Статті в журналах з теми "Manchester massacre"

The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.

The 200th anniversary of the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ has been marked by numerous public events, exhibitions in museums and libraries, and the re-examination of the event by historians in books and articles. The broader significance has been much debated, and much attention paid to the experiences of individuals who took part in the reform rally.1 Perhaps understandably, less attention has been paid to the military presence at St Peter’s Field, apart from the notorious Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry (hereafter the Manchester Yeomanry). The aim of this paper is not to examine once again the mass of evidence relating to the massacre, but to introduce readers to some of the military sources available which may help in the interpretation of the conduct of the cavalry on that day and correct some small errors that have crept into the literature. The paper examines and compares the background, training and equipment of the regular and yeomanry regiments in 1819, and the relative experience of the officers and men who made up the ranks of the mounted troops at St Peter’s Field on that day. Some consequences for later civil protests and disturbances are suggested from a military perspective.

Focusing on the activist exhibition The Mothers of Tiananmen (2019), this article examines my methodology of curating for social action and justice using international collaboration and participatory arts-as-research. The exhibition responded to the ongoing campaign for justice for the victims and survivors of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, as well as sought to support women’s creative resistance and voice. The Mothers of Tiananmen was co-created with artist Mei Yuk Wong, the 64 Museum (Hong Kong), and artists participating in the Centre for International Women Artists (Manchester). The context for the exhibition is the city of Manchester, which has one of the highest Chinese populations in England, along with a diverse international demographic with over 200 languages spoken. Through this case study, curating is presented as a creative and critical tool by which to respond to the range of justice and activist concerns of international and diasporic communities.

Abstract On the 16th August 1819, a crowd of around sixty thousand gathered outside Manchester to listen to the renowned radical Henry Hunt. When the crowd appeared to grow restless the authorities ordered in a regiment of Hussars. Eleven were killed, hundreds injured. The radical presses swiftly condemned the “Peterloo massacre.” So, away in Italy, did the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The consequence of Shelley’s anger was one of the greatest poems of political protest in the English language. It was entitled The Mask of Anarchy. This article is about this poem. It asks why Shelley wrote it, what he wanted to say, and how he chose to say it.

Abstract Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy, was crucially informed by printed news sources relating to the momentous events in Manchester of 16 August 1819. Hitherto our knowledge of those sources has been confined to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This article re-examines the available evidence and argues that Shelley may well also have drawn on the accounts of Peterloo written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile. It traces the connections between Carlile and the Shelley circle in London during 1819 (including Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg), and identifies a number of suggestive verbal parallels between Shelley’s Mask and Carlile’s prose. But there were also important political differences between the two men; an appreciation of those differences throws new light on the Mask’s ambivalent attitude to the prospect of revolution, and Shelley’s strident advocacy of non-violent resistance to state-sponsored oppression.

Originally spurred by determination to bring the Manchester authorities to justice in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, Henry Hunt persisted in seeking to gain election for the popular constituency of Preston. Eventually successful in 1830, he entered parliament pledged to present every petition sent to him, including that from Mary Smith calling for female suffrage. Having provided a rational vindication of the rights of women, her petition descended into a diatribe against married men who indulged in homosexual acts to the despair of their suicidal wives. This was a thinly veiled reference to alleged goings on in the household of the radical journalist William Cobbett. This article seeks to place in context the allegations and subsequent heated controversy by examining the long-term relationship between Hunt and Cobbett, dating back to the early nineteenth century and their mutual conversion from loyalism to radicalism. Already strained by the longstanding animus of Cobbett’s wife towards Hunt on account of his adulterous domestic circumstances, the radical allies were increasingly at odds in the years after Peterloo, divided over political and personal issues in a bewildering and increasingly unrestrained manner. Jealous of Hunt’s electoral success at Preston and furious with his radical condemnation of the Reform Bill, Cobbett inveighed against the ‘Preston Cock’. Hunt responded in kind, repeating allegations soon taken up in Mary Smith’s petition. Historians have simply noted how the petition was greeted with derision, but as this article shows, it merits deeper study. An early milestone on the long journey to secure votes for women, Mary Smith’s petition reveals political, personal and sexual divisions in early nineteenth-century radicalism - over feminism, homosexuality and adultery - attitudes and prejudices which inhibited any decisive pre-Victorian advance beyond manhood suffrage. The article concludes with a postscript noting Hunt’s fall from favour as the Reform Bill was passed, losing his Preston seat in the first election under the new propertied franchise. He died shortly thereafter but was rehabilitated and revered a few years later by the Chartists. His presentation of the first petition for female suffrage has seemingly been lost from history.

Background/Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of application-linked stretching ball instruments that record the rolling time and force of patients compared with a traditional simple stretching ball. Methods: Fourteen participants with plantar fasciitis were divided into a simple massage ball group (group A, n = 8) and an application-linked massage ball group (group B, n = 6). The application-linked massage ball sends information regarding the massages, such as the frequency and force of the massage on the foot, to the application on the patient’s smartphone. All clinical outcomes were evaluated at the beginning of the study and 1-, 2-, and 3-month follow-up. The primary outcome measure was the Manchester–Oxford Foot Questionnaire (MOXFQ) score. Results: At the beginning of the study, the initial MOXFQ score was not significantly different between the two groups (p = 0.948). At each time point, the MOXFQ score of the whole population did not improve significantly compared to that of the initial state (p = 0.131). Generalized estimating equation modeling demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the improvement of the MOXFQ score between groups A and B during follow-up (p = 0.826). In addition, no group-by-time interactions were observed (p = 0.457). Conclusions: The efficacy of an application-linked massage ball for the treatment of plantar fasciitis was not as definite as that of a traditional simple stretching ball in patients whose symptoms persisted for at least six months. Future studies that include patients with acute plantar fasciitis are required.

This article examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s interest in contemporary possibilities of text dissemination in order to reconcile the normally opposing tendencies of gradualism (“slow reform”) and “violent” revolution in his life and writings. I offer a close reading of two parallel cultural events, both of which produced a national commotion that widely disseminated radical views—the “Peterloo” massacre at Manchester and Lord Eldon’s copyright rulings as Lord Chancellor. In both instances, the government’s attempts to control expression had the opposite effect due to the consequences of press coverage and political activism. In combination with nonviolent textual piracy, I argue that the circulation of the belief in poetry’s power concomitantly with the formation of a radical canon encouraged the latter’s circulation as propaganda, de facto establishing a common cultural heritage for the growing radical movement. Since Shelley’s writings became a fundamental component of the cultural glue that encouraged cohesion of the expanding radical class as soon as one decade after his premature death, I suggest that a reading of Shelley’s political strategies that moves beyond “ineffectualism” can highlight the continuing relevance of Shelley’s aesthetics and political thought.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

I miss the ferry to San Pietro, so after a long bus trip winding through the southern Sardinian rocky terrain past gum trees, shrubs, caper plants, and sheep, I take refuge from the rain in a bar at the port. While I order a beer and panini, the owner, a man in his early sixties, begins to chat asking me why I’m heading to the island. For the tuna, I say, to research cultural practices and changes surrounding the ancient tuna trap la tonnara, and for the Girotonno international tuna festival, which coincides with the migration of the Northern Bluefin Tuna and the harvest season. This year the slogan of the festival reads Dal Sulcis a Sushi ("From Sulcis to Sushi"), a sign of the diverse tastes to come. Tuna here is the best in the world, he exclaims, a sentiment I hear many times over whilst doing fieldwork in southern Italy. He excitedly gestures for me to follow. We walk into the kitchen and on a long steel bench sits a basin covered with cloth. He uncovers it, and proudly poised, waits for my reaction. A large pinkish-brown loin of cooked tuna sits in brine. I have never tasted tuna in this way, so to share in his enthusiasm I conjure my interest in the rich tuna gastronomy found in this area of Sardinia called Sulcis. I’m more familiar with the clean taste of sashimi or lightly seared tuna. As I later experience, traditional tuna preparations in San Pietro are far from this. The most notable characteristic is that the tuna is thoroughly cooked or the flesh or organs are preserved with salt by brining or drying. A tuna steak cooked in the oven is robust and more like meat from the land than the sea in its flavours, colour, and texture. This article is about taste: the taste of, and tastes for, tuna in a traditional fishing community. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and is part of a wider inquiry into the place of tradition and culture in seafood sustainability discourses and practices. In this article I use the notion of a taste network to explore the relationship between macro forces—international markets, stock decline and marine regulations—and transformations within local cultures of tuna production and consumption. Taste networks frame the connections between taste in a gustatory sense, tastes as an aesthetic preference and tasting as a way of learning about and attuning to modes and meanings surrounding tuna. As Antoine Hennion asserts, taste is more than a connoisseurship of an object, taste represents a cultural activity that concerns a wide range of practices, exchanges and attachments. Elspeth Probyn suggests that taste “acts as a connector between history, place, things, and people” (65) and “can also come to form communities: local places that are entangled in the global” (62). Within this framework, taste moves away from Bourdieu’s notion of taste as a social distinction towards an understanding of taste as created through a network of entities—social, biological, technological, and so forth. It turns attention to the mundane activities and objects of tuna production and consumption, the components of a taste network, and the everyday spaces where tradition and transformation are negotiated. For taste to change requires a transformation of the network (or components of that network) that bring such tastes into existence. These networks and their elements form the very meaning, matter, and moments of tradition and culture. As Hennion reminds us through his idea of “reservoir(s) of difference” (100), there are a range of diverse tastes that can materialise from the interactions of humans with objects, in this case tuna. Yet, taste networks can also be rendered obsolete. When a highly valued and endangered species like Bluefin is at the centre of such networks, there are material, ethical, and even political limitations to some tastes. In a study that follows three scientists as they attempt to address scallop decline in Brest and St Brieuc Bay, Michael Callon advocates for “the abandonment of all prior distinction between the natural and the social” (1). He draws attention to networks of actors and significant moments, rather than pre-existing categories, to figure the contours of power. This approach is particularly useful for social research that involves science, technology and the “natural” world. In my own research in San Pietro, the list of human and non-human actors is long and spans the local to the global: Bluefin (in its various meanings and as an entity with its own agency), tonnara owners, fishermen, technologies, fish shops and restaurants, scientific observers, policy (local, regional, national, European and international), university researchers, the sea, weather, community members, Japanese and Spanish buyers, and markets. Local discourses surrounding tuna and taste articulate human and non-human entanglements in quite particular ways. In San Pietro, as with much of Italy, notions of place, environment, identity, quality, and authenticity are central to the culture of tuna production and consumption. Food products are connected to place through ecological, cultural and technological dimensions. In Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch’s terms this frames food and tastes in relation to a spatial dimension (its place of origin), a social dimension (its methods of production and distribution), and a cultural dimension (its perceived qualities and reputation). The place name labelling of canned tuna from San Pietro is an example of a product that represents the notion of provenance. The practice of protecting traditional products is well established in Italy through appellation programs, much like the practice of protecting terroir products in France. It is no wonder that the eco-gastronomic movement Slow Food developed in Italy as a movement to protect traditional foods, production methods, and biodiversity. Such discourses and movements like Slow Food create local/global frameworks and develop in relation to the phenomenon and ideas like globalisation, industrialization, and homogenisation. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Pietro over the 2013 tuna season. This included interviews with some thirty participants (fishers, shop keepers, locals, restaurateurs, and tonnara owners), secondary research into international markets, marine regulations, and environmental movements, and—of course—a gustatory experience of tuna. Walking down the main street the traditions of the tonnara and tuna are palpable. On a first impression there’s something about the streets and piazzas that is akin to Zukin’s notion of “vernacular spaces”, “sources of identity and belonging, affective qualities that the idea of intangible culture expresses, refines and sustains” (282). At the centre is the tonnara, which refers to the trap (a labyrinth of underwater nets) as well as the technique of tuna fishing and land based processing activities. For centuries, tuna and the tonnara have been at the centre of community life, providing employment, food security, and trade opportunities, and generating a wealth of ecological knowledge, a rich gastronomy based on preserved tuna, and cultural traditions like the famous harvest ritual la mattanza (the massacre). Just about every organ is preserved by salting and drying. The most common is the female ovary sac, which becomes bottarga. Grated onto pasta it has a strong metallic offal flavour combined with the salty tang of the sea. There is also the male equivalent lusciami, a softer consistency and flavour, as well as dried heart and lungs. There is canned tuna, a continuation of the tradition of brining and barrelling, but these are no ordinary cans. Each part of the tuna is divided into parts corresponding loosely to anatomy but more closely to quality based on textures, colour, and taste. There is the ventresca from the belly, the most prized cut because of its high fat content. Canned in olive oil or brine, a single can of this cut sells for around 30 Euros. Both the canned variety or freshly grilled ventresca is a sumptuous experience, soft and rich. Change is not new to San Pietro. In the long history of the tonnara there have been numerous transformations resulting from trade, occupation, and dominant economic systems. As Stefano Longo describes, with the development of capitalism and industrialization, the socio-economic structure of the tonnara changed and there was a dramatic decline in tonnare (plural) throughout the 1800s. The tonnare also went through different phases of ownership. In 1587 King Philip II formally established the Sardinian tonnare (Emery). Phillip IV then sold a tonnara to a Genovese man in 1654 and, from the late 18th century until today, the tonnara has remained in the Greco family from Genova. There were also changes to fishing and preservation technologies, such as the replacement of barrels after the invention of the can in the early 1800s, and innovations to recipes, as for example in the addition of olive oil. Yet, compared to recent changes, the process of harvesting, breaking down and sorting flesh and organs, and preserving tuna, has remained relatively stable. The locus of change in recent years concerns the harvest, the mattanza. For locals this process seems to be framed with concepts of before, and after, the Japanese arrived on the island. Owner Giuliano Greco, a man in his early fifties who took over the management of the tonnara from his father when it reopened in the late 1990s, describes these changes: We have two ages—before the Japanese and after. Before the Japanese, yes, the tuna was damaged. It was very violent in the mattanza. In the age before the pollution, there was a crew of 120 people divided in a little team named the stellati. The more expert and more important at the centre of the boat, the others at the side because at the centre there was more tuna. When there was mattanza it was like a race, a game, because if they caught more tuna they had more entrails, which was good money for them, because before, part of the wage was in nature, part of the tuna, and for this game the tuna was damaged because they opened it with a knife, the heart, the eggs etc. And for this method it was very violent because they wanted to get the tuna entrails first. The tuna remained on the boat without ice, with blood everywhere. The tonnara operated within clear social hierarchies made up of tonnarotti (tuna fishermen) under the guidance of the Rais (captain of tonnara) whose skills, charisma and knowledge set him apart. The Rais liaised with the tonnarotti, the owners, and the local community, recruiting men and women to augment the workforce in the mattanza period. Goliardo Rivano, a tonnarotto (singular) since 1999 recalls “all the town would be called on for the mattanza. Not only men but women too would work in the cannery, cutting, cleaning, and canning the tuna.” The mattanza was the starting point of supply and consumption networks. From the mattanza the tuna was broken down, the flesh boiled and brined for local and foreign markets, and the organs salted and dried for the (mainly) local market. Part of the land-based activities of tonnarotti involved cleaning, salting, pressing and drying the organs, which supplemented their wage. As Giuliano described, the mattanza was a bloody affair because of the practice of retrieving the organs; but since the tuna was boiled and then preserved in brine, it was not important whether the flesh was damaged. At the end of the 1970s the tonnara closed. According to locals and reportage, pollution from a nearby factory had caused a drastic drop in tuna. It remained closed until the mid 1990s when Japanese buyers came to inquire about tuna from the trap. Global tastes for tuna had changed during the time the tonnara was closed. An increase in western appetites for sushi had been growing since the early 1970s (Bestore). As Theadore Bestore describes in detail, this coincided with a significant transformation of the Japanese fishing industry’s international role. In the 1980s, the Japanese government began to restructure its fleets in response to restricted access to overseas fishing grounds, which the declaration of Excusive Economic Zones enforced (Barclay and Koh). At this time, Japan turned to foreign suppliers for tuna (Bestore). Kate Barclay and Sun-Hui Koh describe how quantity was no longer a national food security issue like it had been in post war Japan and “consumers started to demand high-quality high-value products” (145). In the late 1990s, the Greco family reopened the tonnara and the majority of the tuna went to Japan leaving a smaller portion for the business of canning. The way mattanza was practiced underwent profound changes and particular notions of quality emerged. This was also the beginning of new relationships and a widening of the taste network to include international stakeholders: Japanese buyers and markets became part of the network. Giuliano refers to the period as the “Japanese Age”. A temporal framing that is iterated by restaurant and fish shop owners who talk about a time when Japanese began to come to the island and have the first pick of the tuna. Giuliano recalls “there was still blood but there was not the system of opening tuna, in total, like before. Now the tuna is opened on the land. The only operation we do on the boat is blooding and chilling.” Here he references the Japanese technique of ikejime. Over several years the technicians taught Giuliano and some of the crew about killing the tuna faster and bleeding it to maintain colour and freshness. New notions of quality and taste for raw or lightly cooked tuna entered San Pietro. According to Rais Luigi “the tuna is of higher quality, because we treat it in a particular way, with ice.” Giuliano describes the importance of quality. “Before they used the stellati and it took five people, each one with a harpoon to haul the tuna. Now they only use one hook, in the mouth and use a chain, by hand. On board there is bleeding, and there is blood, but now we must keep the quality of the meat at its best.” In addition to the influence of Japanese tastes, the international Girotonno tuna festival had its inauguration in 2003, and, along with growing tourism, brought cosmopolitan and international tastes to San Pietro. The impact of a global taste for tuna has had devastating effects on their biomass. The international response to the sharp decline was the expansion of the role of inter-governmental monitoring bodies like International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the introduction of quotas, and an increase in the presence of marine authorities on fleets, scientific research and environmental campaigns. In San Pietro, international relationships further widened and so did the configuration of taste networks, this time to include marine regulators, a quota on Bluefin, a Spanish company, and tuna ranches in Malta. The mattanza again was at the centre of change and became a point of contention within the community. This time because as a practice it is endangered, occurring only once or twice a year, “for the sake of tradition, culture” as Giuliano stated. The harvest now takes place in ranches in Malta because for the last three years the Greco family have supplied the tonnara’s entire quota (excluding tuna from mattanza or those that die in the net) to a major Spanish seafood company Riccardo Fuentes e Hijos, which transports them live to Malta where they are fattened and slaughtered, predominantly for a Japanese market. The majority of tuna now leave the island whole, which has profoundly transformed the distribution networks and local taste culture, and mainly the production and trade in tuna organs and canned tuna. In 2012, ICCAT and the European Union further tightened the quotas, which along with competition with industrial fisheries for both quota and markets, has placed enormous pressure on the tonnara. In 2013, it was allocated a quota that was well under what is financially sustainable. Add to the mix the additional expense of financing the obligatory scientific observers, and the tonnara has had to modify its operations. In the last few years there has been a growing antagonism between marine regulations, global markets, and traditional practices. This is exemplified in the limitations to the tuna organ tradition. It is now more common to find dried tuna organs in vacuum packs from Sicily rather than local products. As the restaurateur Secondo Borghero of Tonno della Corsa says “the tonnara made a choice to sell the live tuna to the Spanish. It’s a big problem. The tuna is not just the flesh but also the interior—the stomach, the heart, the eggs—and now we don’t have the quantity of these and the quality around is also not great.” In addition, even though preserved organs are available for consumption, local preserving activities have almost ceased along with supplementary income. The social structures and the types of actors that are a part of the tonnara have also changed. New kinds of relationships, bodies, and knowledge are situated side by side because of the mandate that there be scientific observers present at certain moments in the season. In addition, there are coast guards and, at various stages of the season, university staff contracted by ICCAT take samples and tag the tuna to generate data. The changes have also introduced new types of knowledge, activities, and institutional affiliations based on scientific ideas and discourses of marine biology, conservation, and sustainability. These are applied through marine management activities and regimes like quotas and administered through state and global institutions. This is not to say that the knowledge informing the Rais’s decisions has been done away with but as Gisli Palsson has previously argued, there is a new knowledge hierarchy, which places a significant focus on the notion of expert knowledge. This has the potential to create unequal power dynamics between the marine scientists and the fishers. Today in San Pietro tuna tastes are diverse. Tuna is delicate, smooth, and rich ventresca, raw tartare clean on the palate, novel at the Girotono, hearty tuna al forno, and salty dry bottarga. Tasting tuna in San Pietro offers a material and affective starting point to follow the socio-cultural, political, and ecological contours and contentions that are part of tuna traditions and their transformations. By thinking of gustatory and aesthetic tastes as part of wider taste networks, which involve human and non-human entities, we can begin to unpack and detail better what these changes encompass and figure forms and moments of power and agency. At the centre of tastes and transformation in San Pietro are the tonnara and the mattanza. Although in its long existence the tonnara has endured many changes, those in the past 15 years are unprecedented. Several major global events have provided conditions for change and widened the network from its once mainly local setting to its current global span. First, Japanese and global tastes set a demand for tuna and introduced different tuna production and preparation techniques and new styles of serving tuna raw or lightly cooked tuna. Later, the decline of Bluefin stocks and the increasing involvement of European and international monitoring bodies introduced catch limitations along with new processes and types of knowledge and authorities. Coinciding with this was the development of relationships with middle companies, which again introduced new techniques and technologies, namely the gabbie (cage) and ranches, to the taste network. In the cultural setting of Italy where the conservation of tradition is of particular importance, as I have explained earlier through the notion of provenance, the management of a highly regulated endangered marine species is a complex project that causes much conflict. Because of the dire state of the stocks and continual rise in global demand, solutions are complex. Yet it would seem useful to recognise that tuna tastes are situated within a network of knowledge, know-how, technology, and practices that are not simple modes of production and consumption but also ways of stewarding the sea and its species. Ethics Approval Original names have been used when participants gave consent on the official consent form to being identified in publications relating to the study. This is in accordance with ethics approval granted through the University of Sydney on 21 March 2013. Project number 2012/2825. References Barclay, Kate, and Koh Sun-Hui “Neo-liberal Reforms in Japan’s Tuna Fisheries? A History of Government-business Relations in a Food-producing Sector.” Japan Forum 20.2 (2008): 139–170. Bestor, Theadore “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.” Foreign Policy 121 (2000): 54–63. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard UP, 1984. Callon, Michael “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” Power, Action, Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge? Ed. John Law. London: Routledge, 1986. 196–223. Emery, Katherine “Tonnare in Italy: Science, History and Culture of Sardinian Tuna Fishing.” Californian Italian Studies 1 (2010): 1–40. Hennion, Antoine “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology” Cultural Sociology 1 (2007): 97–114. Longo, Stefano “Global Sushi: A Socio-Ecological Analysis of The Sicilian Bluefin Tuna Fishery.” Dissertation. Oregon: University of Oregon, 2009. Morgan, Kevin, Marsden, Terry, and Johathan Murdoch. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Palsson, Gisli. Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991. Probyn, Elspeth “In the Interests of Taste & Place: Economies of Attachment.” The Global Intimate. Eds. G. Pratt and V. Rosner. New York: Columbia UP (2012). Zukin, Sharon “The Social Production of Urban Cultural Heritage: Identity and Ecosystem on an Amsterdam Shopping Street.” City, Culture and Society 3 (2012): 281–291.

Introduction Within wellness circles, there has been growing concern over an increasing focus on Alternative Right (or Alt-right) conspiracy (see Aubry; Bloom and Moskalenko). Greene, referring to a definition provided by the Anti-Defamation League, defines the Alt-right as a loose political network characterised by its rejection of mainstream conservatism, embrace of white nationalism, and use of online platforms (33). The “wellness revolution”, on the other hand, which marked a split from the health care sector in which “thought leaders” replaced medical experts as authorities on health (Pilzer, qtd. in Kickbusch and Payne 275), combines New Age practices with ideological movements that emphasise the “interdependence of body, mind and spirit” (Voigt and Laing 32). It has been noted that there is overlap between the circulation of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism (see Ward and Voas; Parmigiani). Influencers following the Paleo diet, or Palaeolithic diet, such as Australian celebrity chef and Paleo diet guru Pete Evans, have also come under fire for sharing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience (see Brennan). Johnson notes that the origins of the Paleo diet can be traced back to 1975, with the publication of Dr Walter Voegtlin’s book The Stone Age Diet. This text, however, has been largely disavowed by Paleo leaders due to Voegtlin’s “white supremacist, eugenicist, and generally unpalatable politics”. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider how white nationalism and conspiracy theory may overlap within the wellness space. A specific example occurred in 2020, when Pete Evans shared an Alt-right conspiracy meme to his Facebook account. The ‘butterfly-caterpillar meme’ contained the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3). Though Evans later commented that the sharing of the hate symbol was unintentional, and that he misunderstood the symbol, this case raised questions about the ability of wellness influencers to amplify white nationalist messaging. This essay is concerned with the question: what makes the wellness industry a target for the spreading of white nationalist ideas? It argues that the wellness industry and far-right ideology possess a pre-occupation with bodily purity which makes it more likely that white nationalist material carrying this message will be spread via wellness networks. Through a critical examination of the media surrounding Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme, this case study will examine the ideological aspects of the Paleo diet and how they appeal to a white nationalist agenda. Focussing on the Australian context, this essay will theorise the spreadability of memes in relation to white nationalist symbolism. It contends that the Paleo diet positions foods that are not organic as impure, and holds a preference for positive messaging. Alt-right propaganda packaged in a positive and New Age frame poses a danger in that it can operate as a kind of contagion for high-profile networks, exponentially increasing its spreadability. This is of particular concern when it is considered that diet can have an impact on people’s actions outside of the online space: it impacts what people consume and do with their bodies, as evidenced by calls for eating disorders created by algorithmic repetition to be considered a ‘cyber-pathy’. This creates the conditions for the wellness industry to be targeted using memes as recruitment material for white nationalist groups. The Paleo Diet and the Sharing of a Neo-Nazi Meme Pete Evans is a famous Australian TV Chef from the hit series My Kitchen Rules, a show that ran from 2010-2020. The show followed pairs from different households as they cooked for Evans and his co-host Manu Feildel. During the show’s run, Evans also became known for spruiking the Paleo diet, producing several cookbooks and a documentary on the topic. According to Catie Gressier, who conducted a study of Paleo dieters in Melbourne, Paleo’s aim is “to eat only those foods available prior to the agricultural revolution: meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds and a small amount of fruit” and that this framed as a more “authentic” diet (3). This is seen as an ideological diet as opposed to others which may consist of rules or eating restrictions. The Paleo diet stresses “real foods” or “organic foods as close to their real state as possible” (Ramachandran et al.). Studies find that the paleo diet can be very nutritious (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). However, it is important to note that the presence of multiple influencers and thought leaders in the field means that there can be several variations in the diet. This article will limit its examination to that of the diet promoted by Evans. A common rationale is that the human body is incompatible with certain mass-produced foods (like grains, pulses, and dairy products, sugar, salt, and modification practices (like food processing), and that these are the cause of many modern conditions (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). While growing concerns over unnatural additives in foods are warranted, it can be observed that in Evans’s case, the promotion of the Paleo diet increasingly blurred the line between pseudoscience and conspiracy. In his Paleo diet book for toddlers, Evans emphasised the importance of the ideological diet and suggested that parents feed their toddlers bone broth instead of breast milk, prompting a federal investigation by the health department (Brennan). This escalated in 2020 during the global pandemic. In January, Evans promoted the work of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate (Molloy). In April, his Biocharger device, which he claimed could cure coronavirus, earned him a hefty fine from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (White). In November, several months after My Kitchen Rules was cancelled, Evans posted an Alt-right political cartoon with the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3), to his Facebook account (Gillespie). In later news reports, it was also pointed out that the black sun symbol was emblazoned on the backpack of the Christchurch shooter (see Sutton and Molloy) who had targeted two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 40. Initially, when a user on Facebook pointed out that the meme contained a black sun, Evans responded “I was waiting for someone to see that” (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). Evans eventually recanted the image, writing: sincere apologies to anyone who misinterpreted a previous post of a caterpillar and a butterfly having a chat over a drink and perceived that I was promoting hatred. I look forward to studying every symbol that have ever existed and research them thoroughly before posting. Hopefully this symbol ❤️ resonates deeply into the hearts of ALL! (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). The post was later deleted. In December of 2020, Evans’s Facebook page of around 1.5 million followers was removed due to its sharing of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus (Gillespie). However, it should be noted that the sharing of the caterpillar-butterfly meme was different from the previous instances of conspiracy sharing, in that Evans stated that it was unintentional, and it included imagery associated with neo-Nazi ideology (the black sun). Evans’s response implies that, while the values of the Paleo diet are framed in terms of positivity, the symbols in the butterfly-caterpillar meme are associated with “promoting hatred”. In this way, Evans frames racism as merely and simplistically an act of hatred, rather than engaging in the ways in which it reinforces a racial hierarchy and racially motivated violence. According to Hartzell (10), white nationalists tend to position themselves as superior to other races and see themselves as protectors of the “white race”. “White” in this context is of European descent (Geary, Schofield and Sutton). There are conspiracy theories associated with this belief, one of which is that their race is under threat of extinction because of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries of origin. This can also be observed in the Alt-right, which is a white nationalist movement that was created and organised online. According to Berger, this movement “seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies”. This is characterised by anti-immigrant sentiment, conspiracy theories, and support for former US President Donald Trump. It can be argued, in this case, that the symbol links to a larger conspiracy theory in which whiteness must be defended against some perceived threat. The meme implies that there is an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, or ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, and that some people are ‘in the know’ while others are not. Spreadable Memes An important aspect of this case study is that this instance of far-right recruitment used the form of a meme. Memes are highly spreadable, and they have very complex mechanisms for disseminating ideas and ideology. This can have a dramatic impact if that ideology is a harmful one, such a white supremacist symbol. While the digital meme, an image with a small amount of text, is common today, Richard Dawkins originally used the term meme to describe the ways in which units of culture can be spread from person to person (qtd. in Shifman 9). These can be anything from the lyrics of a song to a political idea. Jeff Hemsley and Robert Mason (qtd. in Shifman) see virality as a “process wherein a message is actively forwarded from one person to other, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of people who are exposed to the message” (55). This also links to Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s notions of spreadability (3-11), a natural selection process by which media content continues to exist through networked sharing, or disappears once it stops being shared. Evans’s response indicates that he merely shared the image. Despite the black sun imagery, a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat is clearly present. A political presence, and one that is associated with white nationalism, is present despite Evans’s attempts to frame the meme in the language of innocence and positivity. This is not to say Evans is extremist or supports a white nationalist agenda. However, in much the same way that sharing of imagery may not necessarily indicate agreement with its ideological messaging, this framing creates a way in which wellness influencers may avoid criticism (Ma 1). Furthermore, the act of sharing the meme, regardless of intention, amplifies its message exponentially. The Paleo Diet, the Far Right and Purity This overlap between wellness and white nationalist ideology is not new. In Jules Evans’s exploration of why QAnon is popular with New Age and far-right followers, she points to the fact that many Nazi leaders – Hitler, Hess, Himmler – “were into alternative medicine, organic and vegetarian diets, homeopathy, anti-vaxxing, and natural healing”. Similarly, Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc argue that a natural diet which focussed on food purity was favoured by the Nazis (421). In their examination of the German neo-Nazi YouTube channel Balaclava Küche they argue add that “present-day extreme right views on environment and diet are often close to positions found in contemporary Green movements and foodie magazines” (422). Like neo-Nazi preoccupations with food, the Paleo diet’s ideology has its basis in the concept of purity. Gressier found that the Paleo diet contains an “embedded moralism” that “filters into constructions of food as either pure or polluting” (1). This is supported by Ramachandran et al.’s study, which found that the diet “promoted ‘real food’ – or the shift to consuming organic whole foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, with an avoidance of processed foods”. This framing of the food as real creates a binary – if one is real, the other must not be. Another example can be seen in Pete Evans’s Webpage, which lists about 33 Paleo recipes. The Butter Chicken recipe states: the paleo way of life is not meant to be restrictive, as you can see from this lovely butter chicken recipe. All the nasties have been replaced with good-quality ingredients that make it as good, if not better, than the original. I prefer chicken thighs for their superior flavour and tenderness. The term “nasties” here can be seen to create a dichotomy between real and fake, the west and the east. We see these foods are associated with impurity, the foods that are not “real foods” are positioned as a threat. It can be seen as an orientalist approach, othering those not associated with the west. As can be observed in this Butter Chicken recipe that is “getting rid of the nasties”, it appropriates and ‘sanitises’ ingredients. In her article on the campaign to boycott Halal, Shakira Hussein points out that “ethnic food” presents as multiculturalism in the context of white chefs and homecooks, but the opposite is true if the roles are switched (91). Later in her essay “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes”, she discusses the “weaponisation of food” and how specific white nationalist groups express disgust at the thought of consuming Muslim food. This ethnocentric framing of butter chicken projects a western superiority, replacing traditional ingredients with ‘familiar’ ingredients, making it more palatable to nationalistic tastes. Spreading Consumption I have established that the Paleo diet, with its emphasis on ‘real foods’, is deeply embedded with nationalist ideology. I have also discussed how this is highly spreadable in the form of a meme, particularly when it is framed in the language of positivity. Furthermore, I have argued that this is an attempt to escape criticism for promoting white nationalist values. I would like to turn now to how this spreadability through diet can have an impact on the physical actions of its followers through its digital communication. The Paleo diet, and how to go about following it as described by celebrity influencers, has an impact on what people do with their bodies. Hanganu-Bresch discusses the concept of orthorexia, a fixation with eating proper foods that operates as a cyber-pathy, a digitally propagated condition targeting media users. Like the ‘viral’ and ‘spreadable’ meme, this puritanical obsession with eating can also be considered both a spreadable condition and ideology. According to Hanganu-Bresch, orthorexia sees this diet as a way to overcome an illness or to improve general health, but this also begins to feel righteous and even holy or spiritual. This operates within the context of neoliberalism. Brice and Thorpe talk about women’s activewear worn in everyday settings, or ‘athleisure’, as a neoliberal uniform that says, ‘I’m taking control of my body and health’. To take this idea a step further, this uniform could be extended out into digital spaces as well in terms of what people post on their profiles and social media. This ideological aspect operates as not only a highly spreadable message, but one that is targeted at the overall health of its followers. It encourages not only the spreading of ideology, in this case, white nationalist ideology, but also the modification of food consumption. If this were then to be used as a vehicle to spread messages that encourage white nationalist ideology, it can be seen to be not only a kind of contagion but a powerful one at that. White nationalist iconography that is clearly associated with white supremacist propaganda has the potential to spread extremism. However, neoliberal principles of discipline and bodywork operate through “messages of empowerment, choice, and self-care” (Lavrence and Lozanski, qtd. in Brice and Thorpe). While racist extremism does not necessarily equate to neoliberal and ethnocentric values, a frame of growth, purity, and positivity create an overlap that allow extremist messaging to spread more easily through these networks. Conclusion The case of Pete Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme exemplifies a concerning overlap between white nationalist discourse and wellness. Ideologically based diets that emphasise real foods, such as the Paleo diet, have a preoccupation with purity and consumption that appeals to white nationalism. They also share a tolerance for the promotion of conspiracy theory and tendency to create an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. Noting these points can provide insight into a potential targeting of the wellness industry to spread racist ideology. As research into spreadability shows, memes are extremely shareable, even if the user does not grasp the meaning behind the symbolism. This article has also extended the idea of the cyberpathy further, noting a weaponisation of the properties of the meme, for the purposes of radicalisation, and how these are accelerated by celebrity influence. This is more potent within the wellness industry when the message is packaged as a form of growth and positivity, which serve to deflect accusations of racism. Furthermore, when diet is combined with white nationalist ideology, it may operate like a contagion, creating the conditions for racism. Those exposed may not have the intention of sharing or spreading racist ideology, but its amplification contributes to the promotion of a racist agenda nevertheless. As such, further investigation into the far-right infiltration of the wellness industry would be beneficial as it could provide more insight into how wellness groups are targeted. Acknowledgements A previous version of this article was presented with Dr Shakira Hussein and Scheherazade Bloul at the Just Food Conference at New York University in June 2021. This article would not have been possible without their input and advice. Dr Shakira Hussein can be contacted at shussein@unimelb.edu.au and Scheherazade Bloul can be contacted at scherrybloul@gmail.com. References Aubry, Sophie. “‘Playing with Fire’: The Curious Marriage of Qanon and Wellness.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Sep. 2020. 29 July 2020 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/playing-with-fire-the- curious-marriage-of-qanon-and-wellness-20200924-p55yu7.html>. Berger, J.M. “Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right.” The Atlantic 29 Oct. 2018. 20 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-alt-right-twitter/574219/>. Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press, 2021. Brennan, Imogen. “Pete Evans’ Co-Authored Paleo Diet Cookbook for Babies under Investigation.” ABC News 12 Mar. 2015. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/paleo-diet-cookbook-for-babies-under-investigation-pete-evans/6309452>. Brice, Julie, and Holly Thorpe. “Chapter 1: Activewear: The Uniform of the Neoliberal Female Citizen.” Sportswomen’s Apparel around the World: Uniformly Dressed (New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures). Ed. Linda K. Fuller. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 19-35. Cambeses-Franco, Cristina, Sara González-García, Gumersindo Feijoo, and María Teresa Moreira. “Is the Paleo Diet Safe for Health and the Environment?” Science of the Total Environment 781 (2021). <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972101785X>. Evans, Pete. “Butter Chicken.” Peteevans.com. 8 Mar. 2022 <https://peteevans.com/recipes/butter-chicken/>. Forchtner, Bernhard, and Ana Tominc. “Kalashnikov and Cooking-Spoon: Neo-Nazism, Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on Youtube.” Food, Culture & Society 20.3 (2017): 415-441. Geary, Daniel, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton. “Introduction: Toward a Global History of White Nationalism.” Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump. Eds. Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton. 1st ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020. 1–28. Gillespie, Eden. “‘Misinterpreted’: Pete Evans Apologises for Sharing Cartoon with Supposed Neo-Nazi Symbol and Is Dropped by Publisher.” SBS The Feed 16 Nov. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/misinterpreted-pete-evans-apologises-for-sharing-cartoon-with-supposed-neo-nazi-symbol-and-is-dropped-by-publisher>. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Greene, Viveca S. “‘Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.” Studies in American Humor 5.1 (2019): 31-69. Gressier, Catie. “Food as Faith: Suffering, Salvation and the Paleo Diet in Australia.” Food Culture & Society (2021): 1-13. Hanganu-Bresch, Cristina. “Orthorexia: Eating Right in the Context of Healthism.” Medical Humanities 46.3 (2020): 311-322. Hartzell, Stephanie L. “Alt-White: Conceptualizing the Alt-Right as a Rhetorical Bridge between White Nationalism and Mainstream Public Discourse.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8 (2018). Hussein, Shakira. “Not Eating the Muslim Other: Halal Certification, Scaremongering, and the Racialisation of Muslim Identity.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4.3 (2015): 85-96. Hussein, Shakira. “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes: On Diversity and the Weaponisation of Food.” Meanjin 76.1 (2017). <https://meanjin.com.au/essays/halal-chops-and-fascist-cupcakes/>. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013. Johnson, Adrienne Rose. “The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014.” Utopian Studies 26.1 (2015): 101-124. Kickbusch, Ilona, and Lea Payne. “Twenty-First Century Health Promotion: The Public Health Revolution Meets the Wellness Revolution.” Health Promotion International 18.4 (2003): 275-278. Ma, Cindy. “What Is the ‘Lite’ in ‘Alt-Lite?’ The Discourse of White Vulnerability and Dominance among Youtube’s Reactionaries.” Social Media + Society 7.3 (2021). Molloy, Shannon. “Celebrity Chef Pete Evans Sparks Fury for ‘Dangerous’ Selfie with Anti-Vaccination Voice.” News.com.au 13 Jan. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/paleo-diet-cookbook-for-babies-under-investigation-pete-evans/6309452>. Morgan, Jonathon. “These Charts Show Exactly How Racist and Radical the Alt-Right Has Gotten This Year.” The Washington Post 26 Sep. 2016. 20 July 2021 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/09/26/these-charts-show-exactly-how-racist-and-radical-the-alt-right-has-gotten-this-year/>. Parmigiani, Giovanna. “Magic and Politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89.2 (2021): 506–529. Ramachandran, Divya, James Kite, Amy Jo Vassallo, Josephine Y. Chau, Stephanie Partridge, Becky Freeman, and Timothy Gill. “Food Trends and Popular Nutrition Advice Online – Implications for Public Health.” Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10.2 (2018). Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press, 2014. Sutton, Candace, Shannon Molloy, and staff writers. “Gunman’s Family in Australia Called Police after News of Christchurch Massacre.” News.com.au 16 Mar. 2019. 14 Nov 2021 <https://www.news.com.au/world/pacific/gunman-who-opened-fire-on-christchurch-mosque-addresses-attack-in-manifesto/news-story/70372a39f720697813607a9ec426a734>. Voigt, Cornelia, and Jennifer H. Laing. “A Way through the Maze: Exploring Differences and Overlaps between Wellness and Medical Tourism Providers.” Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care (2013): 30-47. Ward, Charlotte, and David Voas. “The Emergence of Conspirituality.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26.1 (2011): 103–121. White, Daniella. “Celebrity Chef Pete Evans Fined $80,000, Ordered to Stop Making Wellness Claims.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Mar. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/celebrity-chef-pete-evans-fined-80-000-ordered-to-stop-making-wellness-claims-20210525-p57v40.html>. Zhou, Naaman. “Pete Evans’ Documentary Should be Cut from Netflix, Doctors Group Says”. The Guardian 2 June 2018. 3 Jan. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/03/pete-evans-documentary-should-be-cut-from-netflix-doctors-group-says>.

Introdução: Os anestésicos locais são substâncias químicas capazes de bloquear de forma reversível a transmissão de impulsos nervosos no local onde forem aplicados, sendo fundamentais no âmbito da Odontologia para controle da dor. Objetivo: Realizar revisão de literatura sobre os principais anestésicos locais utilizados na Odontologia. Metodologia: O estudo trata-se de uma revisão narrativa realizada entre os meses de janeiro e março de 2018. As bases de dados para a busca da literatura foram Scielo, Pubmed, Web of Science, Bireme. As palavras-chaves usadas foram “Anestésicos Locais”, “Mecanismos de Ação”, “Farmacologia”, “Odontologia”, “Relação Estrutura-atividade”, “Canais de Sódio”, presentes no DeCS. Discussão: A cocaína foi o primeiro composto a ser utilizado como anestésico local e foi a partir desta que os novos anestésicos foram desenvolvidos. Os anestésicos locais apresentam na sua estrutura molecular um anel aromático, uma cadeia intermediária e um grupo amina. Eles atuam sobre os neurônios e seu sítio de ação são os canais de sódio dependente de voltagem, aos quais se ligam reversivelmente, abolindo a excitabilidade neuronal. A classificação dos anestésicos locais é definida quanto à estrutura química e quanto à duração de ação, sendo os principais utilizados na Odontologia lidocaína, mepivacaína, articaína, prilocaína, cloridrato de bupivacaína. Conclusão: Conforme a literatura revisada, é necessário o conhecimento do cirurgião-dentista sobre as características farmacológicas individuais dos anestésicos locais e as sistêmicas do paciente para uma escolha correta, já que sua utilização é variável para cada usuário, e a manipulação inadequada desses fármacos pode levar a sérios riscos para a saúde do paciente.Descritores: Odontologia; Anestésicos locais; Farmacologia; Relação Estrutura-Atividade; Canais de Sódio; Mecanismos Moleculares de Ação Farmacológica.Almeida FM. Controle medicamentoso da dor. In: Estrela C. Dor odontogênica. São Paulo: Artes Médicas; 2001. p.243-61.Silva AP, Diniz AS, Araújo FA, Souza CC. Presença da queixa de dor em pacientes classificados segundo o protocolo de Manchester. Rev Enferm Centro Oeste Mineiro. 2013;3(1):507-17.Rang HP, Dale MM, Ritter JM, Flower RJ, Henderson G. Farmacologia. 8. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier; 2016.Paiva LCA, Cavalcanti AL. Anestésicos locais em odontologia: Uma revisão de literatura. UEPG Ci Biol Saúde. 2005; 11(2):35-42.Soares RG, Salles AA, Irala LED, Limongi O. Como escolher um adequado anestésico local para as diferentes situações na clínica odontológica diária? RSBO. 2006;3(1):35-40.Miller RD, Hondeghem LM. Anestésicos Locais. In: Katzung BG. Farmacologia básica e clínica. 10. ed. Rio de Janeiro: AMGH Editora; 2010. p.301-7.Becker D, Reeed K. Essentials of local anesthetic pharmacology. Anesth Prog. 2006;53(3):98-108.Alves RIL. Anestésicos locais [dissertação]. Porto, Portugal: Universidade Fernando Pessoa; 2013.Malamed SF. Manual de anestesia local. 6. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier; 2013.Ferreira AAA, Silva ID, Diniz RS, Guerra GCB. Anestésicos locais: revisando o mecanismo de ação molecular. Infarma. 2006;18(5/6):15-18.Anjos ED, Carvalho RWF. Complicações sistêmicas em anestesia local. In: Lubiana NB. Pro-Odonto Cirurgia. 2. ed. Porto Alegre: Artmed; 2007. p.143-78.Carvalho RWF, Pereira CU, Anjos ED, Laureano Filho JR, Vasconcelos BCE. Anestésicos locais: como escolher e prevenir complicações sistêmicas. Rev Port Estomatol Med Dent Cir Maxilofac. 2010;51(2):113-20.Teixeira RN. Anestesia local sem vasoconstritor versus com vasoconstritor [dissertação] Porto, Portugal: Faculdade de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade Fernando Pessoa; 2014.Carvalho B, Fritzen EL, Parodes AG, Santos RB, Gedoz L. O emprego dos anestésicos locais em Odontologia: revisão de literatura. Rev bras odontol. 2013;70(2):178-81.Santaella GM. Soluções anestésicas locais: uma revisão de literatura [monografia]: Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina; 2011.Reis Jr A. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) e Karl Köller (1857-1944) e a descoberta da anestesia local. Rev Bras Anestesiol. 2009;59(2):244-57. Bobbio A. História Sinótica da Anestesia. São Paulo: Novel; 1969.Byck R. Freud e a Cocaína. Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo; 1989.Araújo DR, Paula E, Fraceto LF. Anestésicos locais: interação com membranas biológicas e com o canal de sódio voltagem-dependente. Quim Nova. 2008;31(7):1775-83.Catterall WA, Mackie K. Local anesthetics. In: Brunton LL, Lazo JS, Parker KL. Goodman and Gillman’s the pharmacologic basis of therapeutics. 11. ed. New York: McGraw Hill; 2006. p. 369-85.Carvalho JCA. Farmacologia dos anestésicos locais. Rev Bras Anestesiol. 1994;44(1):75-82.Faria FAC, Marzola C. Farmacologia dos anestésicos locais – considerações gerias. BCI. 2001;8(29):19-30.Bahl R. Local anestesia in dentistry. Anesth Prog. 2004;51(4):138-42.Udelsmann A, Dreyer E, Melo MS, Bonfim MR, Borsoi LFA, Oliveira TG. Lipídeos nas intoxicações por anestésicos locais. ABCD arq bras cir dig. 2012;25(3):169-72.Fozzard HA, Lee PJ, Lipkind JM. Mechanism of local anesthetic drug action on voltage-gated sodium channels. Curr Pharm Des. 2005;11(21):2671-86.Jackson T, Mclure HA. Pharmacology of local anesthetics. Ophthalmol Clin North Am. 2006;19(2):155-61.Schulman JM, Strichartz GR. Farmacologia dos Anestésicos Locais. In: Golan DE, Tashjian Jr AH, Armstrong EJ, Armstrong AW. Princípios de Farmacologia: a base fisiopatológica da farmacoterapia. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara Koogan; 2009. p.131-145.Golan DE, Tashjian Jr AH, Armstrong EJ, Armstrong AW. Princípios de Farmacologia: a base fisiopatológica da farmacoterapia. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara Koogan; 2014.Marieb EM, Hoehn K. Anatomia e Fisiologia. 3. ed. Porto Alegre: Artmed; 2009.Carvalho-De-Souza JL. Análise do efeito inibitório do eugenol sobre canais para Na+ ativados por voltagem em neurônios sensitivos [tese]. São Paulo: Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas – USP; 2009.Andrade ED. Terapêutica medicamentosa em odontologia. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Artes Médicas; 2014.Parise GK, Ferranti KN, Grando CP. Sais anestésicos utilizados na odontologia: revisão de literatura. J Oral Investig. 2017;6(1):75-84.Gordh T. Lidocaine: the origino of a modern local anesthetic. Anesthesiology. 2010;113(6):1433-37.Peñarrocha M, Sanchis BJM, Martínez GJM. Anestesia local em odontologia. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara Koogan; 2008.DEF. Dicionário de especialidades farmacêuticas 2016. 44. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Publicações Científicas; 2016.Vasconcelos RJH, Nogueira RVB, Leal AKR, Oliveira CTV, Bezerra JGB. Alterações sistêmicas decorrente do uso da lidocaína e prilocaína na prática odontológica. Rev cir traumatol buco-maxilo-fac. 2002;1(2):13-19.Montan MF, Cogo K, Bergamaschi CC, Volpato MC, Andrade ED. Mortalidade relacionada ao uso de anestésicos locais em odontologia. RGO. 2007;55(2):197-202.Gaffen AS, Haas DA. Survey of local anesthetic use by ontario dentists. J Can Dent Assoc. 2009;75(9):649.Souza LMA, Ramacciato JC, Motta RHL. Uso de Anestésicos locais em pacientes idosos. RGO. 2011;59:25-30.Yagiela JA, Dowd FJ, Johnson BS, Mariotti AJ, Neidle EA. Farmacologia e terapêutica para dentistas. 6. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier; 2011.Mojumdar EH, Lyubartsev AP. Molecular dynamics simulations of local anesthetic articaine in a lipid bilayer. Biophys Chem. 2010;153(1):27-35.Maniglia-Ferreira C, Almeida-Gomes F, Carvalho-Sousa B, Barbosa AV, Lins CC, Souza FD et al. Clinical evaluation of three anesthetics in endodontics. Acta Odontol Latinoam. 2009;22(1):21-6.Moore PA, Doll B, Delie RA, Hersh EV, Korostoff J, Johnson S et al. Hemostatic and anesthetic efficacy of 4% articaine HCL with 1:200,00 epinephrine and 4% articaine HCL with 1:100,000 epinephrine when administrated intraorally for periodontal surgery. J Periodontol. 2007;78(2):247-53.Santos CF, Modena KC, Giglio FP, Sakai VT, Calvo AM, Colombini BL et al. Epinephrine concentration (1,100,00 or 1,200,000) does not affect the clinical efficacy of 4% articaine forlower third molar removal: a double-blind, randomized, cross study. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2007;65(12):2445-52.Massaro F. Lipossomal bupivacaine: a long-acting local anesthetic for postsurgical analgesia. Focus On. 2012; 47:213-26.Dantas MVM, Gabrielli MAC, Hochuli VE. Effect of mepivacaine 2% with adrenaline 1:100.000 in blood pressure. Rev Odontol UNESP. 2008;37(3):223-27.

IntroductionWhen I saw Patriots Day (Berg 2016) at my local multiplex, a family entered the theatre and sat a few rows in front of me. They had a child with them, a boy who was perhaps nine or ten years old. Upon seeing the kid, I had a physical reaction. Not quite a knee-jerk, but more of an uneasy gut punch. ‘Don't you know what this movie is about?’ I wanted to ask his parents; ‘I’ve seen Jeff Bauman’s bones, and that is not something a child should see.’ I had lived through the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, and the memories were vivid in my mind as I waited for the movie to start, to re-present the memory on screen. Admittedly, I had lived through it from the other side of the world, watching through the mediated windows of the computer, smartphone, and television screen. Nevertheless, I remembered it in blood-soaked colour detail, brought to me by online photo galleries, social media updates, the failed amateur sleuths of Reddit, and constant cable news updates, breaking news even when the events had temporarily stalled. Alison Landsberg has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to describe how historical events are re-created and imbued with an affective experience through cinema and other sites of mass cultural mediation, allowing those who did not experience the past to form a personal connection to and subjective memory of history (2). For the boy in the cinema, Patriots Day would most likely be his first encounter with and memory of the Boston Marathon bombing. But how does prosthetic memory apply to audience members like me, who had lived through the Boston bombing from a great distance, with personalised memories mediated by the first-person perspective of social media? Does the ease of dissemination of information, particularly eyewitness photographs and videos, create possibilities for a prosthetic experience of the present? Does the online mediation of historical events of the present translate to screen dramatisations? These questions become particularly pertinent when the first-release audience of a film has recent, living memories of the real events depicted on screen.The time between when an event occurs and when it is brought to cinemas in a true-events adaptation is decreasing. Rebecca A. Sheehan argues that the cultural value of instant information has given rise to a trend in the contemporary biopic and historical film that sees our mediated world turned into a temporal "paradox in which the present is figured as both historical and ongoing" (36). Since 2005, Sheehan writes, biographical films that depict the lives of still-living public figures or in other ways comment on the ongoing history of the present have become increasingly frequent. Sheehan cites films such as The Social Network (Fincher 2010), The Queen (Frears 2006), W. (Stone 2008), and Game Change (Roach 2012) as examples of this growing biopic trend (35-36). In addition to the instantaneous remediation of public figures in the contemporary biopic, similarly there is a stable of contemporary historical films based on the true stories of ordinary people involved in extraordinary recent events. Films such as The Impossible (Bayona 2012), World Trade Center (Stone 2006), United 93 (Greengrass 2006), and Deepwater Horizon (Berg 2016) bring the death and destruction of real-world natural disasters or terrorist attacks to a sanitised but experiential cinematic event. The sensitive nature of some of the events in question often see the films labelled “too soon” and exploitative of recent tragedy. Films such as these typically do not have known public figures as their protagonists, but they arise from a similar climate of the demands of televisual and online mediation that Sheehan describes in the “instant biopics” of her study (36). Given this rise of brief temporal space between real events and their dramatisations, in this essay, I examine Patriots Day in light of the role digital experience plays in both its dramatisation and how the film's initial audience may remember the event. As Patriots Day replicates a kind of prosthetic memory of the present, it uses the first-instance digital mediation of the event to form prosthetic memories for future viewers. Through Patriots Day, I seek to gesture toward the possibilities of first-person digital mediation of major news events in shaping dramatisations of the recent past.Digital Memories of the Boston Marathon BombingTo examine the ways the Boston Marathon bombing circulated in online space, I look at the link- and image-based online discussion platform Reddit as an example of engagement with and recirculation of the event, particularly as a form of engagement defined by photographs and videos. Because the Boston Marathon is a televised and widely-reported event, professional videographers and photographers were present at the marathon’s finish line at the time of the first explosion. Thus, the first bomb and its immediate aftermath were captured in news footage and still images. The graphic nature of some of these images depicting the violence of the scene saw traditional print and television outlets cropping or otherwise editing the photographs to make them appropriate for mass broadcast (Hughney). Some online outlets, however, showed these pictures in their unedited form, often accompanied by warnings that required readers to scroll further down the page or click through the warning to see the photographs. These distinctive capabilities of the online environment allowed individuals to choose whether to view the image, while still allowing the uncensored image to circulate and be reposted elsewhere, such as on Reddit. In addition to photos and videos shot by professionals at the finish line, witnesses armed with smart phone cameras and access to social media posted their views of the aftermath to social media like Twitter, enabling the collation of both amateur and professionally shot photographs of the scene by online news aggregators such as Buzzfeed (Broderick). The Reddit community is seen as an essential part of the Boston Bombing story for the way some of its users participated in a form of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigation that resulted in the false identification of suspects (see: Nhan et al.; Tapia et al.; Potts and Harrison). There is another aspect to Reddit’s role in the circulation and mediation of the story, however, as online venues became a go-to source for news on the unfolding event, where information was delivered faster and with greater accuracy than the often-sensationalised television news coverage (Starbird et al. 347). In addition to its role in providing information that is a part of Reddit’s culture that “value[s] evidence of some kind” to support discussion (Potts and Harrison 144), Reddit played a number of roles in the sense-making process that social media can often facilitate during crisis situations (Heverin and Zach). Through its division into “subreddits,” the individual communities and discussion areas that make up the platform, Reddit accommodates an incredibly diverse range of topics and interests. Different areas of Reddit were able to play different roles in the process of sharing information and acting in a community sense-making capacity in the aftermath of the bombing. Among the subreddits involved in attempting to make sense of the event were those that served as appropriate places for posting image galleries of both professional and amateur photographs and videos, drawn from a variety of online sources. Users of subreddits such as /r/WTF and /r/MorbidReality, for example, posted galleries of “NSFL” (Not Safe For Life) images of the bombing and its aftermath (see: touhou_hijack, titan059, f00d4tehg0dz). Additionally, the /r/Boston subreddit issued calls for anyone with photographs or videos related to the attack to upload them to the thread, as well as providing an e-mail address to submit them to the FBI (RichardHerold). The /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit became a hub for analysis of the photographs. The subreddit's investigatory work was picked up by other online and traditional media outlets (including the New York Post cover photo which misidentified two suspects), bringing wider attention to Reddit’s unfolding coverage of the bombing (Potts and Harrison 148). Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory, and her application of it, largely relates to mass culture’s role in “the production and dissemination of memories that have no direct connection to a person’s lived past” (20). The possibilities for news events to be recorded and disseminated by smart phones and social media, however, help to create a deeper sense of affective engagement with a distant present, creating prosthetic memories out of the mediated first-hand experiences of others. The graphic nature of the photos and videos of the Boston bombing collected by and shared on sites like Reddit, the ongoing nature of the event (which, from detonation to the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, spanned five days), and the participatory activity of scouring photographs for clues to the identity of the bombers all lend a sense of ongoing, experiential engagement with first-person, audiovisual mediations of the event. These prosthetic memories of the present are, as Landsberg writes of those created from dramatisations or re-creations of the past, transferable, able to belong to those who have no “natural” claim to them (18) with an experiential element that personalises history for those who do not directly experience it (33). If widely disseminated first-person mediations of events like the Boston bombing can be thought of as a prosthetic experience of present history, how will they play a part in the prosthetic memories of the future? How will those who did not live through the Boston bombing, either as a personal experience or a digitally mediated one, incorporate this digital memory into their own experience of its cinematic re-creation? To address this question, I turn to consider Patriots Day. Of particular note is the bombing sequence’s resemblance to digital mediations of the event as a marker of a plausible docudramatic resemblance to reality.The Docudramatic Re-Presentation of Digital MemoryAs a cinematic representation of recent history, Patriots Day sits at a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie, more so than an instant history film typically would. Composite characters or entirely invented characters and narratives that play out against the backdrop of real events are nothing out of the ordinary in the historical film. However, Patriots Day's use of real material and that of pure invention coincides, frequently in stark contrast. The film's protagonist, Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a fictional character, the improbable hero of the story who is present at every step of the attack and the manhunt. He is there on Boylston Street when the bombs go off. He is there with the FBI, helping to identify the suspects with knowledge of Boylston Street security cameras that borders on a supernatural power. He is there at the Watertown shootout among exploding cars and one-liner quips. When Dzokhar Tsarnaev is finally located, he is, of course, first on the scene. Tommy Saunders, as embodied by Wahlberg, trades on all the connotations of both the stereotypical Boston Southie and the action hero that are embedded in Wahlberg’s star persona. As a result, Patriots Day often seems to be a depiction of an alternate universe where Mark Wahlberg in a cop uniform almost single-handedly caught a terrorist. The improbability of Saunders as a character in a true-events drama, though, is thoroughly couched in the docudramatic material of historical depiction. Steven N. Lipkin argues that docudrama is a mode of representation that performs a re-creation of memory to persuade us that it is representing the real (1). By conjuring the memory of an event into being in ways that seem plausible and anchored to the evidence of actuality—such as integrating archival footage or an indexical resemblance to the actual event or an actual person—the representational, cinematic, or fictionalised elements of docudrama are imbued with a sense of the reality they claim to represent (Lipkin 3). Patriots Day uses real visual material throughout the film. The integration of evidence is particularly notable in the bombing sequence, which combines archival footage of the 2013 race, surveillance footage of the Tsarnaev brothers approaching the finish line, and a dramatic re-creation that visually resembles the original to such an extent that its integration with archival footage is almost seamless (Landler). The conclusion of the film draws on this evidential connection to the real as well, in the way that docudrama is momentarily suspended to become documentary, as interviews with some of the real people who are depicted as characters in the film close out the story. In addition to its direct use of the actual, Patriots Day's re-creation of the bombing itself bears an indexical resemblance to the event as seen by those who were not there and relies on memories of the bombing's initial mediation to vouch for the dramatisation's accuracy. In the moments before the bombing's re-creation, actual footage of the Tsarnaevs's route down Boylston Street plays, a low ominous tone of the score building over the silent security footage. The fictional Saunders’s fictional wife (Michelle Monaghan) has come to the finish line to bring him a knee brace, and she passes Tamerlan Tsarnaev as she leaves. This shot directly crosses a visual resemblance to the actual (Themo Melikidze playing Tsarnaev, resembling the bomber through physicality and costuming) with the fictional structuring device of the film in the form of Tommy Saunders. Next, in a long shot, we see Tsarnaev bump into a man wearing a grey raglan shirt. The man turns to look at Tsarnaev. From the costuming, it is evident that this man who is not otherwise named is intended to represent Jeff Bauman, the subject of an iconic photograph from the bombing. In the photo, Bauman is shown being taken from the scene in a wheelchair with both legs amputated from below the knee by the blast (another cinematic dramatisation of the Boston bombing, Stronger, based on Bauman’s memoir of the same name, will be released in 2017). In addition to the visual signifier of Bauman from the memorable photograph, reports circulated that Bauman's ability to describe Tsarnaev to the FBI in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was instrumental in identifying the suspects (Hartmann). Here, this digital memory is re-created in a brief but recognisable moment: this is the before picture of Jeff Bauman, this is the moment of identification that was widely circulated and talked about, a memory of that one piece of good news that helped satisfy public curiosity about the status of the iconic Man in the Wheelchair.When the bombs detonate, we are brought into the smoke and ash, closer access than the original mediation afforded by the videographers at the finish line. After the first bomb detonates, the camera follows Saunders as he walks toward the smoke cloud. As the second bomb explodes, we go inside the scene. The sequence cuts from actual security camera footage that captured the blast, to a first-person perspective of the explosion, the resulting fire and smoke, and a shot that resembles the point of view of footage captured on a smart phone. The frame shakes wildly, giving the viewer disorienting flashes of the victims, a sense of the chaos without seeing anything in lasting, specific detail, before the frame tips sideways onto the pavement, stained with blood and littered with debris. Coupled with this is a soundscape that resembles both the subjective experience of a bombing victim and what their smart phone video has captured. There is the rumble of the explosion and muffled sounds of debris hidden under the noise of shockwaves of air hitting a microphone, fading into an electronic whine and tinnitus ring. A later shot shows the frame obscured by smoke, slowly clearing to give us a high angle view of the aftermath, resembling photographs taken from a window overlooking the scene on Boylston Street (see: touhou_hijack). Archival footage of first responders and points of view resembling a running cell phone camera that captures flashes of blood and open wounds combine with shots of the actors playing characters (both fictional and based on real people) that were established at the beginning of the film. There is once again a merging of the re-created and the actual, bound together by a sense of memory that encourages the viewer to take the former as plausible, based on its resemblance to the latter.When Saunders runs for the second bombing site further down the street, he looks down at two bodies on the ground. Framed in close-up, the bloodless, empty expression and bright blue shirt of Krystle Campbell are recognisable. We can ignore the inaccuracies of this element of the digital memory amidst the chaos of the sequence. Campbell died in the first bombing, not the second. The body of a woman in a black shirt is between the camera's position on the re-created Boylston Street and the actor standing in for Campbell, the opposite of how Campbell and her friend Karen Rand lay beside each other in photographs of the bombing aftermath. The police officer who takes Krystle's pulse on film and shakes her head at Wahlberg's character is a brunette, not the blonde in the widely-circulated picture of a first responder at the actual bombing. The most visceral portion of the image is there, though, re-created almost exactly as it appeared at its first point of mediation: the lifeless eyes and gaping mouth, the bright blue t-shirt. The memory of the event is conjured into being, and the cinematic image resembles the most salient elements of the memory enough for the cinematic image to be a plausible re-creation. The cinematic frame is positioned at a lower level to the original still, as though we are on the ground beside her, bringing the viewer even closer to the event, even as the frame crops out her injuries as scene photographs did not, granting a semblance of respectful distance from the real death. This re-creation of Krystle Campbell’s death is a brief flash in the sequence, but a powerful moment of recognition for those who remember its original mediation. The result is a sequence that shows the graphic violence of the actuality it represents in a series of images that invite its viewer to expand the sequence with their memory of the event the way most of them experienced it: on other screens, at the site of its first instance of digital mediation.ConclusionThrough its use of cinematography that resembles actual photographic evidence of the Boston Marathon bombing or imbues the re-creation with a sense of a first-person, digitally mediated account of the event, Patriots Day draws on its audience's digital memory of recent history to claim accuracy in its fictionalisation. Not everyone who sees Patriots Day may be as familiar with the wealth of eyewitness photographs and images of the Boston Marathon bombing as those who may have experienced and followed the events in online venues such as Reddit. Nonetheless, the fact of this material's existence shapes the event's dramatisation as the filmmakers attempt to imbue the dramatisation with a sense of accuracy and fidelity to the event. The influence of digital memory on the film’s representation of the event gestures toward the possibilities for how online engagement with major news events may play a role in their dramatisation moving forward. Events that have had eyewitness visual accounts distributed online, such as the 2015 Bataclan massacre, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and Westminster Bridge attack, or the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile that was streamed on Facebook live, may become the subject of future dramatisations of recent history. The dramatic renderings of contemporary history films will undoubtedly be shaped by the recent memory of their online mediations to appeal to a sense of accuracy in the viewer's memory. As recent history films continue, digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. ReferencesBroderick, Ryan. “Photos from the Scene of the Boston Marathon Explosion (Extremely Graphic).” Buzzfeed News, 16 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/first-photos-from-the-scene-of-the-boston-marathon-explosion?utm_term=.fw38Byjq1#.peNXWPe8G>.f00d4tehg0dz. “Collection of Photos from the Boston Marathon Bombing (NSFW) (NSFL-Gore).” Reddit, 16 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cfhg4/collection_of_photos_from_the_boston_marathon/>.Hartmann, Margaret. “Bombing Victim in Iconic Photo Was Key to Identifying Boston Suspects.” New York Magazine, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/bombing-victim-identified-suspects.html>.Heverin, Thomas, and Lisl Zach. “Use of Microblogging for Collective Sense-Making during Violent Crises: A Study of Three Campus Shootings.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63.1 (2012): 34-47. Hughney, Christine. “News Media Weigh Use of Photos of Carnage.” New York Times, 17 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/news-media-weigh-use-of-photos-of-carnage.html>.Landler, Edward. “Recreating the Boston Marathon Bombing in Patriots Day.” Cinemontage, 21 Dec. 2016. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://cinemontage.org/2016/12/recreating-boston-marathon-bombing-patriots-day/>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia U P, 2004. Lipkin, Steven N. Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films Based on True Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Nhan, Johnny, Laura Huey, and Ryan Broll. “Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombing.” British Journal of Criminology 57 (2017): 341-361. Patriots Day. Dir. Peter Berg. CBS Films, 2016.Potts, Liza, and Angela Harrison. “Interfaces as Rhetorical Constructions. Reddit and 4chan during the Boston Marathon Bombings.” Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. Greenville, North Carolina, September-October 2013. 143-150. RichardHerold. “2013 Boston Marathon Attacks: Please Upload Any Photos in Relation to the Attacks That You Have.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_marathon_attacks_please_upload_any/>.Sheehan, Rebecca A. “Facebooking the Present: The Biopic and Cultural Instantaneity.” The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Eds. Tom Brown and Bélen Vidal. New York: Routledge, 2014. 35-51. Starbird, Kate, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand, Peg Achterman, and Robert M. Mason. “Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.” iConference 2014 Proceedings. Berlin, March 2014. 654-662. Tapia, Andrea H., Nicolas LaLone, and Hyun-Woo Kim. “Run Amok: Group Crowd Participation in Identifying the Bomb and Bomber from the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Proceedings of the 11th International ISCRAM Conference. Eds. S.R. Hiltz, M.S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P.C. Shih. University Park, Pennsylvania, May 2014. 265-274. titan059. “Pics from Boston Bombing NSFL.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cf0po/pics_from_boston_bombing_nsfl/>.touhou_hijack. “Krystle Campbell Died Screaming. This Sequence of Photos Shows Her Final Moments.” Reddit, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/1cktrx/krystle_campbell_died_screaming_this_sequence_of/>.

IntroductionRegional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.The Tasmanian Midlands have been identified as a biodiversity hotspot (Australian Government), with a long history of Aboriginal cultural management disrupted by colonial invasion. Recent archaeological work in the Midlands, including the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project, has focused on the use of convict labour during the nineteenth century in opening up the Midlands for settler agriculture and transport. Now, the Midlands are placed under increasing pressure by changing agricultural practices such as large-scale irrigation. At the same time as this intensification of agricultural activity, significant progress has been made in protecting, preserving and restoring endemic ecologies. This progress has come through non-government conservation organisations, especially Greening Australia and their program Tasmanian Island Ark, and private landowners placing land under conservation covenants. These pressures and conservation activities give rise to research opportunities in the biological sciences, but also pose challenges in communicating the value of conservation and research outcomes to a wider public. The Species Hotel project, beginning in 2016, engaged with the aims of restoration ecology through speculative design while The Marathon Project, a multi-year curatorial art project based on a single property that contains both conservation and commercially farmed zones.This article questions the role of regionality in these three interconnected projects—Kerry Lodge, Species Hotel, and Marathon—sited in the Tasmanian Midlands: the three projects share a concern with the specificities of the region through engagement with specifics sites and their histories and ecologies, while also acknowledging the forces that shape these sites as far more mobile and global in scope. It also considers the interdisciplinary nature of these projects, in the crossover of art and design with ecological, archaeological and agricultural practices of measuring and intervening in the land, where communication and interpretation may be in tension with functionality. These projects suggest ways of working that connect the ecological and the cultural spheres; importantly, they see rural locations as sites of knowledge production; they test the value of small-scale and ephemeral interventions to explore the place of art and design as intervention within colonised landscape.Regions are also defined by overlapping circles of control, interest, and authority. We test the claim that these projects, which operate through cross-disciplinary collaboration and network with a range of stakeholders and community groups, successfully benefit the region in which they are placed. We are particularly interested in the challenges of working across institutions which both claim and enact connections to the region without being centred there. These projects are initiatives resulting from, or in collaboration with, University of Tasmania, an institution that has taken a recent turn towards explicitly identifying as place-based yet the placement of the Midlands as the gap between campuses risks attenuating the institution’s claim to be of this place. Paul Carter, in his discussion of a regional, site-specific collaboration in Alice Springs, flags how processes of creative place-making—operating through mythopoetic and story-based strategies—requires a concrete rather than imagined community that actively engages a plurality of voices on the ground. We identify similar concerns in these art and design projects and argue that iterative and long-term creative projects enable a deeper grappling with the complexities of shared regional place-making. The Midlands is aptly named: as a region, it is defined by its geographical constraints and relationships to urban centres. Heading south from the northern city of Launceston, travellers on the Midland Highway see scores of farming properties networking continuously for around 175 kilometres south to the outskirts of Brighton, the last major township before the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. The town of Ross straddles latitude 42 degrees south—a line that has historically divided Tasmania into the divisions of North and South. The region is characterised by extensive agricultural usage and small remnant patches of relatively open dry sclerophyll forest and lowland grassland enabled by its lower attitude and relatively flatter terrain. The Midlands sit between the mountainous central highlands of the Great Western Tiers and the Eastern Tiers, a continuous range of dolerite hills lying south of Ben Lomond that slope coastward to the Tasman Sea. This area stretches far beyond the view of the main highway, reaching east in the Deddington and Fingal valleys. Campbell Town is the primary stopping point for travellers, superseding the bypassed towns, which have faced problems with lowering population and resulting loss of facilities.Image 1: Southern Midland Landscape, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.Predominantly under private ownership, the Tasmanian Midlands are a contested and fractured landscape existing in a state of ecological tension that has occurred with the dominance of western agriculture. For over 200 years, farmers have continually shaped the land and carved it up into small fragments for different agricultural agendas, and this has resulted in significant endemic species decline (Mitchell et al.). The open vegetation was the product of cultural management of land by Tasmanian Aboriginal communities (Gammage), attractive to settlers during their distribution of land grants prior to the 1830s and a focus for settler violence. As documented cartographically in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, the period 1820–1835, and particularly during the Black War, saw the Midlands as central to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal landowners. Clements argues that the culture of violence during this period also reflected the brutalisation that the penal system imposed upon its subjects. The cultivation of agricultural land throughout the Midlands was enabled by the provision of unfree convict labour (Dillon). Many of the properties granted and established during the colonial period have been held in multi-generational family ownership through to the present.Within this patchwork of private ownership, the tension between visibility and privacy of the Midlands pastures and farmlands challenges the capacity for people to understand what role the Midlands plays in the greater Tasmanian ecology. Although half of Tasmania’s land areas are protected as national parks and reserves, the Midlands remains largely unprotected due to private ownership. When measured against Tasmania’s wilderness values and reputation, the dry pasturelands of the Midland region fail to capture an equivalent level of visual and experiential imagination. Jamie Kirkpatrick describes misconceptions of the Midlands when he writes of “[f]latness, dead and dying eucalypts, gorse, brown pastures, salt—environmental devastation […]—these are the common impression of those who first travel between Spring Hill and Launceston on the Midland Highway” (45). However, Kirkpatrick also emphasises the unique intimate and intricate qualities of this landscape, and its underlying resilience. In the face of the loss of paddock trees and remnants to irrigation, change in species due to pasture enrichment and introduction of new plant species, conservation initiatives that not only protect but also restore habitat are vital. The Tasmanian Midlands, then, are pastoral landscapes whose seeming monotonous continuity glosses over the radical changes experienced in the processes of colonisation and intensification of agriculture.Underlying the Present: Archaeology and Landscape in the Kerry Lodge ProjectThe major marker of the Midlands is the highway that bisects it. Running from Hobart to Launceston, the construction of a “great macadamised highway” (Department of Main Roads 10) between 1820–1850, and its ongoing maintenance, was a significant colonial project. The macadam technique, a nineteenth century innovation in road building which involved the laying of small pieces of stone to create a surface that was relatively water and frost resistant, required considerable but unskilled labour. The construction of the bridge at Kerry Lodge, in 1834–35, was simultaneous with significant bridge buildings at other major water crossings on the highway, (Department of Main Roads 16) and, as the first water crossing south of Launceston, was a pinch-point through which travel of prisoners could be monitored and controlled. Following the completion of the bridge, the site was used to house up to 60 male convicts in a road gang undergoing secondary punishment (1835–44) and then in a labour camp and hiring depot until 1847. At the time of the La Trobe report (1847), the buildings were noted as being in bad condition (Brand 142–43). After the station was disbanded, the use of the buildings reverted to the landowners for use in accommodation and agricultural storage.Archaeological research at Kerry Lodge, directed by Eleanor Casella, investigated the spatial and disciplinary structures of smaller probation and hiring depots and the living and working conditions of supervisory staff. Across three seasons (2015, 2016, 2018), the emerging themes of discipline and control and as well as labour were borne out by excavations across the site, focusing on remnants of buildings close to the bridge. This first season also piloted the co-presence of a curatorial art project, which grew across the season to include eleven practitioners in visual art, theatre and poetry, and three exhibition outcomes. As a crucial process for the curatorial art project, creative practitioners spent time on site as participants and observers, which enabled the development of responses that interrogated the research processes of archaeological fieldwork as well as making connections to the wider historical and cultural context of the site. Immersed in the mundane tasks of archaeological fieldwork, the practitioners involved became simultaneously focused on repetitive actions while contemplating the deep time contained within earth. This experience then informed the development of creative works interrogating embodied processes as a language of site.The outcome from the first fieldwork season was earthspoke, an exhibition shown at Sawtooth, an artist-run initiative in Launceston in 2015, and later re-installed in Franklin House, a National Trust property in the southern suburbs of Launceston.Images 2 and 3: earthspoke, 2015, Installation View at Sawtooth ARI (top) and Franklin House (bottom). Image Credits: Melanie de Ruyter.This recontextualisation of the work, from contemporary ARI (artist run initiative) gallery to National Trust property enabled the project to reach different audiences but also raised questions about the emphases that these exhibition contexts placed on the work. Within the white cube space of the contemporary gallery, connections to site became more abstracted while the educational and heritage functions of the National Trust property added further context and unintended connotations to the art works.Image 4: Strata, 2017, Installation View. Image Credit: Karen Hall.The two subsequent exhibitions, Lines of Site (2016) and Strata (2017), continued to test the relationship between site and gallery, through works that rematerialised the absences on site and connected embodied experiences of convict and archaeological labour. The most recent iteration of the project, Strata, part of the Ten Days on the Island art festival in 2017, involved installing works at the site, marking with their presence the traces, fragments and voids that had been reburied when the landscape returned to agricultural use following the excavations. Here, the interpretive function of the works directly addressed the layered histories of the landscape and underscored the scope of the human interventions and changes over time within the pastoral landscape. The interpretative role of the artworks formed part of a wider, multidisciplinary approach to research and communication within the project. University of Manchester archaeology staff and postgraduate students directed the excavations, using volunteers from the Launceston Historical Society. Staff from Launceston’s Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery brought their archival and collection-based expertise to the site rather than simply receiving stored finds as a repository, supporting immediate interpretation and contextualisation of objects. In 2018, participation from the University of Tasmania School of Education enabled a larger number of on-site educational activities than afforded by previous open days. These multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational networks, drawn together provisionally in a shared time and place, provided rich opportunities for dialogue. However, the challenges of sustaining these exchanges have meant ongoing collaborations have become more sporadic, reflecting different institutional priorities and competing demands on participants. Even within long-term projects, continued engagement with stakeholders can be a challenge: while enabling an emerging and concrete sense of community, the time span gives greater vulnerability to external pressures. Making Home: Ecological Restoration and Community Engagement in the Species Hotel ProjectImages 5 and 6: Selected Species Hotels, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credits: Patrick Sutczak. The Species Hotels stand sentinel over a river of saplings, providing shelter for animal communities within close range of a small town. At the township of Ross in the Southern Midlands, work was initiated by restoration ecologists to address the lack of substantial animal shelter belts on a number of major properties in the area. The Tasmania Island Ark is a major Greening Australia restoration ecology initiative, connecting 6000 hectares of habitat across the Midlands. Linking larger forest areas in the Eastern Tiers and Central Highlands as well as isolated patches of remnant native vegetation, the Ark project is vital to the ongoing survival of local plant and animal species under pressure from human interventions and climate change. With fragmentation of bush and native grasslands in the Midland landscape resulting in vast open plains, the ability for animals to adapt to pasturelands without shelter has resulted in significant decline as animals such as the critically endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot struggle to feed, move, and avoid predators (Cranney). In 2014 mass plantings of native vegetation were undertaken along 16km of the serpentine Macquarie River as part of two habitat corridors designed to bring connectivity back to the region. While the plantings were being established a public art project was conceived that would merge design with practical application to assist animals in the area, and draw community and public attention to the work that was being done in re-establishing native forests. The Species Hotel project, which began in 2016, emerged from a collaboration between Greening Australia and the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design, the School of Land and Food, the Tasmanian College of the Arts and the ARC Centre for Forest Value, with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. The initial focus of the project was the development of interventions in the landscape that could address the specific habitat needs of the insect, small mammal, and bird species that are under threat. First-year Architecture students were invited to design a series of structures with the brief that they would act as ‘Species Hotels’, and once created would be installed among the plantings as structures that could be inhabited or act as protection. After installation, the privately-owned land would be reconfigured so to allow public access and observation of the hotels, by residents and visitors alike. Early in the project’s development, a concern was raised during a Ross community communication and consultation event that the surrounding landscape and its vistas would be dramatically altered with the re-introduced forest. While momentary and resolved, a subtle yet obvious tension surfaced that questioned the re-writing of an established community’s visual landscape literacy by non-residents. Compact and picturesque, the architectural, historical and cultural qualities of Ross and its location were not only admired by residents, but established a regional identity. During the six-week intensive project, the community reach was expanded beyond the institution and involved over 100 people including landowners, artists, scientists and school children from the region (Wright), attempting to address and channel the concerns of residents about the changing landscape. The multiple timescales of this iterative project—from intensive moments of collaboration between stakeholders to the more-than-human time of tree growth—open spaces for regional identity to shift as both as place and community. Part of the design brief was the use of fully biodegradable materials: the Species Hotels are not expected to last forever. The actual installation of the Species Hotelson site took longer than planned due to weather conditions, but once on site they were weathering in, showing signs of insect and bird habitation. This animal activity created an opportunity for ongoing engagement. Further activities generated from the initial iteration of Species Hotel were the Species Hotel Day in 2017, held at the Ross Community Hall where presentations by scientists and designers provided feedback to the local community and presented opportunities for further design engagement in the production of ephemeral ‘species seed pies’ placed out in and around Ross. Architecture and Design students have gone on to develop more examples of ‘ecological furniture’ with a current focus on insect housing as well as extrapolating from the installation of the Species Hotels to generate a VR visualisation of the surrounding landscape, game design and participatory movement work that was presented as part of the Junction Arts Festival program in Launceston, 2017. The intersections of technologies and activities amplified the lived in and living qualities of the Species Hotels, not only adding to the connectivity of social and environmental actions on site and beyond, but also making a statement about the shared ownership this project enabled.Working Property: Collaboration and Dialogues in The Marathon Project The potential of iterative projects that engage with environmental concerns amid questions of access, stewardship and dialogue is also demonstrated in The Marathon Project, a collaborative art project that took place between 2015 and 2017. Situated in the Northern Midland region of Deddington alongside the banks of the Nile River the property of Marathon became the focal point for a small group of artists, ecologists and theorists to converge and engage with a pastoral landscape over time that was unfamiliar to many of them. Through a series of weekend camps and day trips, the participants were able to explore and follow their own creative and investigative agendas. The project was conceived by the landowners who share a passion for the history of the area, their land, and ideas of custodianship and ecological responsibility. The intentions of the project initially were to inspire creative work alongside access, engagement and dialogue about land, agriculture and Deddington itself. As a very small town on the Northern Midland fringe, Deddington is located toward the Eastern Tiers at the foothills of the Ben Lomond mountain ranges. Historically, Deddington is best known as the location of renowned 19th century landscape painter John Glover’s residence, Patterdale. After Glover’s death in 1849, the property steadily fell into disrepair and a recent private restoration effort of the home, studio and grounds has seen renewed interest in the cultural significance of the region. With that in mind, and with Marathon a neighbouring property, participants in the project were able to experience the area and research its past and present as a part of a network of working properties, but also encouraging conversation around the region as a contested and documented place of settlement and subsequent violence toward the Aboriginal people. Marathon is a working property, yet also a vital and fragile ecosystem. Marathon consists of 1430 hectares, of which around 300 lowland hectares are currently used for sheep grazing. The paddocks retain their productivity, function and potential to return to native grassland, while thickets of gorse are plentiful, an example of an invasive species difficult to control. The rest of the property comprises eucalypt woodlands and native grasslands that have been protected under a conservation covenant by the landowners since 2003. The Marathon creek and the Nile River mark the boundary between the functional paddocks and the uncultivated hills and are actively managed in the interface between native and introduced species of flora and fauna. This covenant aimed to preserve these landscapes, linking in with a wider pattern of organisations and landowners attempting to address significant ecological degradation and isolation of remnant bushland patches through restoration ecology. Measured against the visibility of Tasmania’s wilderness identity on the national and global stage, many of the ecological concerns affecting the Midlands go largely unnoticed. The Marathon Project was as much a project about visibility and communication as it was about art and landscape. Over the three years and with its 17 participants, The Marathon Project yielded three major exhibitions along with numerous public presentations and research outputs. The length of the project and the autonomy and perspectives of its participants allowed for connections to be formed, conversations initiated, and greater exposure to the productivity and sustainability complexities playing out on rural Midland properties. Like Kerry Lodge, the 2015 first year exhibition took place at Sawtooth ARI. The exhibition was a testing ground for artists, and a platform for audiences, to witness the cross-disciplinary outputs of work inspired by a single sheep grazing farm. The interest generated led to the rethinking of the 2016 exhibition and the need to broaden the scope of what the landowners and participants were trying to achieve. Image 7: Panel Discussion at Open Weekend, 2016. Image Credit: Ron Malor.In November 2016, The Marathon Project hosted an Open Weekend on the property encouraging audiences to visit, meet the artists, the landowners, and other invited guests from a number of restoration, conservation, and rehabilitation organisations. Titled Encounter, the event and accompanying exhibition displayed in the shearing shed, provided an opportunity for a rhizomatic effect with the public which was designed to inform and disseminate historical and contemporary perspectives of land and agriculture, access, ownership, visitation and interpretation. Concluding with a final exhibition in 2017 at the University of Tasmania’s Academy Gallery, The Marathon Project had built enough momentum to shape and inform the practice of its participants, the knowledge and imagination of the public who engaged with it, and make visible the precarity of the cultural and rural Midland identity.Image 8. Installation View of The Marathon Project Exhibition, 2017. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.ConclusionThe Marathon Project, Species Hotel and the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project all demonstrate the potential of site-based projects to articulate and address concerns that arise from the environmental and cultural conditions and histories of a region. Beyond the Midland fence line is a complex environment that needed to be experienced to be understood. Returning creative work to site, and opening up these intensified experiences of place to a public forms a key stage in all these projects. Beyond a commitment to site-specific practice and valuing the affective and didactic potential of on-site installation, these returns grapple with issues of access, visibility and absence that characterise the Midlands. Paul Carter describes his role in the convening of a “concretely self-realising creative community” in an initiative to construct a meeting-place in Alice Springs, a community defined and united in “its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future” (17). Within that regional context, storytelling, as an encounter between histories and cultures, became crucial in assembling a community that could in turn materialise story into place. In these Midlands projects, a looser assembly of participants with shared interests seek to engage with the intersections of plant, human and animal activities that constitute and negotiate the changing environment. The projects enabled moments of connection, of access, and of intervention: always informed by the complexities of belonging within regional locations.These projects also suggest the need to recognise the granularity of regionalism: the need to be attentive to the relations of site to bioregion, of private land to small town to regional centre. The numerous partnerships that allow such interconnect projects to flourish can be seen as a strength of regional areas, where proximity and scale can draw together sets of related institutions, organisations and individuals. However, the tensions and gaps within these projects reveal differing priorities, senses of ownership and even regional belonging. Questions of who will live with these project outcomes, who will access them, and on what terms, reveal inequalities of power. Negotiations of this uneven and uneasy terrain require a more nuanced account of projects that do not rely on the geographical labelling of regions to paper over the complexities and fractures within the social environment.These projects also share a commitment to the intersection of the social and natural environment. They recognise the inextricable entanglement of human and more than human agencies in shaping the landscape, and material consequences of colonialism and agricultural intensification. Through iteration and duration, the projects mobilise processes that are responsive and reflective while being anchored to the materiality of site. Warwick Mules suggests that “regions are a mixture of data and earth, historically made through the accumulation and condensation of material and informational configurations”. Cross-disciplinary exchanges enable all three projects to actively participate in data production, not interpretation or illustration afterwards. Mules’ call for ‘accumulation’ and ‘configuration’ as productive regional modes speaks directly to the practice-led methodologies employed by these projects. The Kerry Lodge and Marathon projects collect, arrange and transform material taken from each site to provisionally construct a regional material language, extended further in the dual presentation of the projects as off-site exhibitions and as interventions returning to site. The Species Hotel project shares that dual identity, where materials are chosen for their ability over time, habitation and decay to become incorporated into the site yet, through other iterations of the project, become digital presences that nonetheless invite an embodied engagement.These projects centre the Midlands as fertile ground for the production of knowledge and experiences that are distinctive and place-based, arising from the unique qualities of this place, its history and its ongoing challenges. 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