Articoli di riviste sul tema "Intellectual life, Sydney NSW"

Olga Penton died of heart failure at her home in Sydney one evening in 1973. She was found the next morning sitting upright in an armchair, with a plate of cold chicken half-eaten on her lap, a knowing smile on her face, and looking a lot younger than her 76 years. This is an image that captures the cheerful stoicism of her last twenty years of life. Fifty years earlier, another sedentary image captures an earlier self: the image is of Olga sitting naked in a bath, presiding over an intellectual salon of writers and free-thinkers in the Brisbane flat she was sharing with her new husband, Brian Penton. It is hard to be sure whether this second image exactly corresponds to reality — neither of my informants was personally present at any of the bathroom salons, and both reported them as a spicy rumour rather than an observed fact — but whether true or not, we can say that the rumour expresses the ambience of intellectual sophistication and sexual daring that seems to have surrounded her at the time.

In late 1853, a small number of unclaimed boxes containing the worldly possessions of the missing explorer Ludwig Leichhardt were deposited at the Australian Museum, Sydney. An estimated 137 volumes of Leichhardt's books and pamphlets were stored alongside his manuscripts, field notes, seed specimens and scientific instruments. While the manuscripts have proved invaluable to those researching the life and work of Leichhardt, his books have lain forgotten and virtually irretrievable in the collections of the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian Museum Research Library. A significant proportion of the library has now been identified and its contents listed and described for the first time, providing new insight into Leichhard's intellectual background and interests.

AbstractThe broad brush strokes of Dorothy Cottrell's paintings in the National Library of Australia mark her as a modernist artist, although not one who painted the burgeoning Sydney Harbour Bridge or bright still-life paintings of Australian flora. Rather, she captured the dun surrounds of Ularunda Station, the remote Queensland property to which she moved in 1920 after attending art school in Sydney. At Ularunda, Cottrell eloped with the bookkeeper to Dunk Island, where they stayed with nature writer E.J. Banfield, then relocated to Sydney. In 1924 they returned to Ularunda and Cottrell swapped her paintbrush for a pen, writing The Singing Gold. After advice from Mary Gilmore, whom her mother accosted in a pub, Cottrell send it to the Ladies Home Journal in America. It was snapped up immediately, optioned for a film and found a publisher in England, who described it as ‘a great Australian book, and a world book’. Gilmore added, ‘As an advertisement for Australia, it will go far — the Ladies Home Journal is read all over the world’. Cottrell herself also went far, emigrating to America, where she wrote The Silent Reefs, set in the Caribbean. Cottrell's creative, intellectual and physical peregrinations — all undertaken in a wheelchair after she contracted polio at age five — show how the local references the international, and vice versa. Through an analysis of the life and writing of this now little-known Queensland author, this essay reflects the regional and transnational elements of modernism as outlined in Neal Alexander and James Moran's Regional Modernisms, illuminating how a crack-shot with a rifle once took Queensland to the world.

AUSTRALIA’S relatively recent discovery by Europeans and rapid loss of traditional knowledge without documentation means the accumulated knowledge of our natural history is scant compared to other continents (e.g., search for publications on the top-order predators of each continent for confirmation). Yet, as Mike Archer highlights in the Foreword to this book, this natural history information is fundamental for us to develop effective conservation strategies. Instead of focusing on accumulating this information, the competitive nature of academia limits the value of publishing simple natural history studies because of the low impact such studies invariably have (see Paul Adam’s chapter), while conservation managers are too busy to publish their natural history research particularly while they receive such little incentive to do so. The Natural History of Sydney offers a valuable remedy to this problem and Dan Lunney and his Royal Zoological Society of NSW editorial team deliver once again in servicing the intellectual needs of Australian zoologists.

Objective The aims of this study were to estimate the prevalence count of people with intellectual developmental disorders (IDD) in New South Wales (NSW) in 2003, by age groups, and to forecast their prevalence until 2043. Methods Administrative data obtained from NSW government departments of education, pensions, health and disability were used to profile the number of people whose characteristics met the criteria for ‘intellectual developmental disorders’ who had received services in 2003. These figures were compared with published tables of NSW data from the national self-report Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC) of 2003 to estimate the likely prevalence of people with intellectual developmental disorders, by age groups in that year. The results were then used as baseline figures in a computational system dynamics model of the aging chain of people with these disorders, built to project prevalence to 2043. Results The number of people who met the criteria for having intellectual developmental disorder in NSW in 2003 was estimated to be 57000 (a ratio of 85 per 10000), with 32000 aged 0–15 years, 15000 aged 16–39 years, 9000 aged 40–64 years and 1000 aged 65+ years. Using these figures as baseline, the computer simulation predicted a total increase to 77225 people in 2013 and 135905 people by 2043. By 2043, the number of children with intellectual developmental disorders will have doubled, from 32000 to 59480, and the number of adults will have tripled, from 25000 to 76420. Conclusions This modelling technique forecast an increase in the prevalence count of people with intellectual developmental disorders in NSW over the period 2003–43 from 57000 (85 per 10000) to 135905 (135 per 10000). These predictions may have important implications for the planning of specialist health services for this group of people. What is known about the topic? The prevalence ratio of people with intellectual developmental disorders is quoted at lying between 1% and 2% of the Australian population, depending on the definition adopted. It is known that life expectancy for this group of people is increasing. Many people with intellectual developmental disorders have multiple service demands and there is a need to understand the prevalence count in various age groups in order to plan effectively for their health service needs. What does this paper add? This paper confirms a NSW prevalence ratio of people with intellectual developmental disorders of approximately 0.85% for the purposes of specialist health service planning at the beginning of the 21st century, and this is predicted to increase to 1.35% over a 40-year period. The paper demonstrates that there will be significant growth in the number of adults surviving to old age between 2003 and 2043. What are the implications for practitioners? It is known that as people with intellectual developmental disorders age, their health promoting care needs increase, as do their dependencies on special supports. Planning for the allocation of resources associated with the welfare and healthcare of people with intellectual developmental disorders may need to be focused on this anticipated increase in the number of older people with the condition.

Successive cohorts of interns assigned to a Sydney teaching hospital since 1987 were interviewed at the beginning and end of their intern year to document factors influencing career choice and psychological morbidity, with comparisons between the graduates of the three NSW medical faculties. Intellectual challenge and altruism were the two most reported motivating factors in choosing Medicine. Many interns expressed regret at their career choice. Apart from anger, self-reported psychological morbidity during internship was low. Interns' evaluation of the relevance of their undergraduate training declined during internship, except for Newcastle graduates. Increased “hands on” clinical experience during undergraduate years, career guidance, assertive-ness training, and time management skills should be included in the undergraduate curriculum. More registrar teaching, frequent performance feedback, regular grievance sessions and decreased clerical activities contribute to more enriching intern experiences.

Abstract Background Higher inflammation has been identified in a substantial subset of both high-risk and chronically ill patients with schizophrenia and related psychoses and this may account for some of the heterogeneity of the schizophrenia. There is also much heterogeneity in cognitive deficits related to schizophrenia with some patients showing a marked decline from premorbid intellectual levels while others show little change from either normal or low intellect. However, the relationship between intellectual change with the illness onset and inflammation in schizophrenia has not been established. Methods Here, we report the assessment of two common markers of inflammation from two independent samples of generally chronically ill patients with schizophrenia and related psychoses (one sample of 73 patients versus 70 healthy controls from Sydney, NSW, Australia and one sample of 297 patients from Syracuse, NY, USA). Peripheral venous blood samples were collected from all patients and blood markers of inflammation (C-Reactive Protein, CRP, and Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio, NLR) were assayed using standard procedures. Assessment of premorbid and current intellectual abilities were obtained from the Sydney cohort of patients. Results Grouping the patients and controls from the Sydney sample into those with elevated (> 3 mg/L) versus normal (< 3 mg/L) CRP levels revealed 42% of the patients versus 20% of the healthy controls had elevated CRP (Chi Square = 9.16, p = .002) and further evidence of inflammation with an elevated mean NLR of 2.5. The frequency of peripheral inflammation was confirmed by the independent sample from Syracuse in which 39% of the patients (n= 115) had an elevated NLR above a cutoff score for normal of 2.2 which was consistent with the Sydney sample. Patients from the Sydney sample who had an elevated CRP also had a significant mean 15-point IQ decline from premorbid IQ levels, whereas the patients with CRP levels within normal limits did not show a statistically significant drop in IQ from premorbid levels (mean IQ decline 7.6 points). Healthy controls with normal CRP had no IQ change (0.0 points) and healthy controls with elevated CRP has a slight, non-significant IQ decline (mean 2.3 points). Discussion Thus, our study showed supportive evidence of elevated peripheral inflammation markers in subgroups of chronically ill patients with schizophrenia from two independent samples and a link between marked intellectual decline from premorbid levels and current peripheral inflammation in one chronically ill subgroup of patients with schizophrenia suggesting a role for inflammation in the cognitive impairment of a substantial proportion (40%) of patients with schizophrenia.

The opening of 'free and fair trade' in natural gas from 1 July 1996 provides the opportunity to service Sydney and regional NSW energy markets with competitively priced Bass Strait gas.The Eastern Gas Pipeline Project (EGPP), proposed by BHP Petroleum Pty Ltd and a Canadian company, Westcoast Energy Inc, will link Victorian reserves to NSW transmission and distribution systems.The proponents have taken on a major coordination exercise to ensure that project planning, market development, communications, environmental assessment and regulatory approvals are integrated and managed against a demanding project schedule.Exposure to three regulatory jurisdictions has complicated this task.The project requires many approvals including approval under the Commonwealth government's foreign investment policy, pipeline permits and licences under Victorian and NSW Pipelines Acts and requires environmental impact assessment under Commonwealth, Victorian and NSW legislation.Early in the project's life the proponents recognised the need for a strongly coordinated approvals process and have since worked with government assessment and facilitation agencies to achieve a coordinated process. This ground-breaking project is now the subject of one Environmental Impact Assessment process, one process for public review and one coordinated decision-making process to meet the requirements of all three jurisdictions.This paper explores the challenges of coordination and suggests ways of improving future joint assessment and approval processes.

This article uses Frank Moorhouse as a study of the formation of a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s. Moorhouse was a key figure in the Sydney Push, a loose Libertarian-anarchist network of artists, writers, intellectuals and party people who rejected the dominant moral values of the 1950s and 1960s. A journalist, Moorhouse later became a well-known fiction writer who was part of a similarly bohemian and activist milieu centred in Sydney's Balmain. Taking Frank Moorhouse as a case study, I will argue that there is something particular about the way public intellectuals have historically been formed and given voice in Australian life, which is characterised by a permeability between art and writing practices and between academic and activist milieux.

Servicing the largest population centre in Australia, Port Botany is vital to the economic wellbeing of Sydney and New South Wales. The channel entrance is often subject to energetic Pacific Ocean swell, moderate tides and occasionally severe winds. In August 2019, the Port Authority of NSW (PANSW) adopted the NCOS ONLINE system to provide enhanced decision support for under keel clearance management of deep drafted vessels in Port Botany. The technical framework and real-life application of the physics-based operational system NCOS ONLINE is presented in this paper.Recorded Presentation from the vICCE (YouTube Link): https://youtu.be/uPvX_0DNjRo

This study investigated the prevalence of psychological distress among parents in Western Sydney households and examined its relationship with household financial, family and life stressors, and potential resilience factors. As part of a longer-term study, parents from Western Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), completed computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) in May 2011 (N=439). Respondents were primary caregivers of at least one child (aged 4–16). Responses were weighted to reflect the Western Sydney population. Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between parent experiences of stressor and resilience factors and reported psychological distress. Overall, 10.7% (95% CI: 7.8, 14.5) reported experiencing high/very high levels of psychological distress. Multivariate analysis indicated that financial hardship factors formed the strongest associations with psychological distress particularly housing and job security factors and, specifically, inability to meet mortgage/rent payments (OR=5.15, 95% CI: 1.74–15.25, p=0.003), poor self-rated health (OR=4.48, 95% CI: 1.88–10.64, p=0.001), adult job loss (OR=3.77, 95% CI: 1.33–10.66, p=0.013), and other family/life events (OR=2.30, 95% CI: 1.05–5.03, p=0.037). High personal resilience was common within this parent population and was a significant protective factor for high psychological distress (OR=0.14, 95% CI: 0.06–0.34, p<0.001). The findings support the development of targeted interventions to promote parent coping strategies in the context of household financial hardship.

Ticks are haematophagous ectoparasites of medical and veterinary significance due to their excellent vector capacity. Modern sequencing techniques enabled the rapid sequencing of bacterial pathogens and symbionts. This study’s aims were two-fold; to determine the nymph diversity in Sydney, and to determine whether external biotic factors affect the microbiota. Tick DNA was isolated, and the molecular identity was determined for nymphs at the cox1 level. The tick DNA was subjected to high throughput DNA sequencing to determine the bacterial profile and the impact of biotic factors on the microbiota. Four nymph tick species were recovered from Sydney, NSW: Haemaphysalis bancrofti, Ixodes holocyclus, Ixodes trichosuri and Ixodes tasmani. Biotic factors, notably tick species and geography, were found to have a significance influence on the microbiota. The microbial analyses revealed that Sydney ticks display a core microbiota. The dominating endosymbionts among all tick species were Candidatus Midichloria sp. Ixholo1 and Candidatus Midichloria sp. Ixholo2. A novel Candidatus Midichloria sp. OTU_2090 was only found in I. holocyclus ticks (nymph: 96.3%, adult: 75.6%). Candidatus Neoehrlichia australis and Candidatus Neoehrlichia arcana was recovered from I. holocyclus and one I. trichosuri nymph ticks. Borrelia spp. was absent from all ticks. This study has shown that nymph and adult ticks carry different bacteria, and a tick bite in Sydney, Australia will result in different bacterial transfer depending on tick life stage, tick species and geography.

In this paper university life for people with intellectual disability will be described across international boundaries, with a particular emphasis on the model of inclusion at the University of Sydney. How the latter model was developed, researched and implemented will be included in the presentation followed by a critique of positive and challenging outcomes reported by universities that have opened their doors to students with intellectual disability. The student voice and that of lecturing staff will be digitally heard within the presentation exemplifying how unity in diversity has enabled students to self-actualize, through increasing their responsibilities and autonomy as adult learners. In keeping with the philosophy of the Maria Grzegorzewska University it will be argued that inclusion at the higher education level means a “good university for all”. Within the presentation the work of the Inclusive Research Network (IRN) at the Centre for Disability Studies will illustrate how in real life both co-design and co-researching between people with intellectual disabilities and people without can add to the concept of both building unity across diversity and crossing the divide.

As a young anaesthetic trainee in 1959 Ross Holland persuaded the Minister of Health in NSW, Australia, to establish SCIDUA, which by law required compulsory reporting for all deaths occurring during anaesthesia or up to 24 hours after cessation of the anaesthetic. The committee was multidisciplinary and, most importantly, had statutory privilege so that no discussions or findings were able to be subpoenaed for other legal investigations or case law. Holland was the foundation secretary of SCIDUA and later Chair. Apart from three years in the 1980s when there were political issues with legal privilege, the committee has met monthly and still meets. Holland was a major figure in antipodean anaesthesia, setting up in 1978 the clinical department at Westmead Hospital Sydney, then in 1987 becoming the foundation Professor to the Department of Anaesthesiology at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1990 foundation Professor and Chair, Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Holland had strong historical interests and was responsible for founding the Society for the Preservation of Artefacts of Surgery and Medicine (SPASM) and its associated museum. He also served an important term as Dean of the Faculty of Anaesthetists, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons prior to that Faculty becoming independent as the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA). Professor Holland received many accolades for these activities during his life, which are noted. It is fitting to recognise his seminal contributions to patient safety over more than 50 years.

IntroductionOne-third of patients with refractory epilepsy may be candidates for resective surgery, which can lead to positive clinical outcomes if efficiently managed. In Australia, there is currently between a 6-month and 2-year delay for patients who are candidates for respective epilepsy surgery from the point of referral for surgical assessment to the eventual surgical intervention. This is a major challenge for implementation of effective treatment for individuals who could potentially benefit from surgery. This study examines implications of delays following the point of eligibility for surgery, in the assessment and treatment of patients, and the factors causing treatment delays.Methods and analysisMixed methods design: Observations of qualitative consultations, patient and healthcare professional interviews, and health-related quality of life assessments for a group of 10 patients and six healthcare professionals (group 1); quantitative retrospective medical records’ reviews examining longitudinal outcomes for 50 patients assessed for, or undergoing, resective surgery between 2014 and 2016 (group 2); retrospective epidemiological study of all individuals hospitalised with a diagnosis of epilepsy in New South Wales (NSW) in the last 5 years (2012–2016; approximately 11 000 hospitalisations per year, total 55 000), examining health services’ use and treatment for individuals with epilepsy, including refractory surgery outcomes (group 3).Ethics and disseminationEthical approval has been granted by the North Sydney Local Health District Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC/17/HAWKE/22) and the NSW Population & Health Services Research Ethics Committee (HREC/16/CIPHS/1). Results will be disseminated through publications, reports and conference presentations to patients and families, health professionals and researchers.

IntroductionIt is unclear whether advance care planning (ACP) undertaken with patients living in the community can improve patient care and avoid unwanted interventions and hospital admissions. We have designed a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to examine if ACP undertaken with patients with advanced illnesses attending hospital outpatient clinics can reduce unplanned hospital admissions and improve patient and caregiver well-being.Methods and analysisPragmatic RCT involving patients from subspecialty outpatient clinics at five clinical sites in Sydney, Australia. Participants will be ≥18 years screened as potentially having palliative care needs and at risk of dying in 6–12 months. The patients will be randomised to intervention or control group. Intervention group will undertake ACP discussions facilitated by a trained health professional. The control group will receive written information on ACP, representing the current standard of care. The primary outcome is the number of unplanned hospital admissions at the 6-month follow-up. Secondary outcomes include: (i) patient’s health-related quality-of-life and quality of chronic disease care; (ii) caregiver’s health-related quality-of-life and caregiver burden and (iii) other health outcomes including ambulance usage, emergency department presentations, hospital admissions, resuscitation attempts, intensive care unit admissions, deaths, documentation of patient wishes in patient records and audit of ACP discussions and documents. The staff’s self-reported attitudes and knowledge of ACP will also be measured. The data will be collected using self-report questionnaires, hospital records audit, audit of ACP documentation and data linkage analysis. Semistructured interviews and focus group discussions with patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals will explore the acceptability and feasibility of the intervention.Ethics and disseminationApproved by South-East Sydney Local Health District Human Research Ethics Committee and NSW Population and Health Services Research Ethics Committee. Results will be disseminated via conference presentations, journal publications, seminars and invited talks.Trial registration numberACTRN12617000280303.

In the wastewater industry, decision-makers lack access to an environmental tool that can assist in further informing the non-financial analysis of a system. Such a tool should incorporate impacts beyond the effluent quality and look at the supporting processes of a plant as well as plant specific operations. Life Cycle Assessment can provide the means to fill a gap in pertinent information towards more sustainable decision-making. The project “Best Practice LCA in the Wastewater Industry” is commissioned by the CRC for Waste Management and Pollution Control at UNSW with representatives from Sydney Water Corporation(SWC), NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation and the NSW Department of Public Works. Two case studies were researched to provide a post-implementation review of changes in wastewater treatment. Case study 1: The conversion from chlorine gas to hypochlorite and UV disinfection has been completed for several inland wastewater plants at SWC. A review of operational data for each of the options has been incorporated into an LCA of each technology. Under efficient dosing conditions, disinfection with the hypochlorite system has the minimum environmental impact. Case study 2 deals with the conversion from anaerobic to aerobic digestion. Aerobic digestion minimises release of nutrients into a sidestream to be further treated in the plant. However conversion results in more biosolids production and higher electricity requirements. This study includes a consideration of the environmental impacts of biosolids production and application. On the basis of the extended system boundary including consideration of reflux composition, energy requirements and biosolids quality to potentially offset fertiliser production, anaerobic digestion performs best in 6 out of 9 impact categories. These results suggest that environmental LCA has a role in informing decision-making on unit process and treatment train selection by quantifying aspects on non-financial criteria. Also, improvement potentials are foreshadowed but not detailed.

Muslims believe that shari’a is God’s law or a divinely revealed law. In Islamic tradition shari’a covers the physical, intellectual, and spiritual needs of human life and comprises a composite of rules of conduct and forms a source of complete guidance towards the right path – siraat al mustaqeem – for the entire humanity. Islam as a complete way of life demands its adherents to follow and carry out the injunctions of the shari’a in all aspects of life. However, Muslims in Australia are a part of a modern secular nation-state which operates under common law system and its constitution demands a separation of church and state. It is in this context this paper sociologically examines the understanding and application of shari’a in Muslim everyday living. It posits that despite the secular nature of Australian state, Muslims are able to implement shari’a in their everyday-living as it is an essential source of guidance for them and forms the basis of being a “good” Muslim. Muslims don’t demand the constitutionalization of shari’a but a wider recognition of it in Australia as it continues to be important and the foundation of their religion, their mode of existence, and ethico-moral structure.

In the aftermath of the Cronulla riots, schools were faced with the fallout of social conflict, including having to deal with widespread fear and confusion both in their local communities and among students. This was especially the case for schools in the Sutherland Shire and in the local government area (LGA) of Bankstown. Apart from the presence of many young people in the initial riot and the revenge raids, some schools, like churches, had been the target of attacks (Leys and Box, 2005: 1; Daily Telegraph, 2005: 5). Schools were also targeted as places to battle the consequences of cultural division: the then Prime Minister John Howard, in his Australia Day speech just over a month after the riots, complained that the teaching of Australian history in schools needed reform to properly foster the core values that would bind a nation together (Sydney Morning Herald, 2006). At all levels of government, a raft of programs designed to ease local tensions were introduced, many of which focused on young people or on schools (see Board of Studies New South Wales, 2007; Surf Life Saving NSW, 2006). This article outlines the contexts for understanding the role of schools: both in terms of the spatial dynamics of the ‘Shire’ and in terms of the changing nature of educational policy. It then focuses on a National Values Education Project (NVEP) involving five schools in south and south-western Sydney as a direct response to the Cronulla riot. It suggests that these contexts produce both a degree of cultural heterogeneity in young people’s social lives and a degree of segregation amongst young people in schooling which delimits ‘what is possible’ in terms of schooling responses to the Cronulla riot.

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

Background Processed seafood products are not readily identifiable based on physical characteristics, which leaves the industry vulnerable to high levels of product mislabelling (globally estimated at 5–30% mislabelled). This is both a food safety issue and a consumer protection issue as cheaper species could be substituted for more expensive species. DNA barcoding is proving to be a valuable tool for authentication of fish products. We worked with high school students to perform a market survey and subsequent species assessment via DNA barcoding to investigate the accuracy of fish product names used by retailers in Sydney, Australia. Methods Sixty-eight fish samples, sold under 50 different common names, were purchased anonymously from two retailers in Sydney. Each product name was recorded and reconciled with the Australian Fish Names Standard (AFNS). Samples were DNA barcoded and resulting sequences were deposited in the online Barcode of Life Data system using the simplified Student Data Portal interface. Results Forty percent of the fish names did not comply with the AFNS, however, half of these were either spelling errors or vendors supplied more information than the standard requires. The other half of the non-compliant samples were given common names not listed on the AFNS. Despite this lack of standardization, DNA barcode data confirmed the retailers’ identifications for 93% of samples and 90% of species sampled. Discussion The level of mislabelling we report for Sydney retailers (7% of samples or 10% of species) compares favorably with the global rates of 5–30%, but unfavorably with the only previous DNA barcode fish authentication study for Australia, which found no confirmed mislabelling in Hobart. Our study sampled mostly Australian produce, only two retailers and no restaurants. Results of our limited sample suggest that although many Sydney fish retailers attempt to implement the voluntary fish name standards, the standards are inadequate. As Australia imports 75% of its seafood, and in other countries restaurants generally show lower levels of compliance than retailers, broader surveys are needed before generalizing these results. DNA barcoding is a powerful yet simple method supported by accessible online analytical tools. Incorporation of fish barcoding into high school science classes provided students with valuable firsthand experience in scientific research and drew together different strands of the NSW curriculum relating to genetics and sustainability. Given the techniques, equipment, and reagents are now readily accessible, we expect to see greater uptake of DNA barcoding technology by high schools, citizen scientists and consumer groups in Australia in future. However, there remains much scope for further development of DNA barcode diagnostics (both data and analytical methods) for commercial fish species.

Purpose – While ageing with an intellectual (learning) disability has been subject to increased research in recent years, there remains little knowledge regarding the daily practice issues that disability workers struggle most to support in this cohort. The purpose of this paper is to gain feedback directly from staff regarding the problems they experience in daily work, and to evaluate whether any changes to legislation or practice could potentially alleviate identified areas of concern. Design/methodology/approach – A Delphi project was conducted over three rounds with participants from rural areas of New South Wales (NSW). The panel was composed of support workers who assist people ageing with a learning disability. Participants were asked their perceptions of the main practice issues facing them while they provide support. Findings – The panel identified 29 issues that were considered problematic in the provision of support to people ageing with a learning disability. A thematic analysis indicated three main themes of access to services; time constraints; and funding. Research limitations/implications – The participants in this study were all disability workers employed by non-government organisations in rural NSW, and as such, many of the issues identified may be specific to this population cohort and geographic setting. Any generalisation of these results to other locations or populations must be considered within these limitations. Originality/value – Identification of the issues facing disability staff may facilitate government, health care providers and disability organisations to proactively plan to address current and future problem areas. The consequent effect of improving practices can assist individuals to receive better support and lead to a corresponding improvement in their quality of life. The current implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia is an ideal opportunity for cross-sectoral collaboration to change practice to facilitate better support for a highly vulnerable group of the community.

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

ABSTRACTBackground:Years of education is the most commonly used proxy measure of cognitive reserve. Other forms of cognitive stimulation in childhood may provide similar protection against cognitive decline, particularly in Indigenous groups, where education may have been lacking in quality or quantity. The Retrospective Indigenous Childhood Enrichment (RICE) scale was developed to measure non-school-based activities and environmental stimulation during childhood that are likely to have enhanced cognitive reserve. The aim of the study was to assess the validity and reliability of the RICE scale with a group of older Aboriginal Australians.Methods:294 Aboriginal Australian people (60–92 years), living in urban or regional areas of NSW, completed the RICE scale as part of a longer face-to-face interview. Additional data was collected on their formal education, childhood environment, and childhood trauma (Study 1). Test–retest, inter-method and inter-rater reliability were assessed in a convenience sample of a further 38 participants by re-administration of the RICE scale at two time points, approximately 14 days apart (M = 14.11, SD = 6.78) (Study 2).Results:Factor analyses reduced the scale from 21 items to 18 and identified three factors: (1) Traditional, (2) Intellectual, and (3) Community. Higher scores on the RICE scale were related to higher years of formal education and lower scores on a childhood trauma questionnaire. The RICE scale had good internal consistency (Cronbach's α 0.79), and excellent test–retest reliability (ICC = 0.95, 95% CI 0.90–0.97) and inter-rater reliability (0.99, CI 95% 0.997–0.999).Conclusions:The RICE is, to our knowledge, the first standardized measure that assesses the level of childhood environmental stimulation in older Aboriginal Australians. This could provide an important supplementary measure, in addition to formal education, to investigate cognitive reserve and dementia risk in this population and enhance understanding of the links between childhood experiences and late-life cognitive decline.

The philosophy of the idea is one of the most important stages of architectural design. It is based on many sources of inspiration, such as nature, architecture, heritage, tools, languages, intellectual philosophies, civilizations and different cultures among the peoples. During the different stages of history, nature was the most important source of inspiration for design. Art, mathematics, astronomy and various different sciences, and man is still trying to excavate in order to know its inherent secrets and learn from them what is useful in the affairs of his daily life, and architecture is one of the most scientific science of nature and the deduction of nature. The architectural form inspired by abstract nature is one of the most glamorous and attractive forms for the recipient to read its mysterious and surprising design content, and some buildings designed in this way have become a symbol and icon known by these countries, such as the Sydney Opera House. Architecture in the Arab world in general and Yemen in particular, suffer from the scarcity of these unique and inspired models of nature, and in some Arab countries, they are almost finger-shaped. Western architects design them. Some of these models are inspired as transport and Tradition. Which contributes to the dissolution of this architectural style, and makes the designers try to move away from it. For fear of failure resulting from the weakness of the process of inspiration. Because there is no general framework. For how to use architectural abstraction in the inspired design of architectural ideas (and here is the research problem). In order to achieve this objective, the descriptive analytical approach was applied to the process of architectural abstraction and comparative analysis of different projects to produce a general framework for understanding and understanding how abstraction is used in the process of design inspiration of nature. The importance of research lies in the discussion of abstraction in architecture in general and architectural design in particular. In addition, its multiple roles in different design practices to lay the foundations and rules for understanding how abstraction can be used to draw inspiration from nature, for the designer to take advantage of them in the production of designs that meet different human needs. Keywords: Abstraction, Inspiration, Creative thinking, Nature, Shape.

This paper originates from an address at the 8th International Symposium on Nitrogen Fixation with Non-Legumes, Sydney, NSW, December 2000 This paper summarizes a multinational collaborative project to search for natural, intimate associations between rhizobia and rice (Oryza sativa L.), assess their impact on plant growth, and exploit those combinations that can enhance grain yield with less dependence on inputs of nitrogen (N) fertilizer. Diverse, indigenous populations of Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. trifolii (the clover root-nodule endosymbiont) intimately colonize rice roots in the Egyptian Nile delta where this cereal has been rotated successfully with berseem clover (Trifolium alexandrinum L.) since antiquity. Laboratory and greenhouse studies have shown with certain rhizobial strain–rice variety combinations that the association promotes root and shoot growth thereby significantly improving seedling vigour that carries over to significant increases in grain yield at maturity. Three field inoculation trials in the Nile delta indicated that a few strain–variety combinations significantly increased rice grain yield, agronomic fertilizer N-use efficiency and harvest index. The benefits of this association leading to greater production of vegetative and reproductive biomass more likely involve rhizobial modulation of the plant’s root architecture for more efficient acquisition of certain soil nutrients [e.g. N, phosphorus (P), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn), sodium (Na) and molybdenum (Mo)] rather than biological N2 fixation. Inoculation increased total protein quantity per hectare in field-grown grain, thereby increasing its nutritional value without altering the ratios of nutritionally important proteins. Studies using a selected rhizobial strain (E11) indicated that it produced auxin (indoleacetic acid) and gibberellin [tentatively identified as gibberellin (GA 7 )] phytohormones representing two major classes of plant growth regulators. Axenically collected rice root exudate significantly enhanced E11’s production of this auxin. This strain extensively colonized the rice root surface under gnotobiotic culture conditions, producing distributions of spatial patchiness that would favour their localized erosion of the epidermal surface, colonization of small crevices at epidermal junctions as a possible portal to enter into the root, and quorum sensing of diffusible signal molecules indicating that their nearest bacterial neighbours are in close proximity in situ. Studies of selected rhizobial endophytes of rice indicated that they produced cell-bound cellulase and polygalacturonase enzymes that can hydrolyze glycosidic bonds in plant cell walls, and non-trifolitoxin bacteriocin(s) that can inhibit other strains of clover rhizobia. Strain E11 was able to endophytically colonize rice roots of varieties commonly used by Filipino peasant farmers, and also to stimulate genotype-specific growth-promotion of corn (Zea mays, maize) under field conditions. An amalgam of these results indicate some rhizobia have evolved an additional ecological niche enabling them to form a three-component life cycle including a free-living heterotrophic phase in soil, a N2-fixing endosymbiont phase within legume root nodules, and a beneficial growth-promoting endocolonizer phase within cereal roots in the same crop rotation. Our results further indicate the potential opportunity to exploit this newly described, plant�rhizobia association by developing biofertilizer inoculants that may assist low-income farmers in increasing cereal production (especially rice) with less fertilizer N inputs, fully consistent with both sustainable agriculture and environmental safety.

The title of this paper is a little misleading as the adjective “meagre” rather than “rich” better suits the picking over of the life of Josephine Gordon Rich (1866-1940), but the intentional pun would have been lost. She was one of a handful of women of her generation in New Zealand to actively pursue science and deserves due recognition for her zoological achievements, and this is the aim of this paper. Information gleaned about Rich’s activities and interests is incomplete, enigmatic and largely inferred through the activities of her teacher, Professor Thomas Jeffery Parker (1850-1897) in Dunedin, and her husband, Professor William Aitcheson Haswell (1854-1925) in Sydney.

AbstractA number of commentators have recently called for a re-examination of the purpose and value of undergraduate education, arguing that change is required if universities are to deliver the value in educational outcomes that students and communities now require for a changing and challenging world (for example, Aoun, 2017; Bok, 2020; Davidson, 2017; Fischman & Gardner, 2022). Indeed, some have argued that such change is necessary to stem an emerging crisis in universities’ ‘social license to operate’ (Bok, 2020). In this paper, we review the case for undergraduate curriculum change and present a case study of one Australian university’s engagement with this challenge, describing the reasons for change, the desired outcomes, and some early impacts on students’ study patterns. The change took place at the University of Sydney over the period from 2014 to 2021 with a new undergraduate curriculum introduced for commencing students from 2018. Intended to prepare students for a changing world, the new curriculum sought a balance between graduates’ expertise in a primary field of study and a set of broader capabilities that would support their capacity for future learning and for creative and effective engagement in life and career, including an understanding of broader intellectual landscapes; the skills for collaboration, invention, and influence; and the integration of knowledge with professional and personal ethics and values. The aspiration to develop such capabilities is shared with many universities around the world, and we describe here how the available evidence base was used to guide whole-of-University curriculum redesign in this case. We also identify areas where further research would be of value.

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. 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Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.

Stuart Hall was many things: public intellectual, academic leader, writer, editor, teacher, political activist, family man and friend. We write here of the two aspects we knew personally, writer and friend. Like so many of us engaged in the early formation of cultural and media studies, we both read and were seriously influenced by his work. John discussed Stuart Hall’s work extensively in his PhD thesis on Australian literature of the 1890s in international contexts, and Stuart was one of his examiners. Ann read Stuart’s work in the late 1970s, having just arrived to teach in the BA (Communication) degree at what was then the NSW Institute of Technology, ten years later to become University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Along with all the other baggage the British brought with them to Port Jackson in 1788 were laws of ownership that were totally foreign to the original inhabitants. The particular law I'll consider here is that of copyright. The result of a few hundred years of evolution, moulded by the common law and acts of Parliament, copyright protects the intellectual property of writers and artists (Saunders). It has three requirements: originality, material form and identifiable author. However, superimposed on the creative practices of the original inhabitants of Australia, copyright has proved a dismal failure. Its inability to continue its evolution means that it does not serve Indigenous Australians, whose creative practices do not fit neatly within its confines. The notions of 'rights' or 'ownership' inherent in current copyright law do not reflect, and are therefore unable to protect, Indigenous intellectual property. The limits of protection are summed up by Janke et al: '[c]ommercial interests are protected … rather than interests pertaining to cultural integrity … [r]ights are valid for a limited period … whereas under Indigenous laws, they exist in perpetuity. Individual notions of ownership are recognised, rather than the Indigenous concept of communal ownership' (Janke 1997). Practical effects of these limitations are the loss of copyright of stories written down or electronically recorded by outsiders, and the absence of special consideration for, or protection of, secret or sacred material (Janke 1997). Mansell notes that Aboriginal intellectual property rights are poorly protected by current laws be they copyright, patent, plant breeders, design laws or trademarks where 'the creative customs and practices of Aborigines' are different to those of whites, who 'emphasise the individual and provide the mechanisms for the commercialisation of an individual's activity. The traditional base of Aboriginal art forms was not created with this in mind' (Mansell 196). Indigenous cultures have their own systems for the protection of intellectual property which are predicated not on the protection of commercial advantage but on the meaning and cultural integrity of the work of art (Janke 1996 15; 1998a 4). Some of these so-called works of art are, in fact, 'law bearers'; these 'Indigenous traditional cultural productions are … legal titles to clan land' (Morris 6). Ignoring this meaning of cultural productions is a little like your bank manager framing your mortgage document or rental agreement for its aesthetic qualities, and evicting you from your house. While copyright law does acknowledge legally-defined entities like corporations or government departments as copyright holders, it is too limited in its definitions to recognise the complex familial relationships and reciprocal responsibilities of Aboriginal society. Under Indigenous laws 'individuals are differentiated in their awareness of elements of the local culture and in the way they make use of those elements depending on such things as their sex, their moiety or skin group, and their initiatory status' (Johnson 10). Given the complex nature of Indigenous attitudes to rights in and ownership of intellectual property, those concerned with questions of fairness in the administration of copyright law must take a new perspective. While copyright law appears, in the main, to have been unable to deal with a system of law which pre-dates it by thousands of years, there have recently been some tentative steps towards a recognition of Indigenous concerns. Golvan, acknowledging that much work needs to be done 'to ensure that the legal system is meaningful to Aboriginal people', sees some aspects of the judgement in the Carpets Case1 which 'show a strong determination to seek to unite Western copyright principles with the need to deal with issues of indigenous cultural harm' (Golvan 10). And, in Foster v Mountford 1976 (discussed below), Justice Muirhead noted that 'revelation of the secrets [contained in the offending book] … may undermine the social and religious stability of [the] hard-pressed community' (quoted in McDonald 24). These examples show some willingness on the part of the courts to take into account matters which fall outside of common law. While there has as yet been very little litigation regarding copyright ownership of written works, there is no reason to assume that this situation will continue. The first case of infringement of Aboriginal copyright to surface in the media occurred in 1966, when David Malangi's painting 'The Hunter' was adapted without permission as part of the design for the new one-dollar note (Johnson 13). Ten years later, the Pitjantjatjara Council was involved in litigation with Dr Mountford, 'an anthropologist who had been given information by the Pitjantjatjara people … in 1940 … about tribal sites and objects, communal legends, secrets, paintings, engravings, drawings and totemic geography' (McDonald 23). Interestingly, this particular case relied not on copyright law but on a breach of confidence as 'the material … was not protected by copyright, being material in which copyright either did not subsist, or in which copyright had expired' (23). This is a good example of the lack of protection afforded by copyright law to intellectual property of religious and spiritual significance.2 At first glance, the implications of the 1992 Mabo land rights case for publishing in Australia today might seem remote. However, some of the implications of this historic case hold the potential for a new approach to intellectual property rights which may actually serve the interests of Indigenous artists and writers. The importance to intellectual property rights of the Mabo decision lies in the fact that 'the Court held that … local law remains in place except to the extent that it may be in conflict with British law, and until it is over-ruled by the colonisers' 3 (McDonald 26). This meant that not only the myth of terra nullius was repudiated, but with it any notion that Australia was 'either a wild and lawless place or a legal blank slate. Indigenous customary law … was thereby given both recognition and validity' (26). Gray goes further than this, and states in relation to native title and Aboriginal art: 'the two in fact are quite inseparable if not exactly the same' (Gray 12). This statement strongly emphasises Morris' concerns expressed above, regarding the diminution of authority of 'cultural productions' when they are perceived as merely artistic objects. Pearson, in discussing Mabo, talks of native title as the 'recognition space' 4 between common law and Aboriginal law (Pearson 154). He points out that Aboriginal law exists, is practised is in fact a 'social reality', and adds that 'it is fictitious to assume that Aboriginal law is extinguished where the common law is unable to recognise that law' 5 (155). Recently the Australian Society of Authors (Heiss) prepared two discussion papers and a checklist for non-Indigenous writers who want to write about Indigenous culture. One of the papers, 'Australian Copyright vs Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights', reiterates the point that the Copyright Act 1968 'as it stands is unsuited to protecting Indigenous culture'. It briefly discusses the desirability of the sharing of copyright between the Indigenous storyteller or informant and their non-Indigenous collaborator an issue I will examine in greater depth in my thesis on cross-cultural editing. A problematic practice, shared copyright deals with 'ownership' in a way that satisfies white or western conceptions but may compromise the Indigenous sense of (Indigenous) communal title to the work. The importance of effective copyright law for Indigenous Australians goes beyond the earning of royalties or the commercial 'ownership' of creative work: it refers to the protection of their cultural heritage (Heiss). One solution suggested by Janke is an amendment to 'the Copyright Act to provide moral rights (rights of attribution, no false attribution and cultural integrity)' (in Heiss). Another possible, though longer term solution, may lie in the way common law itself develops. It has evolved over time, albeit slowly, to suit the needs of the particular environment economic, technological, cultural or other in which it has to operate. As Ginsberg remarks in the context of the introduction of moral rights law to two common law countries, the US and Australia, regarding the gradual adoption of moral rights: 'a Common Law approach to moral rights … slowly builds up to the general principle from gritty examples worked out fact-by-fact. This accretion method is familiar to both our countries' legal approaches' (Ginsberg 34). This same accretion method could be used to change copyright law so that it more adequately protects Indigenous intellectual property. Whatever solution is reached, at present the copyright laws are colour-blind when presented with the complex and alien nature of Indigenous cultural practice. In the interests of reconciliation, natural justice and the integrity of Indigenous culture, reform cannot come too soon. NOTES 1. Milpurrurru v Indofurn Pty Ltd, 1995; an Australian company copied and adapted various Indigenous works of art and had them woven into carpets in Vietnam, and imported into Australia. Permission to use the designs was never sought. An award of almost $200,000 was made to the 8 artists involved, and the offending carpets were withdrawn from sale. By 1996, Indofurn had been wound up and the director declared bankrupt: the artists have not received a cent. (Janke 1998b 9). 2. Fortunately for the Pitjantjatjara elders, the court held that Mountford's book did constitute a breach of confidence. 3. 'The Court held that the rights of Indigenous inhabitants of a colony are the same as the rights of a conquered nation: local law remains in place except to the extent that it may be in conflict with British law, and until it is over-ruled by the colonisers' (McDonald 26). 4. 'Native title is therefore the space between the two systems, where there is recognition. Native title is, for want of a better formulation the recognition space between the common law and the Aboriginal law which now afforded recognition in particular circumstances' (Pearson 154). 5. However, some cases subsequent to Mabo place limitations upon the recognition of Indigenous traditional law. Justice Mason in Coe v Commonwealth of Australia (1993, at 115) stated that 'Mabo … is at odds with the notion … that [Indigenous Australians] are entitled to any rights and interest other than those created or recognised by the law of the Commonwealth, the [relevant] State… and the common law' (McDonald 2627). References Coe v Commonwealth of Australia (1993) 68 ALJR 110 Ginsberg, J. (1992). Moral Rights in a Common Law System. Moral Rights in a Copyright System. P. Anderson and D. Saunders. Brisbane, Qld: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University. Golvan, C. (1996). 'Aboriginal Art and Copyright.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 512. Gray, S. (1996). 'Black Enough? Urban and non-traditional Aboriginal art and proposed legislative protection for Aboriginal art.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 29-44 Heiss, A. (2001). Australian Copyright vs Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights, Australian Society of Authors. < http://www.asauthors.org/resources> Accessed 15.08.01. Janke, T. (1996). 'Protecting Australian indigenous arts and cultural expression.' Culture and Policy 7(3): 1327. Janke, T. (1998a). Editorial. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 45. Janke, T. (1998b). Federal Court awards record damages to Aboriginal artists. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 89. Janke, T., Frankel, M. & Company, Solicitors (1997). Proposals For The Recognition and Protection of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, AIATSIS for the Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Project. <http://www.icip.lawnet.com.au/> Accessed 25.4.98. Johnson, V. (1996). Copyrites: Aboriginal art in the age of reproductive technologies. Sydney, NSW: NIAAA & Macquarie University. Mansell, M. (1997). Barricading our last frontier Aboriginal cultural and intellectual propery rights. Our land is Our Life: Land rights past, present and future. G. Yunupingu. St Lucia, Qld, UQP: 195209. Milpurrurru v Indofurn Pty Ltd (1995) 30 IPR 209. Morris, C. (1998). The Responsibility of Maintaining the Oldest Continuous Culture in the World. Queensland Community Arts Network News 1: 67. Pearson, N. (1997). The Concept of Native Title at Common Law. Our Land is Our Life: Land rights past, present and future. G. Yunupingu. St Lucia, Qld, UQP: 150162. Saunders, D. (1992). Early Modern Law of Copyright in England: Statutes, courts and book cultures. Authorship and Copyright. D. Saunders. London, Routledge: 3574. Links http://www.icip.lawnet.com.au/ http://www.asauthors.org/resources Citation reference for this article MLA Style McDonnell, Margaret. "The Colour of Copyright" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php>. Chicago Style McDonnell, Margaret, "The Colour of Copyright" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style McDonnell, Margaret. (2002) The Colour of Copyright. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/copyright.php> ([your date of access]).

‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

The elaborate cross-media spectacle, ‘Australian Idol,’ ostensibly lays bare the process of creating a pop star. Yet with so much made visible, much is rendered opaque. Specifically, ‘Idol’ is defined by the use of carefully-tuned strategies of publicity and promotion that create, shape and reshape a series of ‘authentic celebrities’ – pop stars whose emergence is sanctified through a seemingly open process of public ratification. Yet, Idol’s main actor is the music industry itself which uses contestants as vehicles for crafting intimate, long-term relationships with consumers. Through an analysis of the process through which various contestants in ‘Australian Idol’ are promoted and sold, it becomes clear that these populist icons are emblematic of an industry reinventing itself in a media environment that presents remarkable challenges and surprising opportunities. Curiously, the debates, strategies and motivations of the public relations industry have received little sustained attention in popular music studies. While much has been written about the contradictions between the rhetoric of rebellion and the complicated realities of corporate success (Frank; Negus), less has been written about the evolution of specific kinds of publicity and the strategies that shape their use in the music industry. This is surprising given the foundational role of public relations strategies within the culture industries generally and the music industry in particular. Specifically, what Turner et. al. define as ‘the promotional culture’ is central to the production and marketing of mainstream popular music. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon offers a rich opportunity to examine how the mainstream of the popular music industry uses distinct and novel marketing strategies in the face of declining sales of compact discs, an advertising environment that is extraordinarily crowded with all manner of competing messages, a steady rate of trade in digital song files and ever more effective competition from video games and DVDs. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon has proved to be a bundle of highly successful strategies for making money from popular music. Selling CDs seems to be almost ancillary to the phenomenon, acting as only one profit centre among many. Indeed, we can track the progress and deployment of specific strategies for shaping the creation of what has become a series of musical celebrities from the start of the first series of ‘Australian Idol’ through a continuous process of strategic publicity. The Attention Economy It has been somewhat hysterically estimated that the average resident of Sydney might be presented with around 3000 commercial messages a day (Lee). It is this kind of communication environment that makes account planners go weak in the knees in both paralysing anxiety and genuine excitement. Many have taken to paying people to go to bars, cafes and clubs to talk up the relative merits of a product to complete strangers in the guise of casual conversation. Similarly, commercial buskers have recently appeared on City Trains to proclaim the virtues of the wares they’ve been contracted to hawk. One can imagine ‘Cockles and Mussels’ has been updated as ‘MP3 Players and Really Cool Footwear.’ These phenomena are variously referred to as ‘viral,’ ‘tipping point,’ ‘word of mouth’ or ‘whisper’ marketing. (Gladwell; Godin; Henry; Lee; Rosen) Regardless of what you call it, the problem inspiring these promotional chats and arias is the same: advertisers can no longer count on getting and holding our attention. As Davenport and Beck, Brody and even Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon have noted, the more taxed public attention gets, the more valuable it becomes. By most industry accounts, the attention economy is an established reality. It represents a significant shift of emphasis away from traditional methods of reaching consumers, instead inspiring new thinking about how to create lasting, flexible and evolving relationships with target audiences. The attention economy is a complicated and often contradictory response to a media environment that appears less and less reliable and to consumers who behaviour is often poorly understood, even mysterious (Elliott and Jankel-Elliott). This challenging backdrop, however, is only the beginning for a seemingly beleaguered music industry. Wherever one looks, from the rise of the very real threat of global piracy to the expansion of the video game industry to mobile phones and hand held players to increasing amounts of money spent on DVDs and ring tones, selling CDs has become almost a sideline. The main event is the profitable use and reuse of the industry’s vast stores of intellectual property through all manner of media, most which didn’t exist ten years ago. Indeed, the ‘Idol’ phenomenon shows us how the music industry has been incorporating its jealously-guarded intellectual property and familiar modes of industrial self-presentation into existing media environments to build long-term relationships with consumers through television, radio, DVDs, CDs, the internet and mobile phones. Further, ‘Idol’s’ producers have supplemented more traditional models of communication by taking direct and explicit account of how and where audiences use a wide variety of media. The broad range of opportunities to participate in ‘Idol’ is central to its success. It demonstrates a willingness on the part of producers to accept the necessity of bending somewhat to the audience’s existing and evolving uses of the media. In short, they are simply not all that fussy about how participation actually happens so long as it does. Producers allow for many kinds of participation in order to constantly offer more specific and more active levels of involvement. ‘Idol’ has transformed consumer relationships within the music industry by coaxing into being ever more intimate, active and reciprocal relationships over the course of the contest by encouraging increasingly specific acts by consumers to complete a continual series of transactions. The Use and Reuse of Celebrity In many quarters, ‘Australian Idol’ has become a byword for bullshit. The competition seems rigged and the contestants are not seen as ‘real’ musicians in large part because their experience appears to be so transparent and so transparently commercial. As the mythology of the music industry has traditionally had it, deserving pop stars are established as celebrities through what is a more or less a linear progression. Early success is based on a carefully constructed sense of authentic cultural production. Credibility is established through a series of contestable affiliations to ostensibly organic music cultures, earned through artistic development and the hard slog of touring and practice (see Maxwell 118). The fraught possibilities of mainstream success continually beckon to ‘real’ musicians as they either ‘crossover’ or remain independent all the while trying to preserve some elusive measure of public honesty. As this mythology was implicitly unavailable to the producers of ‘Idol,’ a different kind of authenticity had to be constructed. Instead of a ‘battles of the bands’ (read: brands) contest, ‘Idol’ producers chose to present ‘unbranded’ aspirants (“Sydney Audition”). These hopefuls are presented as appealingly ambitious or merely optimistic individuals with varying degrees of talent. Those truly blessed, not only with talent but the drive to work it into saleable shape, would be carefully chosen from the multitude and offered an opportunity to make the most of their inherent yet unformed ability. Thus, their authenticity was assumed to be an implicit, inchoate presence, requiring the guiding hand of insiders to reach full flower. Through the facilitation of competition and direction provided in the form of knowledgeable music industry veterans who never tire of giving stern admonitions to indifferent performers who do not take full advantage of the opportunity presented to them, contestants are asked to prove themselves through an extended period of intense self-presentation and recreation. The lengthy televised, but tightly-edited auditions, complete with extensive commentary and the occasional gnashing of teeth on the part of the panel of experts and rejected contestants, demonstrate to us the earnest intent of those involved. Importantly, the authenticity of those proceeding through the contest is never firmly established, but has to be continually and strategically re-established. Each weighty choice of repertoire, wardrobe and performance style can only break them; each successful performance only raises the stakes. This tense maintenance of status as a deserving celebrity runs in tandem with the increasingly attentive and reciprocal relationship between the producers and the audience. The relationship begins with what has proved to be a compelling first act. Thousands of ‘ordinary’ Australians line up outside venues throughout the country, many sleeping in car parks and on footpaths, practising, singing and performing for the mobile camera crews. We are presented with their youthful vigour in all its varied guises. We cannot help but be convinced of the worth of those who survive such a process. The chosen few who are told with a flourish ‘You’re going to Sydney’ are then faced with what appears to be a daunting challenge, to establish themselves in short order as a performer with ‘the X factor’ (“Australian Idol” 14 July 2004). A fine voice and interesting look must be supplemented with those intangible qualities that result in wide public appeal. Yet these qualities are only made available to the public and the performer because of the contest itself. When the public is eventually asked to participate directly, it is to both produce and ratify exactly these ambiguous attributes. More than this, contestants need our help just to survive. Their celebrity is almost shockingly unstable, more fleeting than its surrounding rhetoric and context might suggest and under constant, expected threat. From round to round, favourites can easily become also rans–wild cards who limp out of one round, but storm through the next. The drama can only be heightened, securing our interest by requiring our input. As any advertiser can tell you, an effective campaign must end in action on our part. Through text message and phone voting as well as extensive ‘fan management’ through internet chat rooms and bulletin boards (see Stahl 228; http://au.messages.yahoo.com/australianidol/), our channelled ‘viral’ participation both shapes and completes the meanings of the contest. These active and often inventive relationships (http://au.australianidol.yahoo.com/fancentral/) allow the eventual ‘Idol’ to claim the credibility the means of their success otherwise renders suspect and these activities appear to consummate the relationship. However, the relationship continues well beyond the gala final. In a fascinating re-narration of the first series of ‘Australian Idol,’ Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story aired on the Friday following the final night of the contest. The story of the newly crowned Idol, Guy Sebastian, was presented in an hour long program that showed his home life, his life as a voice teacher in the Adelaide suburbs and his subsequent journey to stardom. The clips depicting his life prior to ‘Idol’ were of ambiguous vintage, cleverly silent on the exact date of production; somehow they were not quite in the past or the future, but floated in some eternal in-between. When his ‘Australian Idol’ experience was chronicled, after the second commercial break, we were allowed to see an intimate portrait of an anxious contestant transformed into ‘Your Australian Idol.’ There could be no doubt of the virtue of Sebastian’s struggles, nor of his well-earned victory. ‘New’ footage began with the sudden sensation reluctantly commenting on other contestants at the original Adelaide cattle call at the prompting of the mobile camera crew and ended with his teary-eyed mother exultant at the final decision as she stood in the front row at the Opera House. Further, not only is the entire run of the first series dramatically recounted in documentary format on the Australian Idol: Greatest Moments DVD, framed by Sebastian’s humble triumph, so are the stories of each member of the Final 12 and the paths they took through the contest. These reiterations serve to reinforce not only Sebastian’s status, but the status of the program itself. They confirm the benevolent success of the industry it so dutifully profiles. We are taken behind the curtain, allowed to see the machinery of stardom grind inevitably to a conclusion, knowing we will be allowed back again when the time is right. Whereas ‘Idol’ is routinely pilloried for its crass commercialism, it remains an unavoidable success. Viewers keep tuning in, advertisers still clamour to sponsor all aspects of the production and the CDs keep selling. Most importantly, the music industry has a showcase for its own operations. The structures of feeling it exists to produce take on a kind of subtle explicitness that ensures their perpetuation. Within an industry faced with threats perceived to be foundational, the creators of ‘Idol’ have produced an audacious and arrogant spectacle. They have made a profitable virtue out of an economic necessity. The expensive and unpredictable process of finding and nurturing new talent has not only been made more reliable, but ‘Idol’ has shown that it can actually turn a profit. The brand of celebrity produced by Idol possesses no mere sheen of populist approval, but embodies that more valuable commodity: popular attention, however reluctant or enthusiastic it may be. References “Australian Idol.” Ten Network, Sydney, 14 July 2004. “Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story.” Ten Network, Sydney, 21 November 2003. Australian Idol: Greatest Moments. Fremantle Media Operations, 2004. Brody, E.W. “The ‘Attention’ Economy.” Public Relations Quarterly 46.3 (2001): 18-21. Davenport, T., and J. Beck. “The Strategy and Structure of Firms in the Attention Economy.” Ivey Business Journal 66.4 (2002): 49–55. Elliott, R., and N. Jankel-Elliott. “Using Ethnography in Strategic Consumer Research.” Qualitative Market Research 6.4 (2003): 215-23. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Henry, Amy. “How Buzz Marketing Works for Teens.” Advertising and Marketing to Children April-June (2003): 3-10. Lee, Julian. “Stealth Marketers Ready to Railroad the Unsuspecting.” Sydney Morning Herald 24-5 July 2004: 3. Maxwell, Ian. “True to the Music: Authenticity, Articulation and Authorship in Sydney Hip-Hop Culture.” Social Semiotics 4.1-2 (1994): 117–37. Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999. Negus, Keith. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Rosen, Emanuel. The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Stahl, Matthew. “A Moment like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy.” Bad Music: Music We Love to Hate. Eds. C. Washburne and M. Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. 212–32. “Sydney Auditions: Conditions of Participation in the Australian Idol Audition.” Australian Idol Website 10 June 2004. http://au.australianidol.com.au>. Turner, G., F. Bonner, and P.D. Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fairchild, Charles. "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>. APA Style Fairchild, C. (Nov. 2004) "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>.

IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

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

This issue’s theme was, in part, spurred into being by Greg Noble’s comments in last year’s newsletter of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia that “cultural studies is crap at affect”. It elicited a bit of argy-bargy although, given the framing, response tended towards: yes, it is; or no, it isn’t. What would it mean to be crap, or conversely good, at affect? It’s been a while now that references to something called affect have littered cult-studs speak. In my own timeline, I remember giving a paper in Glasgow in the early 1990s. Nothing about it remains in my memory except that the Scots didn’t understand what I meant by A-ffect, as my mongrel tongue then pronounced it. At the time, the field was caught up in the media effects paradigm, so perhaps the misunderstanding was that common confusion between effect and affect. Although by and large the media effects school was fairly passionless, in feminist television and film studies, melancholia and other emotional states were important, but they weren’t named as Affect. Affect as an essentially empty term, as yet another contentless term in cultural theory, has been thoroughly skewered by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Their argument is against accounts of feelings that in privileging the cultural cannot adequately comprehend the variety of bodily and physiological responses. Inspired by the clinical psychologist, Silvan Tomkins, in crossing the biological and the cultural, or in their framing, the digital and the analogue, they seek a model that “can differentiate”, outside of the usual reliance on difference. Instead of the on/off, same/other logic so prevalent in cultural theory, they turn to the distinct and differentiating affects that Tomkins names: disgust-contempt; shame-humiliation; distress-anguish; anger-rage; surprise-startlement; enjoyment-joy; interest-excitement. You will recall their pitiless critique of Ann Cvetkovich’s book Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism. If you’ve read them as they sliced in theoretical posturing, you’ll never forget their critique. It was Cvetkovich’s first book. Sedgwick and Frank admit that their tactic was “graceless”. As they explicate, the objective of their critique was “a gestalt strategy of involving readers in a sudden perceptual reorganisation and unexpected self-recognition”. They reason that had they chosen works by more well-known authors, “our strategy would have had no chance of success”. Not knowing the author, and only vaguely aware of the book, I felt a frisson of mixed, but enthusiastic, emotions (surprise, excitement, interest, enjoyment) at lines such as: Perhaps most oddly for a theory of affect, this one has no feelings in it. Affect is treated as a unitary category … There is no theoretical room for any difference between, say, being amused, being disgusted, being ashamed, and being enraged. … It would be plausible to see a variety of twentieth-century theoretical languages as attempts, congruent with this one, to detoxify the excesses of the body, thought, and feeling by reducing the multiple essentialist risks of analog representation to the single, unavowedly essential certainty of one or another on/off switch. (Sedgwick and Frank 27) You would think that their critique would effectively put you off writing about Affect. But that is neither the case for the discipline, nor for that particular author. If writing about Affect without feeling, as an indiscriminate and undiscerning category, is effectively “crap”, what constitutes good, or at least not-crap uses of affect? If “crap” uses of affect amount to yet another nebulous and unsubstantiated entity (you could do a roll call of other such terms from the 1990s: politics, ethics, poetics, posthuman, and so on), why and how should we be interested in affect? Put another way, does an attention to affect extend existing cultural theories, or is it a discrete object of study and analysis? To take the latter, it’s clear that affect, understood as distinct physical and social phenomena, is of intrinsic interest. My recent studies of shame have convinced me that you could spend a productive life investigating how different disciplines conceptualise just this one affect. I barely scratched the surface, but the different approaches of, say, evolutionary biology and psychology, historical and biological anthropology, and bio-sociology offer extraordinarily interesting takes on the experience, expression and constitution of shame. And one thing leads to another. I still haven’t properly read Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression. And I’m now really interested in how one would approach the more positive emotions and affects in a rigorous manner. It’s at the first level – of how affect extends and enriches cultural analysis – that I have the most experience. To take my own work, which goes back to the late 1980s, I’m beginning to see – either in hindsight or because of age – that there has been a consistent search as to how to convey the textures of everyday life. From Sexing the Self through Outside Belongings, Carnal Appetites and to Blush, I’ve scribbled away, constantly worrying at the ineffable, the awesome materiality of discourse and life as we know it. Subjectivity – how to use the self –, sexuality and queer angles, the oblique, the obvious, the ordinary … these are aspects that cannot be properly understood without recourse to the affective ways in which they appear and are recognised, or not, by individuals and social groups. I say this not to vaunt my own work, which has, in any case, been immensely inflected and inspired by the intellectual contexts which I’ve been lucky enough to inhabit. It is, I think, salutary not only for one’s own sense of a trajectory, but also intellectually important to remember that hot topics like Affect do not emerge as precocious brainchildren. Humans have wondered at these aspects of life for a very long time. Another important thing to remember is that they/we have wondered in awe-struck ways. When Affect becomes hot, it becomes untouchable and untouched by that wonder and by a necessary gratitude to the ideas that allow us to think … And write. Writing affect should inspire awe and awe inspires modesty. I’ve experimented with writing shame, arguing that it can provide an ethics of writing that continually makes us viscerally aware of the stakes involved in communicating to readers the importance of ideas. But we could also begin to imagine what writing joy might entail. Clifton Evers writes “stoke” in his work on masculinity and surfing. And years ago, Rosi Braidotti wrote “rage” as a major feminist modus operandi. If there can be no such thing as affectless writing (humans after all cannot not communicate), writing affects must be compelled by a modest acknowledgement of the effects of our critical writing. Modesty directs us to the small things, to the details and nuances that Sedgwick and Frank place within an intellectual project that can distinguish 256,000 shades of gray but also knows that there are real differences between red, and yellow, and blue. Or in Tomkins’ words, “the key to both Science and Art is the union of specificity and generality”, and he adds “is extremely difficult since the individual tends to backslide in one direction or the other”. As Georges Devereux once said, “a realistic science of man can only be created by men most aware of their own humanity when it implement it most completely in their scientific work” (xx). Affect in this sense constitutes an object of inquiry and a way of doing research that demands the abstract and concrete be brought to bear on each other. It also extends cultural theory and analysis by reminding us of our humanity and the tremendous effort it entails to implement it in our work. So let A-ffect rest (in peace), so we can put our energies into motivated analyses of the constitution, the experience, the political, cultural and individual import of many affects. References Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Devereux, Georges. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton and Co, 1967. Evers, Clifton. Becoming-Wave, Becoming-Man. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2005. Evers, Clifton. “Men Who Surf.” Cultural Studies Review 10.1 (2004): 27-41. Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. Trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson. London and New York: Routledge, 2002/1966. Noble, Greg. “What Cultural Studies Is Crap At.” Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Newsletter Oct. 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Tomkins, Silvan, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Probyn, Elspeth. "A-ffect: Let Her RIP." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/13-probyn.php>. APA Style Probyn, E. (Dec. 2005) "A-ffect: Let Her RIP," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/13-probyn.php>.

This article examines the tension between traditional participation in a potently religious state ritual of war remembrance and the injunction to remain at home during a pandemic crisis. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) led to the cancellation of numerous religious gatherings across Australia, with the notable inclusion of the Christian Good Friday services and Jewish Passover celebrations in large groups—the first time these celebrations were universally cancelled. The injunction against gatherings was still in place on Anzac Day, April 25, 2020. As the most significant date in the religious life of “secular” Australia, we examine how the populace was encouraged to participate in this war remembrance ritual without forming into groups. Here, the two authors—scholars based in Katoomba, a city on the Western periphery of Sydney, NSW—share their fieldwork observations of dawn activities that took place in their immediate vicinity. They confront a very particular fieldwork question—how to do fieldwork when there is technically no field, yet there is an intimation that some participants may try to gather despite official expectations? They also consider how prevailing conditions may have created a specific COVID-19-influenced field methodology—one that limited their work on this morning. Overall, despite significant governmental efforts to showcase the “Anzac Spirit” on the day, without the typical ceremonial infrastructure, the rituals of the day had an unusually flat and prosaic feel, which, they argue, may not be fully accounted for by the general negativity and confusion surrounding the pandemic.

IntroductionThe Sydney Opera House is Australia’s, if not the world’s, most recognisable building. It is universally recognised as an architectural icon and as a masterpiece of the built environment, which has captured the imagination of many (Commonwealth of Australia 4). The construction of the Sydney Opera House, between 1959 and 1973, utilised many ground-breaking methods and materials which, together, pushed the boundaries of technical possibilities to the limits of human knowledge at the time (Commonwealth of Australia 36, 45). Typical investigations into the Sydney Opera House focus on its architects, the materials, construction, or the events that occur on its stages. The role of the illumination, in the perception and understanding of Australia’s most famous performing arts centre, is an under-investigated aspect of its construction and its use today (Dwyer Backstage Biography 1; Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 131).This article examines the illumination of the Sydney Opera House from the perspective of light as a construction material, another element that is used to ‘build’ the structure on Bennelong Point. This article examines the illumination from an historical view as Jørn Utzon’s (1918-2008) concepts for the building, including the lighting design intentions, were not all realised as he did not complete the project. The task of finishing this structure was allocated to the architectural cooperative of Hall, Todd & Littlemore who replaced Utzon in 1966. The Danish-born Utzon was appointed in January 1957 having won an international competition, from a field of over 230 entries, to design a national opera house for Sydney. He quickly began the task of resolving his design, transforming the roughly-sketched concepts presented in his competition entry, into detailed drawings that articulated how the opera house would be realised. The iteration of these concepts can be most succinctly identified in Utzon’s formal design reports to the Opera House Committee which are often referred to based on the colour of their cover design. The first report, the ‘red book’ was issued in 1958 with further developments of the architectural and services designs outlined in the ‘yellow book’ which followed in 1962. The last of the original architects’ publications was the Utzon Design Principles (2002) which was created as part of the reengagement process—between the Government of New South Wales and the Sydney Opera House with the original architect—that commenced in 1999.As with many modern buildings (such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church or Adrian D. Smith’ Burj Khalifa), concrete was selected to form the basic structural element of the Sydney Opera House. Working with the, now internationally-renowned, engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners, Utzon designed some of the most significant shapes and finishes that have become synonymous with the site. The concrete elements range from basic blade walls with lustrous finishes to the complex, shape-changing beams that rise from under the monumental stairs and climb to terminate in the southern foyers. Thus, demonstrating the use of concrete as both a structural element and a high quality architectural finish. Another product used throughout the Sydney Opera House is granite. As a hardwearing stone, it is used in a crushed form as part of the precast panels that line the walls and internal flooring and as setts on the forecourt. As with the concrete the use of the same material inside and out blurs the distinction between interior and exterior. The forecourt forms a wide-open plaza before the building rises like a headland as it meets the harbour. The final, and most recognisable element is that of the shell (or roof) tiles. After many years of research Utzon settled on a simple mix of gloss and matt tiles of approximately 120mm square that, carefully arranged, produced a chevron shaped ‘lid’ and results in an effect likened to snow and ice (Commonwealth of Australia 51).These construction elements would all remain invisible if not illuminated by light, natural or artificial. This paper posits that the illumination reinforces the architecture of the structure and extends the architectural and experiential narratives of the Sydney Opera House across time and space. That, light is—like concrete, granite and tiles—a critical component of the Opera House’s build.Building a Narrative with LightIn creating the Sydney Opera House, Utzon set about harnessing natural and artificial illumination that are intrinsic parts of the human condition. Light shapes every facet of our lives from defining working and leisure hours to providing the mechanism for high speed communications and is, therefore, an obvious choice to reinforce the structure of the building and to link the built environment with the natural world that enveloped his creation. Light was to play a major role in the narrative of the Sydney Opera House starting from a patron’s approach to the site.Utzon’s staged approach to a performance at the Sydney Opera House is well documented, from the opening passages of the Descriptive Narrative (Utzon 1-2) to the Lighting Master Plan (Steensen Varming). The role of artificial light in the preparation of the audience extends beyond the simple visibility necessary to navigate the site. Light provides a linking element that guides an audience member along their ‘journey’ through several phases of transformation from the physicality of the city on the forecourt to “another world–a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) in the theatres. Utzon conceived of light as part of the storytelling process, expressing the building’s narrative in a way that allows illumination is to be so much more than signposts to points of activity such as cloaking areas, theatre entries and the like. The lighting was intended to delineate various stages on the ‘journey’ noted above, to reinforce the transition from one world to another such that the combination of light and architecture would provide a series of successive stimuli that would build until the crescendo of the performance itself. This supports the transition of the visitor from the world of the everyday into the narrative of the Sydney Opera House and a world of make believe. Yet, in providing a narrative between these two ‘worlds’ the lighting becomes an anchor—or an element held in suspension – a mediator in the tension between the city at the beginning of the ‘journey’ and the ‘other world’ of the performance at the end. There is a balance to be maintained between illuminating the Sydney Opera House so that it remains prominent in its harbour location, easily read as a distinct sculptural structure on the peninsular separate from, but still an essential part of, the city that lies beyond Circular Quay to the south. Utzon alludes to the challenges of crafting the illumination so that it meets these requirements, noting that the illumination of the broardwalks “must be compatible with the lighting on the approach roads” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 68) while maintaining that “the floodlit building will be the first and last impression for [… an audience] to receive” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). These lighting requirements are also tempered by the desire that the “night time [...] view will be all lights and reflections, [that] stretch all along the harbour for many miles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1) reinforcing the use of light as an anchor that provides both a point of reference and serves as a mediator of the Sydney Opera House’s place within the city.The narrative of the materials and elements that are combined to give the final, physical form its striking sensory presence is also told through light, in particular colour. Or, perhaps more precisely in an illumination sense, the accurate reproduction of colour and by extension accurate presentation of the construction materials used in the creation of the Sydney Opera House. Expression of the ‘truth’ in the materials he used was important for Utzon and the faithful representation of details such as the fine grains in timber and the smooth concrete finishes required careful lighting to enhance these features. When extended to the human occupants of the Sydney Opera House, there is a short, yet very descriptive instruction: the lighting is to give “life to the skin and hair on the human form in much the same way as the light from candles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Thus, the narrative of the materials and their quality was as important as the final structure and those who would occupy it. It is the role of light to build upon the story of the materials to contribute to the overall narrative of the Sydney Opera House.Building an Experience through IlluminationUtzon envisaged that light would do much more than provide illumination or tell the narrative of the materials he had selected – light was also to build a unique architectural experience for a patron. The experience of light was to be subtle; the architecture was to retain a position of centre stage, reinforced by, rather than ever replaced by, the illumination. In this way, concealed lighting was proposed which would be “designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of overall acoustic design” and “installed in carefully selected places based on knowledge gleaned from experimental work” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Through concealing the light source, the architecture did not become cluttered or over powered by a dazzling array of fixtures and fittings that detracted from the audience’s experiences. For instance, to illuminate the monumental steps, Utzon proposed that the fittings would be recessed into the handrails, while the bar and lounge areas would be lit from discreet fittings installed within the plywood ceiling panels (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 16) to create an experience of light that was unified across the site. In addition to the aesthetical improvements gained from the removal of the light sources from the field of view, unwanted glare is also reduced reinforcing the ‘whole’ of the architectural experience.During the time that Utzon was conceptualising the illumination of the Sydney Opera House, the Major Hall (what is now known as the Concert Hall) was envisaged as what might be considered as a modern multipurpose venue, one that could accommodate among other activities: symphonic concerts; opera; ballet and dance; choral concerts; pageants and mass meetings (NSW Department of Local Government 24). The Concert Hall was the terminus for the ‘journey’—where the actors and audience find themselves in the same space, the ‘other world’—“a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2). This other world was to sumptuously explode with rich colours “which uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre, a play, an opera or a concert” (Utzon Utzon Design Principles 34). These highly decorated and colourful finishes contrast with the white shells further highlighting the ‘journey’ that has taken place. Utzon proposed to use the illumination to reinforce this distance and provide the link between the natural colours of the raw materials used outside the theatre and highly decorated colours of the performance spaces.The lighting treatment of the theatres extended into the foyers and their public amenities to ensure that the lighting design contributed to the overall enhancement of a patron’s visit and delivered the experience of the ‘journey’ that was envisaged by Utzon (Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 130-32). This standardised approach was in concert with Utzon’s architectural philosophy where repetitive systems of construction elements were utilised, for instance, in the construction of the shells. Utzon clearly articulated this approach in The Descriptive Narrative, noting that “standard light fittings will be chosen […] to suit each location” (67), however the standardisation would not compromise other considerations of the space such as the acoustical performance, with Utzon noting that the “fittings for auditoria and rehearsal rooms must be of necessity, designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of over acoustic design” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Another parallel between the architectural development of the Sydney Opera House and Utzon’s approach to the lighting concepts was, uncommon at the time, his preference for prototyping and experimentation with lighting effects and various fittings (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). A sharp contrast to the usual practices of the day which relied upon more straightforward procurement processes with generic rather than tailored solutions. Peter Hall, of Hall, Todd & Littlemore, discussed the typical method of lighting design which was prevalent during the construction of the Sydney Opera House, as a method which “amounted to the electrical engineers laying out on a plan sufficient off-the-shelf light fittings to achieve the desired illumination levels […] the resulting effects were dull even if brightly lit” (Hall 180). Thus, Utzon’s careful approach to ensure that light and architecture were in harmony as “nothing is introduced into the scheme, before it has been carefully investigated and has proved to be the right solution to the problem” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) was highly innovative for its time.The use of light to provide an experience was not necessarily new, for example RSL Clubs, theme parks and department stores all used light to attract attention to their products and services, however the scale and proposed execution of these concepts was pioneering for Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Utzon’s concepts provided a highly experiential unified design to provide the patron with a unique architectural experience built through the careful use of light.Building the Scenery with LightArchitecture might be considered set design on a grand scale (for example see Raban, Rasmuseen and Read). Both architects and set designers are concerned with the relationship between the creative designs and the viewers and both set up opportunities for interactions between people (as actors or users) and structure. However, without light, the scene remains literally, in the dark, isolated from its surroundings and unperceetable to an audience.Utzon was acutely aware of the relationship between the Sydney Opera House and the city in which it stands. The positioning of the structure on the site is no accident and the interplay between the ‘sails’ and the sun is perhaps the most recognised lighting feature of the Sydney Opera House. By varying the angle of the shells, the reflections and the effects of the sunlight are constantly varying depending on the viewer’s position and focus. More importantly, these subtle variations in the light enhance the sculptural effect of the direct illumination and help create the effect of “matt snow and shining ice” (Commonwealth of Australia 51): the ‘shimmer of life’ so desired by Utzon as the sunlight strikes the ceramic tiles. This ‘shimmer’ is not the only natural lighting effect. The use of the different angles ensures variation in the light, clouds and resulting shadows to heighten interest and create an ever-changing scene that plays out on the shells as the sun moves across the sky, as Utzon notes, “something new goes on all the time and it is so important–this interplay is so important that together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes it a living thing” (Utzon Sydney Opera House 49). This scene is enhanced by the changing quality of the sunlight; the shells appear to be deep amber at first light their shadows long and faint before becoming shorter and stronger as the sun moves towards its midday position with the colour changing slowly to ‘pure’ white before the shadows change sides, the process reverses and they again disappear under the cover of darkness. Although the scene replays daily, the relative location of the sun and changing weather patterns ensure infinite variation in the effect.This changing scene, on a grand scale, with light as the central character is just as important as the theatrical performances taking place indoors on the stages. With a mobile audience, the detailing of the visual scene that is the structure becomes more important. The Sydney Opera House competes for attention with shipping movements in the harbour, the adjacent bridge with the ant-like procession of climbers and the activities of the city to the south. Utzon foresaw this noting that the “position on a peninsular, which is overlooked from all angles makes it important to maintain an all-round elevation. There can be no backsides to the building and nothing can be hidden from the view” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). The use of natural light to enhance the sculptural form and reinforce isolation of the structure on the peninsular, centre stage on the harbour is therefore not a coincidence. Utzon has deliberately harnessed the natural light to ensure that the Sydney Opera House is just as vibrant a performer as its surroundings. In this way, Utzon has used light to anchor the Sydney Opera House both in the city it serves and for the performances it houses.It is not just the natural light that is used as such an anchor point. Utzon planned for artificial lighting of the sails and surrounding site to ensure that after dark the ‘shimmer’ of the white tiles would be maintained with an equivalent, if manufactured, effect. For Utzon, the sculptural qualities of structure were important and should be clearly ‘read’ at night, even against a dark harbour on one side and the brighter city on the other. Through the use of artificial lighting, Utzon set the scene on Bennelong Point with the structure clearly centred in the set that is the Sydney skyline. This reinforced the notion that a journey into the Sydney Opera House was something special, a transition from the everyday to the ‘other’ world.ConclusionFor Utzon light was just as essential as concrete and other building materials for the design of the Sydney Opera House. The traditional bright lights of the stage had no place in the architectural illumination, replaced instead by a much more subtle, understated use of light, and indeed its absence. Utzon planned for the lighting to envelope an audience but not to smother them. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete his project and in 1968 J.M. Waldram was eventually appointed to complete the lighting design. Waldram’s lighting solutions—many of which are still in place today—borrowed or significantly drew upon Utzon’s original illumination concepts, thus demonstrating their strength and timeless qualities. In this way light builds on the story of the structure, reinforcing the architecture of the building and extending the narratives of the construction elements used to build the Sydney Opera House.AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the assistance of Rachel Franks for her input on an early draft of this article and thanks the blind peer reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions, of course any remain errors or omissions are my own. ReferencesCommonwealth of Australia. Sydney Opera House Nomination by the Government of Australia for Inscription on the World Heritage List. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2006.Cleaver, Jack. Surface and Textured Finishes for Concrete and Their Impact upon the Environment. Sydney: Steel Reinforcement Institute of Australia, 2005.Dwyer, Simon. A Backstage Biography of the Sydney Opera House. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2016: 1-10.———. “Utzon’s Use of Light to Influence the Audience’s Perception of the Sydney Opera House”. Inhabiting the Meta Visual: Contemporary Performance Themes. Eds. Helene Gee Markstein and Arthur Maria Steijn. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary P, 2016.Hall, Peter. Sydney Opera House: The Design Approach to the Building with Recommendations on Its Conservation. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1990.NSW Department of Local Government. An International Competition for a National Opera House at Bennelong Point Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: Conditions and Program (“The ‘Brown’ Book”). Sydney: NSW Government Printer, 1957.Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: Picador, 2008.Rasmuseen, Steen. Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1964.Read, Gary. “Theater of Public Space: Architectural Experimentation in the Théâtre de l'Espace (Theater of Space), Paris 1937.” Journal of Architectural Education 58.4 (2005): 53-62.Steensen Varming. Lighting Master Plan. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2007.Utzon, Jørn. Sydney Opera House: The Descriptive Narrative. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1965.———. The Sydney Opera House. Zodiac, 1965. 48-93.———. Untitled. (The ‘Red’ Book). Unpublished, 1958.———. Untitled. (The ‘Yellow’ Book). Unpublished, 1962.———. Utzon Design Principles. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2002.

It seems not insignificant that the cult film Donnie Darko is set in the final stages of the Bush-Dukakis election campaign, which had the twin effects of inaugurating the Bush presidential dynasty and making “liberal” an insurmountably derogatory term in American politics. Donnie’s gift of seeing into the future is, at least superficially, a reaction to his medication for “emotional problems”. But the count-down to his apocalyptic date with a giant bunny-rabbit also coincides with the demise of any remaining hope for a certain kind of progressive Left politics. With the options for escaping a conservative small town life fast disappearing, an impenetrable theory of time-travel appears to offer a plausible reprieve from Donnie’s destiny. As we learn very early in the movie, however, even time-travel cannot offer salvation: Donnie, like a particular idea of America, is doomed. Strangely representative of cultural studies’ theoretical preoccupations, Donnie’s character is unavoidably implicated in an omnipresent therapeutic culture while also demonstrating good taste in 80s music, an attraction to mischief and a fitful enthusiasm for saving the world. In the context of this editorial, the film acts as a useful retrospective archive of the moment when “affect” came to wide attention as the key site for politics in the United States. Donnie Darko documents the rise and spectacular fall of Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), a charismatic motivational speaker and incidental kiddy-porn ringleader who makes a fortune with his book, Attitudinal Beliefs. Cunningham’s converts find liberation by freeing themselves from their own fears, for according to his paradigm, there are only two features of the “energy spectrum”: fear and love. The trick to a successful life – and good grades – is to choose the “Right-eous” path of the latter (Gregg and Fuller). But as the film develops, the audience slowly comes to realise that no one will avoid the truly terrifying fate that is Grandma Death’s secret: everyone dies alone. Donnie Darko encapsulates the overwhelming nature of adolescent angst which gravitates between the “indifference of terror and boredom” and which Lawrence Grossberg has claimed to be “the most powerful and pervasive affective relations in everyday life” (184). Donnie and his peers aren’t just subject to the petty tyrannies of high-school; the film’s plot allegorises a much wider cultural shift. As Grossberg argued extensively throughout the 1990s, the strategy of new conservatives has been to conduct a political agenda at the level of affect, or what today we might recognise as “the battle for hearts and minds”. It succeeds by colonising the very mood, imagination and hope of a citizenry. When Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) is fired as English teacher at Donnie’s school – the result of a moral values campaign against a prescribed textbook – she says of the students: “We are losing them to apathy. They are slipping away”. Karen conveys despair and anger at this prospect, only to be met with the headmaster’s rebuke: “I am sorry that you have failed”. Here the apparently naïve optimism of a brilliant teacher is subject to the same indignant script her students face: individualised torment for a structurally ingrained lack of hope. Grossberg has consistently urged that cultural studies intellectuals recognise scenarios like these as the perniciously mundane locations where the fight for the future is waged: When the very possibility of political struggle is being erased – not because the scene of politics (or the public sphere) has disappeared in some postmodern apocalypse, but because there is an active attempt to use popular discourses to restructure the possibilities of everyday life – the political intellectual has no choice but to enter into the struggle over affect in order to articulate new ways of caring. (23) This issue of M/C Journal reveals some of the many ways this objective continues to be thwarted in the current political climate and in contexts which veer to varying degrees from the mainstream political situation in the United States. In the lead article for the issue, Shane McGrath makes the point that the politics of compassion are far from straightforward in an era of “compassionate conservatism” but that they are noticeably straight (see also Berlant). One of the most important distinctions he asks us to make is to “recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings”. The essay that follows is a helpful explanation of the theoretical legacies behind “Feeling, Emotion and Affect”. Eric Shouse provides an introduction to the vocabulary that many writers for this issue share and in some cases challenge. “The importance of affect”, Shouse claims, is that “in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message”. This is precisely the difficulty of forming any rational model of political opposition to apparently personable leaders like Bush, or concertedly “ordinary” leaders like John Howard: a diverse population will often interpret a manifest message through a quite different set of unconscious criteria. Anne Aly and Mark Balnaves offer an example of this kind of affective resonance in their article, “The Atmosfear of Terror”. Chilling riots around Sydney’s southern beaches in the week of this issue’s production lend added pertinence to their reading which argues that attitudes towards Muslims in Australia are “less to do with the actual threat of a terrorist attack on Australian soil and more to do with….reprisal for the terrorist attacks” that have already occurred elsewhere. Describing a quite different and highly intimate experience of fear is Lessa Bonniface, Lelia Green and Maurice Swanson’s essay documenting their work developing HeartNET, a Website devoted to discussion amongst heart patients. This collaborative project is part of an Australian Research Council linkage grant and illustrates how cultural theory can be tested and extended in productive partnerships with the wider community. Megan Watkins’s eloquent essay on the affects of classroom practice shares a similar attention to corporeality in the way that it highlights the neglected bodily dimensions of learning and motivation, while Glen Fuller’s “The Getaway” offers a quite different example of the ways that our bodies can surprise us by betraying disciplines we may not have consciously registered. Two further essays by Beth Seaton and Margaret Hair have the specific purpose of drawing attention to affective relations otherwise suppressed in the landscapes around us, reflecting upon the ethics of acknowledging past and present trauma. The issue then embarks on a series of exciting new approaches to popular media, in Anna Gibbs’s article on the hypnotic properties of television, Leanne Downing’s introduction to the politics of “eater-tainment” accompanying block-buster films, and finally, Gregory Seigworth’s affirming reading of indie darling, Sufjan Stevens. In a fitting gesture given the imperatives Grossberg sets out, Seigworth considers the significance of Stevens’ live show in terms of an “affect of corn” that he submits as one humble exercise that might help to “redeem a future for the present”. In the amount of time since the issue’s conception “affect” has moved from being regarded as something that “cultural studies has always been crap at” (Noble) to “the new cutting edge” (Hemmings) while for some it has become “that word I never want to hear again” (Sofoulis). As Elspeth Probyn notes in the contribution that closes the issue, witnessing a cherished theoretical interest become fashionable can be bemusing and disabling – what I hope these essays demonstrate is that fashion need not relinquish usefulness. This issue of M/C Journal involved some tough editorial decisions due to a remarkably high number of submissions. I thank all of the writers who offered work for consideration as well as those who responded so enthusiastically to my invitation. Thanks also to the referees who gave their time and expertise and the correspondents whose patience was doubtlessly tested in the finishing stages. I am particularly indebted to Laura Marshall and Neysa Ellison-Stone for their excellent and speedy copy-editing. Finally, the stunning cover image for this M/C Journal is “Collage” by Jane Simon with stills from Undiegate, a Super-8 film by Marian Prickett and Jane Simon (Melbourne, 2002). Its rich texture, exciting juxtaposition and overriding implication of possibility couldn’t have been more fitting my hopes for this issue. References Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Ed. Lauren Berlant. Essays from the English Institute. London: New York, 2004. Donnie Darko. [motion picture] Directed by R. Kelly, 2001. Gregg, Melissa and Glen Fuller. “Where Is the Law in ‘Unlawful Combatant’? Resisting the Refrain of the Right-eous.” Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 147-59. Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Hemmings, Clare. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19.5 (2005): 548-67. Noble, Greg. “What Cultural Studies Is Crap At.” Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Newsletter October, 2004. Sofoulis, Zoe. Comment at Culture Fix: The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, University of Technology, Sydney, November 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Affect." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Dec. 2005) "Affect," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>.

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.

In Australia, we are more prepared for the year 2000 than many. With regard to the technical difficulties that might be experienced, we have the honour of being the 12th most prepared nation in the event of worst predictions. In addition to the usual effects the impending millennium is wreaking however, Australia is also anticipating the year we will be hosting the Olympic games. The fervour that has seen religious cult members invest in matching pairs of Nike trainers (and coincidentally, buy plane tickets to Australia) has also infected this nation's official image-makers, who have been busy preparing for the definitive moment when the world's television cameras will be pointed at Sydney Harbour, and Australia, by association, will be the subject of international media scrutiny. Since the closing ceremony of the Atlanta-hosted Olympic games in 1996, commentators have expressed the uneasiness that such observation provokes in Australians. The entrance of inflated kangaroos on bikes into the Atlanta Olympic stadium was described by David Marr in the Sydney Morning Herald as "the first in a long line of cringes", and he warned Australians that "we must all understand from now on that embarrassment is part of the Olympic Spirit. It's a key to us surviving the next four difficult years until the torch goes out in Homebush. All of us are going to be embarrassed some of the time by the Olympic image of ourselves". Marr's anxiety is further revealed in his comparison of the inferior display (with the exception of the Bangarra dancers)1 of the "few minutes of the Royal Easter Show" presented by the Australian contingent at the ceremony, with the efforts of the representatives of the United States of America, who are described as "some of the greatest stars in the West". Marr is convinced of his assessment of Australia's lesser cultural talent, noting that not only did the Atlanta audience seem puzzled by the display of Australian culture before they were able to recognise "the profile of the Opera House", but also that the transmission of the event via a "bank of [television] sets in David Jones's window" failed to elicit much of a response from those who watched, and was unable to distract those who didn't watch away from their involvement in shopping, working or driving. Marr's generally pessimistic assessment of Australia's artistic and cultural merits is not one that is obviously shared by the organisers of the four Olympic arts festivals that are being held leading up to the Sydney 2000 games. From the 1997 "Festival of the Dreaming" through to 1998's "A Sea Change", this year's "Reaching the World", and next year's finale "Harbour of Light", the rhetoric has focused on showcasing "a strong vision of Australian culture" (Cochrane). It would appear Marr's advice, that Australians resign ourselves to a painful four year cringe festival, is at odds with the enthusiasm being invested in creating those images by the directors of the respective festivals. There are, however, more similarities in these apparently different visions of Australia than are immediately apparent. In National Fictions, Graeme Turner identifies a dominant tradition in the construction of Australian narratives which dates from the nationalist pastoral ideals of the 1890's. Turner explores how in fiction, the Australian individual has been formed through an imagined experience of "exile, divorce and isolation" (60). This experience is closely linked to a view of the land as uncompromising, and brutal in its effects. In contrast to the North American protagonist who sets out to conquer the Western Frontier, the belief of the Australian protagonist is that she, or more likely he, can do nothing to overcome the harshness of the landscape, and therefore must simply endure its effects. This attitude also transfers itself to the relationship the individual has with society. Again, where the North American individual will generally triumph over the constraints of society, and is prized for her or his difference, for the Australian individual difference is problematic; it will ensure she or he is viewed with suspicion and resentment within the narrative. It is only through accepting and conforming to the values of the community that the Australian individual will survive. Turner's thesis is "one that insists on the connection between the individual narratives on the one hand and the culture which produces them on the other". Thus, it is argued that "narrative is an epistemological category, one of the means through which we construct our world" (National Fictions 142). Certainly, it is a narrative of communal embarrassment, frustration and survival that Marr invokes when he urges Australians to accept our exile in all matters cultural. It is also this narrative of cultural frustration and isolation that is informing the Sydney 2000 cultural Olympics. The planning of the Sydney Olympics Arts Festival has drawn on discourses around the occasion the Olympics presents for Australia to clearly establish a cultural identity. This has been contrasted with evidence of the extent to which former Olympic host cities Atlanta and Barcelona were able to assert the extensive credentials of their cultures. Craig Hassall, the general manager of the Sydney Olympic Arts Festivals identifies Barcelona as "the benchmark", arguing that "Barcelona reinforced the cultural fabric of that city by reminding the world of the power of Miró, Gaudi and the Catalan culture" (Cochrane). Hassall's assessment of the Barcelona cultural Olympics recalls Marr's comments about the strength of the American artists in Atlanta. In contrast to the inarguable evidence of the cultural achievements of Spain and the United States, the Australian cultural Olympics is perceived as the moment when we will have the opportunity to present our culture for the first time; we will overcome our cultural exile and take our first steps onto the world's stage. Thus Hassall maintains that "the brief for Sydney is slightly more complicated [than that proposed in Barcelona]. Our task is to establish rather than reinforce, a strong vision of Australian culture" (Cochrane). Although Robert Fitzpatrick, the director of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, is less enthusiastic about the other cities' efforts, claiming "Atlanta botched it [and] Barcelona did only slightly better", he nevertheless arrives at similar conclusions to Hassall, suggesting that "this is an occasion for Australia's arts mitzvah" (Hallet). Turner offers an explanation for this connection between the Australian experience of exile and shows how it engenders a response to constantly establish and re-establish a particularly Australian identity when he argues: if the myth of exile proposes that life does not go on here as it does elsewhere, and if there is an intuition of a society beyond these shores in which the 'norm' resides, then 'universal' philosophical solutions to the problems of existence within the society may not be convincing. Our fictions characteristically address not only the modern, 'universal', problem of meaning that has its own archaeology within world literature, but also specifically Australian physical and metaphysical problems. Metaphysically, Australia becomes a special case, since existence here is defined as being Australian as well as human. As victims of cosmic xenophobia, we are still bailed up by the problem of being Australian as well as by (the usual) problems of inventing or discovering meaning. Far from being an indication of cultural immaturity, or the failure of our writers' and film-makers' attempts to articulate a national identity, this is in fact a defining feature of the portrait of the individual as protagonist in Australian narrative. (National Fictions 80-1) The narrative trajectory of the four festivals bears out this dominant Australian characteristic of defining our identity through exile. While Andrea Stretton, the artistic director of "A Sea Change" and "Reaching the World" applies the analogy of a concerto to the arrangement of the Olympic arts festivals -- "beginning and ending with a bang, with a change of pace in the middle" (Morgan) -- it is also possible to locate in their narrative a shift between an assertion of cultural identity, using specific notions of indigenous identity in "Festival of the Dreaming", and multi-cultural identity in "A Sea Change", towards an ever-present awareness of separation from the rest of the world, so that the third festival is entitled "Reaching the World" and the final festival anticipates sending out a beacon, a "Harbour of Light", beckoning the world to join us in the year 2000. Although the distinction between the assertion of identity and the frustrated feeling of exile are not quite so clearly distinguished in terms of their relationship to a particular festival in the manner that I have described (they are both in operation to varying degrees in all the festivals), it is from a culture that understands itself to be in permanent exile that the narratives being employed by the organisers of the cultural Olympics are derived. So, rather than orchestrating our debut onto the world's stage, it might be argued that the role of the Olympic arts festivals is one of co-ordinating participation in our favourite national pastime: inventing Australia, again. Footnote Marr notes, "Bangarra held the night together. As they were leaving there was a moment that was exactly as the world should see us -- the dancers throwing handfuls of dust in the Atlanta air. Thank God for their dignity and sense of themselves". In making the exception of the Bangarra dancers Marr resorts to a notion of indigeneity as authentic and fixed. However good the intention, the use of this concept of indigenous identity is highly problematic. Graeme Turner has observed the spectacle of the contrast between the way indigenous Australians participated in the Brisbane-hosted 1982 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, and the demonstration that took place outside the stadium. He suggests that if Australians are to avoid a repeat of this scenario at the Sydney 2000 Olympics "we will need to find other ways of representing the nation" (Making It National 144). In Marr's article, at least, there is little evidence, two years on from Turner's comments, of moving beyond the 'noble savage' representation of indigeneity. Further study of the participation and representations of Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in the Olympics Arts Festivals and the Olympics will be required before deciding whether other ways of representing Australia are being articulated for the occasion Sydney 2000. References Cochrane, Peter. "Here's Looking at You, White Australia." Sydney Morning Herald 24 June 1997: 15. Hallet, Bryce. "Sydney 'Must Take Risks'." Sydney Morning Herald 25 June 1998: 15. Marr, David. "The First in a Long Line of Cringes." Sydney Morning Herald 6 Aug. 1996: 2. Morgan, Joyce. "A Change of Pace." Sydney Morning Herald 1 May 1998: 19. Turner, Graeme. Making It National: Nationalism and Australian Popular Culture. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. 2nd ed. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Kirsty Leishman. "'And the Winner Is Fiction': Inventing Australia, Again, for the Sydney Y2K Olympics." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/sydney.php>. Chicago style: Kirsty Leishman, "'And the Winner Is Fiction': Inventing Australia, Again, for the Sydney Y2K Olympics," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/sydney.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Kirsty Leishman. (1999) 'And the winner is fiction': inventing Australia, again, for the Sydney y2k Olympics. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/sydney.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract Background Spinal cord injury (SCI) is associated with autonomic imbalance and significant secondary conditions, including cardiac and brain dysfunction that adversely impact health and wellbeing. This study will investigate the effectiveness (intention-to-treat) of a neuro-cardiac self-regulation therapy to improve autonomic and neural/brain activity in adults with SCI living in the community. Methods A two-arm parallel, randomised controlled trial in which adults with SCI living in the community post-rehabilitation will be randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. The treatment group (N = 60) aged 18–70 years with a chronic traumatic or non-traumatic SCI, will receive intervention sessions once per week for 10 weeks, designed to regulate autonomic activity using computer-based feedback of heart rate variability and controlled breathing (called HRV-F). Comprehensive neurophysiological and psychological assessment will occur at baseline, immediate post-treatment, and 6 and 12-months post-treatment. Primary outcome measures include electrocardiography/heart rate variability (to assess autonomic nervous system function) and transcranial doppler sonography (to assess cerebral blood circulation in basal cerebral arteries). Secondary outcomes measures include continuous blood pressure, electroencephalography, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, respiration/breath rate, electrooculography, cognitive capacity, psychological status, pain, fatigue, sleep and quality of life. Controls (N = 60) will receive usual community care, reading material and a brief telephone call once per week for 10 weeks and be similarly assessed over the same time period as the HRV-F group. Linear mixed model analysis with repeated measures will determine effectiveness of HRV-F and latent class mixture modelling used to determine trajectories for primary and selected secondary outcomes of interest. Discussion Treatments for improving autonomic function after SCI are limited. It is therefore important to establish whether a neuro-cardiac self-regulation therapy can result in improved autonomic functioning post-SCI, as well as whether HRV-F is associated with better outcomes for secondary conditions such as cardiovascular health, cognitive capacity and mental health. Trial registration The study has been prospectively registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry (ACTRN12621000870853.aspx). Date of Registration: 6th July 2021. Trial Sponsor: The University of Sydney, NSW 2006. Protocol version: 22/07/2021.

My message is this in regard to SMS messages and swarming crowds; this is ludicrous behaviour; it is unAustralian. We all share this wonderful country. (NSW Police Assistant Commissioners Mark Goodwin, quoted in Kennedy) The cops hate and fear the swarming packs of Lebanese who respond when some of their numbers are confronted, mobilising quickly via mobile phones and showing open contempt for Australian law. All this is the real world, as distinct from the world preferred by ideological academics who talk about “moral panic” and the oppression of Muslims. They will see only Australian racism as the problem. (Sheehan) The Politics of Transmission On 11 December 2005, as Sydney was settling into early summer haze, there was a race riot on the popular Cronulla beach in the city’s southern suburbs. Hundreds of people, young men especially, gathered for a weekend protest. Their target and pretext were visitors from the culturally diverse suburbs to the west, and the need to defend their women and beaches in the face of such unwelcome incursions and behaviours. In the ensuing days, there were violent raids and assaults criss-crossing back and forth across Sydney’s beaches and suburbs, involving almost farcical yet deadly earnest efforts to identify, respectively, people of “anglo” or “Middle Eastern” appearance (often specifically “Lebanese”) and to threaten or bash them. At the very heart of this state of siege and the fear, outrage, and sadness that gripped those living in Sydney were the politics of transmission. The spark that set off this conflagration was widely believed to have been caused by the transmission of racist and violent “calls to arms” via mobile text messages. Predictably perhaps media outlets sought out experts on text messaging and cell phone culture for commentary, including myself and most mainstream media appeared interested in portraying a fascination for texting and reinforcing its pivotal role in the riots. In participating in media interviews, I found myself torn between wishing to attest to the significance and importance of cell phone culture and texting, on the one hand (or thumb perhaps), while being extremely sceptical about its alleged power in shaping these unfolding events, on the other — not to mention being disturbed about the ethical implications of what had unfolded. In this article, I wish to discuss the subject of transmission and the power of mobile texting culture, something that attracted much attention elsewhere — and to which the Sydney riots offer a fascinating and instructive lesson. My argument runs like this. Mobile phone culture, especially texting, has emerged over the past decade, and has played a central role in communicative and cultural practice in many countries and contexts as scholars have shown (Glotz and Bertschi; Harper, Palen and Taylor). Among other features, texting often plays a significant, if not decisive, role in co-ordinated as well as spontaneous social and political organization and networks, if not, on occasion, in revolution. However, it is important not to over-play the role, significance and force of such texting culture in the exercise of power, or the formation of collective action and identities (whether mobs, crowds, masses, movements, or multitudes). I think texting has been figured in such a hyperbolic and technological determinist way, especially, and ironically, through how it has been represented in other media (print, television, radio, and online). The difficulty then is to identify the precise contribution of mobile texting in organized and disorganized social networks, without the antimonies conferred alternatively by dystopian treatments (such as moral panic) or utopian ones (such as the technological sublime) — something which I shall try to elucidate in what follows. On the Beach Again Largely caught unawares and initially slow to respond, the New South Wales state government responded with a massive show of force and repression. 2005 had been marked by the state and Federal enactment of draconian terror laws. Now here was an opportunity for the government to demonstrate the worth of the instruments and rationales for suppression of liberties, to secure public order against threats of a more (un)civil than martial order. Outflanking the opposition party on law-and-order rhetoric once again, the government immediately formulated new laws to curtail accused and offender’s rights (Brown). The police “locked” down whole suburbs — first Cronulla, then others — and made a show of policing all beaches north and south (Sydney Morning Herald). The race riots were widely reported in the international press, and, not for the first time (especially since the recent Redfern and Macquarie Fields), the city’s self-image of a cosmopolitan, multicultural nation (or in Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s prim and loaded terms, a nation “relaxed and comfortable”) looked like a mirage. Debate raged on why the riots occurred, how harmony could be restored and what the events signified for questions of race and identity — the latter most narrowly construed in the Prime Minister’s insistence that the riots did not reflect underlying racism in Australia (Dodson, Timms and Creagh). There were suggestions that the unrest was rather at base about the contradictions and violence of masculinity, some two-odd decades after Puberty Blues — the famous account of teenage girls growing up on the (Cronulla) Shire beaches. Journalists agonized about whether the media amounted to reporter or amplifier of tensions. In the lead-up to the riots, at their height, and in their wake, there was much emphasis on the role mobile text messages played in creating the riots and sustaining the subsequent atmosphere of violence and racial tension (The Australian; Overington and Warne-Smith). Not only were text messages circulating in the Sydney area, but in other states as well (Daily Telegraph). The volume of such text messages and emails also increased in the wake of the riot (certainly I received one personally from a phone number I did not recognise). New messages were sent to exhort Lebanese-Australians and others to fight back. Those decrying racism, such as the organizers of a rally, pointedly circulated text messages, hoping to spread peace. Media commentators, police, government officials, and many others held such text messages directly and centrally responsible for organizing the riot and for the violent scuffles that followed: The text message hate mail that inspired 5000 people to attend the rally at Cronulla 10 days ago demonstrated to the police the power of the medium. The retaliation that followed, when gangs marauded through Maroubra and Cronulla, was also co-ordinated by text messaging (Davies). It is rioting for a tech-savvy generation. Mobile phones are providing the call to arms for the tribes in the race war dividing Sydney. More than 5000 people turn up to Cronulla on Sunday … many were drawn to the rally, which turned into a mob, by text messages on their mobiles (Hayes and Kearney). Such accounts were crucial to the international framing of the events as this report from The Times in London illustrates: In the days leading up to the riot racist text messages had apparently been circulating calling upon concerned “white” Australians to rally at Cronulla to defend their beach and women. Following the attacks on the volunteer lifeguards, a mobile telephone text campaign started, backed up by frenzied discussions on weblogs, calling on Cronulla locals to rally to protect their beach. In response, a text campaign urged youths from western Sydney to be at Cronulla on Sunday to protect their friends (Maynard). There were calls upon the mobile companies to intercept and ban such messages, with industry spokespeople pointing out text messages were usually only held for twenty-four hours and were in many ways more difficult to intercept than it was to tap phone calls (Burke and Cubby). Mobs and Messages I think there are many reasons to suggest that the transmission of text messages did constitute a moral panic (what I’ve called elsewhere a “mobile panic”; see Goggin), pace columnist Paul Sheehan. Notably the wayward texting drew a direct and immediate response from the state government, with legislative changes that included provisions allowing the confiscation of cell phones and outlawing sending, receipt or keeping of racist or inflammatory text messages. For some days police proceeded to stop cars and board buses and demand to inspect mobiles, checking and reading text messages, arresting at least one person for being responsible for transmitting banned text messages. However, there is another important set of ideas adduced by commentators to explain how people came together to riot in Sydney, taking their cue from Howard Rheingold’s 2002 book Smart Mobs, a widely discussed and prophetic text on social revolution and new technologies. Rheingold sees text messaging as the harbinger of such new, powerful forms of collectivity, studying emergent uses around the world. A prime example he uses to illustrate the “power of the mobile many” is the celebrated overthrow of President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines in January 2001: President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than 1 million Manila residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled … Estrada fell. The legend of “Generation Txt” was born (Rheingold 157-58). Rheingold is careful to emphasize the social as much as technical nature of this revolution, yet still sees such developments leading to “smart mobs”. As with his earlier, prescient book Virtual Community (Rheingold 1993) did for the Internet, so has Smart Mobs compellingly fused and circulated a set of ideas about cell phones and the pervasive, wearable and mobile technologies that are their successors. The received view of the overthrow of the Estrada government is summed up in a remark attributed to Estrada himself: “I was ousted by a coup d’text” (Pertierra et al. ch. 6). The text-toppling of Estrada is typically attributed to “Generation Txt”, underlining the power of text messaging and the new social category which marks it, and has now passed into myth. What is less well-known is that the overriding role of the cell phone in the Estrada overthrow has been challenged. In the most detailed study of text messaging and subjectivity in the Philippines, which reviewed accounts of the events of the Estrada overthrow, as well as conducting interviews with participants, Pertierra et al. discern in EDSA2 a “utopian vision of the mobile phone that is characteristic of ‘discourses of sublime technology’”: It focuses squarely on the mobile phone, and ignores the people who used it … the technology is said to possess a mysterious force, called “Text Power” ... it is the technology that does things — makes things happen — not the people who use it. (Pertierra et al. ch. 6) Given the recrudescence of the technological sublime in digital media (on which see Mosco) the detailed examination of precise details and forms of agency and coordination using cell phones is most instructive. Pertierra et al. confirm that the cell phone did play an important role in EDSA2 (the term given to the events surrounding the downfall of Estrada). That role, however, was not the one for which it has usually been praised in the media since the event — namely, that of crowd-drawer par excellence … less than half of our survey respondents who took part in People Power 2 noted that text messaging influenced them to go. If people did attend, it was because they were persuaded to by an ensemble of other reasons … (2002: ch. 6) Instead, they argue, the significance of the cell phone lay firstly, in the way it helped join people who disapproved of Pres. Estrada in a network of complex connectivity … Secondly, the mobile phone was instrumental as an organizational device … In the hands of activists and powerbrokers from politics, the military, business groups and civil society, the mobile phone becomes a “potent communications tool” … (Pertierra et al. 2002: ch. 6) What this revisionist account of the Estrada coup underscores is that careful research and analysis is required to understand how SMS is used and what it signifies. Indeed it is worth going further to step back from either the celebratory or minatory discourses on the cell phone and its powerful effects, and reframe this set of events as very much to do with the mutual construction of society and technology, in which culture is intimately involved. This involves placing both the technology of text messaging and the social and political forces manifested in this uprising in a much wider setting. For instance, in his account of the Estrada crisis Vicente L. Rafael terms the tropes of text messaging and activism evident in the discourses surrounding it as: a set of telecommunicative fantasies among middle-class Filipinos … [that] reveal certain pervasive beliefs of the middle classes … in the power of communication technologies to transmit messages at a distance and in their own ability to possess that power (Rafael 399). For Rafael, rather than possessing instrinsic politics in its own right, text messaging here is about a “media politics (understood in both senses of the phrase: the politics of media systems, but also the inescapable mediation of the political) [that] reveal the unstable workings of Filipino middle-class sentiments” (400). “Little Square of Light” Doubtless there are emergent cultural and social forms created in conjunction with new technologies, which unfreeze and open up (for a time) social relations. As my discussion of the Estrada “coup d’text” shows, however, the dynamics of media, politics and technology in any revolution or riot need to be carefully traced. A full discussion of mobile media and the Sydney uprising will need to wait for another occasion. However, it is worth noting that the text messages in question to which the initial riot had been attributed, were actually read out on one of the country’s highest-rating and most influential talk-radio programs. The contents of such messages had also been detailed in print media, especially tabloids, and been widely discussed (McLellan, Marr). What remains unknown and unclear, however, is the actual use of text messages and cell phones in the conceiving, co-ordination, and improvisational dynamics of the riots, and affective, cultural processing of what occurred. Little retrospective interpretation at all has emerged in the months since the riots, but it certainly felt as if the police and state’s over-reaction, and the arrival of the traditionally hot and lethargic Christmas — combined with the underlying structures of power and feeling to achieve the reinstitution of calm, or rather perhaps the habitual, much less invisible, expression of whiteness as usual. The policing of the crisis had certainly been fuelled by the mobile panic, but setting law enforcement the task of bringing those text messages to book was much like asking them to catch the wind. For analysts, as well as police, the novel and salience appearance of texting also has a certain lure. Yet in concentrating on the deadly power of the cell phone to conjure up a howling or smart mob, or in the fascination with the new modes of transmission of mobile devices, it is important to give credit to the formidable, implacable role of media and cultural representations more generally, in all this, as they are transmitted, received, interpreted and circulated through old as well as new modes, channels and technologies. References The Australian. “SMS Message Goes Out: Let’s March for Racial Tolerance.” The Australian. 17 September, 2005. 6. Brown, M. “Powers Tested in the Text”. Sydney Morning Herald. 20 December, 2005. 7. Burke, K. and Cubby, B. “Police Track Text Message Senders”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23-25 December, 2005. 7. Daily Telegraph. “Police Intercept Interstate Riot SMS — Race Riot: Flames of Fear.” Daily Telegraph. 15 December, 2005. 5. Davis, A. “Flying Bats Rang Alarm”. Sydney Morning Herald. 21 December, 2005. 1, 5. Dodson, L., Timms, A. and Creagh, S. “Tourism Starts Counting the Cost of Race Riots”, Sydney Morning Herald. 21 December, 2005. 1. Goggin, G. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006. In press. Glotz, P., and Bertschi, S. (ed.) Thumb Culture: Social Trends and Mobile Phone Use, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Harper, R., Palen, L. and Taylor, A. (ed.)_ _The Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives on SMS. Dordrecht: Springer. Hayes, S. and Kearney, S. “Call to Arms Transmitted by Text”. Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 4. Kennedy, L. “Police Act Swiftly to Curb Attacks”. Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 6. Maynard, R. “Battle on Beach as Mob Vows to Defend ‘Aussie Way of Life.’ ” The Times. 12 December 2005. 29. Marr, D. “One-Way Radio Plays by Its Own Rules.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 6. McLellan, A. “Solid Reportage or Fanning the Flames?” The Australian. 15 December, 2005. 16. Mosco, V. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Overington, C. and Warne-Smith, D. “Countdown to Conflict”. The Australian. 17 December, 2005. 17, 20. Pertierra, R., E.F. Ugarte, A. Pingol, J. Hernandez, and N.L. Dacanay, N.L. Txt-ing Selves: Cellphones and Philippine Modernity. Manila: De La Salle University Press, 2002. 1 January 2006 http://www.finlandembassy.ph/texting1.htm>. Rafael, V. L. “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” Public Culture 15 (2003): 399-425. Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002. Sheehan, P. “Nasty Reality Surfs In as Ugly Tribes Collide”. Sydney Morning Herald. 12 December, 2005. 13. Sydney Morning Herald. “Beach Wars 1: After Lockdown”. Editorial. Sydney Morning Herald. 20 December, 2005. 12. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "SMS Riot: Transmitting Race on a Sydney Beach, December 2005." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/02-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (Mar. 2006) "SMS Riot: Transmitting Race on a Sydney Beach, December 2005," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/02-goggin.php>.