Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Small business – Western Australia – Case studies"

The Kwinana Industrial Area of Western Australia has emerged as a world leading example of industrial symbiosis. This involves businesses in close proximity exchanging by-product material, water and energy. Utilisation of a previously discarded resource as an alternative input to another company can help improve both business and sustainability performance of the participating companies. For example, the exchange can reduce disposal costs and provide a cheaper input for the receiving company. The environmental benefits can include reduced collective resource consumption and waste generation, whilst the social benefits may include new employment opportunities and reduction of emission (e.g. water or traffic) to the local community. This article presents the integrated research programme undertaken at the Centre of Excellence in Cleaner Production, Curtin University of Technology which seeks to enhance the uptake of industrial symbiosis in Australian heavy industrial areas. The case of Kwinana is discussed with illustrative case studies of industrial symbiosis exchanges. International interest in the creation of industrial symbiosis continues to grow and the article concludes with a discussion on the emerging role of measurement and control technolo

There is much evidence in the literature that small business growth has long been regarded as critically important for the economy and for employment growth. This paper focuses initially on an analysis of the impediments to business growth identified from the survey responses of small businesses in the western metropolitan region of Melbourne. From the survey information 25 small businesses were then selected for case study analysis to further examine the nature of impediments to growth and to examine how innovative and successful small business operators dealt with these impediments. A number of common impediments were identified, especially problems accessing finance, getting the right employee skills and the low use of support services. Analysis of the case studies yielded some insights as to: ▪ how successful small business operators deal with such impediments or obstacles to their innovation and growth; ▪ the low level of awareness and expectations small business operators generally have of the support programmes and services currently available to them; ▪ the nature of support small businesses would like to have to overcome perceived impediments to growth; ▪ strategies needed to successfully engage small businesses in support initiatives and to encourage innovation and growth. The findings have significant implications for small business development initiatives, including the provision of management training and support for small business operators.

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the old modernist engineering technologies, such as single purpose stormwater infiltration basins, can be transformed into quality environments that integrate ecological and social functions and promote multiple sets of outcomes, including biodiversity restoration, water management, and cultural and recreational purposes, among other urban roles. Using the principles and theories of biophilic urbanism, regenerative design, and qualitative inquiry, this article analyzes and discusses the actors, drivers, strategies, constraints, and values motivating the stakeholders to reinvent Perth’s stormwater infrastructure through two local case studies. The “WGV sump park” was developed through a public-private partnership, including professional consultants with community input, and the “Green Swing sump garden” was an owner-builder community-driven project involving volunteers, who maintain it. The results of this research suggest that both projects are successful at managing stormwater in a way that creates multiple community and biodiversity benefits. Communities could gain improved access to nature, social interaction, health, and well-being if local governments support these alternative approaches to regenerate underutilized stormwater infrastructure by promoting biophilic interventions. Mainstreaming this design approach identified some issues that may arise during the implementation of this biophilic urban approach, and the paper suggests ways to enhance the wider delivery of regenerative and biophilic design into urban planning, involving volunteer delivery and maintenance for small scale projects and fully professional assessments for large scale projects.

A reliable estimate of population size is of paramount importance for making management decisions on species of conservation significance that may be impacted during development. The western ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus occidentalis) is regularly encountered during urban development and is the subject of numerous surveys to estimate its abundance. A variety of techniques have been used for this species with mixed results. This paper reports on a case study using distance sampling to estimate density of P. occidentalis in a small habitat remnant near Busselton, Western Australia. Density estimates obtained were within the range of previous studies of this species and we suggest that this technique should be employed in future surveys to improve the accuracy of population estimates for this species before development.

Limited water resources exist in numerous remote indigenous settlements around Australia. Indigenous people in these communities are still living in rudimentary conditions while their urban counterparts have full amenities, large scale water supplies and behavioral practices which may not be appropriate for an arid continent but are supported by extensive infrastructure in higher rainfall coastal areas. As remote indigenous communities continue to develop, their water use will increase, and in some cases, costly solutions may have to be implemented to augment supplies. Water harvesting techniques have been applied in settlements on a small scale for domestic and municipal purposes, and in the large, broadacre farm setting for productive use of the water. The techniques discussed include swales, infiltration basins, infiltration trenches and “sand dam” basins. This paper reviews the applications of water harvesting relevant to small communities for land rehabilitation, landscaping and flood control. Landscaping is important in these communities as it provides shelter from the sun and wind, reduces soil erosion and hence reduced airborne dust, and in some cases provides food and nutrition. Case studies of water harvesting systems applied in the Pilbara Region, Western Australia for landscaping around single dwellings in Jigalong and Cheeditha, in a permaculture garden in Wittenoon and at a college and carpark in Karratha are described.

AbstractAustralian cities were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the spread of the automobile and suburbanization. This article examines the patterns of retail diffusion that followed and the resultant adoption of the shopping centre form. Further, it considers the broader implications of retail innovation during a period of urban disruption, revealing intersections between urban geographies, business innovation and retail hierarchies. In the Australian case, dominant firms were able to leverage their market power to adapt to shifting retail geographies and new technologies, while some small entrepreneurial developers catering to the needs of these established retailers laid foundations for national and international expansion. A by-product of these processes was the creation of a unique Australian shopping centre form.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why small to medium enterprises (SMEs) access knowledge from external actors in general and from higher education institutions (HEIs) in particular and what is the extent to which these knowledge access pathways affect SME innovativeness. Design/methodology/approach – The paper involved both quantitative and qualitative approaches: a survey of 1,226 SMEs and a mini case study to follow-up on issues arising from the survey analysis. Survey data were analysed using both non-parametric and multivariate Poisson regression analysis. The case study was based on a medium-sized manufacturing firm in South Australia. Findings – While there are significant differences between the micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, the evidence suggests that SMEs generally use “generic” university–industry knowledge transfer pathways (e.g. published research results) rather than university–industry links with high “relational” involvement. More significantly, the results indicate that SMEs are more likely to rely on organisations other than universities and related R&D enterprises for knowledge acquisition like clients/customers or suppliers. While collaboration is most likely to occur within the same state/territory, or Australia, many SMEs also collaborate internationally, usually as part of normal supplier–customer relationships, reinforcing knowledge acquisition from organisationally proximate partners. These findings are also supported by the case study. Research limitations/implications – This research was limited to surveying SMEs in one geographic (metropolitan) region in Australia. It also does not account for the different patterns of HEI–SME interactions in different industry sectors. There is also only one case study. Originality/value – First, the research adds to the few field studies that have investigated accessing knowledge for innovation among SMEs. Specifically, the research contributes to an understanding of the heterogeneous roles that different actors play in facilitating knowledge access for improving innovative SMEs outcomes. Second, the research does not treat all SMEs similarly in terms of size effects but instead accounts for differing SME sizes and how this affects their selection of knowledge access pathways. Third, the research contributes to a small number of studies that attempt to understand how HEIs and SMEs can work better together in the context of a regional innovation system, especially one that is relatively less competitive to the larger economy.

This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative art projects in suburban Sydney (Australia) as outflows of singular interfaces between artists, institutions, audiences, and administrators. We begin analytically with the circulations that variously draw on and craft notions of locality and community in two projects staged in western Sydney, both involving nonlocal artists collaborating with business entities and arts institutions. In each case, specific circulations worked to produce a differently spatialized interplay of artists’ processes, aesthetic objects, events, performances and dialogues. The article develops a working conception of “interspatiality” that draws on actor network and assemblage concepts to elicit how creative labor entangles people, places, communities, and ways of working and thinking.

Multi-Level Marketing is a kind of novelty in the business reality. The greatest popularity gained in Western countries, where it functions as a kind of hybrid method in distribution of the goods with the design of the sales network. It is one of the most secure business models. In Poland the awareness of this type of activity is still small and remains a wide spectrum of scientific research. This situation has led to the creation of this article. The aim of the publication is to highlight the problems of Multi-Level Marketing, an indication of the essence of this phenomenon, and show how far is different than traditional marketing. The article presents the system of functioning of this kind of business, how it works a system of charging commissions and indicated a practical example of this system. Considerations based on literature studies and case studies.

Purpose – The paper aims to examine the competitive advantage of the environmental behaviour at a firm level and micro-cluster level, building the analysis on Harts model of natural resource-based view of the firm and by using Brown et al.'s framework for analysing contextual resources that would provide locational advantage based on environmental behaviour. The case study examines the drivers and the obstacles to environmental action and demonstrates how clustering has been important in progressing a sustainability agenda. Design/methodology/approach – A case study of a single wine tourism cluster in Australia is undertaken using mixed methods. Findings – The main drivers for environmental action are genuine concerns for the environment by the cluster participants, especially water conservation in the Australian context. Supporting this is the co-ordination of the Lovedale Chamber of Commerce which has promoted its “greening Lovedale” project as a source of regional identity and potential competitive advantage. The obstacles to action are those that are present when small firms dominate, a lack of resources and a lack of know how. Through clustering small businesses can share resources, access specialists and share knowledge. Research limitations/implications – A single cluster case study within the Australian and the wine tourism context confined to one point in time. Practical implications – The clustering of firms in agricultural regions offers the opportunity to achieve individual and collective benefits. Clustering participation can reduce costs, achieve scale economies and share knowledge. These advantages are relevant for environmental actions. In the context of weak or absent government actions and regulations over the environment, regional clusters can utilise the advantages of clustering to meet environmental goals. These in turn can contribute to regional identity and regional comparative advantage. These issues are addressed through the study of the Lovedale wine cluster in Australia. Originality/value – There are few studies of how clustered agricultural industries are addressing environmental challenges independently of central government directives or subsidies. Clustering enables small firms to participate in environmental programs despite being faced by resource and knowledge shortages.

The major economic use of the northern Australian rangelands is beef cattle grazing. Beef production enterprises are typically large and employ ‘low-input’ herd and pasture management systems, and the longer-term viability and sustainability of many is uncertain. Productivity gains have been stagnant for most of the past decade, and nutritional constraints are a major source of the poor animal production and financial returns across the sector. There has been a growing interest in the scope for small-scale, dispersed irrigation developments – mosaic irrigation – to provide an augmented supply of higher-quality forages to certain classes of animals in order to alter their reproduction and/or growth potential and to exploit market opportunities. An ex-ante economic review undertaken by the CSIRO of the prospects for mosaic irrigation employed bioeconomic simulation modelling of case studies of irrigation development scenarios conducted at the individual beef enterprise scale in three contrasting regions of northern Australia – the Burdekin (north Queensland), the Barkly Tableland (Northern Territory) and the Kimberley (northern Western Australia). This paper presents a summary of the methods, results and conclusions of the case study modelling. The results present a mixed picture of the economic potential for the various irrigation development options that were canvassed. The level of animal productivity (e.g. average weight of sale animals) increased for all of the irrigation simulation scenarios, but in most instances the projected economic advantage ranged from negative to only moderately positive across the three regional case studies. Where there was an apparently attractive return on the irrigation investment (e.g. a real internal rate of return of >15%), this primarily occurred under the more buoyant market conditions that have prevailed in recent years. The influence of irrigated forage availability on herd structure through management options such as the early weaning of calves appears to be at least as valuable as changes in liveweight gain for particular classes of animals.

Small businesses in desert Australia are disadvantaged by remoteness from suppliers and markets, workforce problems, and limited opportunities to explore alliances across the desert. This paper outlines an initiative to support and encourage capacity building in remote desert centres and to create networks to overcome the isolation experienced by desert-based small and medium-sized enterprises. Building on existing local initiatives and seizing the opportunities offered by a range of new information and communication technologies (ICT), businesses are linked together to explore the benefits of networking, to identify possible synergies and opportunities for collaboration, to gain practical ICT and networking skills and confidence in the processes, and create real outcomes for their business. The initiative began with a pilot project focused on training and mentoring business owners and managers in business clustering. In addition to education and training outcomes, this pilot produced more outcomes for the participating businesses than had been anticipated. In the final year $7 million of new business was reported. Many businesses embraced this way of working together to improve competitiveness; as a consequence the networks have continued to operate beyond the life of the pilot project. Several case studies are presented to demonstrate how ICT has been used for the transfer of ideas and knowledge, for collaboration, and to open new commercial opportunities for businesses that arose as a direct result of their participation. Proof of concept has been demonstrated in the value to businesses of this approach to long-distance inter-business cooperation and networking. The paper outlines key findings from the pilot project, including the needs for an appropriate pace of development, mix of technologies used, nurturing of business champions, flexibility, local facilitation, and real business outcomes, among others. These findings are being used to inform future developments in long-distance, cross-border business networking internationally and an expanded project involving nine regions of desert Australia.

A major challenge confronting many contemporary systematists is how to integrate standard taxonomic research with conservation outcomes. With a biodiversity crisis looming and ongoing impediments to taxonomy, how can systematic research continue to document species and infer the ‘Tree of Life’, and still maintain its significance to conservation science and to protecting the very species it strives to understand? Here we advocate a systematic research program dedicated to documenting short-range endemic taxa, which are species with naturally small distributions and, by their very nature, most likely to be threatened by habitat loss, habitat degradation and climate change. This research can dovetail with the needs of industry and government to obtain high-quality data to inform the assessment of impacts of major development projects that affect landscapes and their biological heritage. We highlight how these projects are assessed using criteria mandated by Western Australian legislation and informed by guidance statements issued by the Environmental Protection Authority (Western Australia). To illustrate slightly different biological scenarios, we also provide three case studies from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which include examples demonstrating a rapid rise in the collection and documentation of diverse and previously unknown subterranean and surface faunas, as well as how biological surveys can clarify the status of species thought to be rare or potentially threatened. We argue that ‘whole of biota’ surveys (that include all invertebrates) are rarely fundable and are logistically impossible, and that concentrated research on some of the most vulnerable elements in the landscape – short-range endemics, including troglofauna and stygofauna – can help to enhance conservation and research outcomes.

The extant literature on family firms has concentrated on succession planning and typically, on the experiences of western industrialized countries. This has skewed research and impeded our understanding of the dynamics of family firms, particularly their growth, evolution, processes and the exercise of power within the firm. In recent years, as family firms reform their organizational structure and processes, professionals and ‘outsiders’ are now brought into the firm to better ‘manage’ and oversee the firm and its activities. These effects are however not well understood and we do not know how they affect the governing process. Through the development of case studies of Chinese family firms in Malaysia, this paper seeks to map out the critical processes and the actors, including the function of non-executive directors, enabling a better understanding of the dynamics underpinning Chinese family firms and their growth. The paper also argues that the effectiveness of any given board structure is not predetermined but open to processes and mobilizing interests within the firm.

Mineral deposits can be described in terms of their mineral systems, i.e., fluid source, migration pathway, and trap. Source regions are difficult to recognize in seismic images. Many orebodies lie on or adjacent to major fault systems, suggesting that the faults acted as fluid migration pathways through the crust. Large faults often have broad internal zones of deformation fabric, which is anisotropic. This, coupled with the metasomatic effects of fluids moving along faults while they are active, can make the faults seismically reflective. For example, major gold deposits in the Archaean Eastern Goldfields province of Western Australia lie in the hanging‐wall block of regional‐scale faults that differ from other nearby faults by being highly reflective and penetrating to greater depths in the lower crust. Coupled thermal, mechanical, and fluid‐flow modeling supports the theory that these faults were fluid migration pathways from the lower to the upper crust. Strong reflections are also recorded from two deeply penetrating faults in the Proterozoic Mt. Isa province in northeastern Australia. Both are closely related spatially to copper and copper‐gold deposits. One, the Adelheid fault, is also adjacent to the large Mt. Isa silver‐lead‐zinc deposit. In contrast, other deeply penetrating faults that are not intrinsically reflective but are mapped in the seismic section on the basis of truncating reflections have no known mineralization. Regional seismic profiles can therefore be applied in the precompetitive area selection stage of exploration. Applying seismic techniques at the orebody scale can be difficult. Orebodies often have complex shapes and reflecting surfaces that are small compared to the diameter of the Fresnel zone for practical seismic frequencies. However, if the structures and alteration haloes around the orebodies themselves, seismic techniques may be more successful. Strong bedding‐parallel reflections were observed from the region of alteration around the Mt. Isa silver‐lead‐zinc orebodies using high‐resolution profiling. In addition, a profile in Tasmania imaged an internally nonreflective bulge within the Que Hellyer volcanics, suggesting a good location to explore for a volcanic hosted massive sulfide deposit. These case studies provide a pointer to how seismic techniques could be applied during mineral exploration, especially at depths greater than those being explored with other techniques.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and economic impact that the internet, specifically websites and social media, have on small businesses. It aims to investigate the benefits available from the use of the internet and social media sites for small businesses that operate in underserved regions. Design/methodology/approach – The research utilizes a case study methodology based on two surveys and semi-structured interviews with the owners or managers of five small companies in the western mountain region of Maine, a region described as underserved by the state departments of tourism and economic development – generally economically depressed, where the businesses are often struggling to survive. Findings – Benefits from the use of websites and social media sites include an increase in awareness and inquiries, enhanced relationships with customers, an increase in the number of new customers, enhanced ability to reach customers on a global scale, and co-promotion of local businesses that enhance the image of small businesses in the region. Research limitations/implications – The small number of firms from a specific region in the USA limits generalizations from this study’s findings. However, the findings offer preliminary insights for future studies on the use of the internet and social media sites for small businesses. Practical implications – The research provides evidence of potential advantages of utilizing web pages and social media sites for small businesses in underserved locations. The findings show that a web presence integrated with meaningful and sustained social media promotion can have a positive impact on business success in terms of increased traffic, awareness and revenues. This study has the potential to shed light on how internet technologies and social media can help struggling small businesses to communicate cost effectively with customers on a global scale, opening new opportunities for sales and growth. Social implications – By exploring the value of social media to small businesses, the authors hope to contribute to enhancement of the quality of life in small business and society as a whole. Originality/value – This paper is among the few reports on how small businesses learn about, utilize, and benefit from the web pages and social media sites.

Every bank needs to strengthen their society's acceptance to exist and grow in the long term. As a country with the largest Muslim population, Islamic banks’ market share in Indonesia is still relatively small. These banks should obtain legitimacy from stakeholders for business continuity and growth. To ensure legitimacy, the impact of all of the corporation's activities on society's welfare is a significant concern. Several studies showed that CSR activities are needed to increase legitimacy. However, previous studies regarding CSR and legitimacy mostly used the positive paradigm, and mostly conducted in Western societies. Since the discussion on this matter in Islamic banking in Indonesia is not yet found, this study aims to understand how Islamic banks in Indonesia implement CSR to gain legitimacy using an Islamic perspective. This research is based on the ontology that reality is constructed by business actors who implement CSR programs. A qualitative case study is used by interviewing practitioners who are in charge of CSR programs in the two largest Islamic banks in Indonesia and supported by banks’ reports. This study reveals how legitimacy is achieved in the context of an Indonesian Islamic bank.

This paper elucidates a map of Indonesian Muslim communities around Sydney in order to observe the possibility to promote a moderate and tolerance of Indonesian Islam worldwide. Indonesian Muslims who live in Australia are relatively small if we consider that we are the closer neighbor of Australia and have the biggest Muslim populations in the world. Most Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney are in a form of kelompok pengajian (Islamic study group), which is commonly based on ethnicity, regionalism (province and regency), and religious affiliation with Indonesian Islamic groups. The main problems of Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney are an ambiguous identity, laziness integration, and dream to home country. Most Indonesian Muslim diaspora in Sydney only consider Australia as the land for making money. Therefore, their inclusion to Australian community is just being Indonesian Muslim in Australia and it seems hard for them to be Australian Muslim, especially in the case of those who already changed to be Australian citizens. This kind of diaspora attitude differs from Muslims Diasporas from the Middle East and South Asia countries who are mostly ready to be fully Australian Muslim.Naturally, most Indonesian Muslim communities put their emphasis to develop their community based on social needs and try to avoid political idea of Islamism. In this case, the Indonesian government, through the Indonesian Consulate in Sydney, has great resources to promote moderate and tolerant views of Indonesian Islam to other Muslim communities, as well as to Western media. In optimizing resources of Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney to envoy Indonesian cultures and policies, it is necessary for Indonesian government to have a person with integrated knowledge on Islamic Studies who are working officially under the Indonesian consulate in Sydney. It is based on the fact that most Indonesian Muslim communities needs a patron from the government to manage and soften some differences among them, especially related to problems of identities, as well as to link them with the wider Australian communities.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the western developed notion of responsible leadership (RL) from a Singapore context. Design/methodology/approach Following the qualitative research tradition, face-to-face interviews with 20 influential Singaporean leaders were developed into case studies. Grounded theory methodology was applied to identify similarities and differences within and across cases. Findings The findings reveal that the interviewed Singaporean leaders projected traits and values consistent with western definitions of responsible and effective leadership. Findings also suggest that contextual factors such as national culture and the ethos of the nation as well as leaders’ relational intelligence influence RL. These factors also help responsible leaders to better manage the tension between responsible and effective leadership. Research limitations/implications The small and geographically bound sample size makes it difficult to generalise the findings of this study. As in other ethics studies, interviewees’ desire to present a socially desirable image of themselves could be high in this study. Finally, the methods and analytical techniques applied may be biased and be influenced by the purposive selection of the participants. Practical implications Singaporean business leaders may need to consider the importance of retaining and developing the national culture and ethos of the nation, since these are the factors that have been identified in this study as key to influencing RL. Originality/value This study identifies the factors that influence RL from a Singapore context. It extends the understanding of the mostly western-based multi-level theory of RL.

Abstract:This essay aims to deepen our comprehension of the economic ethics of different peoples in Asia, as well as realizing a degree of cultural relativism, in order to enhance amicable economic associations. It counterbalances the conventionally strong West-oriented views which regard exotic features of non-Western economies as backward and illogical elements that disturb smooth and orthodox development and, hence, should be eradicated. The author, first, recalls a number of facts which depict the eruptive economic transformation in Asia. He, then, criticizes the imposition of Western-style development and exploitation without excluding Japan’s colonialism in Taiwan and Korea, and pleads for multiple forms of development and modernity. Economic transactions should be analysed in relation to sociocultural aspects, and, therefore, communities and ethics groups play a substantive role between the public and private sectors, the market, and individuals. For instance, small farmers in Southeast Asia, struggling with the weakness of tenant farmers and pressures of the market mechanism, developed ingenious and participatory forms of survival, increasingly supported by non-governmental organizations. Case studies from Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines give a vivid picture of these activities. Because the developing economies are composed of market and non-market sectors, reasonable attention should be given to the ethics beyond market principles, with particular emphasis on community as foundation.

PurposeTo provide the outcome of information system (IS) related practice survey designed to identify current trends in Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs).Design/methodology/approachThis research is exploratory in nature, a survey methodology is used for study and the focus of study is cross‐sectional. Two companies have been selected for detailed case studies. The objective of the study was to become more familiar through survey and information collected to one point in time. The methodology was based on a questionnaire survey and personal interviews.FindingsThe outcomes, based on a survey of 210 SMEs, reveal that though SMEs understand and acknowledge the importance of the IS in day‐to‐day operations management in the present dynamic and heterogeneous business environment but these are yet to implement, operate and exploit it fully in a formal and professional manner so as to enable them to derive maximum business gains out of it. SMEs are not found equipped adequately with the IS resources to suit their needs.Research limitations/implicationsThe target of the study is the SMEs operational in the western part of India and hence it has the limitation in terms of the scope. However, the overall results are encouraging with 70 percent response rare in the survey and underline the need for more such studies. The results have implications for all managers responsible for IS, any SME in the era of globalization.Originality/valueThe paper presents IS‐related practices going on in Indian SMEs. Findings reported in the paper provide SMEs operators the utility of IS in day‐to‐day business operations.

Purpose – This paper aims to understand the role resources-for-infrastructure (R4I) swaps play in internationalisation strategies, thereby contributing to a modern theory of the multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on experiences of rising power firms. Since 2004, the Chinese Government; state-owned policy banks; and oil, mining and construction corporations have used a relatively unique form of internationalisation through complex, large-scale R4I swaps in Africa. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a resource bundling perspective and political economy lens to analyse complex entry decisions and success, as well as the failure of R4I swaps. The paper is based on a comparative analysis of published case studies of R4I swaps in seven African countries complemented by field research by the first author. Findings – The findings show that, under very specific circumstances, R4I swaps can be considered as a successful internationalisation strategy. R4I swaps enable Chinese MNEs to build and maintain relationships with non-market elites that control access to natural resources and infrastructure contracts. Research limitations/implications – The sample of cases, although representing all relevant R4I-swaps, is too small to come for more quantitative conclusions on success/failure factors. Practical implications – R4I swaps are a very unlikely model for Western MNEs, as they lack the necessary country-specific competitive advantages and institutional mechanisms. Originality/value – To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of all relevant Chinese R4I swaps in Africa and contains original data from fieldwork in Ghana and D.R. Congo.

ABSTRACTThe introduction of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) into Australia and New Zealand during the 1990s as a means of controlling feral rabbits is an important case study in viral emergence. Both epidemics are exceptional in that the founder viruses share an origin and the timing of their release is known, providing a unique opportunity to compare the evolution of a single virus in distinct naive populations. We examined the evolution and spread of RHDV in Australia and New Zealand through a genome-wide evolutionary analysis, including data from 28 newly sequenced RHDV field isolates. Following the release of the Australian inoculum strain into New Zealand, no subsequent mixing of the populations occurred, with viruses from both countries forming distinct groups. Strikingly, the rate of evolution in the capsid gene was higher in the Australian viruses than in those from New Zealand, most likely due to the presence of transient deleterious mutations in the former. However, estimates of both substitution rates and population dynamics were strongly sample dependent, such that small changes in sample composition had an important impact on evolutionary parameters. Phylogeographic analysis revealed a clear spatial structure in the Australian RHDV strains, with a major division between those viruses from western and eastern states. Importantly, RHDV sequences from the state where the virus was first released, South Australia, had the greatest diversity and were diffuse throughout both geographic lineages, such that this region was likely a source population for the subsequent spread of the virus across the country.IMPORTANCEMost studies of viral emergence lack detailed knowledge about which strains were founders for the outbreak or when these events occurred. Hence, the human-mediated introduction of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) into Australia and New Zealand from known starting stocks provides a unique opportunity to understand viral evolution and emergence. Within Australia, we revealed a major phylogenetic division between viruses sampled from the east and west of the country, with both regions likely seeded by viruses from South Australia. Despite their common origins, marked differences in evolutionary rates were observed between the Australian and New Zealand RHDV, which led to conflicting conclusions about population growth rates. An analysis of mutational patterns suggested that evolutionary rates have been elevated in the Australian viruses, at least in part due to the presence of low-fitness (deleterious) variants that have yet to be selectively purged.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a study that examines an under-researched area, the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in Australian home-based businesses (HBB). Design/methodology/approach – HBB constitute a large part of the economy, yet little is known of how they use ICT to improve their business operations. The study involved a case study comprising interviews with 30 business operators in the Western region of Melbourne, a major Australian city. The findings were analysed using a unique approach to Rogers’ (2003) Diffusion of Innovations, employing the innovation-decision process as a lens for the analysis. Findings – The study findings suggest that ICT application adoption in HBB participants is not uniform, with adoption of applications such as e-mail differing from adoption of newer applications, such as social networking. ICT use needs to be considered according to individual ICT applications and explained in the context of particular HBB. The study contributes to studies of innovation adoption, particularly in relation to the use of ICT applications in HBB. Research limitations/implications – It should be remembered that this study involved interviews with a broad selection of 30 HBB in the Western region of Melbourne, Australia. The results should be considered in the context of hypothesis generation in regards to HBB rather than hypothesis testing that can occur with larger samples. The authors feel that this study would be representative of the practices of ICT adoption in many such groupings of HBB in cities of major Western countries, but hesitate to claim that similar, specific uses of ICT applications would be matched elsewhere. Practical implications – This study has a number of practical implications. The results suggest that researchers should consider adoption of individual ICT applications in HBB. Further, policy makers looking to support the use of ICT by HBB should consider that the HBB in this study had adopted different ICT applications and were at different stages of ICT adoption. This is worth considering when deciding upon policies relating to how to suppzort the HBB sector (such as provision of training support and so forth). Originality/value – The paper introduces a unique means to assess the adoption of ICT applications by examining their level of penetration, level of maturity and usefulness to HBB.

Abstract ContextDetermining the most efficient detection method for a target species is key for successful wildlife monitoring and management. Driven transects and sign surveys are commonly used to monitor populations of the endangered numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus). Camera trapping is being explored as a new method. These methods were unevaluated for efficacy and cost for numbat detection. AimsTo compare efficacy and costing of driven transects, sign surveys and camera trapping for detecting numbats in the Upper Warren region, Western Australia. MethodsSeven repeat sign surveys and driven transects, as well as 4 months of camera trapping, were conducted concurrently at 50 sites along three transects. Numbat detection rates and costing of the three techniques were compared, and detection probabilities were compared between sign surveys and camera trapping. Key resultsNumbat signs were detected during 88 surveys at 39 sites, exceeding camera trapping (26 detections at 13 sites) and driven transects (seven detections near five sites). The estimated probability for detecting a numbat or a sign thereof (at a site where numbats were present) ranged from 0.21 to 0.35 for a sign survey, and 0.02 to 0.06 for 7 days of camera trapping. Total survey costs were lowest for driven transects, followed by camera trapping and sign surveys. When expressed as cost per numbat detection, sign surveys were cheapest. ConclusionsComparative studies of survey methods are essential for optimal, cost-effective wildlife monitoring. Sign surveys were more successful and cost effective than camera trapping or driven transects for detecting numbats in the Upper Warren region. Together with occupancy modelling, sign surveys are appropriate to investigate changes in occupancy rates over time, which could serve as a metric for long-term numbat monitoring. ImplicationsThere is no ‘best’ method for wildlife surveys. Case-specific comparison of animal detection methods is recommended to ensure optimal methods. For the numbat population in the Upper Warren region, further studies are needed to improve numbat detection rates from camera trapping, and to test sign surveys in autumn (March to May), when surviving juvenile numbats have established their own territory and assumptions regarding population closure are less likely to be violated.

Purpose An alignment between financial and operational measures is an essential element to capture the lean productivity improvements enabling supply chain sustainability. With the aim of supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in addressing corporate sustainability challenges, this study aims to examine the impact of leanness on supply chain sustainability, and the moderating role of sustainability control systems (SCS) on the relationship between leanness and supply chain sustainability. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on lean manufacturing and the levers of control framework, survey data was collected from 106 manufacturing SMEs in Sri Lanka. Moderated multiple regression analysis was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings The study finds that lean manufacturing practices, such as just-in-time deliveries, quality management, environmental management and employee involvement show a significant positive impact on supply chain sustainability. As proposed, the interactive use of SCS shows a significant, positive moderating impact on the relationship between employee involvement and social supply chain sustainability. The diagnostic use of SCS negatively moderates the relationships between just-in-time deliveries and economic supply chain sustainability, and environmental management and economic supply chain sustainability. However, both interactive and diagnostic uses of SCS do not show any significant moderating impact between lean manufacturing and environmental supply chain sustainability. Research limitations/implications The following limitations should be taken into account in interpreting the results and implications of this study. Firstly, the study refers to supply chain sustainability as environmental, social and economic sustainability. As these concepts represent broader perspectives of sustainability, and no consensus on how to measure has yet been agreed, future studies may focus on other variables that might capture different perspectives of supply chain sustainability. Secondy, future researchers may further extend the role of SCS (including all four control systems – belief, boundary, interactive and diagnostic) in examining the impact of leanness on supply chain sustainability. Thirdly, this study has considered a sample of manufacturing SMEs in the Western province in Sri Lanka. The results should be carefully generalised to other manufacturing organisations in Sri Lanka and beyond. Finally, future studies may also investigate the impact of leanness on supply chain sustainability by using alternative methodologies, such as multiple case studies. Originality/value SMEs are more likely to focus on diagnostic control systems with the aim of promoting economic supply chain sustainability. However, the findings reveal that manufacturing SMEs in the developing country context lack strong SCS to enable supply chain sustainability.

The role of towns and small business is poorly understood, yet towns are vital for the long-term viability of communities in rural and remote Australia. This case study in the central western region of Queensland (CWQ) examines the impacts of drought on rural towns and how to build a resilient regional community and alleviate hardship. Evidence was collected during drought from town businesses through surveys, interviews and a public meeting in 2017. Towns in CWQ are especially exposed to the risks of drought, as approximately half of the businesses are directly linked to agriculture. Townspeople are major contributors to social cohesion and resilience in rural and regional communities, which are often service and maintenance centres of nationally important infrastructure such as roads for inter-state freight transport and tourism. Drought and declining grazier incomes have led to reduced spending in towns. Populations have dropped sharply, as itinerant agricultural workers leave the region. The complex economic and social flow-on impacts of drought have resulted in lower socioeconomic resilience. The majority of community members interviewed expressed a desire to build secure livelihoods, which echoes other research where existing and new rangelands livelihoods are seen as contributing to the success of the nation, a common global desire. Local organisations in CWQ display innovative business and community strategies. Future actions need to support and build on these initiatives. A framework with the acronym D.U.S.T. has been developed, with associated actions aimed at building resilience in these communities. D.U.S.T. is appropriate for this often-dusty region, and stands for: D. Decide to act; U. Understand the context; S. Support and develop local capacities and institutions; and T. Transform regional governance. The key for decision-makers is to work with local people who understand the contextual complexity and local needs. Actions need to be based on principles of adaptability, equity and inclusiveness, and working with the whole of the community. Building on existing collaborations and innovations as well as transforming governance and secure funding arrangements are needed. Lessons from the communities in CWQ may help other rural and remote regions build resilience to cope with the unpredictable financial, social and environmental future.

Abstract Objective – To discover public library clients’ needs and preferences for modes of training on the use of the Internet and the libraries’ online resources and to apply these findings to improve training offered by public library staff. Design – Multiple exploratory case study. Setting – Two public libraries in New South Wales, Australia: a regional library (Mudgee Branch of the Mid-Western Regional Council Library Service) and a metropolitan library (Marrickville Central Library). Subjects – A total of 24 public library clients. The participants were split evenly between the two libraries, with 12 from the Mudgee Branch and 12 from the Marrickville Central. The respondents were further subdivided into two groups based on age (35 to 44 years old and 65 or older) and evenly distributed by sex within the groups. Methods – This study used naturalistic inquiry to frame the multiple exploratory case study of two public libraries. Ruthven used maximum variation sampling to guide the selection of participants. Library staff helped the researcher to identify possible participants at Marrickville, while the researcher advertised for participants at Mudgee Library and at an Internet/database course taught at the Mudgee Business Enterprise Centre. She used snowball sampling to find additional participants at both sites. Ruthven conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants, with questions covering their preferences, recommendations, and needs for online resource training. The data from the interviews and search logs were analyzed using inductive data analysis. Main Results – Participants preferred small group, face-to-face, formalized instruction for initial training on online resources. For further training, participants preferred individualized assistance and immediate support instead of formal classes. They noted a lack of training opportunities and a lack of help from library staff as sources of frustration when trying to learn to use online resources at the public libraries. Conclusion – Public library staff should offer formalized classes for those beginning to learn about using online resources, and focus on ad hoc, individualized assistance for more advanced learners. Since offering this type of instructional program is dependent on staff knowledge and staff availability, library staff members need to be trained in the use of online resources and classroom presentation skills.

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to investigate the socioeconomic impact on perceived household food security in the North Luwu District of South Sulawesi Province in the eastern part of Indonesia. In Indonesia, 87 million people are presently vulnerable to food insecurity. Thus, the United Nations Development Programme’s primary millennium development goal for Indonesia is to halve the number of people who suffer from hunger by 2015. It is clear that food security at the household level is crucial to achieving this target. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 371 household heads were interviewed. The households’ perceptions of their food security status were captured by asking the household head the following question: “How do you perceive your household’s food security status during the last month”? Respondents could select from the following options: insecure, somewhat insecure, somewhat secure, secure and highly secure. Here, the household head’s answer is regarded as the household’s subjective food security status (SFSS). We then applied descriptive analysis and an ordered logit model to determine the socioeconomic factors that influence SFSS. Findings – As expected, in both analyses, household income and formal level of education have a strong relationship to SFSS. However, this study finds that food nutrition knowledge also shows a significant role in enhancing the probability that household SFSS will be in a better food security category. This could be a breakthrough in improving household food security status given the lack of formal education. Practical implications – Neighborhood resource-based food preparation counseling programs are essential. Existing food programs for Indonesian households should be reoriented and incorporated into the non-formal educational curriculum and should be carried out at the family level or in small groups to ensure that the message of the program is delivered effectively. In the short term, for non-farm households, the government should provide targeted households with crash programs such as revolving funds for household-level business activities. For farm households, ensuring that farming infrastructures, facilities and technologies are adequate and affordable is crucial to sustaining their production process. Originality/value – This is the first study to investigate the perceptions of household heads on their food security status in Indonesia. Most prior studies on household food security in Indonesia were conducted in response to Indonesia’s 1997 economic crisis and focused predominantly on Java, in the western part of Indonesia; there is little existing research on the eastern part of Indonesia. Moreover, this study is the first to emphasize the significant role of food nutrition knowledge in increasing the probability of household heads’ perceptions on their food security status being in a better category.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore four Korean teacher learners’ academic experiences in an Australian Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) master’s programme. By investigating the ways they encounter the overseas teacher education programme and how to interact with different meanings, this study reveals Korean teacher learners’ multiple selves and several meaning systems embedded in them. The understandings from the case provide some implications for curriculum internationalisation in higher education as well as TESOL. Design/methodology/approach Interviews, a focus group discussion and metaphors were used as data, and from these narratives, the participants’ experience was categorised into the programme’s aspects of the methods, contents and applicability, materials and usefulness, assessment criteria and feedback and communication and support. Each interview was undertaken in a library for around one and a half hours. At the end of the interviews, participants were required to produce a metaphor of desirable teacher/lecturer roles. For triangulation, a focus group discussion was conducted for approximately two hours, in which three participants could represent social worlds, evaluate them and establish themselves as members of particular groups. All the questions were semi-structured and about teaching and learning experiences in Korea and Australia and ideas of lecturers’ roles, practices and desirable pedagogy. Findings From the analysis of the participants’ experiences in these, it was revealed that their identity was tangled with that of the (English) teacher, consumer, (international) student and non-native speaker. The meaning systems of these identities were based on the mixture of the Korean traditional and Western or modern educational values: positive attitude towards communicative language teaching and its contexutalisation, pursuit of practical knowledge and pragmatic ideas, favour for discussions and getting confirmation from authorities and being positioned in the weak and using different communication rules, etc. Research limitations/implications From the insights from this case, the lecturers and programme coordinators in intercultural TESOL courses will gain some ideas for a curriculum responsive to international needs. While it cannot be denied that the small scale of the study has limitations for generalisation, this research will be one of the required literatures which examines East Asians or Koreans in Western academic institutions, given that this qualitative study complements the findings of the quantitative studies by specifically disclosing the ways Korean teacher learners’ identity and the meaning systems of desirable pedagogies. Practical implications For the curriculum internationalisation in TESOL and several higher education (HE) courses, the lecturers’ and the institutions’ awareness of cultural differences and reducing stereotyping, language support and being explicit about new rules in the new game and communication for support and respectful and professional encounters are essential, alongside the learners’ voluntary endeavour for academic adaptation in their overseas learning. Social implications The effort to understand each other in education is a good start for intercultural communication, that is, curriculum internationalisation in TESOL as well as higher education. Originality/value Different from other studies in similar areas, this study discloses the multiple selves/identities and meaning systems of the teacher learners in TESOL, by maximising the benefits of a qualitative study. The understandings from this approach help the researcher draw out practical implications for curriculum internationalisation in TESOL and HE.

The article substantiates the need to create tourist information centers in Ukraine as one of the important tools of information support for the development of modern tourism and the promotion of a national tourism product. The success of the tourism industry in Ukraine in the context of the formation of a global information space is largely determined by the effectiveness of information support for the tourism sector. It is noted that an important task of the policy of local authorities in tourism management is to improve the information support of this process, since without advertising and information that attracts consumers of certain services, the development of tourist and recreational activities is impossible. The activity of the TIC is extremely important for destinations with a significant share of independent tourists, because, in this case, they are the main centers for the provision of information services. The essence of the concept of “tourist information center” is revealed and its main tasks are defined. It was noted that the tourist information center is an important tool of the tourist infrastructure, with the help of which tourists and other tourism entities have the opportunity to receive complete tourist information and advisory services on tourism activities in the area and beyond. The TIC can provide information support to the system of state regulation and tourism management in the region, since it is necessary to constantly update the regulatory and informational and analytical framework that provides effective management of the development of tourism and resorts. The following goals of creating tourist information centers in Ukraine are proposed: promoting the development of domestic tourism; providing information to local and foreign tourists and tourist organizations; promoting cooperation between tourism organizations of the city; conducting trainings and seminars for specialists in the field of tourism; development of tourist opportunities of the city; attracting more tourists to the area; improving the competitive advantages of the area by improving the tourism infrastructure; replenishment of the local budget due to taxation of tourism business entities; rational use of tourist and recreational resources of the area; attracting investment in the tourism business; creating a positive international image and popularizing tourist areas. The world experience of organizational and economic aspects of the activity of tourist information centers is investigated. In the developed tourist countries of the world, an extensive modern network of tourist infrastructure institutions, which includes information centers, is successfully operating. Such establishments allow tourists to receive the necessary tourist information and advisory services on tourist destinations. In the USA, each state has its own tourist information centers. The “Hospitality Center” is a recreation area, including a center for visitors, they are funded by local taxes included in each bed. In South America, the most active tourist information centers operate in Peru. Free centers provide tourist information and assistance for domestic and foreign tourists. Information includes monuments and recommended itineraries. In Australia, most visitor centers are run by local or state authorities, and in some cases by the Tourism Operators Association on behalf of the government. These information centers provide services such as housing selection and booking tours (automobile, air, bus, rail). They are the first link in acquaintance of a visitor with a city or region. The practice of the work of tourist information centers in Ukraine is considered and a list of them is compiled. It is noted that today tourist information centers have been created in most regions of Ukraine and in small cities of the Western region of Ukraine. Keywords tourist information center, world experience, domestic practice, creation goals, objectives, activity results.

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

Purpose In mature industries, downward vertical (line) extension has become an increasingly popular strategy, particularly for automobile manufacturers aiming at expanding their consumer bases and/or avoiding competition in higher market segment. This paper aims to examine how Mercedes-Benz (MB) practiced a downward vertical line extension within the same product category. When commercialized as a product line innovation, the MB A-Class was the first and most symbolic move made by a premium brand in the automobile industry. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates the microfoundations of a vertical downward extension strategy. To do so, the authors adopt a narrative style to analyze the story of the MB A-Class from its inception to its commercialization. Secondary data sources, such as company websites, annual reports, internal documents, books, public relations and press releases, were used. Qualitative as well as quantitative performance outcomes were assessed using market and product sales in Western Europe (1997-2016) and the results of an MB brand image survey conducted in 1998 following the accident faced by the A-Class. Findings The case illustrates that contrary to initial assumptions, lower-quality extensions may be relevant for prestige brands under certain conditions and identifies four strategy components that may drive a successful downward stretch: combine organizational, product, process and marketing innovation with the support of dynamic capabilities; manage paradoxes/contradictions in terms of product development; target the high-end of a lower consumer segment; and adopt a “brand humility talk scheme”. Research limitations/implications Existing studies primarily focus on consumers’ evaluations of vertical step-down extensions. Rare are the articles that adopt the company’s perspective. Moreover, additional research is needed to assess the short- and long-term impacts of vertical downward extension on performance outcomes. Practical implications The case of the MB A-Class encourages top executives to consider the trade-offs inherent to a down-market strategic move: keeping the (premium) brand’s standards high within a reduced cost/price envelope while learning the codes of the new/bottom of the market. In addition, the A-Class may serve as a fundamental school case for marketing managers and creative advertising agencies on what should and should not be done, whether at the product or at the advertising level. Originality/value This paper demonstrates that a premium brand that practiced a vertical downward line extension can expand its sales in a mass market, by targeting a small but growing segment with a high willingness to pay for more expensive products. This adds to the contention that it is not the downscale extension product price per se that negatively affects the parent brand but rather where it stands in the hierarchy of the market segment considered and the ability of the premium brand to integrate the downscale extension to its own history (i.e. combining its original values with tangible product benefits while backing the cause of the new market). Finally, the story of the A-Class strongly suggests that any company needs to upgrade its capabilities as part of the learning process of a new market to convert a business opportunity into a market success.

Education in Oceania continues to reflect the embedded implicit and explicit colonial practices and processes from the past. This paper conceptualises a cultural approach to education and leadership appropriate and relevant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As elementary school leaders, we highlight Kanne Lobal, a traditional Marshallese navigation practice based on indigenous language, values and practices. We conceptualise and develop Kanne Lobal in this paper as a framework for understanding the usefulness of our indigenous knowledge in leadership and educational practices within formal education. Through bwebwenato, a method of talk story, our key learnings and reflexivities were captured. We argue that realising the value of Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices for school leaders requires purposeful training of the ways in which our knowledge can be made useful in our professional educational responsibilities. Drawing from our Marshallese knowledge is an intentional effort to inspire, empower and express what education and leadership partnership means for Marshallese people, as articulated by Marshallese themselves. Introduction As noted in the call for papers within the Waikato Journal of Education (WJE) for this special issue, bodies of knowledge and histories in Oceania have long sustained generations across geographic boundaries to ensure cultural survival. For Marshallese people, we cannot really know ourselves “until we know how we came to be where we are today” (Walsh, Heine, Bigler & Stege, 2012). Jitdam Kapeel is a popular Marshallese concept and ideal associated with inquiring into relationships within the family and community. In a similar way, the practice of relating is about connecting the present and future to the past. Education and leadership partnerships are linked and we look back to the past, our history, to make sense and feel inspired to transform practices that will benefit our people. In this paper and in light of our next generation, we reconnect with our navigation stories to inspire and empower education and leadership. Kanne lobal is part of our navigation stories, a conceptual framework centred on cultural practices, values, and concepts that embrace collective partnerships. Our link to this talanoa vā with others in the special issue is to attempt to make sense of connections given the global COVID-19 context by providing a Marshallese approach to address the physical and relational “distance” between education and leadership partnerships in Oceania. Like the majority of developing small island nations in Oceania, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has had its share of educational challenges through colonial legacies of the past which continues to drive education systems in the region (Heine, 2002). The historical administration and education in the RMI is one of colonisation. Successive administrations by the Spanish, German, Japanese, and now the US, has resulted in education and learning that privileges western knowledge and forms of learning. This paper foregrounds understandings of education and learning as told by the voices of elementary school leaders from the RMI. The move to re-think education and leadership from Marshallese perspectives is an act of shifting the focus of bwebwenato or conversations that centres on Marshallese language and worldviews. The concept of jelalokjen was conceptualised as traditional education framed mainly within the community context. In the past, jelalokjen was practiced and transmitted to the younger generation for cultural continuity. During the arrival of colonial administrations into the RMI, jelalokjen was likened to the western notions of education and schooling (Kupferman, 2004). Today, the primary function of jelalokjen, as traditional and formal education, it is for “survival in a hostile [and challenging] environment” (Kupferman, 2004, p. 43). Because western approaches to learning in the RMI have not always resulted in positive outcomes for those engaged within the education system, as school leaders who value our cultural knowledge and practices, and aspire to maintain our language with the next generation, we turn to Kanne Lobal, a practice embedded in our navigation stories, collective aspirations, and leadership. The significance in the development of Kanne Lobal, as an appropriate framework for education and leadership, resulted in us coming together and working together. Not only were we able to share our leadership concerns, however, the engagement strengthened our connections with each other as school leaders, our communities, and the Public Schooling System (PSS). Prior to that, many of us were in competition for resources. Educational Leadership: IQBE and GCSL Leadership is a valued practice in the RMI. Before the IQBE programme started in 2018, the majority of the school leaders on the main island of Majuro had not engaged in collaborative partnerships with each other before. Our main educational purpose was to achieve accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), an accreditation commission for schools in the United States. The WASC accreditation dictated our work and relationships and many school leaders on Majuro felt the pressure of competition against each other. We, the authors in this paper, share our collective bwebwenato, highlighting our school leadership experiences and how we gained strength from our own ancestral knowledge to empower “us”, to collaborate with each other, our teachers, communities, as well as with PSS; a collaborative partnership we had not realised in the past. The paucity of literature that captures Kajin Majol (Marshallese language) and education in general in the RMI is what we intend to fill by sharing our reflections and experiences. To move our educational practices forward we highlight Kanne Lobal, a cultural approach that focuses on our strengths, collective social responsibilities and wellbeing. For a long time, there was no formal training in place for elementary school leaders. School principals and vice principals were appointed primarily on their academic merit through having an undergraduate qualification. As part of the first cohort of fifteen school leaders, we engaged in the professional training programme, the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL), refitted to our context after its initial development in the Solomon Islands. GCSL was coordinated by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP). GCSL was seen as a relevant and appropriate training programme for school leaders in the RMI as part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded programme which aimed at “Improving Quality Basic Education” (IQBE) in parts of the northern Pacific. GCSL was managed on Majuro, RMI’s main island, by the director at the time Dr Irene Taafaki, coordinator Yolanda McKay, and administrators at the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) RMI campus. Through the provision of GCSL, as school leaders we were encouraged to re-think and draw-from our own cultural repository and connect to our ancestral knowledge that have always provided strength for us. This kind of thinking and practice was encouraged by our educational leaders (Heine, 2002). We argue that a culturally-affirming and culturally-contextual framework that reflects the lived experiences of Marshallese people is much needed and enables the disruption of inherent colonial processes left behind by Western and Eastern administrations which have influenced our education system in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Kanne Lobal, an approach utilising a traditional navigation has warranted its need to provide solutions for today’s educational challenges for us in the RMI. Education in the Pacific Education in the Pacific cannot be understood without contextualising it in its history and culture. It is the same for us in the RMI (Heine, 2002; Walsh et al., 2012). The RMI is located in the Pacific Ocean and is part of Micronesia. It was named after a British captain, John Marshall in the 1700s. The atolls in the RMI were explored by the Spanish in the 16th century. Germany unsuccessfully attempted to colonize the islands in 1885. Japan took control in 1914, but after several battles during World War II, the US seized the RMI from them. In 1947, the United Nations made the island group, along with the Mariana and Caroline archipelagos, a U.S. trust territory (Walsh et al, 2012). Education in the RMI reflects the colonial administrations of Germany, Japan, and now the US. Before the turn of the century, formal education in the Pacific reflected western values, practices, and standards. Prior to that, education was informal and not binded to formal learning institutions (Thaman, 1997) and oral traditions was used as the medium for transmitting learning about customs and practices living with parents, grandparents, great grandparents. As alluded to by Jiba B. Kabua (2004), any “discussion about education is necessarily a discussion of culture, and any policy on education is also a policy of culture” (p. 181). It is impossible to promote one without the other, and it is not logical to understand one without the other. Re-thinking how education should look like, the pedagogical strategies that are relevant in our classrooms, the ways to engage with our parents and communities - such re-thinking sits within our cultural approaches and frameworks. Our collective attempts to provide a cultural framework that is relevant and appropriate for education in our context, sits within the political endeavour to decolonize. This means that what we are providing will not only be useful, but it can be used as a tool to question and identify whether things in place restrict and prevent our culture or whether they promote and foreground cultural ideas and concepts, a significant discussion of culture linked to education (Kabua, 2004). Donor funded development aid programmes were provided to support the challenges within education systems. Concerned with the persistent low educational outcomes of Pacific students, despite the prevalence of aid programmes in the region, in 2000 Pacific educators and leaders with support from New Zealand Aid (NZ Aid) decided to intervene (Heine, 2002; Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). In April 2001, a group of Pacific educators and leaders across the region were invited to a colloquium funded by the New Zealand Overseas Development Agency held in Suva Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. The main purpose of the colloquium was to enable “Pacific educators to re-think the values, assumptions and beliefs underlying [formal] schooling in Oceania” (Benson, 2002). Leadership, in general, is a valued practice in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Despite education leadership being identified as a significant factor in school improvement (Sanga & Chu, 2009), the limited formal training opportunities of school principals in the region was a persistent concern. As part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded project, the Improve Quality Basic Education (IQBE) intervention was developed and implemented in the RMI in 2017. Mentoring is a process associated with the continuity and sustainability of leadership knowledge and practices (Sanga & Chu, 2009). It is a key aspect of building capacity and capabilities within human resources in education (ibid). Indigenous knowledges and education research According to Hilda Heine, the relationship between education and leadership is about understanding Marshallese history and culture (cited in Walsh et al., 2012). It is about sharing indigenous knowledge and histories that “details for future generations a story of survival and resilience and the pride we possess as a people” (Heine, cited in Walsh et al., 2012, p. v). This paper is fuelled by postcolonial aspirations yet is grounded in Pacific indigenous research. This means that our intentions are driven by postcolonial pursuits and discourses linked to challenging the colonial systems and schooling in the Pacific region that privileges western knowledge and learning and marginalises the education practices and processes of local people (Thiong’o, 1986). A point of difference and orientation from postcolonialism is a desire to foreground indigenous Pacific language, specifically Majin Majol, through Marshallese concepts. Our collective bwebwenato and conversation honours and values kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness) (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Pacific leaders developed the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific People (RPEIPP) in 2002 to take control of the ways in which education research was conducted by donor funded organisations (Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). Our former president, Dr Hilda Heine was part of the group of leaders who sought to counter the ways in which our educational and leadership stories were controlled and told by non-Marshallese (Heine, 2002). As a former minister of education in the RMI, Hilda Heine continues to inspire and encourage the next generation of educators, school leaders, and researchers to re-think and de-construct the way learning and education is conceptualised for Marshallese people. The conceptualisation of Kanne Lobal acknowledges its origin, grounded in Marshallese navigation knowledge and practice. Our decision to unpack and deconstruct Kanne Lobal within the context of formal education and leadership responds to the need to not only draw from indigenous Marshallese ideas and practice but to consider that the next generation will continue to be educated using western processes and initiatives particularly from the US where we get a lot of our funding from. According to indigenous researchers Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu (2010), doing research that considers “culturally appropriate processes to engage with indigenous groups and individuals is particularly pertinent in today’s research environment” (p. 37). Pacific indigenous educators and researchers have turned to their own ancestral knowledge and practices for inspiration and empowerment. Within western research contexts, the often stringent ideals and processes are not always encouraging of indigenous methods and practices. However, many were able to ground and articulate their use of indigenous methods as being relevant and appropriate to capturing the realities of their communities (Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014; Thaman, 1997). At the same time, utilising Pacific indigenous methods and approaches enabled research engagement with their communities that honoured and respected them and their communities. For example, Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian researchers used the talanoa method as a way to capture the stories, lived realities, and worldviews of their communities within education in the diaspora (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014; Vaioleti, 2005). Tok stori was used by Solomon Islander educators and school leaders to highlight the unique circles of conversational practice and storytelling that leads to more positive engagement with their community members, capturing rich and meaningful narratives as a result (Sanga & Houma, 2004). The Indigenous Aborigine in Australia utilise yarning as a “relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010, p. 38). Despite the diverse forms of discussions and storytelling by indigenous peoples, of significance are the cultural protocols, ethics, and language for conducting and guiding the engagement (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014). Through the ethics, values, protocols, and language, these are what makes indigenous methods or frameworks unique compared to western methods like in-depth interviews or semi-structured interviews. This is why it is important for us as Marshallese educators to frame, ground, and articulate how our own methods and frameworks of learning could be realised in western education (Heine, 2002; Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). In this paper, we utilise bwebwenato as an appropriate method linked to “talk story”, capturing our collective stories and experiences during GCSL and how we sought to build partnerships and collaboration with each other, our communities, and the PSS. Bwebwenato and drawing from Kajin Majel Legends and stories that reflect Marshallese society and its cultural values have survived through our oral traditions. The practice of weaving also holds knowledge about our “valuable and earliest sources of knowledge” (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019, p. 2). The skilful navigation of Marshallese wayfarers on the walap (large canoes) in the ocean is testament of their leadership and the value they place on ensuring the survival and continuity of Marshallese people (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019; Walsh et al., 2012). During her graduate study in 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner conceptualised bwebwenato as being the most “well-known form of Marshallese orality” (p. 38). The Marshallese-English dictionary defined bwebwenato as talk, conversation, story, history, article, episode, lore, myth, or tale (cited in Jetnil Kijiner, 2014). Three years later in 2017, bwebwenato was utilised in a doctoral project by Natalie Nimmer as a research method to gather “talk stories” about the experiences of 10 Marshallese experts in knowledge and skills ranging from sewing to linguistics, canoe-making and business. Our collective bwebwenato in this paper centres on Marshallese ideas and language. The philosophy of Marshallese knowledge is rooted in our “Kajin Majel”, or Marshallese language and is shared and transmitted through our oral traditions. For instance, through our historical stories and myths. Marshallese philosophy, that is, the knowledge systems inherent in our beliefs, values, customs, and practices are shared. They are inherently relational, meaning that knowledge systems and philosophies within our world are connected, in mind, body, and spirit (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Nimmer, 2017). Although some Marshallese believe that our knowledge is disappearing as more and more elders pass away, it is therefore important work together, and learn from each other about the knowledges shared not only by the living but through their lamentations and stories of those who are no longer with us (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). As a Marshallese practice, weaving has been passed-down from generation to generation. Although the art of weaving is no longer as common as it used to be, the artefacts such as the “jaki-ed” (clothing mats) continue to embody significant Marshallese values and traditions. For our weavers, the jouj (check spelling) is the centre of the mat and it is where the weaving starts. When the jouj is correct and weaved well, the remainder and every other part of the mat will be right. The jouj is symbolic of the “heart” and if the heart is prepared well, trained well, then life or all other parts of the body will be well (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). In that light, we have applied the same to this paper. Conceptualising and drawing from cultural practices that are close and dear to our hearts embodies a significant ontological attempt to prioritize our own knowledge and language, a sense of endearment to who we are and what we believe education to be like for us and the next generation. The application of the phrase “Majolizing '' was used by the Ministry of Education when Hilda Heine was minister, to weave cultural ideas and language into the way that teachers understand the curriculum, develop lesson plans and execute them in the classroom. Despite this, there were still concerns with the embedded colonized practices where teachers defaulted to eurocentric methods of doing things, like the strategies provided in the textbooks given to us. In some ways, our education was slow to adjust to the “Majolizing '' intention by our former minister. In this paper, we provide Kanne Lobal as a way to contribute to the “Majolizing intention” and perhaps speed up yet still be collectively responsible to all involved in education. Kajin Wa and Kanne Lobal “Wa” is the Marshallese concept for canoe. Kajin wa, as in canoe language, has a lot of symbolic meaning linked to deeply-held Marshallese values and practices. The canoe was the foundational practice that supported the livelihood of harsh atoll island living which reflects the Marshallese social world. The experts of Kajin wa often refer to “wa” as being the vessel of life, a means and source of sustaining life (Kelen, 2009, cited in Miller, 2010). “Jouj” means kindness and is the lower part of the main hull of the canoe. It is often referred to by some canoe builders in the RMI as the heart of the canoe and is linked to love. The jouj is one of the first parts of the canoe that is built and is “used to do all other measurements, and then the rest of the canoe is built on top of it” (Miller, 2010, p. 67). The significance of the jouj is that when the canoe is in the water, the jouj is the part of the hull that is underwater and ensures that all the cargo and passengers are safe. For Marshallese, jouj or kindness is what living is about and is associated with selflessly carrying the responsibility of keeping the family and community safe. The parts of the canoe reflect Marshallese culture, legend, family, lineage, and kinship. They embody social responsibilities that guide, direct, and sustain Marshallese families’ wellbeing, from atoll to atoll. For example, the rojak (boom), rojak maan (upper boom), rojak kōrā (lower boom), and they support the edges of the ujelā/ujele (sail) (see figure 1). The literal meaning of rojak maan is male boom and rojak kōrā means female boom which together strengthens the sail and ensures the canoe propels forward in a strong yet safe way. Figuratively, the rojak maan and rojak kōrā symbolise the mother and father relationship which when strong, through the jouj (kindness and love), it can strengthen families and sustain them into the future. Figure 1. Parts of the canoe Source: https://www.canoesmarshallislands.com/2014/09/names-of-canoe-parts/ From a socio-cultural, communal, and leadership view, the canoe (wa) provides understanding of the relationships required to inspire and sustain Marshallese peoples’ education and learning. We draw from Kajin wa because they provide cultural ideas and practices that enable understanding of education and leadership necessary for sustaining Marshallese people and realities in Oceania. When building a canoe, the women are tasked with the weaving of the ujelā/ujele (sail) and to ensure that it is strong enough to withstand long journeys and the fierce winds and waters of the ocean. The Kanne Lobal relates to the front part of the ujelā/ujele (sail) where the rojak maan and rojak kōrā meet and connect (see the red lines in figure 1). Kanne Lobal is linked to the strategic use of the ujelā/ujele by navigators, when there is no wind north wind to propel them forward, to find ways to capture the winds so that their journey can continue. As a proverbial saying, Kanne Lobal is used to ignite thinking and inspire and transform practice particularly when the journey is rough and tough. In this paper we draw from Kanne Lobal to ignite, inspire, and transform our educational and leadership practices, a move to explore what has always been meaningful to Marshallese people when we are faced with challenges. The Kanne Lobal utilises our language, and cultural practices and values by sourcing from the concepts of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). A key Marshallese proverb, “Enra bwe jen lale rara”, is the cultural practice where families enact compassion through the sharing of food in all occurrences. The term “enra” is a small basket weaved from the coconut leaves, and often used by Marshallese as a plate to share and distribute food amongst each other. Bwe-jen-lale-rara is about noticing and providing for the needs of others, and “enra” the basket will help support and provide for all that are in need. “Enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara” is symbolic of cultural exchange and reciprocity and the cultural values associated with building and maintaining relationships, and constantly honouring each other. As a Marshallese practice, in this article we share our understanding and knowledge about the challenges as well as possible solutions for education concerns in our nation. In addition, we highlight another proverb, “wa kuk wa jimor”, which relates to having one canoe, and despite its capacity to feed and provide for the individual, but within the canoe all people can benefit from what it can provide. In the same way, we provide in this paper a cultural framework that will enable all educators to benefit from. It is a framework that is far-reaching and relevant to the lived realities of Marshallese people today. Kumit relates to people united to build strength, all co-operating and working together, living in peace, harmony, and good health. Kanne Lobal: conceptual framework for education and leadership An education framework is a conceptual structure that can be used to capture ideas and thinking related to aspects of learning. Kanne Lobal is conceptualised and framed in this paper as an educational framework. Kanne Lobal highlights the significance of education as a collective partnership whereby leadership is an important aspect. Kanne Lobal draws-from indigenous Marshallese concepts like kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness, heart). The role of a leader, including an education leader, is to prioritise collective learning and partnerships that benefits Marshallese people and the continuity and survival of the next generation (Heine, 2002; Thaman, 1995). As described by Ejnar Aerōk, an expert canoe builder in the RMI, he stated: “jerbal ippān doon bwe en maron maan wa e” (cited in Miller, 2010, p. 69). His description emphasises the significance of partnerships and working together when navigating and journeying together in order to move the canoe forward. The kubaak, the outrigger of the wa (canoe) is about “partnerships”. For us as elementary school leaders on Majuro, kubaak encourages us to value collaborative partnerships with each other as well as our communities, PSS, and other stakeholders. Partnerships is an important part of the Kanne Lobal education and leadership framework. It requires ongoing bwebwenato – the inspiring as well as confronting and challenging conversations that should be mediated and negotiated if we and our education stakeholders are to journey together to ensure that the educational services we provide benefits our next generation of young people in the RMI. Navigating ahead the partnerships, mediation, and negotiation are the core values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). As an organic conceptual framework grounded in indigenous values, inspired through our lived experiences, Kanne Lobal provides ideas and concepts for re-thinking education and leadership practices that are conducive to learning and teaching in the schooling context in the RMI. By no means does it provide the solution to the education ills in our nation. However, we argue that Kanne Lobal is a more relevant approach which is much needed for the negatively stigmatised system as a consequence of the various colonial administrations that have and continue to shape and reframe our ideas about what education should be like for us in the RMI. Moreover, Kannel Lobal is our attempt to decolonize the framing of education and leadership, moving our bwebwenato to re-framing conversations of teaching and learning so that our cultural knowledge and values are foregrounded, appreciated, and realised within our education system. Bwebwenato: sharing our stories In this section, we use bwebwenato as a method of gathering and capturing our stories as data. Below we capture our stories and ongoing conversations about the richness in Marshallese cultural knowledge in the outer islands and on Majuro and the potentialities in Kanne Lobal. Danny Jim When I was in third grade (9-10 years of age), during my grandfather’s speech in Arno, an atoll near Majuro, during a time when a wa (canoe) was being blessed and ready to put the canoe into the ocean. My grandfather told me the canoe was a blessing for the family. “Without a canoe, a family cannot provide for them”, he said. The canoe allows for travelling between places to gather food and other sources to provide for the family. My grandfather’s stories about people’s roles within the canoe reminded me that everyone within the family has a responsibility to each other. Our women, mothers and daughters too have a significant responsibility in the journey, in fact, they hold us, care for us, and given strength to their husbands, brothers, and sons. The wise man or elder sits in the middle of the canoe, directing the young man who help to steer. The young man, he does all the work, directed by the older man. They take advice and seek the wisdom of the elder. In front of the canoe, a young boy is placed there and because of his strong and youthful vision, he is able to help the elder as well as the young man on the canoe. The story can be linked to the roles that school leaders, teachers, and students have in schooling. Without each person knowing intricately their role and responsibility, the sight and vision ahead for the collective aspirations of the school and the community is difficult to comprehend. For me, the canoe is symbolic of our educational journey within our education system. As the school leader, a central, trusted, and respected figure in the school, they provide support for teachers who are at the helm, pedagogically striving to provide for their students. For without strong direction from the school leaders and teachers at the helm, the students, like the young boy, cannot foresee their futures, or envisage how education can benefit them. This is why Kanne Lobal is a significant framework for us in the Marshall Islands because within the practice we are able to take heed and empower each other so that all benefit from the process. Kanne Lobal is linked to our culture, an essential part of who we are. We must rely on our own local approaches, rather than relying on others that are not relevant to what we know and how we live in today’s society. One of the things I can tell is that in Majuro, compared to the outer islands, it’s different. In the outer islands, parents bring children together and tell them legends and stories. The elders tell them about the legends and stories – the bwebwenato. Children from outer islands know a lot more about Marshallese legends compared to children from the Majuro atoll. They usually stay close to their parents, observe how to prepare food and all types of Marshallese skills. Loretta Joseph Case There is little Western influence in the outer islands. They grow up learning their own culture with their parents, not having tv. They are closely knit, making their own food, learning to weave. They use fire for cooking food. They are more connected because there are few of them, doing their own culture. For example, if they’re building a house, the ladies will come together and make food to take to the males that are building the house, encouraging them to keep on working - “jemjem maal” (sharpening tools i.e. axe, like encouraging workers to empower them). It’s when they bring food and entertainment. Rubon Rubon Togetherness, work together, sharing of food, these are important practices as a school leader. Jemjem maal – the whole village works together, men working and the women encourage them with food and entertainment. All the young children are involved in all of the cultural practices, cultural transmission is consistently part of their everyday life. These are stronger in the outer islands. Kanne Lobal has the potential to provide solutions using our own knowledge and practices. Connie Joel When new teachers become a teacher, they learn more about their culture in teaching. Teaching raises the question, who are we? A popular saying amongst our people, “Aelon kein ad ej aelon in manit”, means that “Our islands are cultural islands”. Therefore, when we are teaching, and managing the school, we must do this culturally. When we live and breathe, we must do this culturally. There is more socialising with family and extended family. Respect the elderly. When they’re doing things the ladies all get together, in groups and do it. Cut the breadfruit, and preserve the breadfruit and pandanus. They come together and do it. Same as fishing, building houses, building canoes. They use and speak the language often spoken by the older people. There are words that people in the outer islands use and understand language regularly applied by the elderly. Respect elderly and leaders more i.e., chiefs (iroj), commoners (alap), and the workers on the land (ri-jerbal) (social layer under the commoners). All the kids, they gather with their families, and go and visit the chiefs and alap, and take gifts from their land, first produce/food from the plantation (eojōk). Tommy Almet The people are more connected to the culture in the outer islands because they help one another. They don’t have to always buy things by themselves, everyone contributes to the occasion. For instance, for birthdays, boys go fishing, others contribute and all share with everyone. Kanne Lobal is a practice that can bring people together – leaders, teachers, stakeholders. We want our colleagues to keep strong and work together to fix problems like students and teachers’ absenteeism which is a big problem for us in schools. Demetria Malachi The culture in the outer islands are more accessible and exposed to children. In Majuro, there is a mixedness of cultures and knowledges, influenced by Western thinking and practices. Kanne Lobal is an idea that can enhance quality educational purposes for the RMI. We, the school leaders who did GCSL, we want to merge and use this idea because it will help benefit students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Kanne Lobal will help students to learn and teachers to teach though traditional skills and knowledge. We want to revitalize our ways of life through teaching because it is slowly fading away. Also, we want to have our own Marshallese learning process because it is in our own language making it easier to use and understand. Essentially, we want to proudly use our own ways of teaching from our ancestors showing the appreciation and blessings given to us. Way Forward To think of ways forward is about reflecting on the past and current learnings. Instead of a traditional discussion within a research publication, we have opted to continue our bwebwenato by sharing what we have learnt through the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL) programme. Our bwebwenato does not end in this article and this opportunity to collaborate and partner together in this piece of writing has been a meaningful experience to conceptualise and unpack the Kanne Lobal framework. Our collaborative bwebwenato has enabled us to dig deep into our own wise knowledges for guidance through mediating and negotiating the challenges in education and leadership (Sanga & Houma, 2004). For example, bwe-jen-lale-rara reminds us to inquire, pay attention, and focus on supporting the needs of others. Through enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara, it reminds us to value cultural exchange and reciprocity which will strengthen the development and maintaining of relationships based on ways we continue to honour each other (Nimmer, 2017). We not only continue to support each other, but also help mentor the next generation of school leaders within our education system (Heine, 2002). Education and leadership are all about collaborative partnerships (Sanga & Chu, 2009; Thaman, 1997). Developing partnerships through the GCSL was useful learning for us. It encouraged us to work together, share knowledge, respect each other, and be kind. The values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity) are meaningful in being and becoming and educational leader in the RMI (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Miller, 2010; Nimmer, 2017). These values are meaningful for us practice particularly given the drive by PSS for schools to become accredited. The workshops and meetings delivered during the GCSL in the RMI from 2018 to 2019 about Kanne Lobal has given us strength to share our stories and experiences from the meeting with the stakeholders. But before we met with the stakeholders, we were encouraged to share and speak in our language within our courses: EDP05 (Professional Development and Learning), EDP06 (School Leadership), EDP07 (School Management), EDP08 (Teaching and Learning), and EDP09 (Community Partnerships). In groups, we shared our presentations with our peers, the 15 school leaders in the GCSL programme. We also invited USP RMI staff. They liked the way we presented Kannel Lobal. They provided us with feedback, for example: how the use of the sail on the canoe, the parts and their functions can be conceptualised in education and how they are related to the way that we teach our own young people. Engaging stakeholders in the conceptualisation and design stages of Kanne Lobal strengthened our understanding of leadership and collaborative partnerships. Based on various meetings with the RMI Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) team, PSS general assembly, teachers from the outer islands, and the PSS executive committee, we were able to share and receive feedback on the Kanne Lobal framework. The coordinators of the PREL programme in the RMI were excited by the possibilities around using Kanne Lobal, as a way to teach culture in an inspirational way to Marshallese students. Our Marshallese knowledge, particularly through the proverbial meaning of Kanne Lobal provided so much inspiration and insight for the groups during the presentation which gave us hope and confidence to develop the framework. Kanne Lobal is an organic and indigenous approach, grounded in Marshallese ways of doing things (Heine, 2002; Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Given the persistent presence of colonial processes within the education system and the constant reference to practices and initiatives from the US, Kanne Lobal for us provides a refreshing yet fulfilling experience and makes us feel warm inside because it is something that belongs to all Marshallese people. Conclusion Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices provide meaningful educational and leadership understanding and learnings. They ignite, inspire, and transform thinking and practice. The Kanne Lobal conceptual framework emphasises key concepts and values necessary for collaborative partnerships within education and leadership practices in the RMI. The bwebwenato or talk stories have been insightful and have highlighted the strengths and benefits that our Marshallese ideas and practices possess when looking for appropriate and relevant ways to understand education and leadership. Acknowledgements We want to acknowledge our GCSL cohort of school leaders who have supported us in the development of Kanne Lobal as a conceptual framework. A huge kommol tata to our friends: Joana, Rosana, Loretta, Jellan, Alvin, Ellice, Rolando, Stephen, and Alan. References Benson, C. (2002). Preface. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (p. iv). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Bessarab, D., Ng’andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Fa’avae, D., Jones, A., & Manu’atu, L. (2016). Talanoa’i ‘a e talanoa - talking about talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples,12(2),138-150. Heine, H. C. (2002). A Marshall Islands perspective. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (pp. 84 – 90). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Infoplease Staff (2017, February 28). Marshall Islands, retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/marshall-islands Jetnil-Kijiner, K. (2014). Iep Jaltok: A history of Marshallese literature. (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Kabua, J. B. (2004). We are the land, the land is us: The moral responsibility of our education and sustainability. In A.L. Loeak, V.C. Kiluwe and L. Crowl (Eds.), Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, pp. 180 – 191. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific. Kupferman, D. (2004). Jelalokjen in flux: Pitfalls and prospects of contextualising teacher training programmes in the Marshall Islands. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 42 – 54. http://directions.usp.ac.fj/collect/direct/index/assoc/D1175062.dir/doc.pdf Miller, R. L. (2010). Wa kuk wa jimor: Outrigger canoes, social change, and modern life in the Marshall Islands (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Nabobo-Baba, U. (2008). Decolonising framings in Pacific research: Indigenous Fijian vanua research framework as an organic response. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 4(2), 141-154. Nimmer, N. E. (2017). Documenting a Marshallese indigenous learning framework (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Sanga, K., & Houma, S. (2004). Solomon Islands principalship: Roles perceived, performed, preferred, and expected. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 55-69. Sanga, K., & Chu, C. (2009). Introduction. In K. Sanga & C. Chu (Eds.), Living and Leaving a Legacy of Hope: Stories by New Generation Pacific Leaders (pp. 10-12). NZ: He Parekereke & Victoria University of Wellington. Suaalii-Sauni, T., & Fulu-Aiolupotea, S. M. (2014). Decolonising Pacific research, building Pacific research communities, and developing Pacific research tools: The case of the talanoa and the faafaletui in Samoa. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 55(3), 331-344. Taafaki, I., & Fowler, M. K. (2019). Clothing mats of the Marshall Islands: The history, the culture, and the weavers. US: Kindle Direct. Taufe’ulungaki, A. M. (2014). Look back to look forward: A reflective Pacific journey. In M. ‘Otunuku, U. Nabobo-Baba, S. Johansson Fua (Eds.), Of Waves, Winds, and Wonderful Things: A Decade of Rethinking Pacific Education (pp. 1-15). Fiji: USP Press. Thaman, K. H. (1995). Concepts of learning, knowledge and wisdom in Tonga, and their relevance to modern education. Prospects, 25(4), 723-733. Thaman, K. H. (1997). Reclaiming a place: Towards a Pacific concept of education for cultural development. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106(2), 119-130. Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Kenya: East African Educational Publishers. Vaioleti, T. (2006). Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research. Waikato Journal of Education, 12, 21-34. Walsh, J. M., Heine, H. C., Bigler, C. M., & Stege, M. (2012). Etto nan raan kein: A Marshall Islands history (First Edition). China: Bess Press.

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. Morris, John. “Notes on A Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.

Getting the Family Together: A Fieldwork Account The final gig of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band’s 2013 tour is a hometown show at New Lambton Community Hall in Newcastle on the coast of New South Wales, Australia. The tour had already covered Newcastle and surrounds at various locations within 50 to 100km of the Newcastle CBD. In addition to lead singer and guitarist Bob Corbett, there are three main members of the Roo Grass Band, Sue Carson on fiddle and mandolin, Dave Carter on banjo, bass and bagpipes and Robbie Long on guitar, mandolin and bass. I enter the building and at the top of the stairs a tall, slim woman with a shock of red hair rushes to greet me with a hug, “It is so good to see you!”This is Veronica, Bob Corbett’s Mum. She’s been busy setting up the merchandise desk, taking tickets, and greeting almost every member of the audience by name. Veronica has functioned as de facto tour manager throughout the band’s Lucky Country Hall Tour. As well as running the merchandise desk and ticketing, she’s occasionally acted as roadie, and has supervised the packing of cars and trailers. These day-to-day jobs on the tour have been done with help from either her sister Roberta or, for most of the tour, a close friend of the band, Jenny. I deposit home-made chocolate brownies and biscuits in the kitchen, setting them up alongside fruit brownies made by Veronica for the audience. Bob’s wife, Kirrily, comes and says hello, followed by their son Marley, who heads straight for the goodies. Their daughter Matilda is running around with her best friend and next-door neighbour, Sophie. Dave, who plays banjo, bass and bagpipes in the band, greets his wife Karen as she arrives with their kids. The band’s fiddle player, Sue, is pacing around, looking fractious. I ask if she’s okay. “Yeah, it is just that my family is meant to be here already and they’re running late. They’re going to miss it.”Not long after, Sue’s partner, Michael (who is also Veronica’s brother, Bob’s uncle) arrives with their son Elijah and his son Gabe, in time for the show. This final gig of the tour seemed to have been largely arranged for the families of the band, and there was little advertising for it. In the way of family get-togethers a mix of tension and excitement fill the room. But once the band starts playing things calm down, a group of kids occupy the dance floor, twirling, swaying, skipping and running along with the music. Family, Authenticity, and Commercial Practices in Australian Country MusicI open with this fieldwork account to illuminate how the presence and involvement of family, through parents, spouses, aunts, uncles, children and even close friends are central to the experience of what it is to be a country music artist in Australia. In the case of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band, for example, band members make choices to involve family in the activity of “being” a band—touring, performing, engaging with fans—and these choices have emotional value for them, but are also yoked to broader discourses of family which circulate in the field of Australian country music. This field story reveals that “family” is not something carved off from artists’ public engagement with the field of Australian country music but is central to it. Discourses of and around “family” are implicit in the practices of Australian country music artists and are strategically used by artists to define what country music is and what is valued in the field. Crucially, the discourse of family is used to support claims to authenticity within country music culture. Ideas about and associated practices concerning, “authenticity” permeate the culture of country music. The discourse reaches across all aspects of the field, and all participants in the scene are compelled to at least turn their minds to questions of authenticity, and develop strategies for dealing with them. Value is conferred on artists seen to convey so-called “true” and “genuine” personas. Indeed the country music community demands something referred to as “honesty” from performers. It needs to be noted that country music is a commercial popular music form and culture. Many agents in the scene have an uneasy symbolic relationship with the commercial aspects of country music, but it is a basic premise within the field: the music exists to make money. This is not to say that financial and popular success (in their quantifiable forms: money made, units sold, crowd sizes, radio spins) is the only thing valued in country music. As a form of cultural capital, authenticity is also valued. But within Australian country music a tension exists between the part of field underpinned by commercial logic and the idea of the popular and those underpinned by notions of creativity, independence and musical integrity. Authenticity is deployed to distinguish country music from other styles of music in a number of keys ways. Authenticity can be taken as an essential quality of music, which “honestly” reflects or expresses an identity or experience (e.g., Australian national identity, rural experience, heartbreak) (Watson, Volume 1; Watson, Volume 2; Sanjek); as a proper way of relating music, artist and audience (Smith); as a ideological watchword which tempers commerciality (Sanjek); or as something “fabricated” or constructed in the codification of the genre (Akenson; Peterson; Carriage and Hayward). I am not positing authenticity as a feature unique to Australian country music. A number of authors have highlighted the role authenticity plays in many forms of popular music to navigate, understand or obfuscate the functions of the commercial music industry and shape its output (Frith; Sanjek; Barker and Taylor). The scholarship on country music and popular music in general often explores how authenticity is inscribed in the products of country music, rather than the processes and practices behind those products: the everyday, extra-musical activities of participants in the scene. This article is concerned then with how discourses of authenticity are sutured to business, musical and promotional practices, and how such tropes function alongside discourses and practices concerning “family” in the negotiation of commercial realities in Australian country music. Rather than looking at end products, my research takes a ground-up approach, exploring what people are doing and how they talk about their practices and decisions. Discourses of “family”, and practices around kin, provide one of many possible entry points for this exploration. MethodologyThis article is based on ethnographic research on Australian country music. Between 2012-2014 I spent many months of focused immersion with Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band at festivals and on tour. This research was part of broader participant observation I conducted which included attending more than 150 country music events across New South Wales and Queensland. I also conducted hundreds of informal interviews at these events, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, including band members Bob Corbett, Sue Carson, Robbie Long, and Michael Carpenter (sometimes drummer).Bob Corbett was recognised by the “mainstream” Australian country music scene in 2012 after winning the Star Maker competition. Since the win Bob and the band’s success within the field has increased—higher album sales, larger crowds, more airplay, recognition, sponsorships and nomination for Golden Guitar Awards (the main Australian country music industry awards). They play a mercurial mix of styles including bluegrass, Western swing, pop folk, and rock. At the core is a concern with storytelling and live, acoustic based performance is central. Bob and the band are primarily engaging with the field of Australian country music (through festivals, media, and self-identification), rather than the folk or bluegrass scenes, which, while related, are distinct fields with different logics, rules and relations.The conceptual framework for this article is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu. In using the term “field” to talk about Australian country music, I understand it as a discrete, relatively autonomous social microcosm, which is located within the social space of Australian society and the broader music industry, yet it is ruled by logics which are “specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields” (Bourdieu in Bourdieu and Wacquant 97). Australian country music consists of systems of relations, which define the occupants of the field—country musicians, country music stars, or country music fans (to name but a few)—and shape the products and practices of the field. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are participants in the field of Australian country music, and work to differentiate their position, and gain a monopoly over authority and influence within the field—to be recognised as successful, authentic country music artists (Bourdieu and Wacquant 100). This framework allows analytic space for exploring and understanding a tension between authenticity, as a form of cultural capital, and the commercial imperatives of country music as a popular music form.Family Bands and the Family BusinessThe significance and foregrounded presence of “family” within Australian country music is a result of the history of the field in which family bands have been prominent. The practice of touring with your spouse, children or other kin has been connected to a discourse of the “Family Band” in Australian country music. Slim Dusty and his family, as pioneers in the Australian country music industry, and arguably the most commercially and culturally successful artists in the scene’s history, are held up as an example par excellence of the country music canon, and provide the model for how country music should or could be done as a family. Slim, his wife Joy, daughter Anne Kirkpatrick and other extended family worked as a “family band” touring, performing, songwriting, recording, and being country music artists. As the “first family” Australian country music band (Baker; Ellis) they dominate the social and cultural imaginary of Australian country music. They represent a tradition of family involvement in the business of country music as a way of dealing with the practical realities of touring, providing emotional support and enjoyment, and as a part of a relatively conservative set of values drawn from country life­. These features work together to discursively distance the “family band” from the commercial music industry and imbue integrity and naturalness in those artists’ engagement with the music business. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band is a family band: fiddle player Sue is Bob’s aunty; her partner Michael Stove, Bob’s uncle, was an original member of the Roo Grass Band. But more than that, the band understands themselves as a “family”. Sometimes-drummer in the band, Michael Carpenter, talked at length about the “Roo Grass Family” when I interviewed him, including the affective value he places on those relationships:I love it when Bob says… ‘Michael’s been a part of the Roo Grass family for a long time’ … it’s a very country music thing to say … when Bob says it, it actually means something, there’s a certain level of weight to it, because I know the way he treats his bands, I know the way he treats the people who are involved ... it does make them feel like they are a part of something special and so, and that’s beyond just doing a gig … it kind of creates this sense of loyalty that is important to me.The other members of the band also understand and value their involvement with the band in a similar way, and it spills into the chemistry the band has on stage, and the enjoyment they derive from playing together. The idea of the family band opens out beyond the actual band as well: the “Roo Grass Family” includes friends, fans and others with strong ties and involvement with the band.Practical, on the ground support (both on tour and also at home) offered by family to artists in Australian country music is a significant source of capital for those artists. However, participants also talk about this family help as a chance to spend time together, and couch it within discourses of loyalty, love, fun and commitment. Practices and discourses of small, DIY business are also sutured to discourse of family, as a way of reinforcing the fierce independence from big business and record companies. The fieldwork account at the beginning of this article reveals some of the work done by family on tour for Bob and the band, mainly through the presence of Bob’s mum, Veronica, as defacto tour manager. During the gig Bob offered a series of acknowledgments for the tour. After thanking the audiences and tour sponsors, he moved on to family:Bob: I’d like to thank my aunty Roberta, she came along and helped us on a tour leg … Ah, I’m going to forget people, I’m going to leave the special ones to last … I would like to thank Kirrily personally, but as Sue said, all partners and stuff, so I love you Kiz. But the most special one of all: Mrs Veronica Corbett [loud applause and cheers]. She’s the backbone! Of the tour, so thanks mum, thanks for everything.Veronica: Absolute pleasure Bobby.Bob: It’s been, it’s been a pleasure. You love doing it.Veronica: I love it.Bob: Yeah, you do love doing it, it’s been great, you know. I don’t want to get too, too sentimental, but, um just before dad died, he turned to me and said ‘look after mum’, and I don’t, I don’t look after mum, but in a way, just sharing all these experiences, like, we’re looking after each other, so, thank you for doing that.In this account, I am interested in the ways in which Bob, Veronica and Sue talk about the labour provided by family. There are a number of ways that participants talk about the practice of getting family to help do the work of touring and performing country music, which emerge here, and are consistently used by Bob and the band. It is spoken of in terms of “spending time” with each other, and of loving that time. Discourses of enjoyment and sociality permeate Bob, Veronica, and others’ discussions of the practical reality of people giving up their time to help. This is part of the cultural capital of authenticity: being a professional country music band out on the road is about more than hard slog, making money and cold business; it is an enjoyable experience, underpinned with love. To be authentic, it should be about more than the dollars.While the involvement of family in the activities of the band is discussed and understood as a chance to spend time together, an enjoyable experience, there are also discourses of support and help tied to these practices by those in and around the band. It is often acknowledged as a practical reality that family members are involved in the activities of the band (or in maintaining the home front) as a source of free or cheap labour which makes touring and performing possible. Sue acknowledged the importance of family support to the band, particularly as an independent band, in the interview: Main sources of support? … the management from Toyota and everything … after winning Star Maker, that was really great, so they’ve really helped … and also family … you certainly need that support, because you can’t, you’ve got to get out there and do it, that’s the only way to do it … it’s very personal support in a lot of ways … we’re not at that stage where, we’re not at a bigger level where there’s plenty of money being thrown around by record companies, that sort of support.In acknowledging the role of family at home while the band tours, as well as the “personal support” given to the band, Sue binds the practices of individuals staying at home, minding kids and maintaining home life, to the discourse of family. She is also linking the practices to the band’s “independent” status and the lack of “money being thrown around by record companies” as the reason this support and other on the road, tour based work, is essential. Within Sue’s account here, and at other times during my fieldwork, there was a sense that she saw the need for family support as a sign of inadequacy, a sign that the band had not yet “made it” to the level where the support comes from record companies, and there will be money thrown around to support the activities of the band. This touches on a broader set of discourses that circulate in the country music community about professionalism and amateurism, which are also linked to ideas about family. While the foregrounding of family has value within the field of country music, there is something else going on here. A division is often drawn between “commercial” and “creative” endeavours in Australian country music. By linking practices involving kin and discourses of family, Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band position themselves as authentic, or real, grass roots, and with creative freedom, in contrast to being creatively constrained or selling out. Within this division, a reliance on one’s family can be understood in some ways as a rejection of the commercial, business networks of country music. In the case of Sue’s account above there is a sense that it is also a way of negotiating success when you do not have access to a record label or other big business support, which may seem the easier route. Sue’s view differs somewhat from Bob’s in this respect. Bob often expressed pride in the fact that they are “doing it on their own” and boasting an independent DIY model of music business (for example through ticketing, tour organisation and production); a business model that relies on the support of their family, but which is respected and valued within Australian country music. ConclusionArtists such as Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band all occupy “positions” in the field of Australian country music, and the discourses of “commercial”, “creative”, and “authentic” all work to categorise artists, and their position in the field. Economic and material circumstances limit, enable or influence the decisions to involve families or not: for Bob, a desire to remain in control of his creative output and career, and the need to maximise income to feed his family makes DIY ticketing, and taking his mum and friends on the road a good choice. But these material factors work with symbolic and cultural factors, in the game of cultural legitimisation about what it is to be a country music artist. The way in which Bob and the band invoked particular discourses of family, loyalty, fun and enjoyment, to talk about the on-the-ground practices of having family involved (or not) in their working lives as musicians is part of the work these bands and artists are doing to represent themselves to the country music community; they are attempting to establish themselves as adequately, legitimately and authentically “country”. In the process they are also shaping what it is to be a country music artist and what is valued within the field—in this case “family”. The constant struggles over what country music is, what is “authentic” country and what represents success, are struggles over the “schemata of classification … which construct social reality” (Bourdieu 20). Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are using strategies in this struggle, in this case the strategies link practices involving kin to discourses of honesty and openness by collapsing public and private, heritage and tradition through the family band, and authenticity, professionalism, and success in the way family support can limit the need to rely on record labels and big business. ReferencesAkenson, James E. “Australia, The United States and Authenticity.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 187–206. Baker, Glen A. “Liner Notes - Annethology: The Best of Anne Kirkpatrick.” July 2010.Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, eds. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992. Carriage, Leigh, and Philip Hayward. “Heartlands: Kasey Chambers, Australian Country Music and Americana.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 113–143. Ellis, Max. “Liner Notes: The Slim Dusty Family Reunion CD.” 2008.Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.Sanjek, David. “Pleasures and Principles: Issues of Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock’n’Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4.2 (1992): 12-21.Sanjek, David. “Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music.” In Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-tonk Bars. Ed. Cecelia Tichi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 22–44. Smith, Graeme. Singing Australian: The History of Folk and Country Music. North Melbourne, VIC: Pluto Press Australia, 2005. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 1. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1982. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 2. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1983.

Regulation in Australia appears to be increasing at an exponential rate. For small businesses that, are often resource poor and isolated, compliance is a burden. They face a paradigm conflict with regulators, who often are imbued with the objective of maintaining quality standards and perceptions of servicing an industry, while the regulated see regulation as an evil and a cost to doing business. Two case studies illustrate the political minefields in alternative approaches to regulation. Finally, the paper reviews changes in regulation internationally and in Australia and puts forward some innovative options for the future implementation of regulation of small businesses.

In the 1980s, an extremely successful Nescafé Gold Blend coffee advertising campaign dared to posit, albeit subliminally, that a love relationship was inextricably linked to coffee. Over several years, an on-again off-again love affair appeared to unfold onscreen; its ups and downs narrated over shared cups of coffee. Although the association between the relationship and Gold Blend was loose at best, no direct link was required (O’Donohoe 62). The campaign’s success was its reprisal of the cultural myth prevalent in the West that coffee and love, coffee and relationships, indeed coffee and intimacy, are companionate items. And, the more stable lover, it would seem, is available on the supermarket shelf. Meeting for coffee, inviting a potential lover in for a late-night cup of coffee, or scheduling a business meeting in an espresso bar are clichés that refer to coffee consumption but have little to do with the actual product. After all, many a tea-drinker will invite friends or acquaintances “for coffee.” This is neatly acknowledged in a short romantic scene in the lauded feature film Good Will Hunting (1997) in which a potential lover’s suggestion of meeting for coffee is responded to smartly by the “genius” protagonist Will, “Maybe we could just get together and eat a bunch of caramels. [...] When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.” It was a date, regardless. Many in the coffee industry will argue that coffee—rather than tea, or caramel—is legendary for its intrinsic capacity to foster and ignite new relationships and ideas. Coffee houses are repeatedly cited as the heady location for the beginnings of institutions from major insurance business Lloyd’s of London to the Boston Tea Party, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels, and even Western Australian indie band Eskimo Joe. This narrative images the coffee house and café as a setting that supports ingenuity, success, and passion. It is tempting to suggest that something intrinsic in coffee renders it a Western social lubricant, economic powerhouse, and, perhaps, spiritual prosthesis. This paper will, however, argue that the social and cultural production of “coffee” cannot be dissociated from feeling. Feelings of care, love, inspiration, and desire constellate around “coffee” in a discourse of warm, fuzzy affect. I suggest that this blooming of affect is not superfluous but, instead, central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers as represented on the Websites of select Western roasting companies, the repetition of this discourse is abundantly clear. Here, the good feelings associated with cross-cultural friendship are figured as the condition and reward for the production of high quality coffee beans. Money, it seems, does not buy happiness—but good quality coffee can. Good (Colonial) Feelings Before exploring the discursive representation of friendship and good feeling among the global coffee community with regard to direct trade, it is important to account for the importance of feeling as a narrative strategy with political affects and effects. In her discussion of “happy objects,” cultural theorist of emotion Sara Ahmed argues that specific objects are associated with feelings of happiness. She gives the telling example of coffee as an object intimately tied with happy feeling within the family. So you make coffee for the family, and you know “just“ how much sugar to put in this cup and that. Failure to know this “just“ is often felt as a failure of care. Even if we do not experience the same objects as being pleasurable, sharing the family means sharing happy objects, both in the sense of sharing knowledge (of what makes others happy) and also in the sense of distributing the objects in the right way (Ahmed, Promise 47). This idea is derived from Ahmed’s careful consideration of affective economies. She suggests emotions neither belong to, or are manufactured by, discrete individuals. Rather, emotions are formed through social exchange. Relieved of imagining the individual as the author of affect, we can consider the ways in which affect circulates as a product in a broad, vitalising economy of feeling (Ahmed, Affective 121). In the example above, feelings of care and intimacy attached to coffee-making produce the happy family, or more precisely, the fleeting instant of the family-as-happy. The condition of this good feeling is not attributable to the coffee as product nor the family as fundamentally happy but rather the rippling of happy feeling through sharing of the object deemed happy. A little too much sugar and happiness is thwarted, affect wanes; the coffee is now bad(-feeling). If we return briefly to the Nescafé Gold Blend campaign and, indeed, Good Will Hunting, we can postulate following Ahmed that the coffee functions as a love object. Proximity to coffee is identified by its apparent causation of love-effects. In this sense, “doing coffee” means making a fleeting cultural space for feeling love, or feeling good. But what happens when we turn from the good feeling of consumption to the complex question of coffee production and trade? How might good feeling attach to the process of procuring coffee beans? In this case, the way in which good feeling seems to “stick to” coffee in mass culture needs to be augmented with consideration of its status as a global commodity traded across sociopolitical, economic, cultural and national borders. Links between coffee and colonialism are long established. From the Dutch East India Company to the feverish enthusiasm to purchase mass plantations by multinational corporations, coffee, colonialism and practices of slavery and indentured labour are intertwined (Lyons 18-19). As a globally traded commodity across a range of political regimes and national borders, tracing the postcolonial and neocolonial relations between multinational companies, small upscale boutique roasters, plantation owners, coffee bean co-ops, regulatory bodies, and workers is complex at best. In what may appear a tangential approach, it is nonetheless instructive to consider that colonial relations are constituted through affective components that support and fuel economic and political exchange (Stoler, Haunted). Again, Ahmed offers a useful context for the relationship between the imperative toward happiness and colonial representation. The civilizing mission can be redescribed as a happiness mission. For happiness to become a mission, the colonized other must be first deemed unhappy. The imperial archive can be described as an archive of unhappiness. Colonial knowledges constitute the other as not only an object of knowledge, a truth to be discovered, but as being unhappy, as lacking the qualities or attributes required for a happier state of existence (Ahmed, Promise 125). The colonising aspect of the relations Ahmed describes includes the “mission” to construct Others as unhappy. Understood as happiness detractors, colonial Others become objects that threaten the radiant appeal of happiness as part of an imperial moral economy. Hence, it is the happiness of the colonisers that is secured through the disavowal of the feelings of Others. Moreover, by documenting colonial unhappiness, colonising forces justify the sanctity of happiness-making through violence. As Ann Stoler affirms, “Colonial states had a strong interest in affective knowledge and a sophisticated understanding of affective politics” (Carnal 142). Colonising discourses, then, are inextricably linked to regimes of sense and feeling. Stoler also writes that European-ness was established through cultivation of an inner sense of self-worth associated with ethics, individuality and autonomy (Haunted 157). The development of a sense of belonging to Europe was hence executed through feeling good in both moral and affective senses of the word. Although Stoler argues her case in terms of the affective politics of colonial sexualities and desire, her work is highly instructive for its argument that emotion is crucial to structures of power in colonial regimes. Bringing Stoler’s work into closer proximity with Ahmed’s postulation of State happiness and its objects, I am now going to suggest that coffee is a palimpsestic cultural site at which to explore the ways in which the politics of good feeling obscure discomforting and complex questions of power, exploitation, and disadvantage in global economies of coffee production and consumption. Direct Trade In the so-called “third wave” specialty coffee market that is enjoying robust growth in Australia, America, and Europe, “direct trade” across the globe between roasters and plantation owners is consistently represented as friendly and intimate despite vast distances and cultural difference. The “third wave” is a descriptor that, as John Manzo describes in his sociological exploration of coffee connoisseurship in privileged Western online and urban fora, refers to coffee enthusiasts interested in brewing devices beyond high-end espresso machines such as the cold drip, siphon, or pour-over. Jillian Adams writes further that third wavers: Appreciate the flavour nuances of single estate coffee; that is coffee that is sourced from single estates, farms, or villages in coffee growing regions. When processed carefully, it will have a distinctive flavour and taste profile that reflects the region and the culture of the coffee production (2). This focus on single estate or “single origin” coffee refers to beans procured from sections of estates and plantations called micro-lots, which are harvested and processed in a controlled manner.The third wave trend toward single origin coffees coincides with the advent of direct trade. Direct trade refers to the growing practice of bypassing “middlemen” to source coffee beans from plantations without appeal to or restriction by regulatory bodies. Rather, as I will show below, relationships and partnerships between growers and importers are imagined as sites of goodwill and good feeling. This focus on interpersonal relationships and friendships cannot be disarticulated from the broader cross-cultural context at stake. The relationships associated with direct trade invariably take place across borders that are also marked by economic, cultural and political differences in which privileged Western buyers engage with non-Western growers on low incomes. Drawing from Ahmed’s concern that the politics of good feeling is tied to colonial nostalgia, it is compelling to suggest that direct trade is haunted by discourses of colonisation. At this point of intersection, I suggest that Western mass cultural associations of coffee with ease, intimacy and pure intentions invite consumers to join a neocolonial saga through partaking in imagined communities of global coffee friends. Particularly popular in Australia and America, direct trade is espoused by key third wave coffee roasters in Melbourne, Portland and Seattle. Melbourne Coffee Merchants are perhaps the most well-known importers of directly traded green bean in Australia. On their Web page they describe the importance of sharing good feelings about high quality coffee: “We aim to share, educate, and inspire, and get people as excited about quality coffee as we are.” A further page describing the Merchants’s mission explains, “Growers are treated as partners in the mission to get the worlds [sic] finest beans into the hands of discerning customers.” The quality of excitement that circulates through the procuring of green beans is related to the deemed partnership between Merchants and the growers. That is, it is not the fact of the apparent partnership or its banality that is important, but the treating of growers as partners that signifies Merchants’s mission to generate good feeling. This is a slight but crucial distinction. Treating the growers as partners participates in an affective economy of excitement and inspiration—how the growers feel is, presumably, in want of such partnership.Not dissimilarly, Five Senses Coffee, boutique roasters in Melbourne and Perth, offer an emotional bonus with the purchase of directly traded coffees. “So go on, select one of our Direct Trade products and bask in the warm glow you get knowing that the farmer who grew the beans that you’re enjoying is reaping the rewards too!” The rewards that the growers are deemed to be receiving are briefly explained in blog posts on the Five Senses news Web page. I am not suggesting that these friendships and projects are not legitimate. Rather, the willingness of Five Senses to negotiate rates with growers and provide the community with an English teacher, for example, fuels an economy of Westerners’s good feelings and implies conventional trading produces unhappiness. This obscures grounds for concern that the provision of an English teacher might indeed serve the interests of colonising discourses. Perhaps a useful entry point into this narrative form is founded in the recently self-published book Coffee Trails by Toby Smith, founder of boutique Australian roaster Toby’s Estate. The book is described on the Toby’s Estate Web page as follows:Filled with personal anecdotes and illustrating his relationships developed over years of visiting the farmers to source his coffee beans, Smith’s commentary of his travels, including a brush with Jamaican customs officials and a trip to a notoriously dangerous Ethiopian market, paints an authentic picture of the colourful countries that produce the second most traded product in the world. [...] Coffee Trails has been Smith’s labour of love over the past two years and the end product is a wonderfully personal account of a man fulfilling his lifelong dream and following his passion across the world. Again, the language of “passion” and “love” registers direct trade coffee as a happy object. Furthermore, despite the fact that coffee is also grown in Australia, the countries that are most vivid in the epic imagination are those associated with “exotic” locations such as Ethiopia and Jamaica. This is arguably registered through the sense that these locations were where Smith encountered danger. Having embarked on a version of the quintessential hero’s journey, Smith can be seen as devoted to, and inspired by, his love-object. His brushes with uncivilised authorities and locations carry the undertones of a colonial imaginary, in which it can be argued Smith’s Western-ness is established and secured as goodwill-invoking. After all, he locates and develops relationships with farmers and buys their coffee which, following the logic of happy objects, disperses and shares good feelings.Gloria Jean’s Coffees, which occupies a similar market position in Australia to the multinational “specialty” coffee company Starbucks (Lyons), also participates in the dispersal of coffee as a happy object despite its mass scale of production and lack of direct trade capability (not unexpectedly, Starbucks hosts a Relationships campaign aimed at supporting humanitarian initiatives and communities). Gloria Jean’s campaign With Heart allocates resources to humanitarian activities in local Australian communities and worldwide in coffee-growing regions. Their Web page states: “With Heart is woven throughout Gloria Jeans Coffee houses and operations by the active participation of Franchise Partners, support office and team members and championed across Australia, by our With Heart Ambassadors.“ The associative message is clear: Gloria Jean’s Coffees is a company indissociable from “heart,” or perhaps loving care, for community.By purchasing coffee, Gloria Jean’s customers can be seen to be supporting heartening community projects, and are perhaps unwittingly working as ambassadors for the affective economy in which proximity to the happy object—the heart-centred coffee company—indicates the procurement of happiness for someone, somewhere. The sale of good feeling enables specialty coffee companies such as Gloria Jean’s to bypass market opportunities associated with Fair Trade regulatory provisions, which, as Carl Obermiller et al. find in their study of Fair Trade buying patterns, also profit from consumers’ purchase of good feeling associated with ethically-produced objects. Instead, assuring consumers of its heart-centredness, Gloria Jean’s Coffees is represented as an embodiment not of fairness but kindness, and perhaps love, for others. The iconography and history of direct trade coffee is most closely linked to Intelligentsia Coffee of Chicago in the USA. Intelligentsia describes its third wave roasting and training business as the first to engage in direct trade in 2003. Its Web page includes an image of an airplane to which the following pop-up is linked: “Our focus is not just identifying quality coffee, but developing and rewarding it. To do this means preserving and developing strong relationships despite the considerable distance. At any given time, there is at least one Intelligentsia buyer at origin.” This text raises the question of what constitutes quality coffee. It would appear that “quality coffee” is knowledge that Intelligentsia owns, and which is rewarded financially when replicated to the satisfaction of Intelligentsia. The strength of the relationships in this interaction is closely linked to the meeting of clear conditions and expectations. Indeed, we are reassured that “at any time” an Intelligentsia buyer is applying these conditions to the product. Quality, then, is at least in part achieved by Intelligentsia through its commitment to travelling long distances to oversee the activities and practices of growers. This paternalistic structure is figured in terms of “strong relationships” rather than, perhaps, a rigorous and shrewd business model (which is assumedly the province of mass-market Others).Amid numerous examples found in even a cursory search on the Web, the overwhelming message of direct trade is of good feeling through care. Long term relationships, imagined as virtuous despite the opacity of the negotiation procedure in most cases, narrates the conviction that relationship in and of itself is a good in what might be called the colonial redramatisation staked by an affective coffee economy. Conclusion: Mourning CoffeeIn a paper on happiness, it might appear out of place to reference grief. Yet Jacques Derrida’s explication of friendship in his rousing collection The Work of Mourning is instructive. He writes that death is accommodated and acknowledged “in the undeniable anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship” (159). Derrida maintains close attention to the productivity and intensity of Otherness in mourning. Thus, friendship is structurally dependent on impending loss, and it follows that there can be no loss without recognising the Otherness of the other, as it were. Given indifference to difference and, hence, loss, it is possible to interpret the friendships affirmed within direct trade practices as supported by a kind of mania. The exuberant dispersal of good feeling through directly traded coffee is narrated by emotional journeys to the primordial beginnings of the happy-making object. That is, fixation upon the object’s brief survival in “primitive” circumstances before its perfect demise in the cup of discerning Western clientele suggests a process of purification through colonising Western knowledges and care. If I may risk a misappropriation of Sara Ahmed’s words; so you make the trip to origin, and you know “just” what to pay for this bean and that. Failure to know this “just” is often felt as a failure of care. But, for whom?References Adams, Jillian. “Thoroughly Modern Coffee.” TEXT Rewriting the Menu: The Cultural Dynamics of Contemporary Food Choices. Eds. Adele Wessell and Donna Lee Brien. TEXT Special Issue 9 (2010). 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue9/content.htm›. Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79 22.2 (2004): 117-39 . -----. “The Politics of Good Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association E-Journal 5.1 (2008): 1-18. -----. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago; London: U Chicago P, 2003. Five Senses Coffee. “Coffee Affiliations.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.fivesenses.com.au/coffee/affiliations/direct-trade›. Gloria Jean’s Coffees. “With Heart.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.gloriajeanscoffees.com/au/Humanitarian/AboutUs.aspx›. Good Will Hunting. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Miramax, 1997. Intelligentsia Coffee. “Direct Trade.” 28 Feb. 2012 ‹http://directtradecoffee.com/›. Lyons, James. “Think Seattle, Act Globally: Specialty Coffee, Commodity Biographies and the Promotion of Place.” Cultural Studies 19.1 (2005): 14-34. Manzo, John. “Coffee, Connoisseurship, and an Ethnomethodologically-Informed Sociology of Taste.” Human Studies 33 (2010): 141-55. Melbourne Coffee Merchants. “About Us.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://melbournecoffeemerchants.com.au/about.asp›. Obermiller, Carl, Chauncy Burke, Erin Tablott and Gareth P. Green. “’Taste Great or More Fulfilling’: The Effect of Brand Reputation on Consumer Social Responsibility Advertising for Fair Trade Coffee.” Corporate Reputation Review 12.2 (2009): 159-76. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Advertising Uses and Gratifications.” European Journal of Marketing 28.8/9 (1993): 52-75. Smith, Toby. Coffee Trails: A Social and Environment Journey with Toby’s Estate. Sydney: Toby Smith, 2011. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. California: U California P, 2002. -----. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Toby’s Estate. “Toby Smith’s Coffee Trails.” 27 Feb 2012 ‹http://www.tobysestate.com.au/index.php/toby-smith-book-coffee-trails.html›.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chapter 2.Graham, Mary. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/graham.html›.Gregory, Jenny. “Remembering Mounts Bay: The Narrows Scheme and the Internationalization of Perth Planning.” Studies in Western Australian History 27 (2011): 145–66.Independent Journal of Politics and News. “Perth Town Trust.” The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News 8 Jul. 1848: 2–3.Moore, George Fletcher. Extracts from the Letters of George Fletcher Moore. Ed. Martin Doyle. London: Orr and Smith, 1834.Morel-EdnieBrown, Felicity. “Layered Landscape: The Swamps of Colonial Northbridge.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2009): 390–419. Nannup, Noel. Songlines with Dr Noel Nannup. Dir. Faculty of Regional Professional Studies, Edith Cowan University (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://vimeo.com/129198094›. (Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

If you have a look at the concert schedules around Australia (and elsewhere in the Western world) these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that you've suddenly been transported back in time: there is a procession of old players, playing (mainly) old songs. The Rolling Stones came through a while ago, as did the Eagles, Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty, and James Brown. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant played updated versions of Led Zeppelin's music, with some new songs strewn in on occasion. The Beach Boys served up a double blast from the past, touring with America ("Horse with No Name") as their opening act. Australian content in this trend is provided by the odd assortment of media darling John Farnham, ex-Grease girl Olivia Newton-John, and former Phantom of the Opera Anthony Warlow, who are touring under the unlikely name of 'The Main Event'; Australian rock legends Cold Chisel have also reformed recently, with a reunion tour to follow. On the more prestigious end of the pop mainstream, The Three Tenors have only had one concert in Australia recently, but publicity-savvy as they have proven themselves to be during the Football World Cup it's a fairly safe bet that they'll be rolling into Sydney Opera House in time for the last Olympics of this millennium, in the year 2000. Thankfully, we've so far been spared of a remaining-Beatles reunion and tour (they did release their Anthology CDs and videos, though), but it wouldn't really come as a surprise anymore. Why this wave of musical exhumations; why now? Admittedly, some of the reunions produced interesting results (Page & Plant's update of Led Zeppelin songs with world music elements comes to mind), but largely the bands involved have restricted themselves to playing old favourites or producing new music that is content with plagiarising older material, and so it's unlikely that the Beach Boys are touring, for example, because they have a strong desire to take surf music to the next level of art. A better explanation, it seems, can be found in the music industry and its structures, and in the way those structures are increasingly becoming inadequate for today's mediascape. For much of this century, popular music in the Western world -- while music itself is a global obsession, the marketing industry largely remains dominated by the West -- has come in waves: to give a broad overview, jazz was outdone by rock'n'roll, which was followed by the British invasion and the British blues revival, leading to the stadium rock of the 1970s (co-existing with disco), which in turn caused the punk revolution that fizzled out into New Wave and the new romantics, which were superseded by Alternative Rock and Britpop. Looking at this succession, it's not difficult to see that the waves have become smaller over time, though: recent styles have failed by far to reach the heights of interest and influence that earlier waves like rock'n'roll and the British invasion achieved. How many people will remember, say, Oasis in three decades; how many will The Beatles? The question seems unfair. This gradual decrease in wave amplitude over the years is directly linked to changes in the media structure in the Western world: earlier, new musical waves swept the few available channels of radio and TV to their full extent; severe bandwidth limitations forced the broadcasters to divert their entire attention to the latest trends, with no air time to be spared for the music of yesteryear. As the number of channels increased, however, so did the potential for variety; today, most cities of sufficient size at least have stations catering for listeners of classical music, over-40s easy listening, mainstream rock, and alternative rock, and perhaps there's also an open-access channel for the more obscure styles; stations for more specific tastes -- all-jazz, all-heavy metal, all-goth -- are now also viable in some cities. As new style waves come in, they might still sweep through the mainstream stations, but will only manage to cause some minor ripples amongst the less central channels. Similar trends exist among music stores, and the music press. The mainstream might remain in the middle of the musical spectrum, therefore, but it's been narrowed considerably, with more and more music fans moving over to the more specialised channels. There is now "an increasingly fragmented international marketplace of popular musics" (Campbell Robinson et al. 272). In media-rich Western nations, this trend is strengthened further by changes to the mediascape brought on by the Internet: the Net is the ultimate enpander of bandwidth, where anyone can add another channel if their needs aren't met by the existing ones. With an unlimited number of specialised channels, with fans deciding their musical diet for themselves instead of having radio DJs or music journalists do it for them, and with the continued narrowing of the mainstream as it loses more and more listeners, new waves of musical styles lose their impact almost immediately now. Whatever your specific tastes, you'll find like-minded people, specialty labels and CD retailers, perhaps even an Internet radio station -- there is now less need than ever to engage with outside trends. Whether that development is entirely desirable remains a point of debate, of course. The paradox for the big old players in the music industry is that the ongoing globalisation of their markets hasn't also led to a globalisation of musical tastes -- largely because of this exponential increase and diversification of channels. Music is a powerful instrument of community formation, and community formation implies first and foremost a drawing of boundaries to everything that isn't part of the community (Turner 2): as musical styles diversify, therefore, there are now more musical taste communities than anyone would care to list. Instead of turning to some mainstreamed, global style of music, listeners are found to turn to the local -- either to the music produced geographically local to them, or to a form of virtually local music, that is, the music of a geographically dispersed, but (through modern communications technologies) otherwise highly unified taste community (Bruns sect. 1 bite 8ff.). There certainly are more such groupings than the industry would care to cater for: the division of their resources in order to follow musical trends in a large number of separate communities is eating into the profits of the large multinationals, while small specialty labels are experiencing a resurgence (despite the major labels' attempts to discourage them). As Wallis & Malm note, "the transformation of the business side of the music industry into a number of giant concerns has not stopped small enterprises, often run by enthusiasts, from cropping up everywhere" (270). The large conglomerates are remarkably ill-prepared to deal with such a plurality of styles: everything in their structure is crying out for a unified market with few, major, and tightly controlled trends. This is where we (and the industry) return to the Beach Boys & Co., then. Partly out of a desire for the good old times when the music business was simple, partly to see if a revival of the old marketing concepts may not reverse the tide once more, the industry majors have unleashed this procession of the musical undead (with only a few notable exceptions) upon us; it is a last-stand attempt to regather the remaining few servicable battleships of the mainstream fleet to grab whatever riches are still to be found there. Judging by ticket prices alone (Page & Plant charged over A$110 per head), there still is money to be made, but these prices also indicate that such 'mainstream' acts are now largely a spectacle for well-to-do over-35s. Amongst younger audiences, the multinationals remain mostly clueless, despite a few efforts to create massively hyped, but musically lobotomised lowest-common-denominator acts, from the Spice Girls to Céline Dion or U2. Most of the acts the major industry players cling to as their main attractions have quite simply lost relevance to all but the most gullible of audiences -- in this context, the advertisment of the travelling Farnham / Newton-John / Warlow show as 'The Main Event' seems almost touching in its denial of reality. It's not like the industry hasn't tried this strategy before, of course: reacting to the fragmented musical world of the early 1970s, with styles from folk to hard rock all equally vying for a share of the audience, the labels created stadium rock -- oversized concerts of overproduced bands who eventually became alienated from their audiences, causing the radical back-to-the-roots revolution of punk. Stadium rock mark II is bound to fail even more quickly and decisively: with most of its proponents not even creating any excitement in the all-important 'young adults' market in the first place, it's the wave that wasn't, and should properly be seen as the best sign yet of the industry's loss of touch with its fragmenting market(s). It's time for new, smaller, and more mobile players to take over from the multinationals, it seems. References Bruns, Axel. "'Every Home Is Wired': The Use of Internet Discussion Fora by a Subcultural Community." 1998. 17 Dec. 1998 <http://www.uq.net.au/~zzabruns/uni/honours/thesis.php>. Campbell Robinson, Deanna, et al. Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable, 1984. Turner, Graeme. "Rock Music, National Culture and Cultural Policy." Rock Music: Politics and Policy. Ed. Tony Bennett. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith U, 1988. 1-6. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Old Players, New Players: The Main Event That Isn't." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Old Players, New Players: The Main Event That Isn't," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) Old players, new players: the Main Event that isn't. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011­ – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004­–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisements, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. As the number of museums grow, so should the number of fashion curators.ReferencesArgus. 10 July 1861. 20 June 2015 ‹http://trove.nla.gov.au/›.Batersby, Selena. “Icons of Fashion.” 2014. 6 June 2015 ‹http://adelaidereview.com.au/features/icons-of-fashion/›.Bitgood, Stephen. “When Is 'Museum Fatigue' Not Fatigue?” Curator: The Museum Journal 2009. 12 Apr. 2015 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.tb00344.x/abstract›. Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2006.Buick, Nadia. “Up Close and Personal: Art and Fashion in the Museum.” Art Monthly Australia Aug. (2011): 242.Clynk, J., and S. Peoples. “All Out in the Wash.” Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice. Eds. Annabella Pollen and Charlotte Nicklas C. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming Sep. 2015. Couchman, Sophia. “Making the ‘Last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘Vanishing’ People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories.” Australian Historical Studies 42.1 (2011): 78–91.Coates, Ian. “The Lambing Flat Riots.” Gold and Civilisation. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, 2011.Clark, Judith. Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. London: V&A Publications, 2006.Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.Crane, Susan. “The Distortion of Memory.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63.Davidson, Patricia. “Museums and the Shaping of Memory.” Heritage Museum and Galleries: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.Discover Central NSW. Milthorpe: BMCW, Mar. 2015.Dethridge, Anna. Fashion as Social Energy Milan: Connecting Cultures, 2005.Falk, John, and Lyn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whaleback Books, 1992.———, John Koran, Lyn Dierking, and Lewis Dreblow. “Predicting Visitor Behaviour.” Curator: The Museum Journal 28.4 (1985): 249–57.Fashion and Politics. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.fitnyc.edu/5103.asp›.Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/#!Fashion-India-Spectacular-Capitalism-Exhibition/cd23/85BBF50C-6CB9-4EE5-94BC-DAFDE56ADA96›.Frost, Warwick. “Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11.3 (2005): 235-250.Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costumes from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.Mazda, Xerxes. “Exhibitions and the Power of Narrative.” Museums Australia National Conference. Sydney, Australia. 23 May 2015. Opening speech.McGowan, Barry. Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina. Wagga Wagga: Museum of the Riverina, 2010.Meyer, Morgan, and Kate Woodthorpe. “The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries.” Sociological Research Online (2008). 6 July 2015 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/1.html›.National Museum of Australia. “Harvest of Endurance.” 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/endurance_scroll/harvest_of_endurance_html_version/home›. Peoples, Sharon. “Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers.” Paper presented at the Fashion Tales 2015 Conference, Milan, June 2015. Ravelli, Louise. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Riegels Melchior, Marie. “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums.” Paper presented at Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22–25 Sep. 2011. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992.Samuels, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 2012.Sandell, Richard. “Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectorial Change.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Schamberger, Karen. “An Inconvenient Myth—the Lambing Flat Riots and Birth of a Nation.” Paper presented at Foundational Histories Australian Historical Conference, University of Sydney, 6–10 July 2015. Smith, Laurajane. The Users of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Vergo, Peter. New Museology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.

This paper explores the effects of labour movement into nonfarm activities on household production choices in rural Vietnam. It finds that agricultural production declines and there are negative effects on farm revenue. However, these conclusions are limited in the north. Households in the north readjust their production structure by investing in livestock and other crops that require less labour. Rice farmers in the south have managed to keep their rice production unaffected by hiring more labour, and investing more capital to switch to less labour-intensive farming. The evidence of relaxing liquidity constraints is found, at least in the short run. While the decline in agricultural revenue in the north suggests some level of substitution between farming and nonfarm activities, the stability in rice production at the national level brings good news to policy makers and food security in Vietnam, despite rapid structural change over the past decades. Keywords Nonfarm, food security, rice self-sufficiency, agricultural transformation, household agricultural production References Akram-Lodhi, A.H., 2005. Vietnam’s agriculture: processes of rich peasant accumulation and mechanisms. Journal of Agrarian Change, 5(1), pp.73–116.Barrett, B., Reardon, T. and Webb, P., 2001. Nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural Africa: concepts, dynamics, and policy implications. Food Policy, 26, pp. 315–331.Brennan, D. et al., 2012. Rural-urban migration and Vietnamese agriculture. In Contributed paper at the 56th AARES Annual Conference. Fremantle, Western Australia.Dang, KS., Nguyen, NQ., Pham, QD., Truong, TTT. and Beresford, M 2006. Policy reform and the transformation of Vietnamese agriculture, in Rapid growth of selected Asian economies: lessons and implications for agriculture and food security, Policy Assistance Series 1/3, FAO, Bangkok.De Brauw, A., 2010. Seasonal Migration and Agricultural Production in Vietnam. Journal of Development Studies, 46(1), pp.114–139.Glewwe, P., Dollar, D. and Agrawal, N., 1994. Economic growth, poverty, and household welfare in Vietnam, World Bank, Washington, DC.Haggblade, S., Hazell, P. and Reardon, T., 2007. Transforming the rural nonfarm economy. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.Hazell, P. and Rahman, A., 2014. New directions for smallholder agriculture 1st ed., Oxford University Press, New York.Hoang, T.X., Pham, C.S. and Ulubaşoǧlu, M., 2014. Non-farm activity, household expenditure, and poverty reduction in rural Vietnam: 2002-2008. World Development, 64, pp.554–568.Huang, J., Wang, X. and Qiu, H.G., 2012. Small-scale farmers in China in the face of modernization and globalization, International Institute for Environment and Development/HIVOS, London.Kajisa, K., 2007. Personal networks and non-agricultural employment: the case of a farming village in the Philippines. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 55(4), pp.668–707.Kilic, T, Carletto, C, Miluka, J. and Savastano, S., 2009. Rural nonfarm income and its impact on agriculture: Evidence from Albania. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.139–60.Lanjouw, J. and Lanjouw, P., 2001. The rural non-farm sector: issues and evidence from developing countries. Agricultural Economics, 26, pp.1–23.Li, L., 2013. Migration, remittances, and agricultural productivity in small farming systems in Northwest China. China Agricultural Economic Review, 5(1), pp.5–23. Minot, N., 2006. Income diversification and poverty in the Northern Uplands of Vietnam, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.Minot, N. and Goletti, F., 1998. Export liberalization and household welfare: the case of rice in Vietnam. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 80(4), pp.738–749.Nguyen, H.Q., 2017. Analyzing the economies of crop diversification in rural Vietnam using an input distance function. Agricultural Systems, 157, pp. 148-156.Oseni, G. and Winters, P., 2009. Rural nonfarm activities and agricultural crop production in Nigeria. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.189–201.Otsuka, K., Liu, Y. and Yamauchi, F., 2013. Factor endowments, wage growth, and changing food self-sufficiency: Evidence from country-level panel data. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 95(5), pp. 1252–1258.Pham, VH, Nguyen, TMH, Kompas, T, Che, TN. and Bui, T., 2015. Rice production, trade and the poor: regional effects of rice export policy on households in Vietnam. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 66(2), pp. 280–307.Pingali, P.L., Xuan, V.T. and Khiem, N.T., 1998. Prospects for sustaining Vietnam’s re-acquired rice export status. Food Policy, 22(4), pp. 345–358.Rozelle, S., Taylor, J.E. and DeBrauw, A., 1999. Migration, remittances, and agricultural productivity in China. American Economic Review, 89(2), pp.287–291.Stampini, M. and Davis, B., 2009. Does non-agricultural labor relax farmers’ credit constraints? Evidence from longitudinal data for Vietnam. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.177–188.Taylor, J.E. and Martin, P.L., 2001. Human capital: migration and rural population change. In G. Rausser & B. Gardner, eds. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, vol 1A. New York: Elsevier Science, pp. 457–511.Taylor, J.E., Rozelle, S. and De Brauw, A., 2003. Migration and incomes in source communities: a new economic of migration perspective from China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(1), pp.75–101.Taylor, J.E. and Lybbert, T., 2015. Essentials of Development Economics, University of California Press, Berkeley.Thirwall, A.P., 2006. Growth and development with special reference to developing economies 8th ed., Palgrave Macmillan, New York.van de Walle, D. and Cratty, D., 2004. Is the emerging non-farm market economy the route out of poverty in Vietnam? Economics of Transition, 12(2), pp.237–274.Warr, P., 2009. Aggregate and sectoral productivity growth in Thailand and Indonesia, Working Papers in Trade and Development, 2009/10, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University.Warr, P., 2014. Food insecurity and its determinants. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 58(4), pp. 519-37.Weiss, C.R., 1996. Exits from a declining sector: econometric evidence from a panel of upper-Austrian farms 1980-1990, Working Paper No. 9601, Department of Economics, University of Linz.Wiggins, S, Kirsten, J. and Llambí, L., 2010. The future of small farms. World Development, 38(10), pp. 1341–48.World Bank, 2006. Vietnam: business, Development Report No 34474-VN, Hanoi, Vietnam. KeywordsNonfarm, food security, rice self-sufficiency, agricultural transformation, household agricultural production References Akram-Lodhi, A.H., 2005. Vietnam’s agriculture: processes of rich peasant accumulation and mechanisms. Journal of Agrarian Change, 5(1), pp.73–116.Barrett, B., Reardon, T. and Webb, P., 2001. Nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural Africa: concepts, dynamics, and policy implications. Food Policy, 26, pp. 315–331.Brennan, D. et al., 2012. Rural-urban migration and Vietnamese agriculture. In Contributed paper at the 56th AARES Annual Conference. Fremantle, Western Australia.Dang, KS., Nguyen, NQ., Pham, QD., Truong, TTT. and Beresford, M 2006. Policy reform and the transformation of Vietnamese agriculture, in Rapid growth of selected Asian economies: lessons and implications for agriculture and food security, Policy Assistance Series 1/3, FAO, Bangkok.De Brauw, A., 2010. Seasonal Migration and Agricultural Production in Vietnam. Journal of Development Studies, 46(1), pp.114–139.Glewwe, P., Dollar, D. and Agrawal, N., 1994. Economic growth, poverty, and household welfare in Vietnam, World Bank, Washington, DC.Haggblade, S., Hazell, P. and Reardon, T., 2007. Transforming the rural nonfarm economy. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.Hazell, P. and Rahman, A., 2014. New directions for smallholder agriculture 1st ed., Oxford University Press, New York.Hoang, T.X., Pham, C.S. and Ulubaşoǧlu, M., 2014. Non-farm activity, household expenditure, and poverty reduction in rural Vietnam: 2002-2008. World Development, 64, pp.554–568.Huang, J., Wang, X. and Qiu, H.G., 2012. Small-scale farmers in China in the face of modernization and globalization, International Institute for Environment and Development/HIVOS, London.Kajisa, K., 2007. Personal networks and non-agricultural employment: the case of a farming village in the Philippines. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 55(4), pp.668–707.Kilic, T, Carletto, C, Miluka, J. and Savastano, S., 2009. Rural nonfarm income and its impact on agriculture: Evidence from Albania. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.139–60.Lanjouw, J. and Lanjouw, P., 2001. The rural non-farm sector: issues and evidence from developing countries. Agricultural Economics, 26, pp.1–23.Li, L., 2013. Migration, remittances, and agricultural productivity in small farming systems in Northwest China. China Agricultural Economic Review, 5(1), pp.5–23. Minot, N., 2006. Income diversification and poverty in the Northern Uplands of Vietnam, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.Minot, N. and Goletti, F., 1998. Export liberalization and household welfare: the case of rice in Vietnam. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 80(4), pp.738–749.Nguyen, H.Q., 2017. Analyzing the economies of crop diversification in rural Vietnam using an input distance function. Agricultural Systems, 157, pp. 148-156.Oseni, G. and Winters, P., 2009. Rural nonfarm activities and agricultural crop production in Nigeria. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.189–201.Otsuka, K., Liu, Y. and Yamauchi, F., 2013. Factor endowments, wage growth, and changing food self-sufficiency: Evidence from country-level panel data. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 95(5), pp. 1252–1258.Pham, VH, Nguyen, TMH, Kompas, T, Che, TN. and Bui, T., 2015. Rice production, trade and the poor: regional effects of rice export policy on households in Vietnam. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 66(2), pp. 280–307.Pingali, P.L., Xuan, V.T. and Khiem, N.T., 1998. Prospects for sustaining Vietnam’s re-acquired rice export status. Food Policy, 22(4), pp. 345–358.Rozelle, S., Taylor, J.E. and DeBrauw, A., 1999. Migration, remittances, and agricultural productivity in China. American Economic Review, 89(2), pp.287–291.Stampini, M. and Davis, B., 2009. Does non-agricultural labor relax farmers’ credit constraints? Evidence from longitudinal data for Vietnam. Agricultural Economics, 40(2), pp.177–188.Taylor, J.E. and Martin, P.L., 2001. Human capital: migration and rural population change. In G. Rausser & B. Gardner, eds. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, vol 1A. New York: Elsevier Science, pp. 457–511.Taylor, J.E., Rozelle, S. and De Brauw, A., 2003. Migration and incomes in source communities: a new economic of migration perspective from China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(1), pp.75–101.Taylor, J.E. and Lybbert, T., 2015. Essentials of Development Economics, University of California Press, Berkeley.Thirwall, A.P., 2006. Growth and development with special reference to developing economies 8th ed., Palgrave Macmillan, New York.van de Walle, D. and Cratty, D., 2004. Is the emerging non-farm market economy the route out of poverty in Vietnam? Economics of Transition, 12(2), pp.237–274.Warr, P., 2009. Aggregate and sectoral productivity growth in Thailand and Indonesia, Working Papers in Trade and Development, 2009/10, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University.Warr, P., 2014. Food insecurity and its determinants. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 58(4), pp. 519-37.Weiss, C.R., 1996. Exits from a declining sector: econometric evidence from a panel of upper-Austrian farms 1980-1990, Working Paper No. 9601, Department of Economics, University of Linz.Wiggins, S, Kirsten, J. and Llambí, L., 2010. The future of small farms. World Development, 38(10), pp. 1341–48.World Bank, 2006. Vietnam: business, Development Report No 34474-VN, Hanoi, Vietnam.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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