Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Royal Australian Army Pay Corps”

ANZAC, the acronym of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, is the name given to a new class often frigates under construction for the Royal Australian and Royal New Zealand Navies. The prime contract was awarded in November 1989, and a separate design sub-contract was awarded concurrently. HMAS ANZAC, the first of eight ships for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), was delivered in March 1996. HMNZS Te Kaha, the first of two ships for the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN), was delivered in May 1997. The paper describes the collaborative process, involving the Australian Department of Defence, the New Zealand Ministry of Defence, and Defence Industry in Australia, New Zealand and overseas, for the design and production of the ships. The need to maximise the level of Australian and New Zealand industrial involvement, led to a process of international competition between prospective suppliers, and significant configuration changes from the contract design baseline. Delivery of the first ship was extended to accommodate the revised approach, and in the event only five months additional time proved necessary. Although formal acceptance of HMAS ANZAC is not due until the completion of operational test and evaluation, the contractor's sea trials have successfully demonstrated the performance exceeding the requirements and the expectations of the RAN. The paper also describes the growing maturity of Australia's naval shipbuilding industry. It suggests some lessons learned from the project, and identifies issues important for the further development and sustainability of the industry. It advocates the need for agreed methodologies to evaluate the productivity of the various elements of the shipbuilding process, and to help ensure the establishment and maintenance of world competitive costs and quality.

Aim:The purpose of this pilot study was to analyze the current cold chain storage methods of Class 8 stores, specifically thermolabile medications and temperature sensitive diagnostics, dressings, and fluids, for the Australian Army in a training area within Australia. This research was designed to identify deficiencies in current storage methods, including the inability to maintain the recommended storage temperature of pharmaceutical stores in accordance with the Therapeutic Goods Administration, as well as foster communication between key stakeholders, including the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps and the Department of Defence Joint Health Command, and to develop a cold chain protocol specific for the Australian Defence Force.Methods:This pilot study identified the common occurrence of breaches in a specific climate and recommends that current mission essential equipment be replaced. It also discusses the need for clearly defined guidelines with accountability of the stakeholders to ensure that the provision of health support to all Australian Defence Force personnel is in accordance with civilian standards.Results:This pilot study identified that the carried thermolabile medications and temperature sensitive diagnostics, dressings, and fluids were commonly exposed to temperatures outside the range recommended by the manufacturers. These findings related mainly to the storage equipment for Class 8 stores used by the Army. As a result, it is recommended that such equipment is replaced so that the cold chain storage meets the Therapeutic Goods Administration Guidelines to ensure that health support to Australian Defence Force Personnel in the field is in accordance with the standard of care expected at a civilian health facility.Discussion:This pilot study has enabled the Australian Defence Force to qualify and quantify the temperature exposure of the medications and stores and engage with key stakeholders to trial and apply new technologies and processes for the management of the cold chain.

The 1900s and 1910s were a prime era for the growth and empowerment of cadet corps within Australia. Private schools in particular sought to build on a newfound spirit of nationalism following the Federation of the colonies in 1901 by harnessing enthusiasm for the nation and British Empire, and by cultivating a martial culture among their predominantly middle-class students. The principal tool harnessed in that cultivation were the school cadet corps, and the most visible symbol of those corps were their uniforms. By focussing on the cadet corps in the private schools of Sydney during this era, this article will explore the emphasis placed on cadet corps uniforms and argue that uniforms were the central element used cultivate a sense of identity and esprit de corps. When considered within the context of broader cadet corps activities, this will further demonstrate the power of uniforms as an instrument of cultural inculcation. The Federation of Australia in 1901 ushered in a new environment of national defence anxiety amongst the new nation’s middle-class citizens. The drive to Federation itself had partly been fuelled by colonial concerns regarding defence, and, in the new century, the newly federated states sought to work together to allay their combined concerns (White 114). But government policies were only one of the many ways the middle class were preparing the nation. Within the education system, middle-class private schools became a key instrument in preparing middle-class boys for their future as leaders of the nation in politics, business, and, of course, in the military. Within those schools, the cadet corps were utilised to instil core middle-class values of discipline, self-sacrifice, and responsibility in boys. As early as 1900, Sydney Grammar School authorities were proposing the resuscitation of their cadet corps following the rise in military spirit due to the Boer War (The Sydneian "Editorial", 1). The subsequent growth in both national and imperial defence-consciousness over the following years resulted in 100 boys forming a petition requesting the formation of a cadet corps in 1907 (The Sydneian "The Cadet Movement", 12). Within a year, the boys’ request was granted. With this type of enthusiasm from boys, the cadet corps increased in strength throughout the private schools of Sydney during the 1900s. Where they had already existed, they now commanded greater prestige, and where a school previously had no cadet corps, one was soon formed. In 1911, Compulsory Military Training commenced in Australia for all youths aged between 12 and 26, with a view to creating a citizens’ militia. Thus, militarism was a marked element in the new nation’s first decade. The changing nature of society during the 1900s also led to changing images of the ideal citizen, and understandably, of the ‘ideal middle-class boy’. Martin Crotty argues that in the 1900s, Australian middle-class society stressed that ‘fighting for one’s country is the peak of personal achievement and the epitome of manliness’ (9). Crotty goes on to examine the perceptions of middle-class manliness throughout the 1900s and 1910s, where masculinity was defined as the soldier serving his country, and the ‘manliest’ thing a person could do was to fight and die in war. Within this context, then, it is no surprise that private school boys welcomed the cadet system openly and were prepared to adhere to the discipline and the drill that went with it without a fuss. At St. Ignatius College, the school magazine Our Alma Mater reported in 1909 that ‘with enthusiasm on the part of the Corps, and attention to details by the officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, the College will be in possession of a really fine corps of the future defenders of the Commonwealth’. Cadets were seen as a partial answer to middle-class fears about the defence of Australia. The cadets would provide strong, disciplined, and willing officers in an army if it was needed for the defence of country and empire. It would also make decent men of the boys, curing them of the slothful habits of modern youth. The Newington reported during the first year of Compulsory Military Training that in a year’s time we shall see a great improvement in the appearance and physique of those who have never hitherto had any instruction in the art of bodily discipline and culture. The slouch and roll so much in vogue amongst a certain class of boys will have disappeared, we hope, and a manlier, firmer walk have taken their place. (December 1911, 171) The Newington succinctly conveyed the hopes of all the private schools of Sydney, irrespective of denomination. Much has been written about the history of the cadet corps within the Australian historical literature. Craig Stockings’s The Torch and the Sword remains a seminal work in the field due to its broad focus on the general cadet movement in Australia. Beyond this, most scholarly works focus either on a specific cadet corps, specific location or region, specific theme, or on a specific period.1 However, relatively scant attention has been paid to the importance of their uniforms, and when uniforms are mentioned, it is usually only briefly and in passing. Given the centrality of the uniform to the culture and identity of the cadet corps, this is a surprising gap in the scholarship that this article seeks to address. The military uniform is ‘a relatively recent phenomenon’ (Tynan and Godson 10). While uniforms appear as far back as antiquity, their widespread adoption over the last couple of centuries is due to a convergence of social norms and technology. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the increasing numbers of public servants meant that more civilians were uniformed whilst performing their duties (Williams-Mitchell 61). Tynan and Godson argue that ‘as state, society and nation converged towards the end of the nineteenth century uniform became part of a modern culture increasingly concerned with regulating time, space, and bodies’ (Tynan and Godson 6). The development of a regular military occurred within this space and can be seen as of part of the development of the stable nation state (Hackett 61). Standardisation of dress for large professional armies was enabled by technological developments brought about by the industrial revolution. Mass production of apparel meant that uniforms could be quickly produced and at a lower cost. In addition, the social culture of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras in the British Empire was reflected in the material culture of their uniforms. During the First World War, military uniforms tended to be influenced by civilian fashion, while during the Second World War ‘a much more systematic approach to military uniforms could be seen’ (Craik 49). Uniforms have a psychological and social significance beyond identity. Uniforms legitimise the power of both the state and of the person wearing the uniform. The uniform seeks to overlay the image of the institution onto the person, obscuring the individual beneath. Uniforms have a power beyond just the outward appearance, they also affect us as individuals, shaping ‘how we are and how we perform our identities’ (Craik 4). This was recognised by utilitarian reformers at the turn of the twentieth century who ‘saw in the military body an efficiency that could usefully be transposed to civil society’ (Tynan and Godson 11), thereby shaping the populace’s inner as well as their outer selves (Craik 4). Further uniforms are about appearance, maintaining high standards of dress and a sense of belonging (Williams-Mitchell 111). Uniforms are instrumental in the creation of an esprit de corps (Langner 126). Being in the military is seen as more than an occupation, it is a vocation (Hackett 9), and to don a uniform communicates one’s sense of purpose. Part of this is achieved through the maintenance and correct wearing of the uniform, the discipline involved setting a moral high bar for others to measure themselves against. The use of school uniforms, particularly within the private school system, had been established by the end of the nineteenth century. While the addition of a military uniform for student cadets may at first seen incongruous, there are clear reasons why these uniforms would be appealing. Up to and during the First World War, British army officers were ‘still the preserve of young men of good social standing’ (Hackett 158), an association which no doubt appealed to schools whose remit was to prepare young men for leadership positions within society. Further, military uniforms were traditionally seen as an inherently masculine dress, with a ‘close fit between the attributes of normative masculinity as inscribed in uniform conduct and normative masculine roles and attributes’ (Craik 12-13). In Australia, wearing the cadet uniform elevated the schoolboy to a member of the Australian defence force and he was treated as such (Wise 132). As a symbol of government, the uniform endows the wearer with the authority of that same government (Langner 124). Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the various cadet corps that emerged from Sydney’s private schools were formed to fulfil a variety of middle-class priorities. But by the 1900s, rhetoric had shifted to emphasise that the cadets were instilling discipline into boys and preparing youth for the defence of Australia and the British Empire. They were also used as a means to express school pride and identity. The stern militarism surrounding most of the cadet activities allowed the instructors to impress upon cadets values of discipline, duty, and sacrifice and to promote romantic illusions of warfare, and, above all, the idea that war was an adventure. Cadets were also taught that their training was preparation for war. Rifle practice, drill, skirmishes, camps, hiding behind trees and running around hills to attack the enemy from behind, using bushes as cover to sneak up on the enemy (all while in uniform) – these were the tactics of modern warfare. And cadets were left in no doubt that they would become the officers of the nation’s defence forces when needed. Throughout the conduct of all of their activities, the cadet corps uniform served as a constant visual reminder of that message. Boys generally wore variations of dark green uniforms with a slouch hat, and at times carried rifles with either blank or live ammunition, depending on their purpose. Some schools used ethnic and cultural traditions and social links in the formation of their cadet corps which was also reflected by varieties in their uniforms. For example, the cadets at Scots College were sponsored by the New South Wales Scottish Rifles (later the 30th Battalion, New South Wales Scottish) and based its uniform on that of the Rifles. It consisted of a slouch hat with a red hackle and blue and gold puggaree, a serge jacket in the Scottish tradition, and kilts from the early 1900s until all uniforms became regulated under Compulsory Military Training in 1911. From the time a boy put on his cadet uniform to the time he took it off he was treated as part of Australia’s defence force, and no longer simply a student at school. The uniform, then, became the prominent visual marker of that shifting role and identity. J. McElhone of St. Joseph’s College wrote in the school magazine in March 1911 that ‘when we don our uniforms, and are armed with rifles, we shall then commence to take a soldierly pride in ourselves’. While in uniform the boys were expected to act like soldiers, and their instructors (also in uniform) treated them much like soldiers, with high standards of drill, discipline, and order maintained. Indeed, throughout the 1900s, the cadet corps commanded as much prestige as the rugby and rowing teams. Cleanliness, discipline, and good order during public parades were met with salutations and praise. Success in competitions with other schools in shooting or tug-of-war or other cadet activities was similarly recorded with pride. As with rugby or rowing, the honour of the school was at stake, a matter reflected in Sydney Grammar’s ruminations over the re-formation of its cadet corps in 1907. One of the school’s primary concerns was the risk of losing the honour of the school by having an unsuccessful and ill-disciplined company. The Sydneian reported in August 1907 that if a new S.G.S Cadet Corps should disgrace itself in public by slovenly drill, as it certainly would, if recruited from the “wasters” and little boys, then the Trustees would be blamed for taking a hasty step without gauging the real wishes of boys and parents … . Any New Cadet Corps must maintain the fine traditions of the old one. It must be the pride of the School – our chief object of out-door interest. All sports must give way to it, rather than that the corps, once formed, should fail. By the early 1900s Newington College and the Kings School both had reputations for the quality and conduct of their cadet corps and it was this reputation that schools such as Sydney Grammar hoped to emulate with the formation of their own cadet corps. The ‘wasters’ and the ‘little boys’ were not required. The cadet corps would bring honour to the school, the nation and empire. The peak expression of this pride came in wearing their uniform for public ceremonies. For example, at St. Ignatius College, the cadet corps served as a funeral cortège for the funeral of a master, Fr. Patrick Keating, in 1913.2 The Newington cadet corps formed a Guard of Honour for the State Governor, Sir Harry Rawson, in 1905 (The Newingtonian, March 1905, 188). As the Guard of Honour the Newington College cadet corps’ duties were extended when they were required to fix bayonets in order to keep back the crowd from the main door of Sydney Town Hall where the Governor was inside (The Newingtonian, March 1905, 188). Whilst it may seem remarkable to have teenage boys keeping crowds back from the door with rifles with fixed bayonets, in the cadet corps of the 1900s this was expected when the circumstances required; the cadets were not looked upon as immature boys, but rather as responsible and disciplined soldiers, and they were thus treated accordingly. Great crowds lined Sydney’s streets to watch the Sydney private school cadet corps parade on special occasions, and, for many youth, being seen in uniform was an exciting and memorable experience. The experience of being one of the estimated eighteen thousand cadets who marched past the Governor-General, Lord Denman, on 30 March 1912 in Centennial Park, with parents, teachers, and government and military officials watching attentively would have been one of great pride (Naughtin 142). In formation at parades, the cadets were required to be in perfect order, buttons polished and shoes shining, as government and military officials inspected them and their uniforms. Boys without complete uniforms were not allowed to attend, as they would reduce the appearance of the company. Orders were given sharply by officers to fix and unfix bayonets, march in precise line, and perform specific manoeuvres, each carried out by the cadets, it was hoped, in unison. At times, the cadet corps throughout the private schools were addressed by the Inspector-General of the army, the Governor-General of Australia, or by their headmaster, each reminding them the responsibility that each one had to their cadet corps, to their school, and to their king and country. They were told that the many hours of drill required of them was teaching them the ‘very valuable and necessary lessons of life’ (The Newingtonian, December 1911, 171). They were told that to be effective soldiers they needed to be disciplined, do as they were told by their officers, and respond to orders swiftly. Thus, these cadets were learning not only the attributes of an officer, but of middle-class society in general: respect, presentation, and acceptance of the rules of society. The cadet corps uniform also helped reinforce notions of duty. Although, prior to 1911, the cadet corps were voluntary, private schools strongly urged all students to join as ‘no true Australian can fail to regard it as his duty to fit himself, as far as he is able, to be of service in the case of a call to defend his country’ (The Torch-Bearer, April 1908, 89). School magazines regularly reported on cadet activities throughout the 1900s and 1910s, including frequent references to the fine appearance. Certainly with boys practicing drill on football fields and outside class windows it must have been difficult for some of those boys who were not cadets not to notice, and be impressed by, the presence of one hundred of their fellow schoolmates carrying their rifles, in military uniform, and in perfect order. For the students who had joined the cadet corps this sense of duty became paramount. They were inundated with rhetoric praising their dedication to the cadet corps and the sacrifices they made by being a cadet. The Sydneian asked cadets to ‘consider your Corps first. It is your duty as “Soldiers of the King”’ (E.A.W. 19). The Torch-Bearer in April 1908 made a similar point: Every boy should remember that by becoming an efficient cadet he is carrying out a duty which he owes (1) to his country by rendering himself more capable of fighting in her defence. (2) to his school by helping to send out a corps that will do her as much credit as cricket and football teams and crews have done in the past. (3) to himself, by undergoing a training which will benefit him body and soul.3 Cadets absorbed this sense of duty, believing that they were honouring their school, their country, and the British Empire. Soldiers of the King they certainly believed they were, at least in the Protestant schools. The boys would be ‘toughened by a soldier’s hard training and learn to bear the pinch of sacrifice and bear it cheerfully’ (The Torch-Bearer, April 1911, 251), unlike their peers who had not joined the cadets who were regarded derisively as ‘civilians’ (The Torch-Bearer, October, 1908, 50). Thus, in an era of growing nationalism and militarism, the cadet corps of the private schools of Sydney grew as a symbol of middle-class values. The most immediate visual representation of that symbolism was the cadet corps uniform. When boys put on their uniform, they experienced a change in their demeanour, their identity, and their sense of duty. It had an instant impact on how they saw themselves, and how they were treated by others. These ideas were inculcated into boys throughout their training, and records from across the Sydney private schools suggest that the boys eagerly embraced those lessons. The cadet corps uniform, then, was a valuable tool in the moderation of behaviour and the instillation of core values. References Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Crotty, Martin. Making The Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 2001. E.A.W. "The Cadet Corps." The Sydneian Dec. 1909: 18-23. Hackett, John. The Profession of Arms. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. Langner, Lawrence. "Clothes and Government." Dress, Adornment and the Social Order. Eds. Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Eicher. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965. Naughtin, Michael. A Century of Striving: St. Joseph's College, Hunter's Hill, 1881-1981. Hunter's Hill, NSW: St. Joseph's College, 1981.. Our Alma Mater. St. Ignatius College magazine. Midwinter 1909. St Joseph's College Magazine. Mar. 1911. Stockings, Craig. The Torch and the Sword: A History of the Army Cadet Movement in Australia. UNSW Press, 2007. The Newingtonian. Newington College Magazine, Mar. 1905. ———. December 1911 The Sydneian. "The Cadet Movement - Past and Present." Aug. 1907: 7-14. ———. "Editorial: The Proposed Resucitation of the Cadet Corps." May 1900: 1-2. The Torch-Bearer. Sydney Church of England Grammar School Magazine, Apr. 1908. ———. Oct. 1908 ———. Apr. 1911 Tynan, Jane, and Lisa Godson. "Understanding Uniform: An Introduction." Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World. Eds. Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980. Routledge, 2020. Williams-Mitchell, Christobel. Dressed for the Job: The Story of Occupational Costume. Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1982. Wise, Nathan. "The Adventurous Cadet: Romanticism and Adventure in the Cadet Corps of the Private Schools of Sydney, 1901-1914." Australian Folklore 29 (2014). Notes 1 For several key examples focussing on this period see Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male; Thomas W. Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-Operative, 1980); David Jones, ‘The Military Use of Australian State Schools: 1872-1914’ (Ph.D. Thesis, La Trobe University, 1991); John Barrett, Falling In – Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’, 1911-1915 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979); Nathan Wise, ‘Playing Soldiers: Sydney Private School Cadet Corps and the Great War’ (Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 96.2 (2010)); Nathan Wise, ‘The Adventurous Cadet: Romanticism and Adventure in the Cadet Corps of the Private Schools of Sydney, 1901-1914’ (Australian Folklore 29 (2014): 127-141). 2 St. Ignatius College Archives, photo ‘Fr. Patrick Keating’s funeral leaving St. Mary’s, North Sydney, for Gore Hill Cemetary, 1913’. 3 The Torch-Bearer, Sydney Church of England Grammar School Magazine, Apr. 1908: 90. The Torch-Bearer uses the double synonym that the cadet corps were both like a sporting team and a military unit. This supports an argument of D.J. Blair’s ‘Beyond the Metaphor: Football and War, 1914-1918’ in The Journal of the Australian War Memorial 28 (Apr. 1996) that sport, particularly team sports such as football, and war were very similar. Sport assisted in the creation of the ideal man, and one best suited for military training, as it enhanced values of ‘loyalty, courage, self-discipline, and teamwork’ that would be required in war. This argument is further supported by the competitive nature of the cadet corps as examined in chapter four.

Introduction On Saturday 6 February 1954, on the third day of the Australian leg of their tour of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The specially-staged Royal Surf Carnival they witnessed—comprising a spectacular parade, surf boat races, mock resuscitations and even unscheduled surf rescues—generated extensive media coverage. Attracting attention from historians (Warshaw 134; Ford 194–196), the carnival lingers in popular memory as not only a highlight of the Australian tour (Conway n.p.; Clark 8) and among the “most celebrated events in Australian surf lifesaving history” (Ford et al. 5) but also as “the most spectacular occasion [ever held] at Bondi Beach” (Lawrence and Sharpe 86). It is even, for some, a “highlight of the [Australian] post-war period” (Ford et al. 5). Despite this, the fuller history of the Queen’s visit to Bondi, including the detailed planning involved, remains unexplored. A small round tin medal, discovered online, offered a fresh way to approach this event. 31mm in diameter, 2mm in depth, this dual-sided, smooth-edged medal hangs from a hoop on approximately 80mm of discoloured, doubled red, white, and blue striped ribbon, fastened near its end with a tarnished brass safety pin. The obverse features a relief portrait of the youthful Queen’s face and neck in profile, her hair loosely pulled back into a low chignon, enclosed within a striped symmetrical scrolled border of curves and peaks. This is encircled with another border inscribed in raised capitals: “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Royal Visit to Waverley N.S.W.” The reverse features a smooth central section encircled with the inscription (again in raised capitals), “Presented to the Children of Waverley N.S.W. 1954”, the centre inscribed, “By Waverley Municipal Council C.A. Jeppesen Mayor”. Figs. 1 & 2: Medal, c.1954. Collection of the Author. Medals are often awarded in recognition of achievement and, in many cases, are worn as prominent components of military and other uniforms. They can also be made and gifted in commemoration, which was the case with this medal, one of many thousands presented in association with the tour. Made for Waverley Council, it was presented to all schoolchildren under 15 in the municipality, which included Bondi Beach. Similar medals were presented to schoolchildren by other Australian councils and States in Australia (NAA A462). This gifting was not unprecedented, with medals presented to (at least some) Australian schoolchildren to commemorate Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee (The Age 5; Sleight 187) and the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (“Coronation Medals” 6). Unable to discover any provenance for this medal aside from its (probable) presentation in 1954 and listing for sale in 2021, I pondered instead Waverley Council’s motivation in sourcing and giving these medals. As a researcher, this assisted me in surmounting the dominance of the surf carnival in the history of this event and led to an investigation of the planning around the Bondi visit. Planning Every level of government was involved in planning the event. Created within the Prime Minister’s Department, the Royal Visit Organisation 1954—staffed from early 1953, filling positions from within the Commonwealth Public Service, armed services and statutory authorities—had overall authority over arrangements (NAA 127, 134). National planning encompassed itineraries, travel arrangements, security, public relations, and protocol as well as fly and mosquito control, the royals’ laundry arrangements, and advice on correct dress (NAA: A1533; NAA: A6122; NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.15; NAA: A1838, 1516/11 Parts 1&2; NAA: A9708, RV/CD; NAA: A9708, RV/CQ; NAA: A9708, RV/T). Planning conferences were held with State officials who developed State visit programs and then devolved organisational responsibilities to Councils and other local organisations (NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.2; NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.3). Once the Bondi Beach location was decided, the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia received a Royal Command to stage a surf carnival for the royals. This command was passed to the president of the Bondi club, who organised a small delegation to meet with government representatives. A thirteen-member Planning Committee, all men (“The Queen to See” 12), was appointed “with full power to act without reference to any other body” (Meagher 6). They began meeting in June 1953 and, soon after this, the carnival was announced in the Australian press. In recognition, the “memorable finale” of a Royal Command Performance before the Queen in London in November 1953 marked the royal couple’s impending tour by filling the stage with people from Commonwealth countries. This concluded with “an Australian tableau”. Alongside people dressed as cricketers, tennis players, servicemen, and Indigenous people, a girl carrying a huge bunch of bananas, and a couple in kangaroo suits were six lifesavers dressed in Bondi march-past costumes and caps, carrying the club flag (Royal Variety Charity n.p.). In deciding on a club for the finale, Bondi was “seen the epitome of the surf lifesaving movement—and Australia” (Brawley 82). The Planning Committee worked with representatives from the police, army, government, local council, and ambulance services as well as the media and other bodies (Meagher 6). Realising the “herculean task” (Meagher 9) ahead, the committee recruited some 170 members (again all men) and 20 women volunteers from the Bondi and North Bondi Surf Clubs to assist. This included sourcing and erecting the carnival enclosure which, at over 200 meters wide, was the largest ever at the beach. The Royal dais that would be built over the promenade needed a canvas cover to shield the royal couple from the heat or rain. Seating needed to be provided for some 10,500 paying spectators, and eventually involved 17 rows of tiered seating set across the promenade, 2,200 deckchairs on the sand in front, and, on each flank, the Bondi Surf Club’s tiered stands. Accommodations also had to be provided at selected vantage points for some 100 media representatives, with a much greater crowd of 50–60,000 expected to gather outside the enclosure. Four large tents, two at each end of the competition area, would serve as both change rooms and shady rest areas for some 2,000 competitors. Two additional large tents were needed, one at each end of the lawns behind the beach, fitted out with camp stretchers that had to be sourced for the St John Ambulance Brigade to deal with first-aid cases, most of whom were envisaged to come from the crowds due to heat stroke (Meagher 6–7). The committee also had to solve numerous operational issues not usually associated with running a surf carnival, such as ensuring sufficient drinking water for so many people on what might be a very hot day (“The Queen to See” 12). With only one tap in the carnival area, the organisers had to lay a water line along the entire one-kilometre length of the promenade with double taps every two to three metres. Temporary toilets also had to be sourced, erected, and serviced. Self-financing and with costs adding up, sponsors needed to be secured to provide goods and services in return for advertising. An iced water unit was, for instance, provided on the dais, without cost, by the ElectrICE Commercial Refrigeration company. The long strip of red carpet laid from where the royals would alight from their car right through the dais was donated by the manufacturer of Feltex, a very popular Australian-made wool carpet. Prominent department store, Anthony Horden’s, loaned the intricately carved chairs to be used by the Royal couple and other officials, while The Bondi Diggers Club provided chrome plated chairs for other official guests, many of whom were the crew of royal yacht, the S.S. Gothic (Meagher 6). Fig. 3: “Feltex [Advertisement].” The Australian Home Beautiful Nov. 1954: 40. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2985285882. The Ladies Committees of the Bondi and North Bondi surf clubs were tasked with organising and delivering lunch and drinks to over 400 officials, all of whom were to stay in position from early morning until the carnival concluded at 5 pm (Meagher 6). Girl members of the Bondi social clubs were to act as usherettes. Officials describe deciding who would meet, or even come in any close proximity to, the Queen as “most ticklish” and working with mayors and other officials a “headache” (“Socialites” 3). In Bondi, there were to be notably few officials sitting with the royal couple, but thousands of “ordinary” spectators seated around the carnival area. On her arrival, it was planned that the Queen would walk through a guard of honour of lifesavers from each Australian and New Zealand club competing in the carnival. After viewing the finals of the surf boat races, the Queen would meet the team captains and then, in a Land Rover, inspect the massed lifesavers and greet the spectators. Although these activities were not contentious, debate raged about the competitors’ uniforms. At this time, full-length chest-covering costumes were normally worn in march-past and other formal events, with competitors stripping down to trunks for surf races and beach events. It was, however, decided that full-length costumes would be worn for the entirety of the Queen’s visit. This generated considerable press commentary that this was ridiculous, and charges that Australians were ashamed of their lifesavers’ manly chests (“Costume Rule” 3). The president of the Bondi Life Saving Club, however, argued that they did not want the carnival spoiled by lifesavers wearing “dirty … track suits, football guernseys … old football shorts … and just about everything except proper attire” (ctd. in Jenkings 1). Waverley Council similarly attempted to control the appearance of the route through which the royals would travel to the beach on the day of the carnival. This included “a sequence of signs along the route” expressing “the suburb’s sentiments and loyalty” (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; see also, “The Royal Tour” 9). Maintaining that “the greatest form of welcome will be by the participation of the residents themselves”, the Mayor sought public donations to pay for decorations (with donors’ names and amounts to be published in the local press, and these eventually met a third of the cost (“The Royal Tour” 9; Waverley Council n.p.). In January 1954, he personally appealed to those on the route to decorate their premises and, in encouragement, Council provided substantial prizes for the most suitably decorated private and commercial premises. The local Chamber of Commerce was responsible for decorating the transport and shopping hub of Bondi Junction, with many businesses arranging to import Coronation decorations from England (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; “The Royal Tour” 9). With “colorful activity” providing the basis of Council’s plan (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4), careful choreography ensured that thousands of people would line the royal route through the municipality. In another direct appeal, the Mayor requested that residents mass along the roadsides, wearing appropriate rosettes or emblems and waving flags (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; “The Royal Tour” 9). Uniformed nurses would also be released from duty to gather outside the War Memorial Hospital as the royals passed by (“Royal Visit” n.p.). At the largest greenspace on the route, Waverley Park, some 10,000 children from the municipality’s 18 schools would assemble, all in uniform and wearing the medal to be presented to them to commemorate the visit. Children would also be provided with large red, white, or blue rosettes to wave as the royals drove by. A special seating area near the park was to be set aside for the elderly and ex-servicemen (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4). Fostering Expectations As the date of the visit approached, preparation and anticipation intensified. A week before, a detailed visit schedule was published in local newspaper Bondi Daily. At this time, the Royal Tour Decorations Committee (comprised of Aldermen and prominent local citizens) were “erecting decorations at various focal points” throughout the municipality (“The Royal Tour” 9). On 4 February, the Planning Committee held their final meeting at the Bondi Beach clubhouse (Meagher 6). The next day, the entire beach was cleaned and graded (Wilson 40). The afternoon before the visit, the Council’s decoration competition was judged, with the winners a house alongside Waverley Park and the beachside Hotel Astra (“Royal Visit” n.p.), one of 14 Sydney hotels, and the only one in Bondi, granted permission to sell liquor with meals until the extended hour of 11.00 pm during the Royal visit (“State House” 5). On the day of the surf carnival, The Sydney Morning Herald featured a large photograph of the finishing touches being put to the official dais and seating the day before (“Stage Set” 15). In reality, there was still a flurry of activity from daybreak on the day itself (Meagher 7), with the final “tidying up and decorating still proceeding” (Meagher 7) as the first carnival event, the Senior boat race heats, began at 10.00 am (“N.Z. Surf” 15). Despite some resident anger regarding the area’s general dilapidation and how the money being spent on the visit could have been used for longstanding repairs to the Pavilion and other infrastructure (Brawley 203), most found the decorations of the beach area appealing (“Royal Visit” n.p.). Tickets to the carnival had sold out well in advance and the stands were filled hours before the Queen arrived, with many spectators wearing sundresses or shorts and others stripping down to swimsuits in the sunshine (“Royal Visit” n.p.). With Police Inspector Michael O’Neill’s collapse and death at a royal event the day before thought to be the result of heat exposure, and the thermometer reaching the high 80s°F (low 30s°C), a large parasol was sourced to be held over the Queen on the dais (Meagher 8). A little after 3:15 pm, the surf club’s P.A. system advised those assembled at the beach that the royal party had left Randwick Racecourse on time and were proceeding towards them (“Queen’s Visit to Races” 17), driving through cheering crowds all the way (“Sydney” 18). At Waverley Park, Council had ensured that the waiting crowds had been entertained by the Randwick-Coogee pipe band (“Royal Visit” n.p.) and spirits were high. Schoolchildren, wearing their medals, lined the footpaths, and 102-year-old Ernest Dunn, who was driven to the park in the morning by police, was provided with a seat on the roadway as well as tea and sandwiches during his long wait (“Royal Tour Highlights” 2; “Royal Visit” n.p.). The royal couple, driving by extremely slowly and waving, were given a rousing welcome. Their attire was carefully selected for the very warm day. The Queen wore a sunny lemon Dior-styled cap-sleeved dress, small hat and white accessories, the Duke a light-coloured suit and tie. It was observed that she wore heavier makeup as a protection against the sun and, as the carnival progressed, opened her handbag to locate her fashionable sunglasses (“Thrills” 1). The Duke also wore sunglasses and used race binoculars (Meagher 8). The Result Despite the exhaustive planning, there were some mishaps, mostly when the excitement of the “near-hysterical crowds” (Hardman n.p.) could not be contained. In Double Bay, for instance, as the royals made their way to Bondi, a (neither new nor clean) hat thrown into the car’s rear seat struck the Duke. It was reported that “a look of annoyance” clouded his face as he threw it back out onto the road. At other points, flags, nosegays, and flutter ribbons (long sticks tied with lengths of coloured paper) were thrown at, and into, the Royal car. In other places, hundreds raced out into the roadway to try to touch the Queen or the Duke. They “withstood the ordeal unflinchingly”, but the Duke was reportedly concerned about “this mass rudeness” (“Rude Mobs” 2). The most severe crowding of the day occurred as the car passed through the centre of Bondi Junction’s shopping district, where uniformed police had to jump on the Royal car’s running boards to hold off the crowds. Police also had to forcibly restrain a group of men who rushed the car as it passed the Astra Hotel. This was said to be “an ugly incident … resentment of the police action threatened to breed a riot” (“Rude Mobs” 2). Almost everything else met, and even exceeded, expectations. The Queen and Duke’s slow progress from Bondi Road and then, after passing under a large “Welcome to Bondi” sign, their arrival at the entrance to the dais only three minutes late and presence at the carnival went entirely to plan and are well documented in minute-by-minute detail. This includes in detailed press reports, newsreels, and a colour film, The Queen in Australia (1954). Their genuine enjoyment of the races was widely commented upon, evidenced in how they pointed out details to each other (Meagher 8), the number of times the Duke used his binoculars and, especially, in their reluctance to leave, eventually staying more than double the scheduled time (“Queen Delighted” 7). Sales of tickets and programs more than met the costs of mounting the event (Meagher 8–9) and the charity concert held at the beach on the night of the carnival to make the most of the crowds also raised significant funds (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4). Bondi Beach looked spectacularly beautiful and gained considerable national and international exposure (Landman 183). The Surf Life Saving Association of Australia’s president noted that the “two factors that organisation could not hope to control—weather and cooperation of spectators—fulfilled the most optimistic hopes” (Curlewis 9; Maxwell 9). Conclusion Although it has been stated that the 58-day tour was “the single biggest event ever planned in Australia” (Clark 8), focussing in on a single event reveals the detailed decentralised organisation which went into both each individual activity as well as the travel between them. It also reveals how significantly responsible bodies drew upon volunteer labour and financial contributions from residents. While many studies have discussed the warm welcome given to the monarch by Australians in 1954 (Connors 371–2, 378), a significant finding from this object-inspired research is how purposefully Waverley Council primed this public reception. The little medal discussed at the opening of this discussion was just one of many deliberate attempts to prompt a mass expression of homage and loyalty to the sovereign. It also reveals how, despite the meticulous planning and minute-by-minute scheduling, there were unprompted and impulsive behaviours, both by spectators and the royals. Methodologically, this investigation also suggests that seemingly unprepossessing material remnants of the past can function as portals into larger stories. In this case, while an object biography could not be written of the commemorative medal I stumbled upon, a thoughtful consideration of this object inspired an investigation of aspects of the Queen’s visit to Bondi Beach that had otherwise remained unexplored. References Brawley, Sean. “Lifesavers of a Nation.” 3 Feb. 2007: 82. [extract from The Bondi Lifesaver: A History of an Australian Icon. Sydney: ABC Books, 2007.] Clark, Andrew. “The Queen’s Royal Tours of Australia Remembered: Reflection.” The Australian Financial Review 10 Sep. 2022: 8. Connors, Jane. “The 1954 Royal Tour of Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 25 (1993): 371–82. Conway, Doug. “Queen’s Perennial Pride in Australia.” AAP General News Wire 26 Nov. 2021: n.p. “Coronation Medals Presented to School Children: 6000 Distributed in Rockhampton District.” Morning Bulletin 12 May 1937: 6. “Costume Rule for Queen’s Bondi Visit.” Barrier Miner 18 Dec. 1953: 3. Curlewis, Adrian. “Letter.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 9. Ford, Caroline. Sydney Beaches: A History. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014. Ford, Caroline, Chris Giles, Danya Hodgetts, and Sean O’Connell. “Surf Lifesaving: An Australian Icon in Transition.” Australian Bureau of Statistics Year Book, Australia 2007. Ed. Dennis Trewin. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007. 1–12. Hardman, Robert. Our Queen. London: Hutchinson, 2011. <https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/OurQueen/DySbU9r0ABgC>. Jenkings, Frank. “Editorial.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.6 (1954): 1. Landman, Jane. “Renewing Imperial Ties: The Queen in Australia.” The British Monarchy on Screen. Ed. Mandy Merck. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016. 181–204. Lawrence, Joan, and Alan Sharpe. Pictorial History: Eastern Suburbs. Alexandria: Kingsclear Books, 1999. Maxwell, C. Bede. “Letter.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 9. Meagher, T.W. “The Royal Tour Surf Carnival Bondi Beach, February 6, 1954.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 6–9. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A462, 825/4/6, Royal tour 1954—Medals for School children—General representations, 1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1533, 1957/758B, Royal Visit, 1953–1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1838, 1516/11 Part 1, Protocol—Royal Visit, 1948–1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1838, 1516/11 Part 2, Protocol—Royal Visit, 1954–1966. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A6122, 1861, Government Heads of State—Royal Visit 1954—ASIO file, 1953–1958. Canberra: Australian Security Intelligence Organization. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/CD, Fly and Mosquito Control. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/CQ, Laundry and Dry Cleaning and Pressing Arrangements. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 2, Minutes of Conferences with State Directors, 22 January 1953–14 January 1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 3, State Publications. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 15, Report by Public Relations Officer. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/T, Matters Relating to Dress. National Archives of Australia (NAA). Royalty and Australian Society: Records Relating to The British Monarchy Held in Canberra. Research Guide. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1998. “N.Z. Surf Team in Dispute.” The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Feb. 1954: 15. “Queen Delighted by Carnival.” The Sun-Herald 7 Feb. 1954: 7. “Queen in the Suburbs: Waverley.” Sun 21 Jan. 1954: 4. “Queen’s Visit to Races: Drive in Suburbs.” The Daily Telegraph 6 Feb. 1954: 17. “Royal Tour Highlights.” The Mail 6 Feb. 1954: 2. Royal Variety Charity. “Coronation Year Royal Variety Performance.” London: London Coliseum, 2 Nov. 1953. <https://www.royalvarietycharity.org/royal-variety-performance/archive/detail/1953-london-coliseum>. “Royal Visit to Waverley.” Feb. 1954 [Royal Visit, 1954 (Topic File). Local Studies Collection, Waverley Library, Bondi Junction, LS VF] “Rude Mobs Spoil Happy Reception.” The Argus 8 Feb. 1954: 2. Sleight, Simon. Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. “Socialites in for Rude Shock on Royal Tour Invitations.” Daily Telegraph 3 Jan. 1954: 3. “Stage Set for Royal Surf Carnival at Bondi.” The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Feb. 1954: 15. “State House Rehearses Royal Opening.” The Sydney Morning Herald 27 Jan. 1954: 5. “Sydney.” Women’s Letters. The Bulletin 10 Feb. 1954: 18. The Age 24 Jun. 1897: 5. The Queen in Australia. Dir. Colin Dean. Australian National Film Board, 1954. “The Queen to See Lifesavers.” The Daily Telegraph 24 Aug. 1953: 12. “The Royal Tour.” Bondi Daily 30 Jan. 1954: 9. “Thrills for the Queen at Bondi Carnival—Stayed Extra Time.” The Sun-Herald 7 Feb. 1954: 1. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Fransisco: Chronicle Books, 2010. Wilson, Jack. Australian Surfing and Surf Lifesaving. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979.

Edith and John Power were a wealthy expatriate Australian couple who lived in England and Europe from the early years of the 20th century until their deaths. In 1915 John Power married Edith Lee in London before serving as a surgeon on the Western Front in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war Edith and John left Britain to live in Paris and Brussels in the centre of a large international group of avant-garde artists. Edith, who was twelve years older than her husband, and had been married twice before (once widowed and once divorced), was to all accounts the driving force behind John's success as an artist -- he exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Kandinsky -- and the great love of his life. The following comes from a book-length fictionalised biography of their lives, narrated by Edith in the early 1960s when she was ninety-two years old. This extract comes from the part of the manuscript dealing with the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Island of Jersey in the second world war; the 'safe haven' to which the Powers had fled in 1938 when war threatened. The first winter under the Germans was very hard and there were reports of old people dying of starvation and exposure. Jack had terrible chilblains and we were both very thin. Cooking fat was only available for doctors to give to invalids, and one poor chap was so desperate that he used sump oil from his car to fry up some gull eggs, and poisoned himself. Sitting down to a plate of boiled potatoes I couldn't sometimes help but reminisce about the wonderful meals we had eaten in Paris and Brussels. How decadent they seemed -- oysters, poached salmon, grilled tournedos with asparagus or a roasted duck, then a glass of champagne, a slice or two of Ange à Cheval and some wild strawberries to finish off with. I also realised how petty all our worries had been up 'til then. We would be upset if the hotel we fancied was booked out for the summer, the bath water cold or a soufflé heavy. When the stock market dropped a point or two we were devastated, and Jack used to sulk for days when he had trouble with a painting or if his frames were not exactly as ordered, the moulding wrong, the gilding scratched or too bright. Such concerns seemed absurd when we faced death every day and misery and fear were all around us. Then the prisoners-of-war arrived from Russia, dressed in rags and even thinner than us. They suffered terribly, working impossibly hard every day on the railway and underground hospital, with nowhere proper to sleep and very little to eat. We felt so sorry for them, and admired those Islanders who, although it was a serious crime, sheltered them if they managed to escape. We had another dreadful reminder of just how awful the Germans could be when they started shooting anyone caught with a crystal radio set. By the summer of 1942 Jack was very ill, although he continued to deny anything was wrong. He finally confided in me just how dire things were one afternoon when we were sitting on the terrace. We were drinking the last of our English tea and discussing how wild the garden had become. One minute Jack was saying how much he enjoyed watching everything return to its natural state, the next he was telling me that he thought he had a cancerous tumour in his kidneys and should see a doctor. I listened in a daze as he detailed the possible treatments and his prognosis, which he anticipated to be poor. Then he stood, drank the dregs in his cup, kissed me and said he had to return to the studio. He had salvaged a piece of wood from somewhere to paint on and didn't want to lose the last light. I was stunned, not wanting to believe what he had told me. I never found out whether Jack suspected the cancer before the Occupation, but if he did, I can't understand why he didn't tell me. We could have gone back to England or over to Switzerland and seen the best doctors. This still puzzles me for Jack was never reticent to seek medical treatment. Tony even laughingly called Jack a hypochondriac, he was so careful with his health, but then again, I know Jack's father had hidden the same condition from his family some forty years before. For many years after the war Ceylon tea only ever tasted of trouble and dismay to me. Nowadays everyone wants to give me tea all the time, especially the nurses. I tell them I'd really like a stiff gin and tonic, but alcohol is another of life's pleasures denied to the elderly. If I could only get out of this bed, I'd get one for myself -- a big one. I have forgotten the name of that doctor we consulted a few days later, but I remember exactly what he said. He confirmed what Jack thought, that the tumours were in his kidneys, but added that they had possibly settled in his lungs as well. In a last (but futile) effort, my poor darling was operated on by this old fashioned surgeon who had to work in the most primitive conditions; without the drugs, anaesthetics or antiseptics he needed. By that time it was difficult to find soap whatever price you were willing to pay, and I gave him some fancy little rose scented tablets to wash up with before he cut Jack open. Jack had never been a fast healer and all the odds were against him; the strain of the advancing cancer, the inadequacy of our diet and the lack of proper medicines. The only foods we could obtain were quite coarse, there was no lean meat to make beef tea or eggs for milk puddings. Jack once said to me something to the effect that the ghastly jokes of fate are not always in the best of taste but they could be extremely witty. I never, however, found anything except the most savage cruelty in his situation, that such a highly trained surgeon had to endure such a crude assault on his body, and that a wealthy philanthropist could suffer so for the want of the most basic requirements of food, firewood and pain killers. My darling, who had been so dreadful when struck down with the slightest illness, was a model patient. It took a long time, but eventually he was able to leave his bed, and the first thing he did was to boil up his own analgesics, potent narcotics which he followed with a stiff whisky. When his condition deteriorated and I had to tend to all his most intimate needs, he was always good tempered and never made me feel I was humiliating or demeaning him. We grew closer than ever, but I knew our time was running out. In another cruel twist of fate Jack was only exempted from deportation to a German internment camp by the sick certificate. An order of 1942 decreed that all the British men not born on the Channel Islands, from the young boys of sixteen to poor old men of seventy, would be transferred to Germany. Thinking about it now, it seems bizarre that such a reasonable bureaucratic rule could regulate the Germans' inhumanity. My darling's last days are as clear in my memory as if they were yesterday. He lay in our yellow bedroom, looking out over the garden to the sea. I only left his side for the briefest periods, and slept in a chair by his bed. Early one morning I woke from an uneasy doze. I looked over to Jack. His face was grey and much too old for his sixty-two years, he was no longer the boy he had always been in my heart. Lying stiffly in the middle of the bed, arms by his side, eyes and lips closed, his breathing was so shallow that his chest hardly rose or fell. I wondered if he felt the weight of the blankets or heard the wind outside. Did he even know how I sat with him? I looked out over the garden. The vegetable patches dug in the chamomile lawn were flourishing, but the grass was long, the roses run to briars, the pond filled with sludge and rotting weeds. I wanted to lie beside my darling and hold him, just as I had each night for so many years, so after I had removed my shoes and placed them together under the bed, I pulled back the sheets and lay on my side facing Jack. He didn't move. I traced my finger across his cheekbones and down his nose to the mouth I had kissed so often. His skin was cool and very dry. I moved over and pressed my body close to his and as he made no sign that this was uncomfortable, I began to relax. The house was quiet and, for the first time in weeks, I sank into a peaceful sleep. When I woke, the soft light of late afternoon was filtering through the curtains. The breeze had dropped outside and I heard a lone bird calling for its mate. Most of the birds had been killed and I thought I would put out some potato bread for him. What depths we were reduced to in those days, eating the gentle creatures around us. It was rumoured that some desperate soul had roasted and eaten a hedgehog, but I still can't believe that was true. There were so many dreadful stories in those days, you never knew what to believe. My hand found Jack's. It was icy. I willed myself not to think of it, but I knew he was gone. I touched his cheek, my fingers slightly warming the cold flesh, then I put my arms right around him and pressed my face into his neck. We lay like that for a long time. Eventually I got up, tucked the blankets around him and closed the window. Downstairs I washed in cold water and dressed in black stockings, black slip and my best black dress. My black shoes were still under Jack's bed, so I laced on my tan brogues. I found my veiled black hat and put it on the sideboard. Even though I knew it was ridiculous, I felt uncomfortable wearing brown shoes with black and returned them to the cupboard. I looked around for my pearls, and realised I had left them upstairs too. I stood outside the bedroom door for some time before I could enter. Then I went in, raised the window and sat on the chair. I don't know what I thought about, but after some time the chirping of the little bird brought me back to the present. I bent and retrieved my shoes from under the bed and placed them beside the door. I could see my pearls lying in a shining mound on top of the blankets just below his hip. As I was picking them up I finally looked at Jack properly. His eyes were closed and his face was relaxed as if in a deep dreamless sleep. He looked years younger. He wore his favourite blue striped pyjamas from Jeremyn Street, but he was a stranger to me. I kissed him for the last time, then lifted the linen sheet to cover the face I had loved so much. I turned away, picked up my shoes and left the room, closing the door behind me. Although I hadn't noticed, that dreadful Sunday, the 1st of August 1943, had been a beautifully hot summer's day, just the sort of day Jack had always loved. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Donna Lee Brien. "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php>. Chicago style: Donna Lee Brien, "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Donna Lee Brien. (1999) Just the sort of day Jack had always loved. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]).

The word ‘uniform’ can be a noun, adjective, or verb. As a noun it relates to prescribed dress, often in occupational settings. As an adjective it relates the sameness between objects and thoughts. As a verb it means to make the same. Underlying each grammatical usage is the concept sameness, to align thoughts, ideas, and physicality. In society where heightened individualism is a key characteristic, the persistence of ‘uniform-ness’ is an intriguing area of research. This issue of M/C Journal embraces the range of meanings that word uniform encompasses, and examines how they present in our culture(s) and how they are represented in the media. In the opening to their book Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World, Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson argue that “as state, society, and nation converged towards the end of the nineteenth century uniform became part of a modern culture increasingly concerned with regulating time, space, and bodies” (Tynan and Godson 6). The modern state demanded uniformity of ideas and thought, underpinned by the rationalism that dominated the enlightenment. To dress in a uniform was to transform the body into that rational, uniform being. At the same time uniformity “suppresses individuality”, controlling social interaction (Joseph and Alex 723-24), and centralising the organisation or state in our social lives. As an item of dress, uniforms are distinctive. Yet they only become distinctive when they become different from everyday dress, such as spurs on Cavalry officers who have no horses or wigs on lawyers when everyone else has dispensed with them (Hobsbawm 4). Dress in general is governed by unwritten social rules, perhaps none so pervasive as being required to dress to your gender. The history of uniform reveals that occupational dress often demarked the appropriate gender for the job. Early military uniforms were masculine, nanny uniforms feminine. Uniform explicates status of both the wearer and the non-wearer, who then becomes the ‘other’, the outsider or the non-conformer. The dichotomy between wearer and non-wearer is not so clear, however, as the power of the uniform also provides the means through which the non-conformer can subvert its meanings through incorrect wearing of the uniform. Similarly, too, we see others subverting uniform social norms to make their political points or for political gain. As Jennifer Craik states, “there is a constant play between the intended symbolisms of uniforms … and the informal codes of wearing and denoting uniforms” (Craik 7). As one of “modernity’s practices; [uniforms represent] resistance to tradition and the embrace of rationality” (Tynan and Godson 1-2). Yet, as the twentieth century progressed, we can see uniforms and uniformity of thought being co-opted to create ‘tradition’ and ‘ritual’ particularly around the state (see Cannadine; Hobsbawn). Concurrently, formal occupational dress for many workers entered a decline near the beginning of the twentieth century (Williams-Mitchell 101), yet other forms of uniform arose. A tendency arose towards what Jennifer Craik calls the ‘quasi-uniform’, those “modes of dress that are consensually imposed as appropriate” (17), for example the business suit, a wedding dress or gym wear. This mode of uniform shifts the dynamic from a top-down directive (such as that in an institution or by government) to a more democratic one, where the general populace seemingly consents to, and socially police. With the advent of film, television, and later the Internet, the access to information has led to what some argue as the homogenisation of culture, albeit one that is dominated by particular western cultures. This too can be seen in international diplomacy. First the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, standardised international dialogue between countries. Uniform processes were put in place, with institutions such as the International Court playing a pivotal role. The English language came to dominate, with over 67 countries counting it as an official language, and many others having it in common use. This was arguably as a result of its primacy in both media and diplomatic communications, creating a uniform language which paradoxically retains its localised character. Although this too may be dissipating as this primacy is being challenged through the reinvigoration of languages from former colonies, from Irish to the Indigenous Australian languages, and the growing populations speaking Spanish and Chinese. Diversity too is being demanded in our media and politics, through more balanced and nuanced representations of people. Uniforms are often products of their time, and in their physical form can appear as from another era, staying static while fashion swiftly moves on. The butler or the chauffeur can look like a relic from a previous age. So too can uniform ways of thinking. The recent changing of state school uniform polices in Australia from gendered to gender-neutral clothing reflects how uniforms can be slow to catch up to social norms of women wearing trousers and shorts for sport, leisure, and work. This reflects not only the clothing, but the institutional beliefs that underpinned uniform policy. In reflection of the ways that uniform has changed, for this edition we have chosen to present the feature article followed by the articles in chronological order. The feature article addresses much of the shift in uniforms. This is followed by ten articles which explore several different types of uniform, both physical and metaphysical, revealing how uniforms have changed in society in the last 125 years. This issue’s feature article takes up the theme of how a dress code has developed into an imposed uniform in parliaments, and how female politicians have challenged the gender norms embedded in these codes. Taking a longitudinal view, “Parliamentary Dress: Gendered Contestation of the Political Uniform” by Jo Coghlan and Lisa J. Hackett first situates the development of parliamentary dress in its historical context that assumes masculine attire. It then highlights how female politicians have used these codes to both signal their adherence to norms and their rejection of the same norms. It further examines the ways that prominent female politicians have subverted the parliamentary uniform to make political statements. Our first article, “The Inculcative Power of Australian Cadet Corps Uniforms in the 1900s and 1910s” by Nathan Wise and Lisa J. Hackett, takes us to the start of the twentieth century and examines how military uniforms entered the classroom in the years leading up to, and during, the First World War. It notes how cadet programmes were part of a wider social movement that sought to instil middle-class values throughout society. By donning uniforms, it was believed, boys would also ‘wear’ the ideology prescribed within them. It also served as a signifier to wider society of the status of these boys and the future possibility of service to their country. The experience of the First World War and the mass-uniforming of the population provided a blue-print for the organisation of labour during wartime. Trends that were established during the First World War developed further, perhaps driven by the social and political upheavals of the inter-war years; the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism. Among this was the continuation of the idea that schoolboys undertake Army cadet programmes as part of their education. Some schools had continued this after the First World War, whilst others would introduce it at the start of the war. Liam Barnsdale’s article “Trooping the (School) Colour: Australian School Cadet Uniforms and Masculine Identities during the Second World War” examines how the cadet programmes within schools increased in popularity during the war period. Central to this was the debate over uniforming boys in appropriate uniforms. As Barnsdale points out, Australia had no official uniform for use by cadets. Instead, individual schools designed their own uniforms, which often revealed the ideology of the school rather than the armed forces. The result was that in Australia cadet uniforms were diverse in their offerings. Founded in the dying days of the Second World War, uniformity of political ideals was encapsulated in the fledging United Nations. Replacing the League of Nations which was founded to maintain world peace, the United Nations has proven to be more effective and long-lasting than its predecessor. The central mission of peacekeeping brought about a new form of military uniform, the distinctive blue berets worn by the United Nations Peace Keepers. Simone Strungaru’s article “The Blue Beret: Representations and Symbolism of UN Peacekeeper’s Uniforms” examines the history of the distinctive uniform. Here Strungaru reveals the rich symbolism that the blue beret leverages in forging a distinctive identity for the men and women who wear it. The centrality of military uniforms in historical state events, such as wars, have meant that their iconography has often been linked to the grand ceremonies of state. David Cannadine argued in 1983 that ceremonies surrounding the British royal family have become “so well stage managed” that the British (and arguably Australians) believe they are good at tradition and ritual (Cannadine 160). The next article in our volume examines the careful management of a royal visit to an Australian beach. Donna Lee Brien’s article “Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954: An Object-Inspired History” examines the material remnants of uniform and how it provides a gateway to historical knowledge. Brien’s examination starts with a commemorative medal handed out to school children as part of the royal visit to Bondi Beach. This medal deliberately ties the school uniform to royalty through the use of a signifier usually worn as a military achievement. This tangible connection allows the organisers to assign royalist identities to the school uniform. Brien’s article further extrapolates how other uniforms, such as those worn by Surf Life Savers, Nurses, and a Pipe Band were used in a carefully orchestrated display of royal pageantry at the beach. A pageantry that was uniquely Imperial and Australian all at once. Xiang Gao’s article “A ‘Uniform’ for all States? International Norm Diffusion and Localisation” takes up how norms within different countries have evolved, arguing that such norms become a type of ‘national uniform’. While states adhere to international norms such as those enshrined in the United Nations, they also have to negotiate with domestic actors and the ideals held by them. Thus, norms have to adapt to local sensibilities. The ability of a state to define its own norms on the international stage is affected by its relative positioning in international relations and diplomacy. Gao argues that more powerful states have increased capacity to define and challenge normative behaviour than smaller powers. The results of this can be seen through international treaties: for example, climate change negotiations. Uniformness and uniforms are not just the apparatus of the state, they also exist to identify members of groups that hold themselves apart from society. From subcultural uniforms to religious cults denoting their affiliation to a power beyond the mortal realm, uniforms have been utilised to exclude both the wearer from society and outsiders from the group. In their article “The Clothes Maketh the Cult: The Myth of the Cult and Pop Culture”, Huw Nolan, Jenny Wise, and Lesley McLean examine how the cult ‘uniform’ is used in popular culture as a device to denote cults as ‘the other’. Pope Francis uses his uniform as a way of challenging international norms when it comes to environmental issues, as argued in Aidan Moir’s article: “The Pope’s New Clothes: The Brand Politics of the Papal Uniform in Popular Culture”. Pope Francis, Moir argues, has deliberately chosen modest religious vestments to signify his environmental ethics and his emulation of his namesake, St Francis of Assisi. This uniform also marks a shift away from the more ornate vestments preferred by his predecessor, Pope Benedict. Moir also notes how each pope has personalised their uniform through the use of accessories, noting both John Paul II and Benedict conspicuously wearing accessories from established brand names such as Prada or Rolex. Pope Francis’s aesthetic rejects these items of conspicuous consumption, creating a humbler appearance, reducing the distance between the Catholic leader and his flock. Uniformity does not necessarily mean homogeneity, but rather, as Fredericks and Bradfield argue, a collective whole that can work together. Their article, “‘Uniting Hearts’: The Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Need for a Uniformed Front for a Constitutionally Enshrined First Nations’ Voice to Parliament” also introduces to our discussion how digital icons, a unique feature of contemporary life, become virtual uniforms, signalling the ideological position of the communicator. The ‘Uluru heart’ icon can be both worn physically and shared online to denote support for the Uluru Statement. The simple use of a recognisable symbol communicates identity and allows for widespread dissemination of support for the Uluru Statement. Nicholas Hookway continues the discussion on the use of uniform to denote support for social causes in his article “‘I decked myself out in pink’: Examining the Role of the Pink Uniform in a Virtual Sports Charity Event”. This article also demonstrates the mutability of the uniform: by adhering to the colour pink, individuals have a wide scope of clothing choices, accessories, makeup, and hair colour, etc., to choose from. Examining the pink uniform through the concept of embodied philanthropy, Hookway demonstrates how sports participants are able to create their own uniform, creating a community among themselves. This article also shows how a uniform can be created that allows for high levels of individualisation, a significant change to the reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This lack of ‘uniformity’ within the uniform appears to have had little negative effect on the wearer’s sense of purpose or unity. The article also shows how, despite pink’s association with femininity, men were prepared to wear the uniform colour to show their support of the cause. The association of the colour with cancer replaces other sociological meanings in this context. The final article in this issue offers a look at how attempts to create a social uniform can be foiled through the lack of a distinctive character, despite the availability of distinct iconography. In “Ayo, Bisexual Check: Bi Bobs, Cuffed Jeans, and Prototypes for a Bisexual Uniform on TikTok”, Collin Knopp-Schwyn examines the difficulties of establishing a uniform when the intended audience struggles to understands its meaning. Despite this, the author locates where the online bisexual community have developed a distinct style that promises the become a prototype for a recognisable bisexual uniform. The articles in this issue provide a comprehensive investigation into various facets of what uniform means both historically and contemporarily. A discernible shift away from highly regimented styles to distinct looks has occurred as society integrates the twin desires of inclusivity and individuality with the long held social need to be part of a recognisable group. References Cannadine, David. "The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition', c. 1820–1977." The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Canto ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 101-64. Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. "Introduction: Inventing Traditions." The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Canto ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 1-14. Joseph, Nathan, and Nicholas Alex. "The Uniform: A Sociological Perspective." The American Journal of Sociology 77.4 (1972): 719-30. Tynan, Jane, and Lisa Godson. "Understanding Uniform: An Introduction." Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World. Eds. Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Williams-Mitchell, Christobel. Dressed for the Job: The Story of Occupational Costume. Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1982.

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711>. Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Barron, Jackson, Kylie Stevens, and Zoe Zaczek. “WAG Who Broke into COVID-19 Bubble for an Eight-Hour Rendezvous with Her AFL Star Boyfriend Opens Up on ‘How Easy It Was’—and Apologises for ‘Really Big Mistake’ That Cost Club $50,000.” The Daily Mail 19 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638959/WAG-AFL-star-sacked-season-coronavirus-breach-reveals-easy-sneak-in.html>. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Benedict, Jeff. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes against Women. Boston: Northeastern Uni. Press, 1999. Benfante, Agata, Marialaura di Tella, Annunziata Romeo, and Lorys Castelli. “Traumatic Stress in Healthcare Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of the Immediate Impact.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (23 Oct. 2020). Blaine, Lech. “The Art of Class War.” The Monthly. 17 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/august/1596204000/lech-blaine/art-class-war#mtr>. Brooks, Samantha K., Rebecca K. Webster, Louise E. Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, and Gideon J. Rubin. “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence.” The Lancet 26 Feb. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext>. Caust, Jo. “Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians Employed in the Creative and Performing Arts Could Lose Their Jobs.” The Conversation 20 Apr. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-3-in-4-australians-employed-in-the-creative-and-performing-arts-could-lose-their-jobs-136505>. Connor, James. “The Athlete as Widget: How Exploitation Explains Elite Sport.” Sport in Society 12.10 (2009): 1369–77. Courage, Cara. “Women in the Arts: Some Questions.” The Guardian 5 Mar. 2012. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/05/women-in-the-arts-introduction>. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. and ed. S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dennien, Matt, and Lydia Lynch. “Footage Shows Relaxed Scenes from AFL Hub amid Calls for Exception Overhaul.” Brisbane Times 3 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/footage-shows-relaxed-scenes-from-afl-hub-amid-calls-for-exemption-overhaul-20200903-p55s74.html>. Dobeson, Shanee. “Bailey Defends Qld Border Rules after Grieving Mother Denied Entry to Bury Son.” MyGC.com.au 12 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.mygc.com.au/bailey-defends-qld-border-rules-after-grieving-mother-denied-exemption-to-bury-son>. Dunn, Amelia. “Who Is Deemed an ‘Essential’ Worker under Australia’s COVID-19 Rules?” SBS News 26 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Emiko. “Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Australia.” YWCA n.d. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.ywca.org.au/opinion/womens-unpaid-care-work-in-australia>. Fullagar, Simone, and Adele Pavlidis. “Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism.” Leisure Sciences (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773996?journalCode=ulsc20>. Flood, Michael, and Sue Dyson. “Sport, Athletes, and Violence against Women.” NTV Journal 4.3 (2007): 37–46. Goodwin, Sam. “AFL Boss Left Fuming over ‘Out of Control’ Quarantine Party.” Yahoo! Sport 8 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/afl-2020-uproar-out-of-control-quarantine-party-224251554.html>. Griffith News. “New Research Shows Why Musicians among the Hardest Hit by COVID-19.” 18 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/18/new-research-shows-why-musicians-among-the-hardest-hit-by-COVID-19>. Hart, Chloe. “‘This Is the Hardest It’s Going to Get’: NZ Warriors Open Up about Relocating to Australia for NRL.” ABC News 8 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/nz-warriors-open-up-about-relocation-to-australia-for-nrl/12531074>. Hooper, James. “10 Broncos Hit with Fines as Club Cops Huge Sanction over Pub Bubble Breach.” Fox Sports 18 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-premiership/teams/broncos/nrl-2020-brisbane-broncos-pub-covid19-bubble-breach-fine-sanctions-who-was-at-the-pub/news-story/d3bd3c559289a8b83bc3fccbceaffe78>. Hytner, Mike. “AFL Suspends Season and Cancels AFLW amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian 22 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/22/afl-nrl-and-a-league-press-on-despite-restrictions>. Jones, Wayne. “Ray of Hope for Medical Care across Border.” Echo Netdaily 14 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.echo.net.au/2020/08/ray-of-hope-for-medical-care-across-border>. Jouavel, Levi. “Women’s Football Shutdowns: ‘It’s Unfair Boys’ Academies Can Still Play’.” BBC News 10 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54876198>. Keh, Andrew. “We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real.” The New York Times 16 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html>. Kennedy, Else. “‘The Worst Year’: Domestic Violence Soars in Australia during COVID-19.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/the-worst-year-domestic-violence-soars-in-australia-during-COVID-19>. Keoghan, Sarah. “‘Everyone’s Concerned’: Players Cop 70% Pay Cut.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/netball/everyone-s-concerned-players-cop-70-per-cent-pay-cut-20200328-p54esz.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Gambling’s Share of NRL Revenue Could Well Double: That Brings Power.” Sydney Morning Herald. 15 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/gambling-s-share-of-nrl-revenue-could-well-double-that-brings-power-20200515-p54tbg.html>. McGrath, Pat. “Racing Victoria Got $16.6 Million in Emergency COVID Funding: Then Online Horse Racing Gambling Revenue Skyrocketed.” ABC News 3 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/racing-victoria-emergency-coronavirus-COVID-funding/12838012>. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Madden, Helena. “Lebron James’s Suite in the NBA Bubble Is Fit for a King.” Robb Report 16 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://robbreport.com/travel/hotels/lebron-james-nba-bubble-suite-1234569303>. Maguire, Joseph. “Sportization.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 4710–11. Mathieson, Craig. “Michael Jordan Pierces the Bubble of Elite Sport in Juicy ESPN Doco.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/michael-jordan-pierces-the-bubble-of-elite-sport-in-juicy-espn-doco-20200511-p54rwc.html>. Maurice, Megan. “Australia’s Summer of Cricket during COVID Is about Money and Power—and Men”. 6 Jan. 2021. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/06/australias-summer-of-cricket-during-COVID-is-about-money-and-power-and-men>. Murphy, Catherine. “Cricket Australia Contributed to Circumstances Surrounding Ball-Tampering Scandal, Review Finds”. ABC News 20 Oct. 2018. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-29/scathing-report-released-into-cricket-australia-culture/10440972>. News.com.au. “How an AFL Star Wide’s Instagram Post Led to a Hefty Fine and a Journalist Being Stood Down.” NZ Herald 3 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/how-an-afl-star-wifes-instagram-post-led-to-a-hefty-fine-and-a-journalist-being-stood-down/7IDR4SXQ6QW5WDFBV42BK3M7YQ>. Nicholson, Matthew, Anthony Kerr, and Merryn Sherwood. Sport and the Media: Managing the Nexus. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Pavlidis, Adele. “Being Grateful: Materialising ‘Success’ in Women’s Contact Sport.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458620300207>. Phillips, Sam. “‘The Future of the Season Is in Their Hands’: Palaszczuk’s NRL Warning.” Sydney Morning Herald 10 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/the-future-of-the-season-is-in-their-hands-palaszczuk-s-nrl-warning-20200810-p55k7j.html>. Pierik, Jon, and Ryan, Peter. “‘I Own the Consequences’: Stack, Coleman-Jones Apologise for Gold Coast Incident.” The Age 5 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/i-own-the-consequences-stack-apologises-for-gold-coast-incident-20200905-p55spq.html>. Poposki, Claudia, and Louise Ayling. “AFL Star’s Wife Who Caused Uproar by Breaching Quarantine to Go to a Spa Reveals She’s Been Smashed by Vile Trolls.” Daily Mail Australia 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8674083/AFL-WAG-Brooke-Cotchin-breached-COVID-19-quarantine-spa-cops-abuse-trolls.html>. Ramsey, Michael. “Axed Swan Spared Jail over Ex-Girlfriend Assault.” AFL.com.au 2 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/526677/axed-swan-spared-jail-over-ex-girlfriend-assault>. Read, Brent. “The NRL Is Set to Finish the Season on a High after Stunning Financial Results.” The Australian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/nrl/the-nrl-is-set-to-finish-the-season-on-a-high-after-stunning-financial-results/news-story/1ce9c2f9b598441d88daaa8cc2b44dc1>. Reel, Justine, J., and Emily Crouch. “#MeToo: Uncovering Sexual Harassment and Assault in Sport.” Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 13.2 (2018): 177–79. Rogers, Michael. “Buckley, Sanderson to Pay Pies’ Huge Fine for COVID Breach.” AFL.com.au 1 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/479118/buckley-sanderson-to-pay-pies-huge-fine-for-COVID-breach>. Richardson, David, and Richard Denniss. “Gender Experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Women Lose from COVID-19, Men to Gain from Stimulus.” The Australia Institute June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gender-experiences-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown>. Rowe, David. “All Sport Is Global: A Hard Lesson from the Pandemic.” Open Forum 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/all-sport-is-global-a-hard-lesson-from-the-pandemic>. ———. “And the Winner Is … Television: Spectacle and Sport in a Pandemic.” Open Forum 19 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/and-the-winner-istelevision-spectacle-and-sport-in-a-pandemic>. ———. Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. ———. “Scandals and Sport.” Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. Eds. Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. London: Routledge, 2019. 324–32. ———. “Subjecting Pandemic Sport to a Sociological Procedure.” Journal of Sociology 56.4 (2020): 704–13. Schout, David. “Cricket Prepares for Mental Health Challenges Thrown Up by Bubble Life.” The Guardian 8 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/08/cricket-prepares-for-mental-health-challenges-thrown-up-by-bubble-life>. Spaaij, Ramón. Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2011. The Sporting Bubble. Dir. Peter Dickson. Nine Network Australia, 2020. Swanston, Tim. “With Coronavirus Limiting Interstate Movement, Queensland Is the Nation’s Sporting Hub—Is That Really Safe?” ABC News 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-29/coronavirus-queensland-rules-for-sports-teams-explainer/12542634>. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women's Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 427–38. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Walter, Brad. “From Shutdown to Restart: How NRL Walked Tightrope to Get Season Going Again.” NRL.com 25 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/05/25/from-shutdown-to-restart-how-nrl-walked-tightrope-to-get-season-going-again>. Wade, Lisa. “Rape on Campus: Athletes, Status, and the Sexual Assault Crisis.” The Conversation 7 Mar. 2017. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/rape-on-campus-athletes-status-and-the-sexual-assault-crisis-72255>. Webster, Andrew. “Sydney Roosters’ Mitchell Pearce Involved in a Drunken Incident with a Dog? And Your Point Is ...?” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Jan. 2016. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/sydney-roosters-mitchell-pearce-involved-in-a-drunken-incident-with-a-dog-and-your-point-is--20160127-gmfemh.html>. Whittaker, Troy. “Three-Peat Not Driving Broncos in NRLW Grand Final.” NRL.com 24 Oct. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/10/24/three-peat-not-driving-broncos-in-nrlw-grand-final>. Yahoo! Sport Staff. “‘Not Okay’: Uproar over ‘Disgusting’ Find inside Quarantine.” Yahoo! Sport 9 July 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/wnba-disturbing-conditions-coronavirus-bubble-slammed-003557243.html>.

In 1983 there was a dramatic change in the activities of the Royal Australian Army Educational Corps (RAAEC). From 1965 to 1983, the RAAEC satisfied the educational needs of soldiers in the Regular Army by conducting the Australian Army Certificate of Education Class 1 (AACE 1) and the Australian Army Certificate of Education Class 2 (AACE 2). These courses were originally designed to parallel civilian secondary school studies, and as a result, the AACE program's structure, subject range and content were similar to those of the civilian educational system. This duplication was so complete that credit towards the AACE qualifications was granted for secondary school studies at, or above, Year 9. In August 1983 the AACE program was replaced by a new program of Army education. This program consisted of two courses - Subject 3 Level 1 and Subject 3 Level 2. Whereas the AACE courses were lengthy and included an extensive range of subjects, the Subject 3 courses were of relatively short duration and addressed only literacy and numeracy skills. As this change was carefully planned and deliberately executed to better satisfy the educational needs of soldiers, for the purposes of this field study, it was described as an innovation - the Subject 3 innovation. The study reported here reviewed the Subject 3 innovation process. To ensure that the review was comprehensive, the innovation process was examined from a number of different perspectives. These included an historical description, an analysis of the innovation strategy, a review of the curriculum development tool and decision making, and a determination of the process necessary to confirm and remediate any deficiencies in the innovation process. The outcomes of this review of the Subject 3 innovation process gave cause to question the validity of many fundamental characteristics of the Subject 3 courses, e.g. the scope of the course content, the content validity of the terminal assessment instruments, and the exit standards of the courses. The field study concluded that there was an urgent need to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the Subject 3 courses to verify and correct these shortcomings.

Non standard working hours such as those experienced by rotational shift workers have a wide ranging impact upon job and roster satisfaction, performance, behaviour, sleep, quality of work and family life. The shift roster plays an important role in moderating the influence of non standard working hours on the individual and the group though it is well documented that shift work does affect everyone differently. Aspects of shift work that appear to be disadvantageous for many individuals can be considered to be beneficial by others depending upon the work circumstances and the needs of the individual and family. This study is concerned with shift work within a section of the Australian Defence environment - the Defence Integrated Secure Communications Network (DISCON) - Royal Australian Army Corps of Signals component, an area previously untouched by academic or other research. The significance of this study is that whilst it has focussed on a unique work environment the findings are not at variance to other shift working research. The Australian Army, through units of the Royal Australian Corps of Signals, has the responsibility of managing and operating the Switching and Communications Centres throughout the states of Victoria and Queensland, and within the cities of Canberra and Sydney. Shift workers and the shift working rosters operating within these units are the focus of this study. The purpose of this study is to compare the four shift working rosters operating within the four different Army units with DISCON and determine which one is most appropriate in terms of current roster design guidelines and shift worker preference. DISCON was established to support the operations of the Australian Defence Force and Department of Defence for the rest of this century and beyond. DISCON is Defence's first secure, integrated communications system, and will be used for command and control of the Australian Defence Force as well as management and administration of the Defence Organisation. DISCON operates by means of interconnected switching centres which direct all incoming message traffic to its destination and link Defence establishments Australia-wide. DISCON Switching Centres serve a particular region through Communications Centres and decentralised communications terminals. DISCON has brought with it new technology, new equipment and a range of new services to its subscribers. DISCON provides facilities for the passage of voice (secure and insecure telephone), facsimile, telegraph and electronic data and is expected to support the current range of tactical (field) external networks and individual tactical radio communication. There has also been a major change to the communications doctrine of providing pre-determined facilities, and subscribers no longer have to rely purely upon area or regional communications centres to service their communications needs of formal message traffic, facsimile and data transmission. Communications terminals have been decentralised to a large extent bringing them closer to the user - in some cases directly to them. Switching centres have also taken on the additional responsibility of providing advice to subscribers whilst communication centres are assisting with user education.