Journal articles on the topic 'Wilderness Society (Australia) Case studies'

This article presents findings from an exploratory research using descriptive case studies of 12 migrant women in Western Australia. The purposive sample represents the government, academia, the private sector, community, civil society and not-for-profit organisations and is ranged in age from the late 20s to the 70s. Underpinned by theoretical frameworks of resilience and empowerment, women have shared their personal case narratives, and five case studies are presented in this paper. Our findings resonate with the vital and uncontested importance of education, the desire to be empowered, the capacity to be resilient and adaptive and the importance of giving back to the community. Key recommendations include the need for migrant women’s continued access to avenues of empowerment and furthering education. The provision of adaptive structures builds resilience and grows strong communities where women feel empowered. We propose that women migrants, through alliances and collaboration, cross borders of learning and work towards generating change and transformation.

Aim/Purpose: Electronic examinations have some inherent problems. Students have expressed negative opinions about electronic examinations (e-examinations) due to a fear of, or unfamiliarity with, the technology of assessment, and a lack of knowledge about the methods of e-examinations. Background: Electronic examinations are now a viable alternative method of assessing student learning. They provide freedom of choice, in terms of the location of the examination, and can provide immediate feedback; students and institutions can be assured of the integrity of knowledge testing. This in turn motivates students to strive for deeper learning and better results, in a higher quality and more rigorous educational process. Methodology : This paper compares an e-examination system at FUT Minna Nigeria with one in Australia, at the University of Tasmania, using case study analysis. The functions supported, or inhibited, by each of the two e-examination systems, with different approaches to question types, cohort size, technology used, and security features, are compared. Contribution: The researchers’ aim is to assist stakeholders (including lecturers, invigilators, candidates, computer instructors, and server operators) to identify ways of improving the process. The relative convenience for students, administrators, and lecturer/assessors and the reliability and security of the two systems are considered. Challenges in conducting e-examinations in both countries are revealed by juxtaposing the systems. The authors propose ways of developing more effective e-examination systems. Findings: The comparison of the two institutions in Nigeria and Australia shows e-examinations have been implemented for the purpose of selecting students for university courses, and for their assessment once enrolled. In Nigeria, there is widespread systemic adoption for university entrance merit selection. In Australia this has been limited to one subject in one state, rather than being adopted nationally. Within undergraduate courses, the Nigerian scenario is quite extensive; in Australia this adoption has been slower, but has penetrated a wide variety of disciplines. Recommendations for Practitioners: Assessment integrity and equipment reliability were common issues across the two case studies, although the delivery of e-examinations is different in each country. As with any procedural process, a particular solution is only as good as its weakest attribute. Technical differences highlight the link between e-examination system approaches and pedagogical implications. It is clear that social, cultural, and environmental factors affect the success of e-examinations. For example, an interrupted electrical power supply and limited technical know-how are two of the challenges affecting the conduct of e-examinations in Nigeria. In Tasmania, the challenge with the “bring your own device” (BYOD) is to make the system operate on an increasing variety of user equipment, including tablets. Recommendation for Researchers: The comparisons between the two universities indicate there will be a productive convergence of the approaches in future. One key proposal, which arose from the analysis of the existing e-examination systems in Nigeria and Australia, is to design a form of “live” operating system that is deployable over the Internet. This method would use public key cryptography for lecturers to encrypt their questions online. Impact on Society : If institutions are to transition to e-examinations, one way of facilitating this move is by using computers to imitate other assessment techniques. However, higher order thinking is usually demonstrated through open-ended or creative tasks. In this respect the Australian system shows promise by providing the same full operating system and software application suite to all candidates, thereby supporting assessment of such creative higher order thinking. The two cases illustrate the potential tension between “online” or networked reticulation of questions and answers, as opposed to “offline” methods. Future Research: A future design proposition is a web-based strategy for a virtual machine, which is launched into candidates’ computers at the start of each e-examination. The new system is a form of BYOD externally booted e-examination (as in Australia) that is deployable over the Internet with encryption and decryption features using public key cryptography (Nigeria). This will allow lecturers to encrypt their questions and post them online while the questions are decrypted by the administrator or students are given the key. The system will support both objective and open-ended questions (possibly essays and creative design tasks). The authors believe this can re-define e-examinations as the “gold standard” of assessment.

AbstractThis article examines legislative changes related to abortion regulation in Australia that create obligations of medical referral on practitioners who have a conscientious objection to abortion. Despite a significant Australian history of accepting secularized conscience claims, particularly in the field of military conscription, the limitation of conscience claims about abortion can be traced to a failure to appreciate the significant secular arguments that can be made to support such claims. We draw on arguments of plurality and pragmatism as capable of providing a firm foundation for legislative protections of freedom of conscience in the case of medical referral for abortion. These justifications are not dependent on religious grounds, and therefore they have the potential to be relevant and persuasive in a secular society such as Australia. Acceptance of a pluralistic argument in favor of freedom of conscience is a powerful commitment to the creation of a society that values human autonomy and a diversity of opinion. It sits comfortably with the democratic values that are enshrined in the Australian political system and institutions. It avoids the potential damage to the individual that may be wrought when conscience is overridden by state compulsion.

A home embodies a sensorial space that is layered with personal memories and traces of history. The success of a home in providing a strong sense of place depends on various factors such as geographical location, climatic conditions, and occupants’ world-views and perceptions. This paper explores Muslims’ perceptions of privacy, modesty and hospitality within their homes through their lived experiences. This case study focuses on three Muslim families living in Australian designed homes within the same suburb of Brisbane, Australia. The study provides prefatory insight into the ways in which these families perform their daily activities and entertain their guests without jeopardizing their privacy needs. The study examines the significance of modesty in the design of Muslim homes as a means by which family members are able to achieve optimum privacy while simultaneously extending hospitality to guests inside and outside their homes. The findings of this study provide opportunities too, for expanding research into culturally adaptable housing systems to help meet the changing needs of Australian multicultural society.

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of results from an Australian Research Council-funded project "Sentiments and Risks: The Changing Nature of Human-Animal Relations in Australia." The data discussed come from a survey of 2000 representative Australians at the capital city, state, and rural regional level. It provides both a snapshot of the state of involvement of Australians with nonhuman animals and their views on critical issues: ethics, rights, animals as food, risk from animals, native versus introduced animals, hunting, fishing, and companionate relations with animals. Its data point to key trends and change. The changing position of animals in Australian society is critical to understand, given its historic export markets in meat and livestock, emerging tourism industry with its strong wildlife focus, native animals' place in discourses of nation, and the centrality of animal foods in the national diet. New anxieties about risk from animal-sourced foods and the endangerment of native animals from development and introduced species, together with tensions between animals' rights and the privileging of native species, contribute to the growth of a strongly contested animal politics in Australia.

This article addresses the audience reception of sensationalist newspapers in interwar Australia through a case study of Sydney weekly Beckett's Budget. During a libel trial brought against Beckett's in 1928, readers came to its defence and their testimony reveals overlaps between reading and political allegiances: reading Beckett's equated with voting Labor. While histories of sensationalist media in Australia have rightly emphasised illicit sexuality and public outcry, connections between sensationalism and working-class political movements remain on the margins of academic interest. Responding to the question ‘Do you read Beckett's?’ readers' evidence at the trial constitutes an audience response and invites debate over the ways gender and class could inform political engagement in the 1920s. Viewing Beckett's Budget outside of ‘brown paper’ and beyond the sensationalist genre reveals a shift in Australian political culture as party strategists embraced a broader electorate, using Beckett's Budget to tap into the culture and concerns of interwar society.

Objectives Healthcare leaders around the world are calling for radical, transformational change of our health and care systems. This will be a difficult and complex task. In this article, we examine case studies in which transformational change has been achieved, and seek to learn from these experiences. Methods We used the case study method to investigate examples of transformational change in healthcare. The case studies were identified from preliminary doctoral research into the transition towards future sustainable health and social care systems. Evidence was collected from multiple sources, key features of each case study were displayed in a matrix and thematic analysis was conducted. The results are presented in narrative form. Results Four case studies were selected: two from the US, one from Australia and one from the UK. The notable features are discussed for each case study. There were many common factors: a well communicated vision, innovative redesign, extensive consultation and engagement with staff and patients, performance management, automated information management and high-quality leadership. Conclusions Although there were some notable differences between the case studies, overall the characteristics of success were similar and collectively provide a blueprint for transformational change in healthcare. What is known about the topic? Healthcare leaders around the world are calling for radical redesign of our systems in order to meet the challenges of modern society. What does this paper add? There are some remarkable examples of transformational change in healthcare. The key factors in success are similar across the case studies. What are the implications for practitioners? Collectively, these key factors can guide future attempts at transformational change in healthcare.

Australia is a country firmly part of the Global North, yet geographically located in the Global South. This North-in-South divide plays out internally within Australia given its status as a British settler-colonial society which continues to perpetrate imperial and colonial practices vis-à-vis the Indigenous peoples and vis-à-vis Australia’s neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This article draws on and discusses five seminal examples forming a case study on Australia to examine big data practices through the lens of Southern Theory from a criminological perspective. We argue that Australia’s use of big data cements its status as a North-in-South environment where colonial domination is continued via modern technologies to effect enduring informational imperialism and digital colonialism. We conclude by outlining some promising ways in which data practices can be decolonized through Indigenous Data Sovereignty but acknowledge these are not currently the norm; so Australia’s digital colonialism/coloniality endures for the time being.

This paper provides details of a preliminary least cost planning (LCP) assessment carried out for Canberra, the capital city of Australia, as part of the development of a 50 year Water Resources Strategy. In the assessment a suite of options consisting of demand management, source substitution, reuse and supply were developed to determine how to satisfy water demand requirements for the projected population over the 50 year planning horizon whilst also achieving the identified demand reduction targets. The options developed were then compared on an equal basis using the principles of LCP to identify the suite of lowest cost options to be considered for further analysis and implementation. The suite of demand management options developed was found to have the lowest whole of society levelised cost. Since the preliminary analysis and release of the Water Resources Strategy in April 2004, a water efficiency team has been set up to develop an implementation plan, implement options, develop an end use model, conduct pilot studies and undertake program evaluations.

Frank Moloney's appropriation of Nicodemus is more justifiable if it is considered in the light of the original socio-historical context of John's Gospel. The world behind the text can be seen to provide an analogy with the world in front of the text. There are, indeed, more layers of practical relevance which could be considered, and it may well be the case that the future of biblical studies in Australia will depend on our capacity to relate the narrow and technical features of the discipline to the wider concerns of religion and society

Indigenous movements in Australia are at a crossroad in their efforts to protect their intrinsic relations with land, nature and culture on the one hand and engaging with the reconciliatory and developmental dynamics of the state on the other. This paper examines the process of articulation and rejuvenation of indigenous identities that negotiate across culture, environment, sustainable livelihood and the developmental needs of the community. Locating these movements within wider socio-historical contexts it focuses on the tensions between a pro-conservation and a pro-development approach in grass roots indigenous movements. Three case studies are presented – drawn from the Sydney region. One indigenous group’s struggle against a housing development, defined as a threat to indigenous and environmental heritage, is contrasted with an indigenous group that is internally divided over an agreement with a mining developer, and a third group that has engaged in constructing housing and welfare projects, and in part has itself become a developer. The article thereby addresses the reformulation of indigenous identities in Australian society as indigenous peoples’ movements have renegotiated the contending pressures of environment and development.

As screen studies scholars have noted over the past two decades, media representation is critical in being able to see oneself as important to society. In 2016, Screen Australia released the “Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in TV Drama” report on the diversity in Australian TV drama. “Seeing Ourselves” paints a critical picture of the lack of inclusive storytelling on Australian scripted TV, suggesting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, asexual and other sexuality- and gender-diverse (LGBTIQA+) people were in fact not seeing themselves—that the representation was lacking diversity, inclusivity, authenticity and complexity. This article presents a case study of the GLAAD Media Institute and similar international organisations and imagines how a similar advisory and advocacy organisation could be established to support Australian screen practitioners and students in being more inclusive of LGBTIQA+ people in their screen stories. It highlights the necessity for, and benefit of, creating an independent organisation that could replicate GLAAD’s three pillars of training, consultation and research to improve the current lack of diversity—the ultimate goal of this organisation being to advocate for real and sustained impact, not just in Australian screen media, but in our local communities and society at large.

Society’s resources are scarce, and biosecurity actions need to be targeted and prioritised. Various models have been developed that prioritise and rank pests and diseases according to the risks they represent. A prioritisation model allows utilisation of scientific, ecological and economic information in decision-making related to biological hazards. This study discusses such models and the properties associated with them based on a review of 78 prioritisation studies. The scope of the models includes all aspects of biosecurity (human, animal and plant diseases, and invasive alien species), but with an emphasis on plant health. The geographical locations of the studies are primarily North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Half of the studies were conducted during the past five years. The review finds that there generally seems to be several prioritisation models, especially in the case of invasive plants, but only a select few models are used extensively. Impacts are often accounted for in the model, but the extent and economic sophistication of their inclusion varies. Treatment of uncertainty and feasibility of control was lacking from many studies.;

Prescribed burning is used in Australia as a tool to manage fire risk and protect assets. A key challenge is deciding how to arrange the burns to generate the highest benefits to society. Studies have shown that prescribed burning in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) can reduce the risk of house loss due to wildfires, but the costs and benefits of different arrangements for prescribed burning treatments have rarely been estimated. In this study, we use three different models to explore the costs and benefits of modifying the spatial arrangement of prescribed burns on public land, using the south-west of Western Australia as a case study. We simulate two hypothetical scenarios: landscape treatments and WUI treatments. We evaluate the long-term costs and benefits of each scenario and compare the results from the three models, highlighting the management implications of each model. Results indicate that intensifying prescribed burning treatments in public land in the WUI achieves a greater reduction in damages compared with applying the majority of the treatments in rural areas. However, prescribed burning in the WUI is significantly more expensive and, despite additional benefits gained from this strategy, in most cases it is not the most economically efficient strategy.

Many Critical Race Theorists today are focusing not on overt forms of racism, but instead on subtler, insinuated perpetrations. These include but are not limited to visual microaggressions. Microaggressions are embedded in everyday interactions within society and serve as subconscious visual reminders to People of Colour of their inferiority and hierarchical subjugation. I argue in this paper that the White Saviour Complex (WSC), typically seen in an imperialistic sense in the West versus Africa dichotomy, can also be studied in the visual mainstream media of Western countries. Therefore, representations of WSC in media act as visual microaggressions towards People of Colour and reinforce racial and intersectional hierarchies present in Western colonial societies. This is argued in examining three case studies from USA, Australia, and Canada. This paper then addresses possible criticisms and critiques of this position through an examination of allyship in relation to WSC.

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through gendered mnemonic labour, gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (PFFP) in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work.

ObjectivesPaediatric guidelines are lacking for management of spontaneous pneumothorax. Adult patient-focused guidelines (British Thoracic Society 2003 and 2010) introduced aspiration as first-line intervention for primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP) and small secondary spontaneous pneumothoraces (SSP). Paediatric practice is unclear, and evidence for aspiration success rates is urgently required to develop paediatric-specific recommendations.MethodsRetrospective analysis of PSP and SSP management at nine paediatric emergency departments across Australia and New Zealand (2003–2010) to compare PSP and SSP management.Results219 episodes of spontaneous pneumothorax occurred in 162 children (median age 15 years, 71% male); 155 PSP episodes in 120 children and 64 SSP episodes in 42 children. Intervention in PSP vs SSP episodes occurred in 55% (95% CI 47% to 62%) vs 70% (60% to 79%), p<0.05. An intercostal chest catheter (ICC) was used in 104/219 (47%) episodes. Aspiration was used in more PSP than in SSP episodes with interventions (27% (18% to 37%) vs 9% (3% to 21%), p<0.05). Aspiration success was 52% (33% to 70%) overall and not significantly different between PSP and SSP. Aspiration success was greater in small vs large pneumothoraces (80% (48% to 95%) vs 33% (14% to 61%), p=0.01). Small-bore ICCs were used in 40% of ICCs and usage increased during the study.ConclusionsIn this descriptive study of pneumothorax management, PSP and SSP management did not differ and ICC insertion was the continuing preferred intervention. Overall success of aspiration was lower than reported results for adults, although success was greater for small than for large pneumothoraces. Paediatric prospective studies are urgently required to determine optimal paediatric interventional management strategies.

Abstract Despite their different politics, populations and histories, there are some striking similarities between the indigenous assimilation policies enacted by the United States and Australia. These parallels reveal much about the harsh practicalities behind the rhetoric of humanitarian uplift, civilization and cultural assimilation that existed in these settler nations. This article compares legislation which provided assimilative pathways to Aborigines and Native Americans whom white officials perceived to be acculturated. Some Aboriginal people were offered certificates of “exemption” which freed them from the legal restrictions on Aboriginal people’s movement, place of abode, ability to purchase alcohol, and other controls. Similarly, Native Americans could be awarded a fee patent which declared them “competent.” This patent discontinued government guardianship over them and allowed them to sell, deed, and pay taxes on their lands. I scrutinize the Board that was sent to Oklahoma to examine the Cheyenne and Arapaho for competency in January and February 1917, and the New South Wales Aborigines’ Welfare Board, which combined the awarding of exemption certificates with their efforts to assimilate Koori people into Australian society in the 1940s and 1950s. These case studies reveal that people of mixed white/indigenous descent were more likely to be declared competent or exempt. Thus, hand in hand with efforts to culturally assimilate Aborigines and Native Americans came attempts to reduce the size of indigenous populations and their landholdings by releasing people of mixed descent from government control, and no longer officially recognizing their indigenous identity.

The One Welfare concept is proposed to guide humans in the ethical treatment of non-human animals, each other and the environment. One Welfare was conceptualized for veterinarians but could be a foundational concept through which to promote the ethical treatment of animals that are outside of direct human care and responsibility. However, wild-living animals raise additional ethical conundrums because of their multifarious values and roles, and relationships that humans have with them. At an open facilitated forum, the 2018 Robert Dixon Memorial Animal Welfare Symposium, a panel of five experts from different fields shared their perspectives on “loving and hating animals in the wild” and responded to unscripted questions from the audience. The Symposium’s objectives were to elucidate views on the ethical treatment of the native and invasive animals of Australia and to identify some of the resultant dilemmas facing conservationists, educators, veterinarians and society. Here, we document the presented views and case studies and synthesize common themes in a One Welfare framework. Additionally, we identified points of contention that can guide further discourse. With this guide in place, the identification and discussion of those disparate views was a first step toward practical resolutions on how to manage wild-living Australian fauna ethically. We concluded that there was great utility in the One Welfare approach for any discourse about wild animal welfare. It requires attention to each element of the triple bottom line and ensures that advocacy for one party does not vanquish the voices from other sectors. We argue that, by facilitating a focus on the ecology in the context of wild animal issues, One Welfare is more useful in this context than the veterinary context for which it was originally developed.

Mining supplies metals and minerals to meet the material and energy needs of the modern world. Typically, mineral resources are widely considered to be ‘finite’ in nature, yet, paradoxically, global production and reported reserves and resources continue to grow. This paper synthesizes an extensive array of data on the long-term trends in cumulative mine production, reserves and resources at a global level as well detailed case studies of Australia, a global leader in many sectors of mining, and lithium, a new metal with rapidly growing demand. Overall, the paper shows that growing mine production has been clearly matched by growing reserves and resources, although there are numerous complex social, environmental and governance factors which are already affecting mines and are expected to increasingly affect mining into the future. Thus it is not possible at present to determine the ‘ultimately recoverable resource’, especially as this is a dynamic quantity dependent on a variety of inter-related factors (e.g., exploration, social issues, technology, market dynamics, environmental risks, governance aspects, etc.). This finding reinforces the need for continuing detailed studies of all metals and minerals to understand their individual supply and use dynamics to help modern society meet its needs and sustainable development goals.

AbstractAfter the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 Ulrich Beck placed terrorism alongside other potentially catastrophic events such as global warming, nuclear disaster, and influenza as one of the ‘dimensions’ of risk society. In risk society, executive governments take ‘precautionary measures’ and parliaments pass ‘preventative laws’ allowing them to accumulate information, detain terrorism suspects, freeze funds and prohibit various groups, in order to stop catastrophic risks from eventuating. International Relations and legal scholars have used risk society theory or the ideas of Michel Foucault to criticise such excesses of the executive and parliamentary branches of government. Most studies either ignore the judiciary or argue that it stands in opposition to the other branches of governments, that it imposes checks and balances in order to uphold the rule of law and protect individual rights. The article argues that this view is naïve and does not acknowledge a long history of judicial deference to the will of the executive and parliament. Through an analysis of case law from Australia and Canada the article explores parallels between early 21st century judicial reasoning and previous periods of crisis, including the Cold War, while identifying some new ‘precautionary approach’ aspects. The judiciary defers to the executive, asserts that the executive is more accountable than it, and seeks to avoid responsibility for engaging in this ‘precautionary justice’. Furthermore, seized by the same fear of terrorism as executive governments, the judiciary shows an ability to adapt existing legal concepts to the exigencies of risk society. The article concludes that as the memory of the 9/11 attacks fades some of the most draconian preventative measures may be scaled back but the judiciary cannot be relied on to keep the executive or parliament in check.

IntroductionThe development and implementation of multisectoral policy to improve health and reduce health inequities has been slow and uneven. Evidence is largely focused on the facts of health inequities rather than understanding the political and policy processes. This 5-year funded programme of research investigates how these processes could function more effectively to improve equitable population health.Methods and analysisThe programme of work is organised in four work packages using four themes (macroeconomics and infrastructure, land use and urban environments, health systems and racism) related to the structural drivers shaping the distribution of power, money and resources and daily living conditions. Policy case studies will use publicly available documents (policy documents, published evaluations, media coverage) and interviews with informants (policy-makers, former politicians, civil society, private sector) (~25 per case). NVIVO software will be used to analyse the documents to see how ‘social and health equity’ is included and conceptualised. The interview data will include qualitative descriptive and theory-driven critical discourse analysis. Our quantitative methodological work assessing the impact of public policy on health equity is experimental that is in its infancy but promises to provide the type of evidence demanded by policy-makers.Ethics and disseminationOur programme is recognising the inherently political nature of the uptake, formulation and implementation of policy. The early stages of our work indicate its feasibility. Our work is aided by a Critical Policy Reference Group. Multiple ethics approvals have been obtained with the foundation approval from the Social and Behavioural Ethics Committee, Flinders University (Project No: 6786).The theoretical, methodological and policy engagement processes established will provide improved evidence for policy-makers who wish to reduce health inequities and inform a new generation of policy savvy knowledge on social determinants.

Music is considered as one of the most effective mediums to enhance cultural diversity. As Korea becomes a more multicultural society, many scholarly works have been examining concepts and theories regarding multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Moreover, an increasing number of scholarly works pertaining to music have been written which aim to teach cultural diversity to students intent on becoming world citizens. Previous works have focused on music curriculum development, comparative studies of multiculturalism in the US and Australia, comparative studies of music textbooks, and the limits of the concept of multiculturalism. However, those studies encompass other types of music which exclude music based on western music idioms. Thus, this study aims to investigate the case of multiculturalism and to examine multicuturalism as it appears in music from the US. To do so, this study focuses on one of the textbooks written by Richard Crawford and Larry Hamberlin that is widely used in America. The research positions this textbook as a turning point in the changing of American music historiography and shows how the coverage of American music history has broadened from classical music to other diverse musical genres. Furthermore, this study will not only analyze the perspective of certain scholars, but will also examine the sort of musical diversity that has been accepted in American music historiography. Finally, this article will shed light on the new way to understand multiculturalism from a different angle.

This paper argues that Australia is lagging behind in recognising the important role social workers and other human services workers can play in schools to improve social and educational outcomes for students. It reports on a small, school-based, human services program, the Schools as Communities program, located in the Australian Capital Territory, and outlines key themes that emerged in interviews with principals and other school staff about the program's effectiveness. The program's outreach workers, who were mostly social workers, had a dual role working with individual families and facilitating community development initiatives of benefit to the school community. Case studies demonstrate how their presence contributed to earlier involvement and support of vulnerable families. They also illustrate that the school setting enabled social workers to work more effectively to build social inclusion in local communities. The paper argues the case for using a wider range of human services professionals from the school base and calls upon education and human services systems to create more effective governance arrangements to make this possible. An expansion of the traditional disciplinary base of education to incorporate social workers and other human services professionals who are skilled at working across multiple domains is essential if schools are to maximise the impact of early intervention and prevention in working towards a more socially inclusive society.

The sons of famous men sometimes fail to succeed in life, particularly if they suffer parental neglect in their childhood and youth. Ira Daniel Aldridge is a case in point—a promising lad who in his formative years lacked sustained contact with his father, a celebrated touring black actor whose peripatetic career in the British Isles and later on the European continent kept him away from home for long periods. When the boy rebelled as a teenager, his father sent him abroad, forcing him to make his own way in the world. Ira Daniel settled in Australia, married, and had children, but he found it difficult to support a family. Eventually he turned to crime and wound up spending many years in prison. The son of an absent father, he too became an absent father to his own sons, who also suffered as a consequence. Ira Daniel’s story is not just a case study of a failed father-son relationship. It also presents us with an example of the hardships faced by migrants who move from one society to another in which they must struggle to fit in and survive. This is especially difficult for migrants who look different from most of those in the community they are entering, so this is a tale about strained race relations too. And it takes place in a penal colony where punishments were severe, even for those who committed petty offences. Ira Daniel tried at first to make an honest living, but finally, in desperation, he broke the law and ended up incarcerated in brutal conditions. He was a victim of his environment but also of his own inability to cope with the pressures of settling in a foreign land. Displacement drove him to fail.

Stroke represents a major health problem in our society. One of the effects of stroke is foot drop. Foot drop (FD) is a weakness that occurs in specific muscles in the ankle and foot such as the anterior tibialis, gastrocnemius, plantaris and soleus muscles. Foot flexion and extension are normally generated by lower motor neurons (LMN). The affected muscles impact the ankle and foot in both downward and upward motions. One possible solution for FD is to investigate the movement based on the bio signal (myoelectric signal) of the muscles. Bio signal control systems like electromyography (EMG) are used for rehabilitation devices that include foot drop. One of these systems is function electrical stimulation (FES). This paper proposes new methods and algorithms to develop the performance of myoelectric pattern recognition (M-PR), to improve automated rehabilitation devices, to test these methodologies in offline and real-time experimental datasets. Label classifying is a predictive data mining application with multiple applications in the world, including automatic labeling of resources such as videos, music, images and texts. We combine the label classification method with the self-advised support vector machine (SA-SVM) to create an adapted and altered label classification method, named the label self-advised support vector machine (LSA-SVM). For the experimental data, we collected data from foot drop patients using the sEMG device, in the Metro Rehabilitation Hospital in Sydney, Australia using Ethical Approval (UTS HREC NO. ETH15-0152). The experimental results for the EMG dataset and benchmark datasets exhibit its benefits. Furthermore, the experimental results on UCI datasets indicate that LSA-SVM achieves the best performance when working together with SA-SVM and SVM. This paper describes the state-of-the-art procedures for M-PR and studies all the conceivable structures.

Most societies have some sort of rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The aborigine in Australia send adolescents into the wilderness on a "walkabout." German noblemen prove their maturity by acquiring dueling scars. Americans have one in which their young people spend three high-pressured hours filling in little boxes. Anthropologists call it "Taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test." What do they measure? To anyone with lingering faith in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and truth-in-packaging, the answer is obvious: The Scholastic Aptitude Test measures scholastic aptitude. For that answer score zero. The test was created in 1926, when people still believed that there was something called intelligence that experts could measure and put a number on. Scholastic aptitude was its academic counterpart. Today no one believes that intelligence is that simple, and developers of the aptitude test have backed away from claiming to measure aptitude. What does the test tell colleges? The College Board says the examination predicts college grades in the freshman year. The technical term is predictive validity, which is measured on a scale of zero to one. Zero means that the result would be as random as using a zip code. A perfect 1.0 means that everyone with high test scores will get high grades, everyone with low scores will get low grades and so forth. Testmakers' research shows that college freshmen grades can be predicted with a validity of 0.42 based on the aptitude test, 0.48 based on high school grades and 0.55 if both are used. Since colleges already have students' grades, the incremental advantage of having the test scores is 0.07. Do test scores change admissions decisions? In a new book, "The Case Against the S.A.T.," James Crouse and Dale Trushei.m of the University of Delaware argue that the test is "valid but redundant." They conducted their own studies and concluded that by using high school grades alone, they could come to the same conclusion as admissions directors in all but 3 percent of cases-not enough, in their opinion, to justify the whole enterprise.

Percussive technology is part of the behavioural suite of several fossil and living primates. Stone Age ancestors used lithic artefacts in pounding activities, which could have been most important in the earliest stages of stone working. This has relevant evolutionary implications, as other primates such as chimpanzees and some monkeys use stone hammer-and-anvil combinations to crack hard-shelled foodstuffs. Parallels between primate percussive technologies and early archaeological sites need to be further explored in order to assess the emergence of technological behaviour in our evolutionary line, and firmly establish bridges between Primatology and Archaeology. What are the anatomical, cognitive and ecological constraints of percussive technology? How common are percussive activities in the Stone Age and among living primates? What is their functional significance? How similar are archaeological percussive tools and those made by non-human primates? This issue of Phil. Trans. addresses some of these questions by presenting case studies with a wide chronological, geographical and disciplinary coverage. The studies presented here cover studies of Brazilian capuchins, captive chimpanzees and chimpanzees in the wild, research on the use of percussive technology among modern humans and recent hunter–gatherers in Australia, the Near East and Europe, and archaeological examples of this behaviour from a million years ago to the Holocene. In summary, the breadth and depth of research compiled here should make this issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B , a landmark step forward towards a better understanding of percussive technology, a unique behaviour shared by some modern and fossil primates.

About four centuries passed between the first appearance of pamphlets in which the medical uses of petroleum were discussed (for example, the Tegernsee (southern Bavaria, 1430), Geneva (Swiss Confederacy, 1480), Nurnberg (northern Bavaria, 1500), and the Antwerp (Duchy of Brabant, today Flanders, 1540–1550) pamphlets), and Michael Faraday's discovery in 1825 of the chemical composition of benzene derived from bituminous oil as a compound of carbon and hydrogen. During this long time span, studies of oil, carried out between alchemy and chemistry, benefited from rapid advances and brilliant insights, much as they had moments of stagnation, and disappointing regressions. In 1855 the chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr., of Yale University, proved that crude oil could be decomposed through a process of fractional distillation into a range of fuels and lubricants cheaper than the oils, greases and waxes rendered by animal fats and vegetal matter (Silliman 1855; Forbes 1948 Forbes 1958). In the course of the early 1860s, oil became the main source of illumination first in North America, then in Europe and Australia. This transformation of oil from a substance of limited use into a commodity of mass consumption radically changed the pattern of oil finding and production. Crude was no longer collected just from natural springs or draining seepages, but was pumped out of the ground from wells drilled by machines using steam power. This was the first step toward the modern oil industry, and a breakthrough in the history of energy: the beginning of an oil society. The first part of this article provides an introduction to the early uses and production of petroleum in Europe, and advances in understanding the nature, the physical properties, and the composition of hydrocarbons. It provides a brief analysis of the interaction between technology, society and the environmental context in northwestern Pennsylvania, where, between 1858 and 1859, a new successful pattern developed to produce oil in commercial quantity. From 1861, that innovative process put the United States in the position to gain increasing shares in the young European mineral oil markets and, subsequently, to jeopardize the position of local oil (vegetal, animal and mineral) producers. The second part, using a national case study approach, explores the history of a British oil company operating in Romania since 1863, the Wallachian Oil Company. This venture by London stockholders—short, difficult, and abortive—is a mirror of the nature of the business implemented by emerging oil companies, not only from Europe, and therefore exemplifies the challenges of setting the modern oil sector in motion in the nineteenth century.

Preparing well before entering a contract is always vital, independent of the characteristics of the project and type of contract. However, as projects become larger and more complex, and value for stakeholders and society becomes the dominating perspective on success, the need for well-developed collaboration is becoming more and more critical. In this paper, we investigate how the parties should prepare for a collaborative project. The purpose is to help owners secure the success of the project for its key stakeholders. We choose to address the issues as an active risk mitigation strategy that serves as a vehicle to reduce uncertainty, avoid unnecessary risks, and utilize opportunities as a project owner. We look at the project mainly through a project owner perspective, but on key points, we contrast this with contractor perspectives. The research was performed in Australia in 2020 and includes public and private sector investment projects. The methodology is qualitative case studies and includes primarily in-depth interviews supplemented with document studies and two workshop group discussions. The paper highlights the difference between being collaborative in a contract and using a collaborative contract. The results document significant differences in preparations depending on the degree of complexity of the projects. One major difference is illustrated in the different levels of precision in terms and definitions used in communication. Complex projects require freedom of interpretation only gained by allowing wide and less precise expressions.

Australia will continue to rely on its soils to maintain national well being. At the same time society will be more demanding that the soil resource be managed sustainably. Soil scientists are therefore challenged to be more effective in helping formulate policy, contributing to public understanding and in applying their knowledge to meet national need. Close consultation with land managers to define important problems is necessary as is increasing confidence that the knowledge we have is appropriate to the task. It is also important to recognise that much of our science was generated as a reductionist response to difficult problems and it is now necessary to integrate our knowledge to deal with those problems. Collaboration across organisations to ensure most effective use of that knowledge is necessary. Important opportunities to demonstrate application of soil science are identified. A plea is made to teach the subject, not just as an intellectual exercise but as a basis for problem solving across the whole range of uses to which soils are put. Case studies for guidance and to identify knowledge gaps are sought. There is also need to recognise that different client industries demand different communication models to ensure that soil science knowledge is applied appropriately.

ISCPES stands for International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sports and it is going to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2018. Since the beginning (Israel 1978) the main goals of the Society were established under a worldwide mind set considering five continents and no discrimination of any kind. The founders wanted to compare Physical Education and Sports across the world, searching for the best practices deserving consideration and applied on the purpose of improving citizen quality of life. The mission still stands for “Compare to learn and improve”.As all the organizations lasting for 39 years, ISCPES experienced several vicissitudes, usually correlated with world economic cycles, social and sports changes, which are in ISS journal articles - International Sport Studies.ISS journal is Scopus indexed, aiming to improve its quality (under evaluation) to reach more qualified students, experts, professionals and researchers; doing so it will raise its indexation, which we know it is nowadays a more difficult task. First, because there are more journals trying to compete on this academic fierce competitive market; secondly, because the basic requirements are getting more and more hard to gather in the publishing environment around Physical Education and Sports issues. However, we can promise this will be one of our main strategic goals.Another goal I would like to address on this Editorial is the language issue. We have this second strategic goal, which is to reach most of languages spoken in different continents; besides the English language, we will reach Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. For that reason, we already defined that all the abstracts in English will be translated into Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese words so people can find them on any search browser. That will expand the demand for our journal and articles, increasing the number of potential readers. Of course this opportunity, given by Motricidade, can be considered as a good example to multiply our scope.In June 2017 we organized a joint Conference in Borovets, Bulgaria, with our colleagues from the BCES – Bulgarian Society for Comparative Educational Studies. During those days, there was an election to appoint a new (Portuguese) president. This constitutes an important step for the Portuguese speaker countries, which, for a 4th year term, will have the opportunity to expand the influence of ISCPES Society diffusing the research results we have been achieving into a vast extended new public and inviting new research experts to innovative debates. This new president will be working with a wide geographical diverse team: the Vice President coming from a South American country (Venezuela), and the other several Executive Board members are coming from Brazil, China, Africa and North America. This constitutes a very favorable situation once, adding to this, we kept the previous editorial team from Australia and Europe. We are definitely committed to improve our influence through new incentives to organize several regional (continental) workshops, seminars and Conferences in the next future.The international research is crossing troubled times with exponential number of new indexed journals trying to get new influence and visibility. In order to do that, readers face new challenges because several studies present contradictory conclusions and outcome comparisons still lacking robust methodologies. Uncovering these issues is the focus of our Society.In the past, ISCPES started its activity collecting answers to the same questions asked to several experts in different countries and continents across the world. The starting studies developed some important insights on several issues concerning the way Physical Education professionals approached their challenges. In the very starting documents ISCPES activity focused in identifying certain games and indigenous activities that were not understood by people in other parts of the world, improving this international understanding and communication. This first attempt considered six groups of countries roughly comprehending 26 countries from all the continents.ISCPES has on its archives several seminal works, PhD proposals and program proposals, which constitutes the main theoretical framework considered in some textbooks printed at the end of the sixties in the XXth century.The methods used mostly sources’ country comparisons, historic development of comparative education systems, list of factors affecting those systems and a systematic analysis of case studies; additionally, international organizations for sports and physical education were also required to identify basic problems and unique features considered for the implementation of each own system. At the time, Lynn C. Vendien & John E. Nixon book “The World Today in Health, Physical Education and Recreation”, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1968, together with two monographies from William Johnson “Physical Education around the World”, 1966, 1968, Indianapolis, Phi Epsilon Kappa editions, were the main textbook references.The main landscapes of interest were to study sports compared or the sport role in Nationalisms, Political subsidization, Religion, Race and volunteering versus professionalism. The goal was to state the true place of sports in societies.In March 1970, Ben W. Miller from the University of California compiled an interesting Exhibit n.1 about the main conclusions of a breakfast meeting occurred during the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. There, they identified thirty-one individuals, which had separate courses in “Comparative and/or International Physical Education, Recreation and Sports”; one month later, they collected eighteen responses with the bibliographic references they used. On this same Exhibit n.1 there is detailed information on the title, catalogue description, date of initial course (1948, the first), credit units, eligibility, number of year offer, type of graduation (from major to doctorate and professional). Concluding, the end of the sixties can be the mark of a well-established body of literature in comparative education and sports studies published in several scientific journals.What about the XXIst century? Is it still important to compare sports and education throughout the world? Only with qualitative methods? Mixed methods?We think so. That is why, after a certain decline and fuzzy goal definition in research motivations within ISCPES we decided to innovate and reorganize people from physical education and sports around this important theme of comparative studies. Important because we observe an increasing concern on the contradictions across different results in publications under the same subject. How can we infer? What about good research questions which get no statistically significant results? New times are coming, and we want to be on that frontline of this move as said by Elsevier “With RMR (results masked review) articles, you don’t need to worry about what editors or reviewers might think about your results. As long as you have asked an important question and performed a rigorous study, your paper will be treated the same as any other. You do not need to have null results to submit an RMR article; there are many reasons why it can be helpful to have the results blinded at initial review”.https://www.elsevier.com/connect/reviewers-update/results-masked-review-peer-review-without-publication-bias.This is a very different and challenging time. Our future strategy will comprehend more cooperation between researchers, institutions and scientific societies as an instrument to leverage our understanding of physical activity and sports through different continents and countries and be useful for policy designs.Next 2018, on the occasion of the UE initiative Sofia – European Capital of Sport 2018 we - Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) & the International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sport (ISCPES) - will jointly organize an International Conference on Sport Governance around the World.Sports and Physical Education are facing complex problems worldwide, which need to be solved. For health reasons, a vast number of organizations are popularizing the belief that physical education and sports are ‘a must’ in order to promote human activity and movement. However, several studies show that modern lifestyles are the main cause for people's inactivity and sedentary lifestyles.Extensive funded programs used to promote healthy lifestyles; sports media advertising several athletes, turning them into global heroes, influencers in a new emerging industry around sports organizations. Therefore, there is a rise in the number of unethical cases and corruption that influence the image of physical education and sports roles.We, the people emotional and physically involved with sports and physical activity must be aware of this, studying, discussing and comparing global facts and events around the world.This Conference aims to offer an incentive to colleagues from all continents to participate and present their latest results on four specific topics: 1. Sport Governance Systems; 2. Ethics and Corruption in Physical Education and Sports Policies; 3. Physical Education and Sport Development; 4. Training Physical Educators and Coaches. Please consider your selves invited to attend. Details in http://bcesconvention.com/

Norfolk Island (South Pacific), a small external territory of Australia, has a placenaming record marked by distinct historical, settlement, and land use periods. This brief communication considers the complex nexus of official–unofficial, embedded–unembedded, and English–Norfolk Island language toponyms as a way to make better sense of the localization of toponymic knowledge and to appreciate better how such knowledge functions within a minute society intricately connected to its own largely known past and an ever changing toponymic present. The data were collected during interview fieldwork on Norfolk Island during the period 2007–2009. It concludes by putting forward a four-category division of Norfolk Island toponyms: 1) official names adhering to common colonial forms; 2) official and unofficial descriptive names; 3) unofficial names commemorating local people; 4) unofficial and esoteric names remembering local events and people. These categories appear distinct, but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The differentiation of processes of toponyms becoming embedded and the localization of toponymic knowledge are a possible explanation for the loss of toponymic knowledge among younger people on Norfolk Island and suggests a general ecological disconnect across time involving people, history, and events associated with Norfolk Island toponyms. The Norfolk Island official–unofficial toponym distinction is applicable to other toponymic case studies, especially situations with competing placenaming histories.

Background: Postvention services aim to ameliorate distress and reduce future incidences of suicide. The StandBy Response Service is one such service operating in Australia for those bereaved through suicide. Few previous studies have reported estimates or evaluations of the economic impact and outcomes associated with the implementation of bereavement/grief interventions. Aims: To estimate the cost-effectiveness of a postvention service from a societal perspective. Method: A Markov model was constructed to estimate the health outcomes, quality-adjusted life years, and associated costs such as medical costs and time off work. Data were obtained from a prospective cross-sectional study comparing previous clients of the StandBy service with a control group of people bereaved by suicide who had not had contact with StandBy. Costs and outcomes were measured at 1 year after suicide bereavement and an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was calculated. Results: The base case found that the StandBy service dominated usual care with a cost saving from providing the StandBy service of AUS $803 and an increase in quality-adjusted life years of 0.02. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis indicates there is an 81% chance the service would be cost-effective given a range of possible scenarios. Conclusion: Postvention services are a cost-effective strategy and may even be cost-saving if all costs to society from suicide are taken into account.

Globally there is an increase in the social and economic impacts of all natural hazards, and especially those that are generated by weather systems. Climate change is a part of this process, but it is most likely that long-term climate change will first become evident as an increase in natural disasters, especially flooding and drought. However, a major cause of increasing natural disasters is the growth and relocation of population, concentrating into complex urban settlements that proliferate infrastructure and property in vulnerable floodplains and the coastal fringe. While Australia has experienced a decline in the loss of life from natural hazards, the loss to business, agriculture and the economy in general has increased exponentially. Weather generated natural disasters dominate the total disaster bill. Vulnerability to natural hazards may be reduced through hazard education and effective warnings. The communication of weather information is inevitably a top down process. Understanding of information and in particular, warnings about hazardous events involves a public safety transfer of knowledge from highly specialised scientists through emergency managers, local politicians and the media, to every member of society. Research shows that selection, interpretation and expression of information and warnings occurs at institutional and societal levels. Both the media and the general public select, re-interpret, and weigh up information about weather and hazards, applying a complex set of attitudes, perceptions, experience and misinformation to the initial message. An understanding of how people interpret the message is essential to the accuracy and safety of warnings and forecasts. Examples and case studies from post-disaster and behavioural research carried out by the Centre for Disaster Studies, and hazard events illustrate the issues of understanding the message. 1

During the Second World War, approximately 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world. The vast majority were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), but after the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), a significant number of these nurses spent three-and-a-half years as POWs in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines. To date, considerable research has been undertaken on POW experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Japan, albeit primarily focused on the testimonies of men and civilian women. This body of research utilises various methodologies, from Yuki Tanaka and Kei Ushimura's efforts to reconcile Japanese war crimes with the corruption of the Bushido ethic and sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society, to Christina Twomey's work on the imprisonment and repatriation of Dutch, Dutch–Eurasian and Australian civilian women and children. In the past fifteen years, historians have become aware of the need to recognise the multiplicity of these experiences, rather than continuing to focus on individual community, camp or regional case studies. Nurses are by no means absent from the discussion, although the majority of notable works on this subject focus on Hong Kong or the Philippines and adopt a descriptive and somewhat anecdotal approach. At the same time, scant critical attention has been paid to the internment of nurses in Indonesia despite a wealth of material kept in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and National Archives of Australia (NAA).

Objectives: High-quality research has a tangible impact on patient care and should inform all medical decision-makings. Appraising and benchmarking of research is necessary in evidence-based medicine and allocation of funding. The aim of this review is to demonstrate how evidence may be gathered by quantifying the amount and type of research by a group of surgeons over a 20-year period. Methods: Members of the Colorectal Surgical Society of Australia and New Zealand were identified in April 2020. A search of the Scopus database was conducted to quantify each surgeon’s research output from 1999 to 2020. Authorship details such as the Hirsch index and number of papers published were recorded, as were publication-related details. Results: 226 colorectal surgeons were included for analysis, producing a total of 5053 publications. The most frequent colorectal topics were colorectal cancer (32%, n = 1617 of all publications), followed by pelvic floor disorders (4.3%, n = 217) and inflammatory bowel disease (3.5%, n = 177). 56% ( n = 2830) of all publications were case series audits (21%, n = 1061), expert opinion pieces (20%, n = 1011) and cohort studies (15%, n = 758). 7% ( n = 354) were randomised control or non-randomised control trials, 3% ( n = 152) were systematic reviews and 1% ( n = 50) were meta-analyses. The top 10% ( n = 23) of authors accounted for more than half (54%, n = 2729) of manuscripts published. Conclusion: Australasian colorectal surgeons made a significant contribution to the medical literature over the past 20 years and the number of publications is increasing over time. A greater output of higher-level evidence research is needed. This information may be used to better allocate researcher funding and grants for future projects.

As clinical legal education (CLE) continues to evolve and prepare practice-ready lawyers, and governments worldwide focus on the multilayered impact of technology, automation and artificial intelligence, there is a pressing need to examine law and entrepreneurship through the lens of global clinical legal education. The range of issues include: corporate social responsibility, disruptive technologies, microbusiness, social entrepreneurship, social impact investing, the creative economy, sustainable local economies, cooperatives and shared work, and inclusive entrepreneurship.Indeed, new legal entities like benefit corporations and low profit limited liability companies (L3Cs) have emerged to address contemporary legal needs and in the United States, the notion of an entrepreneurial mindset is prominent. Many of today’s law students are Millennial generation, ages 18-34, while others are digital natives who have not known a world without technology.Business law clinics (BLCs), also referred to as transactional clinics, representing for profit, nonprofit or nongovernmental (NGOs) organizations and social enterprises aim to support the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems while promoting social and economic justice. BLCs teach law students substantive law, practical skills and professional values. Indeed, BLCs with a social and economic justice perspective can help law students, the next generation of leaders, to develop critical analytic skills and insights into how entrepreneurship supports and sometimes hurts human rights and civil society efforts.Part one of this article examines the evolution of global CLE in western countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and in Georgia and Croatia. Part two discusses a more recent phenomenon in CLE, the emergence of BLCs, which expand the clinical experience beyond the courtroom to the boardroom, and the differences and similarities between litigation and transactional legal clinics. Part three examines the rise in BLCs globally, and contains case studies of the global experience in transactional CLE with perspectives from Georgia, Croatia, Australia, Canada and the U.K. Part four considers the unique pedagogical and programmatic aspects of BLCs, such as redefining “practice-ready,” teaching Millennials, and collaboration as a lawyering skill. Part five reflects on the significance of BLCs now. In Part six the article concludes by looking to the future of BLCs in a global context. The article also includes an Appendix 1 with BLC Lawyering Competencies and Learning Outcomes and Appendix 2 with a Checklist for Starting or Re-Imagining a BLC.

2086 Background: Medulloblastoma (MB) accounts for less than 1% of adult intracranial tumours. While pediatric MB has been investigated in several randomized studies, the evidence in adults is limited to case reports and retrospective series, with no accepted standard of care. The Australian Cooperative Trials Group for Neuro-Oncology (COGNO) sought to determine the range and consistency of clinicians’ approaches to management as a basis for future trials. Methods: We aimed to identify current treatment strategies for adult MB through an international electronic survey launched at the 2012 meeting of the Society of Neuro-Oncology and by email invitation. Clinicians who had treated at least 1 adult patient with MB, central primitive neuroectodermal tumor (cPNET), or pinealoblastoma in the preceding year were asked about their most recent patient and asked to discuss their approach to management of a typical clinical scenario. Results: Between Nov 2012 and Jan 2013, 45 clinicians (11 medical oncologists, 7 radiation oncologists, 5 pediatric oncologists, and 22 others) from Australia (n = 24), USA (n = 3), Europe (n = 4) and other countries (n = 14) completed the survey. Responding clinicians had treated 54 cases in the past 12 months. The commonest histological type was MB (64%), followed by cPNET (20%). Most patients were male (68%), and most had high-risk disease (65%). 56% had complete surgical resection and 32% had molecular testing. Radiotherapy was predominantly craniospinal (92%) and mostly post-resection (80%). Combination chemotherapy was more common than single agent. Vincristine, cisplatin, cyclophosphamide was the most common protocol (43%). Others included carboplatin, etoposide, ifosfamide (29%), vincristine, lomustine, cisplatin (19%), vincristine, lomustine, prednisone (5%). Further details will be presented at the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting. Conclusions: Our study has shown substantial international variation in the treatment of adult MB, most pronounced in the choice of chemotherapeutic agents, highlighting the need for further collaborative research to guide evidence-based treatment strategies.

Aim/Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore trends and motivations for doctoral students’ participation in domestic and international conferences. We draw on doctoral students’ perceptions and experiences from four contexts (USA, Scotland, England, Australia) to further explore variations across different global contexts. Background: There is increased recognition of the importance of conferences within doctoral education. Yet very little is known or understood about doctoral students’ participation and motivations for participating in conferences. Methodology: Our sample includes doctoral students from four institutions studying in a School of Education. We used an online survey and follow-up focus group interviews to investigate doctoral students’ perceptions and experiences of conferences. Contribution: There are few studies on doctoral students’ participation in conferences. This study contributes to the literature on doctoral students as it investigates the trends and rationale for doctoral students’ participation in national and international conferences. We highlight the importance of conferences as learning sites for doctoral students. Furthermore, our research highlights dissimilarities and ambiguities in the provision of support for doctoral students’ regarding what we describe as the social aspect of their researcher learning and development, in this case, in networking activities. Findings: Our findings show that a) at both the individual (doctoral students) and institutional level, there is an implicit understanding of the importance of networking and yet programs rarely formally require conference attendance; b) students’ motivations to attend conferences may be mediated by their career aspirations and supportive structures (i.e., funding); and c) conferences support doctoral students’ learning and confidence in future networking. Recommendations for Practitioners: Our recommendations to doctoral education training programs and/or supervisors are to explicitly discuss and promote networking and/or conference attendance, and to find ways to support students to engage in networking outside their immediate study environment. Recommendation for Researchers: Our recommendation to researchers is to further investigate the importance of networking behaviors and experiences on doctoral student training and/or career outcomes. Impact on Society: This research highlights the importance of recognizing the learning needs of doctoral students who are expected to work in a complex, globally connected society as part of the reality of higher education in the 21st century. Future Research: Results from the study could help inform a larger study on the trends and motivations of doctoral students’ networking across all disciplines.

Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad continues to seek thought-provoking manuscripts, insightful essays, well-researched papers, and concise book reviews that may provide the profession of study abroad an intellectual charge, document some of the best thinking and innovative programming in the field, create an additional forum for dialogue among colleagues in international education, and ultimately enrich our perspectives and bring greater meaning to our work. In this issue, Frontiers focuses on one of the most compelling themes of interest among international educators: learning outside the home society and culture. Through the researched articles, we hope to engage you in further thinking and discussion about the ways we learn in other societies and cultures; the nature of such learning and the features that make it distinctive from learning in one's home culture; the methods, techniques, and best practices of such learning; and the integration of learning abroad into the broader context of the "internationalization" of the home campus. Brian J. Whalen's lead article in this edition of the journal develops our theme by providing an overview of learning outside the home culture, with particular emphasis on the role that memory plays in this enterprise. Whalen examines the psychological literature and uses case studies to focus on the ways in which students learn about their new society and culture, and about themselves. Hamilton Beck, on the other hand, presents an intriguing study from the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. In examining his Autobiography and Du Bois's three-year stay in Berlin from 1892 to 1894 as a graduate student at the Friedrich Wilhelms-Universitat zu Berlin, Beck uncovers an excellent example of "learning outside one's home society and culture" through the series of social, political, and ideological encounters Du Bois experiences, reflects on, and then remembers. The article ends with several "lessons" learned from late- nineteenth-century Germany that remained with Du Bois for the rest of his life, as shown in his Autobiography and his collection of essays in The Souls of Black Folk. A team of field study and study abroad specialists from Earlham College looks at our theme through the use of ethnography and the techniques of field study for students living and working in Mexico, Austria, and Germany. The article demonstrates through the observations of the students how effective the use of field research methods can be in learning about Mexican social relations and cultural traditions by working in a tortilla factory, or about Austrian social habits and traditions by patronizing a night club and its "intimate society." We are reminded of other methods of strengthening learning outside the home society and culture by the case study of the Canadian students from Ontario who attended a teacher training program at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Barbara Jo Lantz's review of a recent publication describing the usefulness of an “analytical notebook" in learning outside the home society and culture underscores the importance of journal writing as an integral part of study abroad. While journals have been used before in study abroad learning, Kenneth Wagner and Tony Magistrale's Writing Across Culture points the international educator in new directions and contexts in which journal writing enhances learning. Finally, in our Update section, Wayne Myles examines the uses of technology-including the Internet, homepages, and electronic bulletin boards-as ways of advertising to, networking with, and processing study abroad students and their learning on and off our campuses. Barbara Burn examines the internationalization efforts of our European colleagues through her review of Hans de Wit's edited work Strategies for Internationalisation of Higher Education, while Aaro Ollikainen follows up an earlier article by Hans de Wit (Frontiers, no. 1), with a detailed look at Finland's efforts at internationalization. Joseph R. Stimpfl's thorough annotated bibliography reminds us that there is a legacy of several decades of critical thinking about study abroad and international education to which we are indebted and on which we can build. With this issue, the editorial board is pleased to begin publishing two issues annually of Frontiers. We are interested in interdisciplinary approaches to study abroad as well as critical essays, book reviews, and annotated bibliographies. In building on the work of previous research, and creating a forum for a debate and discussion, we hope that we may begin to define both theoretically and practically the contours of the frontiers of study abroad. Michael Monahan, Macalester College Thomas Ricks, Villanova University

Ford’s ‘Comments (Laws 2018, 7(4), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws7040034, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/7/4/34)’ are biased by a partisan approach to the issues at stake and cannot be based on scientific evidence. The article “A Counterfactual Impact Analysis of Fair Use Policy on Copyright Related Industries in Singapore”, which Gibert and Gafelle wrote together nearly a decade ago, came under heavy criticism by George S. Ford from an organization named the Phoenix Centre for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies in an article ‘A Counterfactual Impact Analysis of Fair Use Policy on Copyright Related Industries in Singapore: A Critical Review’. (subsequently ‘the fair use study’) The Fair use study was peer reviewed by LAWS and supports the hypothesis that a more flexible fair use policy is correlated with faster growth rates in private copying technology industries and fewer negative consequences than copyright holders may desire to see. The findings of the Fair use study upset Ford as well as a host of different institutions advocating for copyright owners, such as International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations; Motion Picture Association; Publishers Association of Australia; New Zealand Society of Authors or Recorded Music NZ-RMNZ. Ford’s article, however, neither contains novel research, nor is it an effort to update this fairly dated analysis, which reflects data nearly twenty years of age. Rather, it is an unnecessary duplication of an old analysis with only some minor modifications, which serve to show that fair use is actually not beneficial to the economy. At the end of this peculiar exercise, Ford himself admits that this analysis is meaningless. The rest of Ford’s article consists of discussing potential limitations of the Fair use study, in a manner which suggests the authors had never disclosed them (which however they had) and thus is misleading. Ford’s most fundamental point of criticism is hinged on a supposed lack of evidence regarding the parallelism assumption, which he himself admits is impossible to offer. Contrary to Ford’s analysis, the Fair use study has the merit of being fully reproducible, which is not the case for Ford’s article. Also, contrary to Ford’s article, the Fair use study has the advantage of carefully drafted limitations and of offering genuine research insights.

The 1880s and early 1890s have been widely recognised as a time of depression in New Zealand. While well-known architects with substantial clienteles were generally able to survive the downturn in business, others struggled to make ends meet, showed signs of extreme stress, or occasionally resorted to sharp practices. Few in-depth studies have been able to show the broad spectrum of architects working in Wellington at a particular time as, until recently, it has been extremely difficult to accumulate the necessary data. The introduction of Papers Past has considerably simplified this task. We can now find and assess almost all the architects who made the news in different ways. Although more than 30 men claimed to be Wellington architects in the 1880s, not all of them were working. Some, such as Frank Mitchell, produced relatively large numbers of plans throughout the decade; many others appear to have been less successful, and to have turned their hands to other activities, for better or worse. In this paper we select a few of the more colourful "architects" residing in Wellington in the 1880s. Our candidates range from the aforementioned Frank Mitchell, through to Christopher Walter Worger, who being bankrupted in Christchurch, moved to Wellington in 1889. Leaving no record of any building designs, he had gone to Dunedin by 1906. Another enigmatic character was James Henry Schwabe, who escaped Dunedin and a rather public humiliation for Wellington in the late 1870s. Similarly, we discuss the erratic behaviour of W.J.W. Robinson, also escaping scandal in Dunedin to practise in the capital. Charles Zahl we find making a fleeting visit in early 1887, before absconding with a large sum of investors' money en route to Rio de Janeiro or Britain. We finish with the case of Ernest Wagner, released into the community after a year's hard labour in 1880. He never practised as an architect again - preferring, or being forced, to live as a farmer in the country south of Auckland. The examples we discuss are the exception rather than the rule. Of the bankruptcies recorded at the time, few came from the upper echelons of society. Some architects who were later prominent in Wellington moved offshore to better conditions in Australia (such as Joshua Charlesworth), whereas others such as William Turnbull were protected to some extent in successful partnerships in which they had a junior role.

This medal is awarded by the New Zealand Plant Protection Society to honour those who have made exceptional contributions to plantprotection in New Zealand in the widest sense. The medal is awarded for outstanding services to plant protection, whether through research,education, implementation or leadership. In 2016, the New Zealand Plant Protection Medal was awarded to Dr Rob Beresford who is one of New Zealand’s most experienced and versatile plant pathologists. Rob started his career in science with an MSc Hons, 1st class, in Auckland in 1978 and was appointed to DSIR Plant Diseases Division at Lincoln in 1979. He was awarded a National Research Advisory Council Postgraduate Research Fellowship to undertake PhD studies at Long Ashton Research Station in the UK from1982 to 1985, returning to Lincoln in 1986. Those studies kicked off a long career in epidemiology and today Rob is New Zealand’s pre-eminent plant disease epidemiologist. For 30 years, Rob has been New Zealand’s strongest advocate for the use of weather-based disease prediction for developing practicaldisease control strategies, particularly to reduce the economic, environmental and market residue impacts of fungicide use. By understanding and modelling relationships between pathogen biology and ecology and weather, Rob has translated complex correlations between biological and physical factorsinto simple practical tools for growers to use for disease control. To date, these have included decision support tools for apple scab, downy mildew in onions, botrytis in grapes and more recently Psa in kiwifruit. He has also developed prediction models for climatic risk of invasive pathogens (potato wart disease and myrtle rust) and for the impacts of climate change on crop diseases. Recognising the importance of climate and weather in affecting plant diseases, Rob has, for many years, championed a network of weather stations in the key horticultural districts throughout New Zealand to generate data for the decision-support tools. It has been a struggle to keep the network running against shortages of funding and the frequent need to re-assert the value of the network to New Zealand horticulture. Rob has built a team of equally committed colleagues who share this understanding and, through tenacity and persistence, have recently achieved an upgrade of the entire network to internet-based communication systems. It is through his close collaborations over many years with the software company HortPlus that his decision support tools have been delivered to the commercial arena. Rob was a member of the New Zealand team that argued the case at the World Trade Organisation for the easing of restrictions on New Zealand apples entering Australia. Rob’s superior skills in interpreting climate data, in this case Australian data, in terms of pathogen survival, establishment and spread, and his clarity in presenting the results were instrumental in the success of that case in 2010. In parallel with Rob’s epidemiological strategy to reduce fungicide use is his interest in the threat of pathogens developing resistance to fungicides. Rob leads research to identify resistance threats to fungicides and also provides liaison between grower associations and agrochemical companies to design and implement robust resistance-management strategies. His focus on resistance started in 2005 when he published updated management strategies for all nine of the then available fungicide groups for the New Zealand Plant Protection Society (NZPPS). In 2007, he re-established the New Zealand Committee on Pesticide Resistance (NZCPR) (which had been in abeyance for 10 years) and chaired the committee’s work on fungicides, insecticides and herbicides from 2007 to 2012. He stepped aside to become NZCPR Science Advisor in 2012 so he could focus on resistance research. Following devastating disease outbreaks of apple scab (Venturia ineaqualis) in the pipfruit industry in 2009, Rob initiated a research programme with Pipfruit New Zealand that showed the cause of the outbreaks to be resistance to two groups of fungicides in use at the time. He has recently coordinated resistance strategy updates for botrytis affecting the wine industry, for summer fruit diseases and is currently leading a programme to monitor resistance of grape powdery mildew to key groups of fungicides. Rob was awarded the 2014 Plant & Food Research Chairman’s Award for his work on fungicide resistance. Rob is an effective communicator at all levels from heavy science to grower forums and is always willing to share his time, skills and knowledge. He has been involved with undergraduate lecturing for many years and has successfully supervised several PhDs. NZPP Medal recipients for the previous five years:2015: Gary Barker2014: -2013: Andrew Hodson2012: Margaret Dick2011: Jim Walker

- G.W.J. Drewes, Taufik Abdullah, Islam and society in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian studies, Singapore, 1986, XII and 348 pp., Sharon Siddique (eds.) - Th. van den End, T.Valentino Sitoy, A history of Christianity in the Philippines. The initial encounter , Vol. I, Quezon City (Philippines): New day publishers, 1985. - R. Hagesteijn, David G. Marr, Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian studies and the research school of Pacific studies of the Australian National University, 1986, 416 pp., A.C. Milner (eds.) - R. Hagesteijn, Constance M. Wilson, The Burma-Thai frontier over sixteen decades - Three descriptive documents, Ohio University monographs in international studies, Southeast Asia series No. 70, 1985,120 pp., Lucien M. Hanks (eds.) - Barbara Harrisson, John S. Guy, Oriental trade ceramics in South-east Asia, ninth to sixteenth century, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1986. 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Abstract. The objective of the study is to provide global grids (0.5°) of revised annual coefficients for the Priestley–Taylor (P-T) and Hargreaves–Samani (H-S) evapotranspiration methods after calibration based on the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers)-standardized Penman–Monteith method (the ASCE method includes two reference crops: short-clipped grass and tall alfalfa). The analysis also includes the development of a global grid of revised annual coefficients for solar radiation (Rs) estimations using the respective Rs formula of H-S. The analysis was based on global gridded climatic data of the period 1950–2000. The method for deriving annual coefficients of the P-T and H-S methods was based on partial weighted averages (PWAs) of their mean monthly values. This method estimates the annual values considering the amplitude of the parameter under investigation (ETo and Rs) giving more weight to the monthly coefficients of the months with higher ETo values (or Rs values for the case of the H-S radiation formula). The method also eliminates the effect of unreasonably high or low monthly coefficients that may occur during periods where ETo and Rs fall below a specific threshold. The new coefficients were validated based on data from 140 stations located in various climatic zones of the USA and Australia with expanded observations up to 2016. The validation procedure for ETo estimations of the short reference crop showed that the P-T and H-S methods with the new revised coefficients outperformed the standard methods reducing the estimated root mean square error (RMSE) in ETo values by 40 and 25 %, respectively. The estimations of Rs using the H-S formula with revised coefficients reduced the RMSE by 28 % in comparison to the standard H-S formula. Finally, a raster database was built consisting of (a) global maps for the mean monthly ETo values estimated by ASCE-standardized method for both reference crops, (b) global maps for the revised annual coefficients of the P-T and H-S evapotranspiration methods for both reference crops and a global map for the revised annual coefficient of the H-S radiation formula and (c) global maps that indicate the optimum locations for using the standard P-T and H-S methods and their possible annual errors based on reference values. The database can support estimations of ETo and solar radiation for locations where climatic data are limited and it can support studies which require such estimations on larger scales (e.g. country, continent, world). The datasets produced in this study are archived in the PANGAEA database (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.868808) and in the ESRN database (http://www.esrn-database.org or http://esrn-database.weebly.com).

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Traditionally, the country way of life, the country worldview -- the country culture -- has been understood differently to the city way of life. Notions of rural have been represented in terms such as 'Eden', 'Arcadia', 'Golden Age', and associated with beauty, fertility, moral uprightness and authenticity. In contrast, notions of urban have been characterised by pollution, sterility, degeneration and artificiality. In Australia, the culture of the first white settlers developed out of this tradition, but with its own distinctive characteristics. The harshness and indomitability of the landscape became the means by which unique character, unifying myths of belonging and societal significance were constructed and asserted. In contrast to the communities of the country's original inhabitants, which were perceived as passive, unproductive and disconnected, the new culture was characterised by notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous' and 'nationalistic' (Moore 54; Turner 6; Ward; White 16ff.). Defining the country worldview in contemporary Australia, however, is problematic. Question marks hang over the continued significance, even existence, of a specifically country culture. Post-war Australia has witnessed enormous economic and social changes, wrought by improved transport and communication networks, a shrinking rural population, and the decreasing importance of the agricultural industries. The steady decline in grass roots support for the National Party of Australia, traditional defender of the country way of life, suggests that the voting population no longer views the upholding of specifically pro-country policies as necessary to the well-being of the nation. Australia is now recognised as the most urbanised, sub-urbanised and multi-cultural of the western industrialised nations. Globalisation of the mass communications media has blurred the boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. Consequently, many argue that the differences between the country and city are now insignificant (for example, Aitkin 34-41). Yet notions of country that are distinct, even definitive, continue to be represented in various urban-based communications industries, cultural policies, and the discourses of environmental politics and nationalism. Examples include John Laws's very popular Across Australia radio talk-back programme which celebrates the outback, the farmer and 'battler', and the 'True Blue' music of country artist John Williamson; the push by the Green movement to separate and protect wilderness areas of 'natural' bushland from the corrupting influences of human cultivation; and the continued significance of the 'bush' and 'bushman' in divers constructions of national cultural identity. Share and Lawrence argue that such representations are a state of mind rather than a state of being, "in the imagination of the cosmopolis" only (Share & Lawrence 101). Imagined or otherwise, however, the evidence suggests that they are representations which are nevertheless there -- albeit constructed in varying ways, with varying emphases, and in a variety of settings. Tamworth: Country at Heart Jacka argues that it is the 'local', constructed by a specific set of forces and circumstances and operating within a particular time frame and place, that provides the best or most 'authentic' means of analysing notions of the 'country' (qtd. in Share & Lawrence 102). Tamworth, situated in North Western New South Wales, approximately four hundred kilometres from Sydney, is one such 'authentic' locality. The city of Tamworth and its surrounding hinterland is populated by some 55,000 people. Timber and farmland constitute 95% of its land use. Agricultural production generates the bulk of its net income. The Tamworth electoral district has been designated 'country' by the State Electoral Office. Promotional billboards erected by the Tamworth City Council and situated on all major highways into the city describe Tamworth as 'the heart of country'. Tamworth is renowned as 'the Country Music Capital of Australasia' and celebrates 'country' values annually through a highly successful Country Music Festival. Clearly, notions of country are significant in the shaping of how Tamworth is perceived as a community locally and nationally. These notions are an important component of the process of meaning generation, circulation and exchange inTamworth -- indeed, they are an important component of the essential fabric that constitutes the Tamworth culture. Analysis The Tamworth worldview was studied through an analysis of the coverage of the local NSW state election campaigns of 1995 and 1999 by Tamworth's only regional daily newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader. Regional daily newspapers are a useful means of analysing the major preoccupations of a culture. They contribute significantly to the construction and representation of the communities they serve: they are moulded by the specific needs of their communities; they are prominent influences of the norms, values and processes of these communities; they are the product of a community that is connected by common and local interests and knowledge, written with and by the people of this community (Mules et al. 242). The coverage of the 1995 and 1999 election campaigns represented a discrete sample of texts with a common focus. An important aspect of this focus was Mr Tony Windsor, Independent State Member for Tamworth. Windsor's Independent status was significant to the study. Firstly, it suggests that he was elected to office on his own merits or on the merits of his policies, as against any particular party affiliation. Papadakis and Bean argue that a vote for an Independent most often represents a protest vote against the dominant players in the political system rather than any systemic approval of the policy positions or other qualities of the recipient (109). This may well have been the case for Windsor's initial victory in 1991. However, in the 1995 election he won an unprecedented 83% of the primary vote, representing voters from right across the political spectrum. He further increased his majority in the 1999 election. Windsor's extraordinary popularity suggests that his appeal cut across the political boundaries into the social and cultural realms. As such, Windsor embodies a singular means of analysing the socio-politico-cultural preoccupations of those he represents. The study tracked story frequency and space, and analysed pictorial, headline and lead texts in terms of story focus, personal and thematic associations, and candidate agency. It was found that the Leader markedly privileged Windsor over his opponents in regards to story frequency and space. The pictorial and key word analyses identified Windsor's public persona as more active and more person-oriented than those of his opponents, and as associated more often with exterior settings, particularly those in or connected with 'bush' locations. This stood in contrast to the representations of his major ALP opponents. In both elections they were female, associated more with interior settings, and represented as speaking more than doing, passive more than active, and concerned more with their emotions and states of being than was Windsor. Overall, the Leader's representation of Windsor was found to comprise the six notions noted above as being characteristic of the traditional country worldview. Windsor's connections with and concerns for the land and country issues were significant. The construction of male and female gender roles was masculinist in nature. The absence of any signifiers associated with notions of 'Aboriginality', 'ethnicity', even 'diversity', indicated the existence of naturalised discourses of 'white' and 'homogeneity'. Notions of productivity were evident through Windsor's preoccupation with the business and industry. Nationalism was implied through Windsor's association with characteristics that epitomise traditional understandings of what it is to be an Australian. Two additional characteristics were also identified. The first of these was named 'Independent', as indicated through the significance placed upon Windsor's politically Independent status. It was defined by the traditional understandings of the country worldview and ideas of integrity, 'a fair go' for the country, and of giving power back to the people. In contrast, the major political parties, ALP and National Party, were associated with the city, corruption, interference, lack of democracy, the undermining of country values by city values, and a subordination of the country to the city. The second characteristic was named 'community'. It was indicated through ideas of belonging and like-mindedness, andWindsor's representation as friendly, person-oriented and concerned with the active provision of services for the people. Implications The Tamworth culture is characterised by the notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous', 'nationalistic', 'Independent' and 'community'. This very characterisation, however, is one that gives rise to a number of questions. What drove the Leader to construct and represent the Tamworth culture in this way? How did and does this particular characterisation serve the needs of the Tamworth people? How and why are these needs different to the needs of city people -- or even people in other rural communities? Perhaps the best answer lies with the demonstrated longevity of the essential nature of the Tamworth worldview. Traditional notions of country have remained distinctive, even definitive, despite Australia's urbanisation, suburbanisation, multiculturalism; despite the enormous economic and social changes that have been wrought by globalisation; despite the consequent blurring of boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. This traditional nature, it seems, is resistant to change. Yet there is also evidence that a blurring of boundaries, even change, has occurred in Tamworth. Examples include the fact that the combined income generated by secondary and tertiary industries in the Tamworth district is now greater than that generated by agriculture; Windsor, with whom the Leader so closely associates the land and other notions traditionally associated with the country, also holds a university degree in economics; the annual Country Music Festival is celebrated largely from within the confines of the city of Tamworth itself; Tamworth City Council and Country Music Festival both have sites on the World Wide Web, thereby connecting them with the very globalisation that the Leader would have them resisting. Although this may suggest that the country has actually appropriated, even assimilated many of the notions that are most often associated with change in today's society, it also seems that this assimilation is one that is on the country's terms only. Notions of the city are subordinated to notions of the country. Change is appropriated, but in a way that maintains the status quo -- that perpetuates the essential country worldview, both locally and nationally. Such evidence of change may also suggest that the Leader's representation of Windsor, of Tamworth, is perhaps a state of mind rather than a state of being. It is a representation that taps into the imagination of the people rather than their everyday existence. In so doing, it worked to position over 85% of the population into voting a particular way in the 1995 and 1999 NSW State elections. It may also work to draw the many people from around Australia who bring their tourist dollars into Tamworth each year to celebrate country values through the Country Music Festival. The Tamworth culture may well uphold a construction of Australian identity that is outside the direct experience of those who live on the coastal fringes, yet it provides an attractive, even desirable holiday destination for many. Perhaps this is because people, country and city alike, continue to see the country as a place that offers them a simple solution to tensions and conflicts that are otherwise unresolvable. Change produces anxiety -- especially a postmodern change in which all semblances of certainty have been removed. On the other hand, the study suggests that the country worldview represents that which does not change. Its definitive nature stands in contrast and provides an alternative to the relativism of the city. Notions of country represent a surety in a world that is otherwise uncertain. References Aitkin, D. "Countrymindedness: The Spread of an Idea." Australian Cultural History 4 (1985): 34-41. Moore, A. "The Old Guard and 'Countrymindedness' during the Great Depression." Journal of Australian Studies 27 (1990): 54. Mules, W., T. Shirato, and B. Wigman. "Rural Identity within the Symbolic Order: Media Representations of the Drought." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. 242. 6. Papadakis, E., and C. Bean. "Independents and the Minor Parties: The Electoral System." Australian Journal of Political Science 30 (1995): 109. Share, P., G. Lawrence. "Fear and Loathing in Wagga Wagga: Cultural Representations of the Rural and Possible Policy Implications." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. Turner, G. Making It National. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Ward, R. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958. White, R. Inventing Australia. Sydney:Allen & Unwin, 1981. 16ff. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Catherine Richardson. "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php>. Chicago style: Catherine Richardson, "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Catherine Richardson. (2000) The politics of a country culture: state of mind or state of being?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]).

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

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. 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