently, a concept that bacilli Calmette–Guerin (BCG) vaccination could confer protection against COVID-19 has emerged. The foundation for this widespread attention came from several recent articles, including the one by Miller et al. submitted to MedRxiv, a pre-print server. The authors of this article suggest that a correlation exists between countries with a prolonged national BCG vaccination program and the morbidity/mortality due to COVID-19. Further, clinical BCG vaccination trials are currently ongoing in the Netherlands, Australia, the UK, and Germany with the hope of reducing mortality due to COVID-19. Although BCG vaccination helps protect children against tuberculosis, experimental studies have shown that BCG can also elicit a non-specific immune response against viral and non-mycobacterial infections. Here, we summarize the pros and cons of BCG vaccination and critically analyze the evidence provided for the protective effect of BCG against COVID-19 and highlight the confounding factors in these studies.

Ripening in sugarcane refers to an increase in sugar content on a fresh weight basis before commercial harvest. Certain chemicals are applied to cane in commercial fields in some countries to accelerate ripening and improve profitability of sugar production. However, responses have usually been reported to be variety and environment specific. We examined changes in the sucrose content in the juice extracted from 43 Australian sugarcane (Saccharum spp. hybrid) varieties in response to 4 ripener treatments in the Burdekin region in northern Queensland over 2 years. The 4 treatments applied were ethephon (as Ethrel®) + fluazifop-P butyl (as Fusilade®), Fusilade® alone, glyphosate (as Weedmaster® Duo), and haloxyfop-R methyl (as Verdict®). These treatments were applied in March–April each year and compared with an untreated control. Of particular interest was whether economic responses are possible for Australian varieties harvested in the May and June period when sugar content in cane is usually low. Increases in sucrose (measured by pol) levels in cane juice were observed after combined application of Ethrel + Fusilade (E+F) and after application of glyphosate, although the result for the latter varied between years. These results suggest that opportunities exist in the Australian industry to improve the profitability of early-harvested sugarcane crops, but further research is required to quantify effects on cane yield and responses in diverse environments.

“Crime is a great leveller,” stated Western Australia's The Inquirer in October 1853. “Policy requires that we should convince the native population that in our Courts of Justice they really are what we profess and tell them they are—the equals of the white man, whatever they may be elsewhere.” The Inquirer was responding to a case that had just come before Perth's Quarter Sessions, in which John Jones was tried for the murder of Neader in the colony's southwest. Jones was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to transportation for life. Given that Australia's colonies were notable for their failure to bring settlers to trial for violence against Aboriginal people, it is significant that The Inquirer's editor did not regard Jones' conviction and sentence as a sign that the Courts of Justice were working as they professed to do. The charge was one of wilful murder, and the evidence indicated that “if ever a foul and deliberate murder was committed, it was on the occasion which led to this trial.” The verdict that Jones was guilty only of manslaughter, he continued, was indicative of the jury's disregard of the law's impartiality when a white man was on trial for the murder of an Aboriginal man. If the law was to make a distinction between white and black, “let it be declared: but to say there is none, and to act as if there were, is a mockery.”

Abstract A number of linguistic studies on courtroom discourse deal with witness examinations, however counsels’ opening statements have been given relatively little attention. Drawing on the analysis of a Crown Prosecutor’s opening statement in a murder trial held at the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and using the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework (Halliday 1994), this study highlights the ways in which the prosecutor constructs his narrative of the crime in his opening statement in order to persuade the jurors of his views. Specifically, the analysis highlights the ways in which the narrative is made persuasive through its specific rhetorical organization and over-specification of orientational information, as well as more credible through quotations from participants with personal experience in the related events. It also shows the ways in which the prosecutor seeks to engage the jurors through his use of second-person pronouns, as well as his differentiated use of the crime participants’ names. Finally, this study highlights the dialogic and heteroglossic characteristics of the adversarial legal process, in that it both refers to what was previously stated and tries to anticipate the response of the jury, whose voice comes as the last word through their verdict.

The Prosecution Project <https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/> is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Project's comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

Tender evaluation is the procedure of choosing the best contractor for a particular project from many applicants. Although rational and logical methods can be used for bidding strategies, bid evaluation remains a skill for which an engineer’s verdict is crucial. Contractors commonly witness that tender selection is not an easy job, and the lowest bid does not necessarily win the contract. The tender decision mainly depends on quantifiable measures such as financial costs and paybacks, and qualitative or invisible factors like administrative security accountability, aptitude, and the proficiency of the contractors. Moreover, Bid evaluation is a decision-making procedure that incorporates an extensive criteria range for which the information is not accordingly. Hence, ambiguity linked to such information is not appropriate for this study. This paper aims to evaluate innovation during the bid evaluation process in the road industry. The research results indicate that the private and public sectors in Australia offer innovative products and work methods, given the chance. Therefore, innovation during the bid evaluation process is welcomed and sometimes strongly encouraged. Further, it is important to have strong research in to how to effectively determine value for money in the context of developing suitable and quality roads. Therefore, this research is useful in the context of evaluating factors that help to understand value for money in the road sector in context of bid evaluation process. Doi: 10.28991/cej-2021-03091676 Full Text: PDF

Research into court interpreting has shown that interpreters can have an impact on the case in many different ways. However, the extent to which this occurs depends on several factors, including the interpreter’s competence, ethics and specialized training in court interpreting, as well as working conditions. One little explored aspect is whether use of consecutive vs. simultaneous interpreting can impact jurors’ perception of a witness or other interpreted party. This paper reports on the results of a large-scale experimental study, with a simulated trial run in different conditions, involving a total of 447 mock jurors. The aim was to identify any differences in the way jurors in Australian courts might assess the evidence of an accused called as a witness, in a monolingual hearing as well as when interpreted consecutively and simultaneously from Spanish to English. Overall, jurors’ recollection of case facts did not differ significantly for the three conditions, though it was lower for consecutive during the afternoon. Jurors also found consecutive more distracting; on the other hand, the consecutive mode was associated with significantly more favourable perception of the accused’s evidence than simultaneous interpreting or monolingual communication. Although jurors found the prosecution to be less convincing when the accused’s evidence was interpreted consecutively compared to the other proceedings, the interpretation mode made no difference to the verdict.

According to Article 56 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, “a judge and a juror may not be examined as a witness about the circumstances of a criminal case which they have become aware of while participating in it”. The Russian Supreme Court has interpreted this rule as imposing a categorical prohibition to examine a juror even though the defense submits and tries to prove that jurors were not impartial due to the extraneous influence and unlawful threats that they confronted in a jury room. As a result, this approach, instead of ensuring the confidentiality of jury deliberations, has been rather used to preclude the discovery of procedural irregularities in reaching a verdict. In its judgment of 7 July 2020, the Russian Constitutional Court has softened this unreasonable restriction by ruling that jurors’ witness immunity is not absolute and appellate courts must use their testimony to establish facts relating to alleged attempts to place unlawful pressure on a jury by undermining the secrecy of jury deliberations. Based on a case file, including the petition that the author of this article drafted and filed to the Russian Constitutional Court, the article reconstructs the arguments invoked by the parties in the course of constitutional proceedings and assesses the approach taken by the Russian Constitutional Court to decide the case. In particular, the court has allowed examining jurors, but only with their consent. Having studied the experience of the countries where a jury system has been present for a long time, namely the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, the author argues that a post-trial examination of jurors is a recognized way to ensure the right of a defendant to an impartial jury. Among other things, the foreign jurisdictions obligate a juror to inform a judge about attempts to unlawfully influence a jury, empowers a judge to determine if there are sufficient grounds for summoning jurors as witnesses, and sets standards of examination. However, none of these legal orders requires that a juror give consent for examination. Therefore, the article concludes that the integrity of jurors in Russia should be protected not by enabling them to testify before an appellate court at their discretion but by strengthening their legal immunity, which in turn will strike an optimal balance between competing constitutional values.

Child sexual assault (CSA) cases reliant on uncorroborated testimony yield low conviction rates. Past research demonstrated a strong relationship between verdict and juror CSA knowledge such as typical delays in reporting by victims, and perceived victim credibility. This trial simulation experiment examined the effectiveness of interventions by an expert witness or an educative judicial direction in reducing jurors' CSA misconceptions. Participants were 885 jurors in New South Wales, Australia. After viewing a professionally acted video trial, half the jurors rendered individual verdicts and half deliberated in groups of 8–12 before completing a post-trial questionnaire. Multilevel structural equation modeling exploring the relationship between CSA knowledge and verdict demonstrated that greater CSA knowledge after the interventions increased the odds ratio to convict by itself, and that the judicial direction predicted a higher level of post-trial CSA knowledge in jurors than other expert interventions. Moreover, greater CSA knowledge was associated with heightened credibility perceptions of the complainant and a corroborating witness. At the conclusion of the trial, the more jurors knew about CSA, the higher the perceived credibility of both the complainant and her grandmother, and the more likely jurors were to convict the accused.

A plea of guilty is a long-accepted factor mitigating sentence in many countries, including Australia, although academic debate over the merits and application of the discount is ongoing. This paper presents findings from a national Australian study on public opinion on the guilty plea sentencing discount, with a particular focus on sexual offences. Survey data were drawn from 989 jurors in cases that resulted in a guilty verdict and 450 unempanelled jurors and 306 online respondents who were provided with vignettes based on real cases. A third of the respondents would have supported a discount in their case if the offender had pleaded guilty. In contrast, more than one half of the respondents surveyed, who had received a vignette with a guilty plea scenario, supported an increment in sentence if the offender had gone to trial. There was more support for a discount in cases involving non-sexual violent offences versus sexual offences and adult versus child victims. Where a discount was supported, this most commonly was a reduction in the length of custodial sentence, with online respondents allocating the least generous discounts. Willingness to accept a sentencing discount was predicted by a range of variables including gender, education, punitive attitudes, offence type and offence seriousness. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for sentencing law and practice.

AbstractIn this paper, I introduce a new challenge to moral realism: the skeptical argument from moral underdetermination. The challenge arises as a consequence of two recent projects in normative ethics. Both Parfit (On what matters, vol 1. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011a) and a group called consequentializers have independently claimed that the main traditions of normative theories can agree on the set of correct particular deontic verdicts. Nonetheless, as Dietrich and List (Philos Rev 126(4):421–479, 2017) and myself (Baumann in J Ethics Soc Philos 13(3):191–221, 2018; Australas J Philos 97(3):511–527, 2019; Ethical Theory Moral Pract 24(4):999–1018, 2021a) have argued, the traditions still disagree about why these are the correct verdicts. This means that we can understand the situation in terms of an idea from the philosophy of science, the underdetermination of theory by the evidence. Yet underdetermination figures in one of the most important skeptical challenges to scientific realism. I show how an analogous skeptical argument can be construed for the moral realm. I propose a standard form for that argument. I then defend it against three possible objections, arguing that it is at least as plausible as, if not more plausible than, its counterpart in the philosophy of science.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen argue that in “contemporary Western visualization central composition is relatively uncommon” (Reading Images 203). In fact, “most compositions polarise elements as Given and New and/or Ideal and Real” (Reading Images 203). This is the regular situation on the front pages of Australia’s national and capital city dailies; but not on May 28. Rather than the favoured front page structures of left (Given) and right (New) and/or top (Ideal) and bottom (Real), on this morning the layouts in the newspapers centralised the Schapelle Corby judgment. While this is not unprecedented, it is the type of coverage usually kept for major issues such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing. Even the recent release of Douglas Wood, which was arguably as, if not more, important for the Australian public in terms of the issues it raised about Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq, did not receive the same type of treatment. Although further study needs to be undertaken, I believe this centralising of issues, that is the running of one story only, on front pages is a growing trend, particularly among the tabloids. The effect of this centralising layout structure is to reduce the news choice for the reader on front pages that they would normally approach with an attitude of scanning and selecting. While this approach could still be taken across the whole paper, the front-page choices are minimised. This essay will examine the coverage of the Corby verdict in the tabloids The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, The Advertiser, The Mercury, and The West Australian, because it is here that the greatest impact of centralisation on the encoded reading paths can be found. Although the broadsheets The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Courier-Mail, and The Canberra Times also centralised the issue, there is not room here to cover them in detail. May 28 was the peak of the media frenzy in the Corby coverage, or at least one of the peaks. As the story is ongoing—turning into something of a soap opera in its call to readers and television news viewers to tune in and see the latest bizarre development, such as the chief lawyer admitting he’s a crook—it could peak again, particularly if on appeal a heavier sentence is handed down. On May 28, the focus moved from Corby’s guilt or innocence to the horror of the twenty-year sentence. In each category—broadsheet and tabloid—the layouts were remarkably similar. At a glance, three of the tabloids are so similar that side-by-side on a newsstand they could have been mistaken for the same. Apart from the fact that Corby’s beauty gave her cultural salience, it is not clear why the Australian media was so taken with her story in the first instance when there are and have been many Australians on drug charges in Asia. My interest here is not so much why or how she became news—that’s an issue for another time—but that once she had captured the attention of the Australian print media, how did they visually treat the material and what are the implications of that treatment. I will argue that the treatment elevated her story, giving it the same weight as the war on terror coverage since 9/11. One of the first elements that draws the eye on any newspaper page is the photograph. Tim Harrower suggests photographs “give a page motion and emotion” (28), arguing however that it is the headline “that leaps out, that grabs you” (37). In reality, it is most likely a combination of both that draws a reader’s attention. Both encode the importance of a story with a dominating photograph or a large headline signalling a story’s significance. The varying size of headlines and photographs and their placement signal the page designer’s order of importance. Six of the ten major Australian newspapers chose the same photograph for their front pages on May 28: a picture of Corby with her head held in her left hand and a look of despair on her face. Four of them—The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun—used the full photograph, while it was heavily cropped into a horizontal picture on the front pages of The West Australian and The Age. The Australian’s choice was similar but the photograph was taken from a slightly different angle. Only one of these newspapers, The West Australian, acknowledged that Corby did not just hang her head in her hand in despair but rather was slapping her head and sobbing as the verdict was read. The television footage gives a different impression of this moment than the still photograph run in the newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier-Mail, in contrast, chose a photograph of Corby struggling with the courtroom police. The Sydney Morning Herald more closely cropped their version so that the emphasis is on Corby. More of the struggle is depicted in The Courier-Mail. The only newspaper making a substantially different choice was The Canberra Times. In this publication, the central vertical photograph was a close up of Corby with tears in her eyes. Her mien is more composed than in the photographs on the other front pages. The source for the photographs, with the exception of The Australian’s choice from Associated Press, was Reuters. Given that the event was in Indonesia and in a crowded courtroom, the array of photographs may have been limited. Of interest was the use of the photograph. The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun ran it full-page, like a poster shot, with the mastheads and headlines over the top. In contrast, The Advertiser maintained a white background for their masthead with the photograph underneath enclosed in a heavy frame and the headlines imposed on top. The other newspapers ran the photograph to the edge of the page without an added frame. The Advertiser, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun chose to forgo their normal front-page teasers. This restricted the scan and select for the reader. Normally readers would have at least two stories, sometimes three, as well as two to three teasers or pointers (usually across the top of the page under the masthead) to scan and select their reading matter. On May 28, however, Corby was centralised with a similar reading path encoded for each of these newspapers. The photograph is the most salient element and the eye moves from this to the main headline at the bottom of the page. As the masthead is known and familiar, unless the reader is selecting the newspaper from a newsstand rather than picking it up from their front yard, it is likely they would only subconsciously register it. These layouts, with a reading path from photograph to headlines down the page, are closer to linear in design, than the normal non-linear format and more interactive front pages. Therefore, the coding is for reading “left to right and from top to bottom, line by line” (Kress and van Leeuwen 218). Newspapers are not normally read in a linear way, but “selectively and partially . . . Their composition sets up particular hierarchies of the movement of the hypothetical reader within and across their different elements. Such reading paths begin with the most salient element, from there move to the next most salient element and so on.” (218) There is also sameness in the headlines and their implications. The Mercury, the most unadorned of the layouts, has “20 Years” in block capitals with a subhead and pointer reading “Corby’s Nightmare Sentence, pages 2-6”. The implication is clear, Corby’s sentence is 20 years in jail and it is pronounced a “nightmare”. The Herald Sun also chose “20 Years” with a subheading of “Shock and tears over jail sentence”. Consolidating this notion of “shock and tears” were three smaller photographs across the bottom of the page depicting crying and sobbing women. No male sympathy was depicted, thus tapping into and reinforcing Australian cultural stereotypes that it is the Australian women rather than the men who cry. The Advertiser’s main headline declared “20 Years in Hell”. Beside this was a smaller underlined headline and pointer “Guilty Corby, sent to jail, Australians react in anger Pages 8-15”. There are slight distinctions in these three pages but essentially the encoded reading path and message is the same. That is not to say that some people may read the pages in a different order. As Kress and van Leeuwen argue “newspaper pages can be read in more than one way” (“Front Page” 205), however, the choice on these pages is limited. The Daily Telegraph uses headlines with different emphasis and includes text from the main story imposed over the photograph. Pointers square-off the pages at the bottom. A kicker head at the top of the page, below the masthead, and set against a photograph of Abu Bakir Bashir, declares: “This terrorist planned the murder of 88 Australians and got two years. Yesterday Schapelle Corby got 20”. This comparison does not appear on the already examined pages. Towards the bottom of the page, the main headline set over two lines reads “Nation’s Fury”. To the right of the “Nation” is a smaller headline, which says “20 years in hell and prosecutor’s still demand life”. The story begins beside the second line “Fury”. The message on this page is more strident than the others and was analysed by the ABC TV show Media Watch on May 30. Media Watch declared the “spin on the verdict” used by The Daily Telegraph as “truly a disgrace”. The criticism was made because Bashir was not convicted in court of masterminding the bombing therefore the word “planned” is problematic and misleading. As the Media Watch report points out, the three Indonesians convicted of masterminding the bombing are on death row and will face the firing squad. The final tabloid, The West Australian, presented a similar message to The Daily Telegraph with a headline of “Bomb plotter: 2½ years / Dope smuggler: 20 years”. The visual impact of this page, however, is not as striking as the other pages. The visual designs of The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun make it immediately clear that the Corby verdict is the central issue in the news and that all other stories are so marginal they are off the page. In contrast, The West Australian ran its normal teasers just below the masthead, offering four choices for the reader as well as weather and home delivery details at the bottom. The heavily cropped central photograph of Corby leaves in only her wrist and central facial features; it is not even immediately apparent that the photograph is of Corby. The story runs in an L-shape around it. Although Corby is central, the reading path is not as clear. The reader’s eye will most likely be drawn from photograph to caption and to headline or headline, photograph, caption. Whatever the path, the story text is always read last, that is, if the reader chooses this story at all (Kress and van Leeuwen, “Front Pages” 205). The story opens by announcing that Corby’s lawyers want the Australian authorities to “launch an investigation” into the case and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has offered the help of two Australian QCs in preparing an appeal. This introduction does not support the headline. The comparison with Bashir comes in paragraph three. While Corby still has salience, the inclusion of teasers on the front of The West Australian brings back the choice for the reader, albeit in a small way. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that newspapers “are the first point of ‘address’ for the readers” presenting “the most significant events and issues of the day for the paper and its readers” (“Front Page” 229). In the Corby coverage on May 28, the newspapers presented the court verdict as the most important of all stories on offer and her image became the most salient element, the “nucleus” of the front pages. All newspapers make choices for their readers in their capacity as gatekeepers (see David Manning White and Glen Bleske), but not, I would argue, to the extent that it appeared in the Corby case. A centralising approach to news can be understood with stories such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing but does one woman’s plight over drug charges in Bali truly deserve such coverage? As a single event maybe not, but the Corby verdict again raised the issue of Australia’s uneasiness about the laws and culture of its Asian neighbours, feelings amplified in the wake of the Bali Bombing. The rhetoric used in the front pages of The Daily Telegraph and The West Australian clearly state this when they compare Corby’s sentence to Bashir’s. They demonstrate a paranoia about the treatment of “our girl” in a foreign judicial system which appears to deal more leniently with terrorists. Thus, one girl’s story is transformed into part of a much larger issue, a fact reinforced through the visual treatment of the material. There remain some questions. What does it say about the newspaper’s attitude to their readers when they centralise issues so strongly that reader choice is removed? Is this part of the “dumbing down” of the Australian media, where news organisations move towards more clearly dictating views to their reading public? Is it attributable to media ownership, after all four of these tabloids belong to News Corporation? These questions and others about the trend towards the centralising of issues are for a bigger study. For now, we watch to see how much longer Corby remains in the nucleus of the news and for further indication of a growing trend towards centralising issues. References Bleske, Glen K. “Mrs Gates Takes Over: An Updated Version of a 1949 Case Study.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Harrower, Tim. The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. “Front Page: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout.” Approaches to Media Discourse. Ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Media Watch. May 30, 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1380398.htm>. Sellers, Leslie. The Simple Subs Book. Oxford: Permagon Press, 1968. White, David Manning. “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delaney, Elizabeth. "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>. APA Style Delaney, E. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>.

Revivalistics is a new comparative, global, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (Zuckermann 2003, 2009, and importantly 2020), and particularistic peculiarities and cultural relativist idiosyncrasies on the other, apparent in linguistic reclamation, revitalization and reinvig- oration across various sociological backgrounds, all over the globe (Zuckermann 2020, Zucker- mann and Walsh 2011, 2014). The best-case scenario is that in which the revivalist happens to be the custodian/owner of the very language being revived (see e.g., in the case of Myaamia). But this is unfortunately rare these days, especially in Australia. Language revival, therefore, is similar to co-parenting. But the revivalist is only a stepfather. The important biological mother is the Indige- nous/minority community. If you are the stepfather and your spouse, who is the biological mother, makes what you perceive to be a mediocre decision with regard to your children, you cannot just disapprove of it. After all, the children are your spouse’s more than they are yours. You must work together for the best possible outcome. Similarly, if the community supports a decision that is not linguistically viable, the revivalist can try to inspire the community members, but must accept their own verdict. That would be difficult for a linguist with poor social skills.This article first introduces revivalistics, the reclamation-revitalization-reinvigration spectrum, and explores the symmetry of one of its tools, namely the LAnguage Revival Diamond (LARD), which consists of four core quad- rants: Language Owners vis-à-vis the Public Sphere; and Linguistics vis-à-vis Pedagogy.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a history of repetitive head impacts (RHI). CTE was described in boxers as early as the 1920s and by the 1950s it was widely accepted that hits to the head caused some boxers to become “punch drunk.” However, the recent discovery of CTE in American and Australian-rules football, soccer, rugby, ice hockey, and other sports has resulted in renewed debate on whether the relationship between RHI and CTE is causal. Identifying the strength of the evidential relationship between CTE and RHI has implications for public health and medico-legal issues. From a public health perspective, environmentally caused diseases can be mitigated or prevented. Medico-legally, millions of children are exposed to RHI through sports participation; this demographic is too young to legally consent to any potential long-term risks associated with this exposure. To better understand the strength of evidence underlying the possible causal relationship between RHI and CTE, we examined the medical literature through the Bradford Hill criteria for causation. The Bradford Hill criteria, first proposed in 1965 by Sir Austin Bradford Hill, provide a framework to determine if one can justifiably move from an observed association to a verdict of causation. The Bradford Hill criteria include nine viewpoints by which to evaluate human epidemiologic evidence to determine if causation can be deduced: strength, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility, coherence, experiment, and analogy. We explored the question of causation by evaluating studies on CTE as it relates to RHI exposure. Through this lens, we found convincing evidence of a causal relationship between RHI and CTE, as well as an absence of evidence-based alternative explanations. By organizing the CTE literature through this framework, we hope to advance the global conversation on CTE mitigation efforts.

Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. Kermit the Frog. “Kermit’s Commencement Address at Southampton Graduate Campus.” Long Island University News 19 May 1996. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.southampton.liu.edu/news/commence/1996/kermit.htm>. McNamara, Eileen. “Honorary senselessness.” The Boston Globe 7 May 2006. ‹http://www. boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/07/honorary_senselessness/>. O’Loughlin, Shaunnagh. “Doctor Cave.” Monash Magazine 21 (May 2008). 13 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue21-2008/alumni/cave.html>. Queensland University of Technology. “Presentation of PhD Theses by Published Papers.” Queensland University of Technology Doctor of Philosophy Regulations (IF49). 12 Oct. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation %20of%20PhD%20Theses>. Swinburne University of Technology. Research Higher Degrees and Policies. 14 Nov. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.swinburne.edu.au/corporate/registrar/ppd/docs/RHDpolicy& procedure.pdf>. University of Canberra. Higher Degrees by Research: Policy and Procedures (The Gold Book). 7.3.3.27 (a). 15 Nov. 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/attachments/ goldbook/Pt207_AB20approved3220arp07.pdf>.

On the back cover of The Art Forger’s Handbook, Eric Hebborn proclaims No drawing can lie of itself, it is only the opinion of the expert which can deceive. (Hebborn) Well certainly, but like many forgers Hebborn was dedicated to ensuring the experts have ample material with which to work. The debate about authenticity rolls into the debate about originality rolls into the debate about excellence, slipping between the verifiable and the subjective, shadowed by the expert assessing, categorising, and delivering verdicts. Yet the proclamation ‘This is authentic’ is not straightforward. It is impossible to prove that the statement ‘This is a painting by Sir Arthur Streeton’ is true. It is always possible (though not probable) that the work in question is an excellent copy, manufactured with materials identical to those employed by Streeton, with brushstrokes reflecting Streeton’s manipulation of paint, applied in the kind of sequence Streeton used and with a provenance crafted to simulate perfectly an acceptable provenance for a work by Streeton. Much easier to prove that a work is not by a particular artist; one very obvious anomaly will suffice (Sloggett 298). But an anomaly requires a context, the body of material against which to assess the new find. John Drew’s manipulation of the art market was successful not because of the quality of the pictures he paid John Myatt to produce (after all they were painted with household emulsion paint often extended with K-Y Jelly). His success lay in his ability to alter the identities of these works by penetrating the archives of the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum and manufacturing an archival history that virtually copied the history of works by his target artists, Nicholson, Giocometti, Chagall, Epstein, Dubeffet, and de Stals. While the paintings mimicked works by these artists, without a provenance (an identity and identity trail) they were nothing more than approximate copies, many which were initially rejected by the dealers and auction houses (Landesman 38). Identity requires history and context: for something to be deemed ‘real’, both need to be verifiable. The plight of stateless refugees lies in their inability to verify their history (who am I?) and their context (I exist here because…). Drew’s ability to deliver a history is only one way in which works can slip identities (or in the case of Drew’s works – can be pushed). Drew’s intention and his ability to profit by the deception denoted fraud. But authentication is more often sought to support not fraud but optimism. ‘Can you please look at this painting which hung in my grandfather’s lounge room for over 50 years? It was given to him by the artist. I remember it as a small boy, and my father also remembers it when he was a child. But I can’t sell it because someone said it didn’t look right. Can you tell if it is by the artist?’ Such a problem needs to be approached on two fronts. Firstly, how strong is the evidence that this work is by the artist and secondly, what is the hypothesis of best fit for this work? The classic authentication process examines a picture and, against a framework of knowns (usually based on securely provenanced works) looks for points of identification between the proffered work and provenanced works. From these points of identification a theory of best fit is developed. For example, a painting with the inscription ‘Arthur Streeton/1896’ is analysed for its pigment content in order to test the proposition that this is a work by Arthur Streeton from 1896. Pigment analysis indicates that titanium white (a pigment not available commercially until 1920) is found in the clouds. So the proposition must be modified: either this is a work by Streeton that has been heavily reworked after 1920, or this is not a work by Streeton, or this is a work by Streeton but the date is wrong. The authentication process will define and redefine each proposition until there is one that best fits the evidence at hand. Fluorescing the date to establish whether it is a recent addition would be part of this process. Examining other whites in the painting to check if the clouds had been added later would be another. Checking the veracity of the provenance would also be critical. We may decide that this is not an 1896 work by Streeton based on the evidence of the pigment. But what if an art historian discovers a small pigment manufacturer in Box Hill whose records show they produced titanium dioxide as a pigment in 1890? The new evidence may affect the conclusion. But more likely we would want to verify such evidence before we altered our conclusion. Between the extremes of Drew’s manufactured identities and the optimism of a third generation is the strengthened work, combining identity shift and hope. Dali pulled a reverse strengthening when he signed 20,000 blank sheets of paper for lithographs that had not yet been executed (Hebborn 79), but more usually it is the inscription not the image that is missing. Of course a signature is good, but signature works may not have, and do not need signatures. A signature may be a picture of a certain place (Heidelberg) at a certain time of day (moonrise); optimism will soon join the dots, producing a David Davies Moonrise. Often an inscription helps; a nondescript clean-shaven Victorian gentleman can become a bearded founding father, an anonymous nag the first winner of the Melbourne Cup. And if the buyer is not convinced, then a signature may win the day. Unlike Drew’s fabricated histories these changes in identity are confined to transformations of the object itself and then, by association, to its context. Art fraud is an endearing topic, partly because it challenges the subjective nature of expertise. When van Meegeren manufactured his most successful ‘Vermeer’ The Supper at Emmaus (1937) he explored the theories of experts, and then set about producing a work that copied not an existing Vermeer, but the critic’s theory of what an as-yet-undiscovered Vermeer would look like. Hannema, van Schendel and finally Bredius subscribed to the theory that Vermeer’s trip to Italy resulted in Caravaggio’s influence on the artist (Dutton 25). Van Meegeren obligingly produced such a work. So does it matter? Is an identical work as good a work? Is a sublime copyist of great artists a great artist? (Not that van Meegeren was either.) Authentication is a process of assessing claims about identity. It involves reputation, ownership, relationships and truth. When an artist executes a copy it is homage to the skill of the master. When Miss Malvina Manton produced a scene of dead poultry in 1874, she was copying the most popular painting in the fledgling collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Schendel’s The Poultry Vendor (Inglis 63), and joined a league of copyists including Henry Gritten and Nicholas Chevalier who sought permission to copy the Gallery’s paintings. When John O’Loughlin copied works by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and passed them off as original the impact on the artist was less benign (Gotting). Sid Nolan refused to identify problematic paintings attributed to his oeuvre claiming that to acknowledge such paintings would cast doubt on his entire oeuvre. Bob Dickerson assiduously tracks down and ‘outs’ problematic paintings from his oeuvre, claiming that not to do so would leave the thin edge of the wedge firmly embedded for future opportunists. Both are concerned with their identity. Creation is a fraught business, simply because the act of creation is the act of giving an identity. Whether we create a child, a musical score, a painting or a t-shirt brand, the newly created entity is located within a lineage and context that means more than the single individual creation. This is why identity theft is such a major crime. If someone steals an identity they also steal the collateral developed around that identity, the ability to deal in credit, to drive a car, to travel overseas, to purchase a house. Identity is a valuable commodity; for an artist it is their tool of trade. There is no doubt that the public celebrates the fake. Perhaps it is a celebration of the power of the object over the critic or the theoretician. But it is an extraordinarily costly celebration. Despite the earlier assertion that it is possible to make the perfect copy, very few even approximate the vibrancy and intelligence of an original. Most, if accepted, would seriously dilute the strength of the artist’s oeuvre. Forging Aboriginal art is even more disgraceful. In a society where cultural transmission has traditionally been based on complex relationships of dance, song, painting and objects to customary rights, laws and obligations, art fraud impacts on the very fabric of society. There will always be works that slip identities, and many are not pulled back. False works do damage; they dull our perceptions, dilute our ability to understand an artist’s contribution to society, and are usually no more than blunt instruments used for financial gain. References Australian Institute of Criminology. “Art Crime: Protecting Art, Protecting Artists and Protecting Consumers.” 2-3 Decembeer 1999. 1 May 2005 http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/artcrime/>. Catterall, L. The Great Dali Art Fraud and Other Deceptions. Fort Lee, New Jersey: Barricade, 1992. Dutton, Denis, ed. The Forger’s Art Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. California: U of California P, 1983 Gotting, Peter. “Shame of Aboriginal Art Fakes.” 16 July 2000. 31 May 2005 http://www.museum-security.org/00/112.html#3>. Hebborn, Eric. The Art Forger’s Handbook. London: Cassell, 1997. Inglis, Alison. “What Did the Picture’s Surface Convey? Copies and Copying in the National Gallery of Victoria during the Colonial Period.” The Articulate Surface: Dialogues on Paintings between Conservators, Curators and Art Historians. Ed. Sue-Anne Wallace, with Jacqueline Macnaughtan and Jodi Parvey. Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, the Australian National University and the National Gallery of Australia, 1996. 55-69. Landesman, Peter. “A 20th-Century Master Scam.” The New York Times Magazine (18 July 1999): 31-63. Sloggett, Robyn. “The Truth of the Matter: Issues and Procedures in the Authentication of Artwork.” Arts, Antiquity and Law 5.3 (September 2000): 295-303. Tallman, Susan. “Report from London Faking It.” Art in America (November 1990): 75-81. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sloggett, Robyn. "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>. APA Style Sloggett, R. (Jul. 2005) "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies In a world where nothing is certain… and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness. – David Lodge (“Sense and Sensibility”) Leon Edel expressed the central puzzle of writing biography as “every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it” (qtd. in Novarr 165). My primary challenge in writing Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean – a biography in the form of a (fictionalised) first-person memoir purportedly written by the subject herself – was the location of a textual voice for Mary that, if not her own, could have credibly belonged to a woman of her time, place and circumstance. The ‘Dean case’ caused a sensation across Australia in the mid-1890s when George Dean was arrested for the attempted murder of his 20-year-old wife, Mary. George was a handsome Sydney ferry master who had played the romantic lead in a series of spectacular rescues, flinging himself into the harbour to save women passengers who had fallen overboard. When on trial for repeatedly poisoning his wife, his actions and motivations were not probed; instead, Mary’s character and behaviour and, by extrapolation, those of the entire female sex, were examined and analysed. This approach climaxed in defence counsel claims that Mary poisoned herself to frame her husband, but George was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the mandatory punishment for attempted murder at that time. Despite the persuasive prosecution evidence and the jury’s unanimous verdict, the Sydney press initiated a public outcry. After a series of inflamed community meetings and with a general election approaching, the Premier called for a Royal Commission into Dean’s conviction. This inquiry came to the extraordinary conclusion that: the facts, as shown, are quite as compatible with the hypothesis that Mrs. Dean ... administered the arsenic to herself – possibly at the prompting of her mother and without any intention of taking a fatal dose – as that the poison was administered to her by her husband with an intent to kill. (Regina v George Dean 16) George was freed with a Royal Pardon and Mary was publicly reviled as a pariah of the lowest order. This unhappy situation continued even after it was revealed that her husband had confessed his guilt to his solicitor, and charges of conspiracy and perjury were brought against George and his lawyers who were then members of the New South Wales Parliament. Although the lawyers both escaped relatively unscathed, George Dean was gaoled for 14 years. This was despite Mary’s story having obvious potential for a compelling biographical narrative. To begin with, she experiences the terror of suspecting her own husband is poisoning her as she convalesces after the birth of their child. She survives repeated doses of strychnine and arsenic, only to confront the humiliating certainty that her husband was desperate to be rid of her. Then, weak and ill, she has to endure the ordeal of police-court proceedings and a criminal trial when she is damned as a witch conspiring with her wicked mother to ruin her husband. Withstanding assertions that her childhood home was a brothel and she a prostitute, she spends long weeks in hospital knowing her husband is under sentence of execution, only to be released, destitute, with a sickly child she has poisoned with her own breast milk. Still physically debilitated, she is called before a Royal Commission where she is again violently cross-examined and, on the day of her twenty-first birthday, is confronted with the knowledge that not only was her mother a transported convict, but that she is, herself, of illegitimate birth. When the Commission finds in her husband’s favour, Mary has to watch her poisoner pardoned, freed and feted as a popular celebrity, while she faces an increasingly viperous press, and is jeered at and spat on in the streets. Next, she is forced to testify at yet another series of public trials and finally, even when her husband confesses his crime and is gaoled for perjury (his Royal Pardon saving him from again facing an attempted murder charge), she is ostracised as the penniless wife of a common criminal and illegitimate daughter of a transported convict. Despite this, and having little more than the shame of divorce to look forward to, Mary nevertheless regains her health and, four years after her final court appearance, marries a respectable shopkeeper. A year later, in 1902, she gives birth to her second child. together with examples written by women of her time, class and education, fabricating an extended letter (written by Mary, but based on historical evidence) seemed a viable textual solution. For centuries, domestic letters were a major means of autobiographical expression for ‘non-literary’, working-class women and, moreover, a textual format within which Mary (silenced for over a century) could finally relate her own version of events. These decisions aligned with what John Burnett has identified as the most common motivations for a working-class person to write an autobiographical narrative: “belief that he [sic] had some important … personal triumph over difficulties and misfortune … to leave for one’s children or grandchildren” (11). This relatively common human desire also tailored neatly with a central theme animating Mary’s life – that ignorance about the past can poison your future. To create a textual voice for Mary in her narrative, I utilised the literary process of ‘ventriloquising’ or providing a believable (fictional) voice for a historical character – the term ‘literary ventriloquism’ was coined by David Lodge in 1987 for how novelists create (and readers ‘hear’) the various voices in literary works (100). While biographies including Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) and, as Richard Freadman has noted, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) have effectively employed varieties of biographical ventriloquism, this is a literary device more frequently used by fiction writers. It is also interesting to note that when skilled fiction writers employ ventriloquism, their resulting works are often perceived as much as biography-histories as imaginative pieces. Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is the invented document of which Kelly biographers dream, an autobiographical account supposedly written by Kelly so his infant daughter might “comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered” (5), but the voice Carey created was so credible that historians (including Ian Jones and Alex McDermott) debated its authenticity. This was despite Carey making no claims for the historical accuracy of his work. Of course, I primarily tested my text against such press interviews, Mary’s own letters and the articulations of her voice reported in the trial and other court records. Not that the latter group of texts can be taken as ‘verbatim’ transcriptions. Although court and other legal records provide, as Karen Dubinskyhas noted, “a window into instances of personal life … we can hear people talking about love, emotional and sexual intimacy, power, betrayal and broken promises” (4), such texts are profoundly mediated documents. The citations we now read in print passed through many hands – Mary’s testimonies would have been initially noted by the court stenographer, then transcribed, corrected, edited, typeset, corrected again, printed and bound – with each stage in the process incorporating inaccuracies, omissions and changes into the text. And, however accurate, such transcripts are never complete, neither indicating the tone in which answers were given, nor the speakers’ hesitations, pauses or accompanying gestures. The transcripts I used also record many examples of Lyndal Roper’s “forced discourse”, where Mary was directed to give only usually abbreviated responses to questions, questions which no doubt often directed the tone, content and even wording of her answers (54). Despite these limitations, it was following Mary in court through these texts, cringing at the humiliation and bullying she was subjected to, rallying when she showed spirit and almost cheering when she was finally vindicated, which allowed me to feel a real human connection with her as my subject. It was via these texts (and her own letters) that I also became aware that Mary Dean had been a person who, at the same time as she was living her life, was also (as are we all) remembering, forgetting and, probably, fabricating stories about that life – stories which, at times, challenged and contradicted each other. My aim was always to move beyond finding a persuasive textual voice for Mary, that is one which seemed authentic (and suitable for a novel), to one able to tell some of the contradictory stories of Mary’s life, as she no longer could. Ultimately, I wanted every utterance of my textual rendering of her speech to declare (as J. M. Coetzee has one of his characters say): “I live, I suffer, I am here. With cunning and treachery, if necessary, I fight against becoming one of the forgotten ones of history” (3). Works Cited Allen, Judith A. Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880. Melbourne: Oxford U P, 1990. Burnett, John, ed. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane, 1976. Carey, Peter. The True History of the Kelly Gang, St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977. Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1895: 5. Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993. Freadman, Richard. â??Prose and Cons of a Bizarre Lifeâ?. The Age 27 May 2000: Saturday Extra, 7. Holmes, Katie. Spaces in Her Day: Australian Womenâ??s Diaries of the 1920s-1930s. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1995. â??Interview with Mrs. Dean.â? Truth 5 May 1895: 7. Jones, Ian. â??Not in Nedâ??s Natureâ?. The Weekend Australian 18-9 Aug. 2001: R12-3. Lodge, David. â??After Bakhtin.â? The Linguistics of Writing. Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987: 89-102. Lodge, David. â??Sense and Sensibilityâ?. The Guardian Unlimited 2 Nov. 2002. [accessed 12/11/02] <http://books.guardian.co..uk/review/story/0,12084,823955,00.php> McDermott, Alex. â??Ned Kellyâ??s Yawp.â? Australian Book Review Mar. 2002: 16-8. McDermott, Alex. â??The Apocalyptic Chant of Edward Kellyâ?. The Jerilderie Letter. Melbourne: Text, 2001. v-xxxiv. Motion, Andrew. Wainewright the Poisoner. London: Faber, 2000. Novarr, David. The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880-1970. West Layfayette, In.: Perdue U P, 1986. Peers, Juliet. What No Man Had Ever Done Before. Malvern, Vic.: Dawn Revival, 1992. Regina v George Dean: Report of the Royal Commission, Appointed Seventh Day of May, 1895. Sydney: Government, 1895. Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Seymour, Mary. Letter to George Clements, 12 October 1891. Letters to Frank Brereton, 22 October 1891, 30 December 1891, 25 April 1892. Regina v George Dean: Report of the Royal Commission: 244-46. Spender, Dale. â??Journal on a Journal.â? Womenâ??s Studies International Forum 10.1 (1987): 1-5. Sydney Morning Herald. 9 October 1895: 8, 10 October 1895: 5. Links http://books.guardian.co..uk/review/story/0 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "Imagining Mary Dean " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/07-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (2004, Jan 12). Imagining Mary Dean . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/07-brien.php>

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Beyond reasonable doubt” is the standard of proof for criminal cases in a court of law. However, what happens when doubt, reasonable or otherwise, is embedded in the media reporting of criminal cases, even before charges have been laid? This paper will analyse newspaper reports of recent rape cases involving Australian footballers, and identify narrative figures that are used to locate blame solely with the alleged victims, protecting the footballers from blame. I uncover several stock female “characters” which evoke doubt in the women’s claims: the Predatory Woman, who hunts down footballers for sex and is always sexually available to any and all footballers; the Woman Scorned, who makes a false rape complaint out of revenge; and the Gold Digger, who makes a false complaint for money. I will argue that the news media thus effectively provide footballers with a criminal defence, before the cases can even reach court. Rape and Football in Australia The issue of football and rape first came to mass public attention in February 2004, when six players from National Rugby League (NRL) team the Canterbury Bulldogs allegedly raped a woman while at a New South Wales resort. Two weeks later, two players from the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team allegedly raped a woman following their pre-season cup victory. These two football codes are the nation’s most popular, with rugby league dominating the north-eastern states, with the southern, eastern and western the domain of Australian Rules. In neither case were charges laid, and although at least twenty distinct cases have been reported in the Australian media, involving more than fifty-six footballers and officials, only one–NRL star Brett Stewart–has yet been tried. Stewart was acquitted in September 2010. Former AFL footballer Andrew Lovett has also been ordered to stand trial in July 2011 for allegedly raping a woman on Christmas Eve, 2009. Nevertheless, the majority of cases never reach court. In criminal cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately decides whether to pursue charges through the courts, and, as most cases will be decided by a jury drawn from the general public, the DPP must decide whether the general public would accept the prosecution’s evidence as proof of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means that if a jury retains any doubt that the accused person is guilty, as long as that doubt is reasonable, they must return a verdict of “not guilty.” Public opinion in high-profile cases is therefore extremely important. If the DPP perceives a high level of public scepticism about a particular case, this indicates that the likelihood of the general public accepting the prosecution’s evidence is low, and they will often decide not to pursue the case. My analysis will show that media reports of the cases, which were published before any decision about laying criminal charges was made, can in fact work to create doubt, taking popular, victim-blaming stories to cast doubt on the complainants’ testimonies. Thus “reasonable doubt,” or a doubt that seems reasonable to many or most readers, is created before the case can even reach court. Predatory Women, Gold Diggers and Women Scorned When debate began in 2004 and explanations were sought for the high numbers of cases, stories abounded in which women have consensual sex with footballers, and then make a false rape complaint. I identify the principal characters of these stories as the Predatory Woman, Gold Digger and Woman Scorned. These stories were particularly prevalent amongst football representatives, blog contributors and talkback radio callers. Some media commentators provided alternative explanations (Magnay, for example), and others were explicitly critical of such stories (Pinkney, Wilson, for example); however, other journalists in fact evoked these same stereotypes. All of these characters have “common currency” (Smart 39), and have been used by defence lawyers in criminal trials for centuries, which means they are likely to be believed. These commentators therefore (indirectly) portray the complainants as liars, and reinforce the pervasive victim-blaming discourses in the wider public. The Predatory Woman The Predatory Woman character can be traced back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when so-called “fallen” women were frequently “scorned as predatory creatures who lured young men into sin” (Clark 59). In her study of newspaper articles on football and sexual assault, gender theorist Kim Toffoletti identified the “predatory female” as a recurrent figure who is used to portray footballers as victims of “deviant” female sexuality (432-3). Toffoletti argues that the assumption underlying the use of the predatory female is that “incidents of sexual assault can occur when women deviate from the ‘conventions’ of heterosexual relations that expect them to be passive and sexually available, and men to exude sexual virility” (433). However, I argue that commentators’ usage often carries this further, and rather than using the story to claim that a victim of rape “deserved” it, the Predatory Woman actually serves as a replacement for the Raped Woman, therefore implicitly claiming that the complainant was lying. The Predatory Woman is the aggressor in all sexual encounters with footballers, a “sexual predator” (McCabe 31) who is said to “target” players and “hunt in packs” (Lyon 1). In a 2004 interview, one footballer described the phenomenon as “frightening” (McCabe 31), and another in 2009 claimed that footballers are “given temptations,” and “some of them [women] are downright predators” (Cunningham 30). The hunting animal metaphor clearly represents women as sexual aggressors, virtually suggesting that they are committing violent acts–moving in on unsuspecting footballers for the “kill” (sex). Thus portraying a complainant as one who seeks out sex with footballers implies that she victimised the players. As a woman cannot be both sexual aggressor and rape victim, the character of the Predatory Woman replaces that of the Raped Woman, therefore invalidating a complainant’s testimony and creating doubt. The Woman Scorned The Woman Scorned, another popular character in footballer sexual assault narratives, has also been evoked by the defence in criminal rape trials for centuries (Sanday; Benedict 2, 39-40, 83; Larcombe 100, 104-106, 111; Lees 78). The prevalence of footballers’ beliefs in the Woman Scorned story when NRL player Simon Williams commented about the prevalence of group sex/rape incidents involving NRL players on the 2009 Four Corners “Code of Silence” episode: It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided, if they [players] had put them [women] in a cab and said thanks or that sort of thing not just kicked her out and called her a dirty whatever. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that stuff up. Williams’ implicit claim here is that no woman would make a rape complaint as long as footballers always “said thanks” after sex. He thus implies that “most” of the complaints have been about revenge from women who felt mistreated after consensual sex: Women Scorned. The Gold Digger The Gold Digger is also an established character in both football rape stories and criminal rape trials; Peggy Sanday identifies her in cases dating from the eighteenth century. In rape cases, the Gold Digger can be evoked when a prominent and/or wealthy man–such as a noble in the eighteenth century, or a footballer in the present context–is accused of rape, whether or not the alleged victim seeks or receives a financial settlement. Many football fans evoked the Gold Digger on Internet blog sites, even when there were no observable characteristics corresponding to the Gold Digger in any of the media narratives. One declared: “My mum said she was probably being a slut, then after they ‘did’ her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it [sic]” (in Baird 41). The Gold Digger stereotype invalidates a rape complaint, as a woman who alleges rape for financial gain must be lying, and was therefore not raped. Her claims are to be doubted. Narrative Immunity From 2009 onward, although traces of these characters remained, the focus of the debate shifted, from the possibility of sexual assault to players’ alcohol intake and the prevalence of “group sex.” Nina Philadelphoff-Puren identifies implicit claims that the complainants were lying in the statements of football representatives (37, 41-43), which imply that they must be Predatory Women, Women Scorned or Gold Diggers. In order to show clearly how journalists mobilised these characters more directly to evoke doubt, I conducted a search of the “Newsbank” newspaper database, for opinion pieces that sought to explain why the allegations were made, using varying combinations of the search terms “AFL,” “NRL,” “football,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” “rugby,” “sexual violence,” “sex” and “women.” Articles were sought in broadsheet newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and tabloids The Herald Sun (Melbourne) and Daily Telegraph (Sydney), the most widely read newspapers in the cities where the alleged incidents occurred. The time-frame selected was 27 February 2004 to 1 May 2004, which covered the period from when the Canterbury Bulldogs case was first reported, until debate died down after the announcement that no charges would be laid against St Kilda footballers Steven Milne and Leigh Montagna. Twenty articles were collected for analysis: two from the Daily Telegraph, eight from the Herald Sun, seven from the Age, and three from the Sydney Morning Herald. Of these, half (ten) overtly blamed the alleged victims, with seven of those explicitly evoking Predatory Woman, Woman Scorned and/or Gold Digger stereotypes, and one strongly implying them. Although it might be expected that tabloid newspapers would be much more likely to (re-)produce popular stereotypes than broadsheets, the same numbers were found in each type of newspaper. The “common currency” (Smart 39) these stories have means that they are more likely to be considered credible than other stories. Their use by respected media commentators–particularly broadsheet journalists, whose publications lay claim to an educated readership and more progressive attitudes–is of even greater significance. In this paper, I will analyse three broadsheet articles in detail, in order to illustrate the various strategies used to evoke the stereotyped characters for an educated readership. The articles selected are by writers from very different backgrounds–a former footballer, a feminist and a “life-skills” coach to AFL footballers–and although it might seem that they would provide markedly different perspectives on the issue, I will show that all three evoke stereotypes that cast doubt on the complainants’ claims. The Story of the “Insider” Former AFL footballer Tim Watson’s “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone” was published shortly after the allegations against the St Kilda AFL players were made public in 2004. The article features a number of Predatory Women, who make “victims” of footballers; however, while Watson does not provide direct narrative accounts of the alleged rapes, he instead recounts narratives of other interactions between footballers and women. Predatory Women therefore come to replace Raped Women as characters and invalidate the alleged victims’ claims; as Watson represents these women as the sole agents, full responsibility for these incidents is attributed to women. The bulk of Watson’s article relates two stories unconnected with any (known) sexual assault cases, about AFL teams travelling to the country for training and being harassed by women. Placing the narratives immediately after warnings about “trouble zones,” when the article is clearly responding to the sexual assault allegations, suggests that his narratives explain what “potential trouble” and “trouble zones” are. He therefore implies that his narratives illustrate what “really” happened with the St Kilda (and Canterbury) players. The only instances where players are given grammatical agency in this narrative is when they “mingled with the locals” and “left the function as a group”; all the narrative action is attributed to women. Mingling has no sexual connotation, and “the locals” is a gender neutral term, implying that the players’ only action at the function was to interact with men and women in a non-sexual way. The characters of “a couple of girls” are introduced, and according to Watson these “girls” made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions that she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players. The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. In order to portray the women more clearly as the sole sexual aggressors–Predatory Women–Watson leaves out any events where players actively participate, events which are highly likely to have occurred. For example, in Watson’s narrative there is no two-way flirtation, and the players do not seek out, encourage or even respond in any (positive) way to the female attention they receive, although anecdotal evidence suggests this is extremely unlikely to have happened (Mewett and Toffoletti 170, 172-73). The women are only grammatical agents with intentions–their agency relates to what they plan to do–however, emphasising the fact that the team left as a group suggests that it was only this defensive action which prevented the women from carrying out their intentions and instigating sexual activity. Using “sidled” rather than “went” or “approached” characterises the woman as sly and manipulative, casting her in a negative light and adding to the sense that she was solely responsible. The second story is described as “almost identical” to the first, but Watson takes even greater pains to emphasise the players’ passivity, again portraying them as victims of Predatory Women. Watson attaches only the passive voice to the players: he says that they were “woken in their hotel rooms” and “subject to determined, but unwanted, advances.” The women are entirely absent from these statements. They appear only as shadows presumed responsible for waking the players and making the unwanted advances. This erasure of the female agent only emphasises the players’ passivity in the face of female seduction and general resistance to overwhelming female sexual aggression. As in the first story, the only action attributed to a footballer is defensive: a senior player convincing the women to leave. This reinforces the idea that male footballers are the victims when it comes to casual sexual relations, and casts doubt on any claims of rape. The Story of the “Insider-Outsider” The second article, “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl…,” is by “life skills” coach to AFL players Damien Foster, who calls himself “a classic insider-outsider” to football (SBS). As a partial outsider, Foster would therefore presumably have less vested interest in protecting footballers than Watson; however, his narrative also denies the complaints’ credibility, clearly evoking a victim-blaming character: the Woman Scorned. Foster obliquely claims that the St Kilda and Canterbury cases arose simply because women and men view sex differently and therefore “a footballer may land himself in trouble because it just doesn’t occur to him to develop tactful, diplomatic methods of saying goodbye”. He continues, “When the girl [sic] realises the total indifference with which she is being treated after intimacy, bitterness sets in and it lingers. There are many girls in Australia now in this situation.” While Foster does not directly say that the “girls” who made rape complaints against the Bulldogs and St Kilda are Women Scorned, the fact that this story is used to explain why the allegations were made says it for him. According to Foster’s logic, if footballers learnt to say “thanks, love, that was great” after sex, then no rape complaints would ever be made. A “Feminist” Story? Controversial feminist Germaine Greer would seem even more likely to avoid victim-blame than men involved with football clubs, and she does not follow Watson’s portrayal of utterly passive, squeaky-clean footballers, or Foster’s narrative of undiplomatic players. In “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder,” she does acknowledge that some harm may have been done; however, Greer nevertheless portrays the complainants as Predatory Women, Women Scorned and Gold Diggers. Greer elects to tell a “history” of male footballer-female interactions, establishing male athletes’ disrespect for and mistreatment of women as a given. However, she goes on to evoke the Predatory Woman, portraying her as utterly desperate and willing to go to any lengths to have contact with players. Greer laments, good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies’ onslaught, believing that as long as they don’t kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven’t been genuinely unfaithful to their wives and sweethearts. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circumstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag, even. This explanation of footballers’ behaviour contains several grammatical patterns which represent the players as passive and not responsible for anything that takes place. In the first sentence, the only things these footballers actually do are succumbing and believing, both passive verbs; the rest of the sentence is devoted to what they do not do: “as long as they don’t kiss… as long as they make no move.” Thus it would seem that the players do not actively participate in the sexual activity instigated by these women, that they simply lie back and allow the women to do as they will. That the women are labelled “desperate creatures” who launch an “onslaught” to which footballers “succumb” confirms their sexual aggression. Although the second and third sentences depict violence and rape, these actions are not directly attributed to the players. The brutal treatment of the women the players have casual sex with has no grammatical agent–“the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with”–dissociating them from the brutality and subtly implying that “someone else” is responsible for it. Similarly, “pack rape” has no agent: no player commits or is involved in it, and it appears to happen independently of them. As Susan Ehrlich demonstrates, this denial of agency is a common tactic for accused rapists to use, in order to deny that they were responsible for their actions (36-61). Thus Greer uses the same grammatical patterns which deflect blame away from footballers, even when the behaviour involved is violent rape. This continual emphasis on the players’ passivity reinforces the portrayal of the women as sexually aggressive Predatory Women. Greer also introduces the figures of the Woman Scorned and Gold Digger. She claims that the only difference between the “old days” and the present scenarios is that now women are “not embarrassed to say that they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.” This paragraph appears almost directly after the one where Greer mentions pack rape and violence, and it may seem therefore that the redress these women seek is for rape. However, since Greer claims that at least some of the women who “want redress” want it because they have been “insulted or humiliated,” rather than raped, this evokes the Woman Scorned. Greer continues by introducing the Gold Digger as a further (and complementary) explanation for these insulted and humiliated women to seek “redress.” Greer writes that women now “also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers – namely, indecent amounts of money.” With this statement, she implies that some women have sex with footballers just so that they can make a rape complaint afterwards and obtain a large payment. She concedes that the women who make allegations against footballers may have been “abused,” but she trivialises them by claiming that they “scream and holler,” portraying them as hysterical. She thus discredits them and casts doubt on their claims. Greer ignores the fact that only one woman has either sought or obtained a financial settlement from footballers for a case of rape, and this woman only applied for it after charges against the players responsible were dropped. Whilst this argument is clearly unfounded, the strength of the Gold Digger story, along with the Woman Scorned and Predatory Woman, is likely to give the impression that the rape complaints made against the footballers were unfounded. Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt The fact that a significant number of media commentators employed tactics similar to those defence lawyers use in rape trials suggests that a de facto “trial” took place; one in which stories that discredit the complainants were prominent. These stories were enough to evoke “(un)reasonable doubt” in the women’s claims, and the accused footballers were therefore “acquitted.” That doubt can be evoked so easily in such high-profile cases is particularly problematic as rape cases in general are those least likely to be believed (Jordan 64-83). Further, many victims state that the fear of disbelief is one of the most important factors in deciding not to pursue criminal charges (Warshaw 50). Even if one leaves aside the likelihood that the prevalence of doubt in the media and the “blogosphere” contributed to the DPP’s decision not to pursue charges, the media “acquittal” is likely to have two further effects: it may deter future complainants from coming forward, if they assume that their claims will similarly be doubted; and it contributes to more generalised beliefs that women habitually lie about rape, particularly those who accuse footballers. While of course any accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, it is equally important to give an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, and not presume that all rape complainants are liars unless proven otherwise. References “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. ABC, 11 May. 2009. Television. Baird, Julia. “All Together, Boys, for a Weekend Roast.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 February. 2004: 41. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cunningham, Ryan. “A Footballer’s Life: Confusion, Temptation and Guilt by Association.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Jun. 2009: 30. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001. Foster, Damien. “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl...” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 13. “Foul Play.” Insight. SBS, 16 Apr. 2004. Television. Greer, Germaine. “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder.” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 1, 17. Jordan, Jan. The Word of a Woman?: Police, Rape and Belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Lyon, Karen. “They Love Their Footy, But Can They Keep the Faith?” Age 20 Mar. 2004: 1. Magnay, Jacquelin. “What Dogs Do.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Feb. 2004: 31 McCabe, Helen. “Perilous Games of Sport and Sex.” Daily Telegraph 1 May. 2004: 31. Mewett, Peter, and Kim Toffoletti. “Rogue Men and Predatory Women: Female Fans’ Perceptions of Australian Footballers’ Sexual Conduct.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43.2 (2008): 165-80. Pinkney, Matthew. “Don’t Make Their Excuses.” Herald Sun 22 March. 2004: 18. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. “Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 17. (2004): 35-51. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Smart, Carol. Feminism and the Power of Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (2007): 427-38. Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Watson, Tim. “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone.” Age 18 Mar. 2004: 16. Wilson, Caroline. “All the Dirty Linen Must — and Will — Be Aired.” Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4.

The book review might be thought of as a provisionally authoritative assessment designed to evaluate a book on behalf of potential readers, and to place the text within an appropriate literary context. It is, perhaps, more often associated with newly published works than established “classics,” which exist both as saleable commodities in the form of published books, and as more abstract entities within the cultural memory of a given audience. This suggests part of the difficulty of reviewing a book like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, originally published in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II). Don Quixote is a long book, and is often referred to through ellipsis or synecdoche. Pared back to its most famous episode, Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills (Part I ch. 8: 63-5), it is frequently interpreted in terms of a comic opposition between the world of chivalric romance that determines the central character’s perceptions and actions, and the world of early modern Spain in which he is set. This seems as good a summary as any of Don Quixote’s behaviour, as the “quixotic” symbolism of this episode is easily transposed onto both the internal world of the text, and the external world in general. But Cervantes’s novel also seems to resist definition in such simple terms; as I intend to suggest, the relationship between what Don Quixote is seen to represent, and his role in the novel, can generate some interesting repercussions for the process of reviewing. Cervantes represents his character’s delusions as a consequence of the books he reads, providing the opportunity for a review (in the sense both of a survey and a critique) of various contemporary literary discourses. This process is formalised early on, as the contents of Don Quixote’s library are examined, criticised and selectively burnt by his concerned friends (Part I ch. 6: 52-8). The books mentioned are real, and the discovery of Cervantes’s own Galatea among those reprieved suggests a playful authorial reflection on the fictional quality of his work, an impression reinforced as the original narrative breaks off to be replaced by a “second author” and Arabic translator between two chapters (Part I ch. 8-9: 70-6). Part II of Don Quixote depicts characters who have read, and refer to, Part I, effectively granting Don Quixote an internal literary identity that is reviewed by the other characters against the figure they actually encounter. To complicate matters, it also contains repeated mentions of a real, but apocryphal, Part II (published in Tarragona in 1614 under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda), culminating in Don Quixote’s encounter with a proof copy of a (fictional) second edition in a Barcelona printing shop (ch. 62: 916). Ironically, while this text appears to question the later, authorised version from which it differs markedly, Cervantes’s mention of it within his own text allows him both to review the work of his rival, and reflect on the reception of his own. These forms of self-reflexivity suggest both a general interest in writing and literature, and a rather more perplexing sense of the text reviewing itself. In an odd sense, Don Quixote pre-empts and usurps the role of the reviewer, appearing somehow to place external reviewers in the position of being contained or implied within it. But despite these pitfalls, more reviews than usual have appeared in 2005, the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part I. Some refer specifically to editions released for the anniversary: Jeremy Lawrance reviews two new editions in Spanish, while Paddy Bullard examines a newly-restored edition of Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation, recommended “for readers of Cervantes who are interested in his profound influence on eighteenth-century British culture, or on the development of the novel as a modern literary genre.” This also suggests something about the way in which translations, like reviews, serve to mark and to mediate their own context. Lawrance’s verdict of “still readable” implies the book’s continuing capacity not only to entertain, but also to generate readings that throw light on the history of its reception. Don Quixote provides a perspective from which to review the concerns implied in critical interpretations of different periods. Smollett’s translation (like Laurence Sterne’s invocations of Cervantes in his Tristram Shandy) suggests an eighteenth-century interest in the relationship between Don Quixote and the novel. This may be contrasted, as Yannick Roy suggests (53-4), both with earlier perceptions of Don Quixote as a figure to be laughed at, and the post-romantic perception of a tragicomical everyman seen as representative of a human condition. Modern interpretations of Don Quixote are also complicated by the canonisation of its hero as a household word. Comparing the anniversary of Don Quixote to the attention given to the centenary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Simon Jenkins notes “few English people read Don Quixote, perhaps because they think they know it already.” It is frequently described as a foundational text of the modern novel; however, at a thousand pages, it must also compete for readers’ time and attention with the ever-increasing gamut of long prose narratives it helped instigate. Don Quixote, the deluded knight-errant lives on, while the subtleties of Cervantes’s narrative may increasingly be dependent on sympathetic reviewers. It would seem that it is no longer necessary to read the story of Don Quixote in order to know, or even write about him. Nevertheless, not least because the book entertains a complex relationship with its character, and because it seems so conscious of its own literary enterprise, Don Quixote is a dangerous book not to have read. Responding to Jenkins’s claim that Cervantes’s work represents a more unique, and more easily grasped, achievement than Einstein’s, Stephen Matchett takes exception to a phenomenon he describes as “a bloke who tilted at windmills.” Arguing that “most of us are sufficiently solipsistic to be more comfortable with writers who chart the human condition than thinkers who strive to make sense of the universe,” he seems to consider Don Quixote as exemplary of a pernicious modern tendency to privilege literary discourses over scientific ones, to take fiction more seriously than reality. Even ignoring the incongruity of a theory of relativity presented as a paradigm of fact (which may speak volumes about textual and existential anxiety in the twenty-first century), this seems a particularly unfortunate judgement to make about Don Quixote. Matchett’s claim about the relative fortunes of science and literature is not only difficult to substantiate, but also appears to have been anticipated by the condition of Don Quixote himself. Rather than arguing that the survival of Cervantes’s novel is representative of a public obsession with fiction, it would seem more accurate, if nonetheless paradoxical, to suggest that Don Quixote seems capable of projecting the delusions of its central character onto the unwary reviewer. Matchett’s article is not, strictly speaking, a review of the text of Don Quixote, and so the question of whether he has actually read the book is, in some sense, irrelevant. The parallels are nevertheless striking: while the surrealism of Don Quixote’s enterprise is highlighted by his attempt to derive a way of being specifically from a literature of chivalry, Matchett’s choice of example has the consequence of re-creating aspects of Cervantes’s novel in a new context. Tilting at chimerical adversaries that recall the windmills upon which its analysis is centred, this review may be read not only as a response to Don Quixote, but also, ironically, as a performance of it. To say this seems absurd; however, echoing Jorge Luis Borges’s words in his essay “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “to justify this ‘absurdity’ is the primary object of this note” (40). Borges explores the (fictional) attempt of obscure French poet Pierre Menard to rewrite, word for word, parts of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Menard’s initial undertaking to “be Miguel de Cervantes,” to “forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918,” is rejected for the more interesting attempt to “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard”. While Menard’s text is identical to Cervantes’s, the point is that the implied difference in context affects the way in which the text is read. As Borges states: It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself. . . . Cervantes’s text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer (41-2). Menard’s “verbally identical” Quixote can also be identified as a review of Cervantes’s text, in the sense that it is both informed by, and dependent on, the original. In addition, it allows a review of the relationship between the book as published by Cervantes, and the almost infinite number of readings engendered by the historical permutations of the last three (and now four) hundred years, from which the influence of Don Quixote cannot be excluded. Matchett’s review is of a different nature, in that it stems from an attempt to question the book’s continuing popularity. It seems absurd to suggest that Matchett himself could have served as a model for Don Quixote. But the unacknowledged debt of his piece to Cervantes’s novel, and to the opposition of discourses set up within it, reveals a supremely quixotic irony: Stephen Matchett appears to have produced a concise and richly interpretable rewriting of Don Quixote, in the persona of Stephen Matchett. References Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Trans. James E. Irby. Labyrinths. Eds. James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates. New York: New Directions, 1964. 36-44. Bullard, Paddy. “Literature.” Times Literary Supplement 8 Apr. 2005. De Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quixote. Trans. John Rutherford. London: Penguin, 2003. (Part and chapter references have been included in the text in order to facilitate reference to different editions.) Jenkins, Simon. “The Don.” Review. Weekend Australian 14 May 2005. Lawrance, Jeremy. “Still Readable.” Times Literary Supplement 22 Apr. 2005. Matchett, Stephen. “A Theory on Einstein.” Review. Weekend Australian 11 June 2005. Roy, Yannick. “Pourquoi ne rit-on plus de Don Quichotte?” Inconvénient: Revue Littéraire d’Essai et de Création 6 (2001): 53-60. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Noonan, Will. "On Reviewing Don Quixote." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>. APA Style Noonan, W. (Oct. 2005) "On Reviewing Don Quixote," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>.

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circumstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circumstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. References Adger, Neil W. “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?” Progress in Human Geography 24.3 (2000): 347-64. Alarcón, Cristina. “Lo Único Real Que Tenemos Es Un Cadáver.” 2007. 12 July 2007 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/subnotas/87986-28144-2007-07-12.html>. Amar Sánchez, Ana María. “El Sueño Eterno de Justicia.” Textos De Y Sobre Rodolfo Walsh. Ed. Jorge Raúl Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Alianza, 2000. 205-18. ———. Juegos De Seducción Y Traición. Literatura Y Cultura De Masas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. American Psychological Association. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx>. Australian Government. “Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy.” 2009. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.tisn.gov.au/Documents/Australian+Government+s+Critical+Infrastructure+Resilience+Strategy.pdf>. Battista, Vicente. “¿Hubo Otra Mujer?” Clarín 2003. 26 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/26/s-03402.htm>. ———. “María Marta: El Relato Del Crimen.” Clarín 2003. 16 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/16/o-01701.htm>. Bourbeau, Philippe. “Resiliencism: Premises and Promises in Securitisation Research.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 3-17. Carpenter, Steve, et al. “From Metaphor to Measurement: Resilience of What to What?” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 765-81. Cecchi, Horacio. “Las Dos Muertes De María Marta.” Página 12 (2002). 12 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14095-2002-12-12.html>. Cecchi, Horacio, and Raúl Kollmann. “Un Escenario Sigilosamente Montado.” Página 12 (2002). 13 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14122-2002-12-13.html>. Drury, John, et al. “Representing Crowd Behaviour in Emergency Planning Guidance: ‘Mass Panic’ or Collective Resilience?” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 18-37. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 83-98. Folke, Carl. “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analyses.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 253-67. Folke, Carl, et al. “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability.” Ecology and Society 15.4 (2010). Gallopín, Gilberto C. “Linkages between Vulnerability, Resilience, and Adaptive Capacity.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 293-303. Goldstein, Sam, and Robert B. Brooks, eds. Handbook of Resilience in Children. New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2006. Grove, Kevin. “On Resilience Politics: From Transformation to Subversion.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 146-53. Gunderson, Lance H. “Ecological Resilience - in Theory and Application.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31 (2000): 425-39. Gunderson, Lance H., and C. S. Holling, eds. Panarchy Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington: Island, 2002. Handmer, John W., and Stephen R. Dovers. “A Typology of Resilience: Rethinking Institutions for Sustainable Development.” Organization & Environment 9.4 (1996): 482-511. H.A.T. “Urgente: Llamen a Agatha Christie.” El País (2003). 14 Jan. 2003 ‹http://historico.elpais.com.uy/03/01/14/pinter_26140.asp>. Holling, Crawford S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Janssen, Marco A., et al. “Scholarly Networks on Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation within the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 240-52. Joseph, Jonathan. “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 38-52. Kaufmann, Mareile. “Emergent Self-Organisation in Emergencies: Resilience Rationales in Interconnected Societies.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 53-68. Munro, Andrew. “The Belsunce Case Judgement, Uptake, Genre.” Cultural Studies Review 13.2 (2007): 190-204. ———. “The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity.” Culture, Theory and Critique 53.1 (2012). ———. “Reading Austin Rhetorically.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46.1 (2013): 22-43. Neocleous, Mark. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178 March/April (2013): 2-7. Resilience Solutions Group, Arizona State U. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://resilience.asu.edu/what-is-resilience>. Seery, Mark D., E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver. “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99.6 (2010): 1025-41. Short, Thomas L. “What They Said in Amsterdam: Peirce's Semiotic Today.” Semiotica 60.1-2 (1986): 103-28. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387-420. Stockholm Resilience Centre. “What Is Resilience?” 2007. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-resilience.html>. Ungar, Michael ed. Handbook for Working with Children and Youth Pathways to Resilience across Cultures and Contexts. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. Viau, Susana. “Carmel.” Página 12 (2002). 27 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-14651-2002-12-27.html>. Walker, Brian, et al. “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004). Walker, Brian, and Jacqueline A. Meyers. “Thresholds in Ecological and Social-Ecological Systems: A Developing Database.” Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004). Walker, Brian, and David Salt. Resilience Thinking Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington: Island, 2006.

Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand Duchess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand Duchess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circumstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand Duchess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand Duchess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.