Introduction

This chapter discusses the various ways in which we can understand 'Australian film'. It is the introductory chapter to the Australian section of the second edition of the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand.

Roller Derby Dolls

In the sprawling outer suburbs of Brisbane, a revolution is brewing. A sassy group of women from all walks of life has a dream: to resurrect the lost sport of full-contact roller derby in Australia. Led by their president Evil Doll, and despite none having experience in business, the roller girls have set up a roller derby league, one of 220 now dotted around the globe. Roller Derby Dolls is a story of female empowerment and of women with a dream—the dream of inspiring women in Australia to strap on the skates and give the sport a go.

Video analytics for the detection of near-miss incidents on approach to railway level crossings

Recent modelling of socio-economic costs by the Australian railway industry in 2010 has estimated the cost of level crossing accidents to exceed AU$116 million annually. To better understand causal factors that contribute to these accidents, the Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation is running a project entitled Baseline Level Crossing Video. The project aims to improve the recording of level crossing safety data by developing an intelligent system capable of detecting near-miss incidents and capturing quantitative data around these incidents. To detect near-miss events at railway level crossings a video analytics module is being developed to analyse video footage obtained from forward-facing cameras installed on trains. This paper presents a vision base approach for the detection of these near-miss events. The video analytics module is comprised of object detectors and a rail detection algorithm, allowing the distance between a detected object and the rail to be determined. An existing publicly available Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) based object detector algorithm is used to detect various types of vehicles in each video frame. As vehicles are usually seen from a sideway view from the cabin’s perspective, the results of the vehicle detector are verified using an algorithm that can detect the wheels of each detected vehicle. Rail detection is facilitated using a projective transformation of the video, such that the forward-facing view becomes a bird’s eye view. Line Segment Detector is employed as the feature extractor and a sliding window approach is developed to track a pair of rails. Localisation of the vehicles is done by projecting the results of the vehicle and rail detectors on the ground plane allowing the distance between the vehicle and rail to be calculated. The resultant vehicle positions and distance are logged to a database for further analysis. We present preliminary results regarding the performance of a prototype video analytics module on a data set of videos containing more than 30 different railway level crossings. The video data is captured from a journey of a train that has passed through these level crossings.

The distribution of absorptive capacity among construction supply chain participants

The absorptive capacity of organisations is one of the key drivers of innovation performance in any industry. This research seeks to refine our understanding of the relationship between absorptive capacity and innovation performance, with a focus on characterising the absorptive capacity of the different participant groups within the Australian road industry supply chain. One of the largest and most comprehensive surveys ever undertaken of innovation in road construction was completed in 2011 by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), based on the Australian road industry. The survey of over 200 construction industry participants covered four sectors, comprising suppliers (manufacturers and distributors), consultants (engineering consultants), contractors (head and subcontractors) and clients (state government road agencies). The survey measured the absorptive capacity and innovation activity exhibited by organisations within each of these participant groups, using the perceived importance of addressing innovation obstacles as a proxy for innovation activity. One of the key findings of the survey is about the impact of participant competency on product innovation activity. The survey found that the absorptive capacity of industry participants had a significant and positive relationship with innovation activity. Regarding the distribution of absorptive capacity, the results indicate that suppliers are more likely to have high levels of absorptive capacity than the other participant groups, with 32% of suppliers showing high absorptive capacity, ahead of contractors (18%), consultants (11%), and clients (7%). These results support the findings of previous studies in the literature and suggest the importance of policies to enhance organisational learning, particularly in relation to openness to new product ideas.

Forming a joint venture project team for multi-discipline engineering services in Australia

Joint venture design teams are formed to combine resources and expertise in order to secure multi-discipline engineering design services on major projects. Bringing together resources from two ordinarily competing companies to form one joint team is however challenging as each parent company brings to the project its own organisational culture, processes and team attitudes. This study examined the factors that impact on forming a successful joint venture project team. Three critical areas were identified from an extensive literature review; Joint Venture Arrangements, Parent Companies and Forming the Team; and a survey was conducted with professionals who have worked in joint venture project teams in the Australian building industry in order to identify factors that affected successful joint venture team formation, and the common lessons learnt. This study reinforced the importance of three key criteria - trust, commitment and compatibility - for partner alignment. The results also identified four key lessons learnt which included; selecting the right resources, enabling a collaborative working environment by way of project office, implementing an independent Joint Venture Manager, and allocating work which is best for project with fees reflecting risk where risk is disproportionate.

Critical success factors for the implementation of a knowledge management system in a knowledge-based engineering firm

This research identifies factors that are crucial to the success of a knowledge management system (KMS) implementation in a prominent Australian engineering consultancy firm. The study employs the Delphi method to solicit the opinions of experienced market leaders in the Australian construction industry, and then benchmarks the organisational profile of the consultancy firm against the Delphi findings. From this comparative case study, recommendations are made pertaining to the organisational and cultural changes required within the consultancy firm in order to improve its readiness to successfully implement a KMS.

From cinema to TV : still the same old stories about journalism

Television drama used to be the poor relation of the full length feature film made for cinema. No self-respecting movie star would be seen dead in the former, and successful TV actors rarely sustained careers of comparable brilliance in the film industry. Those days are gone, if a series such as House of Cards is any indicator of the trends.

The Cultural Atlas of Australia

An online interactive map and associated database including textual extracts and audiovisual material of film/novel/play locations in Australia.

Critical factors affecting the implementation of sustainable housing in Australia

Improved public awareness of the environment and available technologies will continue to highlight the importance of sustainable housing in the coming years. Despite this potential, the majority of new housing development in Australia is still “project homes” with few tangible sustainability measures. Stakeholders tend to have different perceptions and priorities on sustainability. To promote the uptake of sustainable housing products, a study of the critical issues affecting the implementation of sustainable housing is necessary. This research investigates multiple factors that may influence key stakeholders’ decision-making towards sustainable housing adoption. Drawing insights from combined questionnaire and interview studies, 12 critical factors and their interrelationships are identified based on professional views in the Australian housing industry. The mutual influences, or driving force and dependency, of these factors are further investigated via Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) to distinguish those requiring prominent and immediate attention. A hierarchical model is developed to help key stakeholders prioritise actions when implementing sustainable housing.

Tragedy and assimilation: Occupying the patterned surface

This chapter draws on biographical data about two notable pattern designers of wall surfaces in the interior. Both had personal histories of multiple careers and geographical locations and both their lives ended in mysterious circumstances. One of the pattern designers, Jim Thompson, disappeared in the Malaysian highlands in 1967 and was never found. The other, Florence Broadhurst, was brutally murdered in 1977; her case remains unsolved. This chapter theorizes that the patterned surface attracted Broadhurst and Thompson as a space to occupy and record their divergent pasts, and questions what it is to lose oneself in the surface of the interior, to find freedom (or slavery) in the abdication of control. This notion is further evidenced in creative works, including the Australian film Candy and the work by skin illustrator Emma Hack. What is it to work with the self as a two-dimensional representation in the outside world? Occupying the surface suggests a reflexive relationship with identity, that makes-over and re-shapes truths, lies and re-constructions. The chapter reminds us that the surface is never in stasis.

Creativity management : the new challenge for BPM

Besides classical criteria such as cost and overall organizational efficiency, an organization’s ability to being creative and to innovate is of increasing importance in markets that are overwhelmed with commodity products and services. Business Process Management (BPM) as an approach to model, analyze, and improve business processes has been successfully applied not only to enhance performance and reduce cost but also to facilitate business imperatives such as risk management and knowledge management. Can BPM also facilitate the management of creativity? We can find many examples where enterprises unintentionally reduced or even killed creativity and innovation for the sake of control, performance, and cost reduction. Based on the experiences we have made within case studies with organizations from the creative industries (film industry, visual effects production, etc.,) we believe that BPM can be a facilitator providing the glue between creativity management and well-established business principles. In this article we introduce the notions of creativity-intensive processes and pockets of creativity as new BPM concepts. We further propose a set of exemplary strategies that enable process owners and process managers to achieve creativity without sacrificing creativity. Our aim is to set the baseline for further discussions on what we call creativity-oriented BPM.

Livable housing design : the voluntary provision of inclusive housing in Australia

This paper reports on a study of the voluntary provision of inclusive housing. The impetus for the study is the Livable Housing Design initiative, an agreement among Australian housing industry and community leaders in 2010 to a national guideline and voluntary strategy with a target to provide minimum access features in all new housing by 2020. Situated in and around Brisbane, Australia, the study problematises the assumption that the housing industry will respond voluntarily; an assumption which this study concludes is unfounded. The Livable Housing Design initiative asks individual agents to consider the needs of people beyond the initial contract, to proceed with objective reasoning and to do the right thing voluntarily. Instead, the study found that interviewees focused on their immediate contractual obligations, were reluctant to change established practices and saw little reason to do more than was legally required of them. This paper argues that the highly-competitive and risk-averse nature of the industry works against a voluntary approach for inclusive housing and, if the 2020 target of the Livable Housing Design initiative is to be reached, a mandated approach through legislation will be necessary. The Livable Housing Design initiative, however, has an important role to play in preparing the Australian housing industry to accept further regulation.

SCRAMSPACE : Radical-Farming Scramjet for access to space

Scramjet-based launch systems offer considerable promise for safe, reliable and economical access to space. A general Scramjets introduction is first provided, followed by the specifics of Australian Scramjet Research and the recent progress in inlet-injection radical-farming scramjets as part of the SCRAMSPACE program. Through both flight and ground tests, leveraging Australias world leadership in scramjet R&D, the SCRAMSPACE project is designed to answer key scientific and technological questions and build an industry-ready talent pool for a future Australian space industry. An extensive descriptions of all phases of the development of the SCRAMSPACE I scramjet-powered free-flight experiment are described in these lecture notes.

Online video in education : acquisition, value & ROI

The session explores the potential for “Patron Driven Acquisition” (PDA) as a model for the acquisition of online video. Today, PDA has become a standard model of acquisition in the eBook market, more effectively aligning spend with use and increased return on investment (ROI). PDA is an unexplored model for acquisition of video, for which library collection development is complicated by higher storage and delivery costs, labor overheads for content selection and acquisition, and a dynamic film industry in which media and the technology that supports it is changing daily. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and La Trobe University in Australia launched a research project in collaboration with Kanopy to explore the opportunity for PDA of video. The study relied on three data sources: (1) national surveys to compare the video purchasing and use practices of colleges, (2) on-campus pilot projects of PDA models to assess user engagement and behavior, and (3) testing of various user applications and features to support the model. The study incorporates usage statistics and survey data and builds upon a peer-reviewed research paper presented at the VALA 2014 conference in Melbourne, Australia. This session will be conducted by the researchers and will graphically present the results from the study. It will map out a future for video PDA, and how libraries can more cost-effectively acquire and maximize the discoverability of online video. The presenters will also solicit input and welcome questions from audience members.

Measuring, modelling and understanding the mechanical behavior of bagasse

In the Australian sugar industry, sugar cane is smashed into a straw like material by hammers before being squeezed between large rollers to extract the sugar juice. The straw like material is initially called prepared cane and then bagasse as it passes through successive roller milling units. The sugar cane materials are highly compressible, have high moisture content, are fibrous, and they resemble some peat soils in both appearance and mechanical behaviour. A promising avenue to improve the performance of milling units for increased throughput and juice extraction, and to reduce costs is by modelling of the crushing process. To achieve this, it is believed necessary that milling models should be able to reproduce measured bagasse behaviour. This investigation sought to measure the mechanical (compression, shear, and volume) behaviour of prepared cane and bagasse, to identify limitations in currently used material models, and to progress towards a material model that can predict bagasse behaviour adequately. Tests were carried out using a modified direct shear test equipment and procedure at most of the large range of pressures occurring in the crushing process. The investigation included an assessment of the performance of the direct shear test for measuring bagasse behaviour. The assessment was carried out using finite element modelling. It was shown that prepared cane and bagasse exhibited critical state behavior similar to that of soils and the magnitudes of material parameters were determined. The measurements were used to identify desirable features for a bagasse material model. It was shown that currently used material models had major limitations for reproducing bagasse behaviour. A model from the soil mechanics literature was modified and shown to achieve improved reproduction while using magnitudes of material parameters that better reflected the measured values. Finally, a typical three roller mill pressure feeder configuration was modelled. The predictions and limitations were assessed by comparison to measured data from a sugar factory.