Sandstone and rust : designing the qualities of Sydney harbour

Landscape architecture is built from place. What place is depends how one reads a site, which then determines what qualities are engaged with, and how they are engaged with, by design. Sydney Harbour is one of the most celebrated and distinctive harbours in the world. The qualities of the indigenous, pre-European landscape have been referred to regularly in the history of Australian landscape architecture as a source of inspiration for a truly Australian language of landscape design. A range of different models of such an Australian language have been proposed and tested on landscape design sites on Sydney Harbour, models that are in a discourse both with the specific landscape and with local landscape architecture theory and practice, particularly in relation to ideas of ‘appropriateness’ in Australian landscape architecture. This essay examines arguments from the 1970s that proposed a ‘palette’ approach to appropriateness, along with a key project from that period, Long Nose Point Park, that demonstrates this approach. The essay will then discuss three recent projects on the Harbour and demonstrate that these projects transcend the ‘palette’ approach by engaging with specific relationships on their sites (a ‘relationships’ approach) that are tied to the cultural occupation of Sydney Harbour. Along the way, the reader will be introduced to the key figures and history of landscape architecture in Australia, and to the geography of Sydney Harbour with its various ecologies and milieus

The importance of ecological scale for wildlife conservation in naturally fragmented environments: A case study of the Brush-Tailed Rock-Wallaby (Petrogale Penicillata)

Determining the ecologically relevant spatial scales for predicting species occurrences is an important concept when determining species–environment relationships. Therefore species distribution modelling should consider all ecologically relevant spatial scales. While several recent studies have addressed this problem in artificially fragmented landscapes, few studies have researched relevant ecological scales for organisms that also live in naturally fragmented landscapes. This situation is exemplified by the Australian rock-wallabies’ preference for rugged terrain and we addressed the issue of scale using the threatened brush-tailed rock-wallaby (Petrogale penicillata) in eastern Australia. We surveyed for brush-tailed rock-wallabies at 200 sites in southeast Queensland, collecting potentially influential site level and landscape level variables. We applied classification trees at either scale to capture a hierarchy of relationships between the explanatory variables and brush-tailed rock-wallaby presence/absence. Habitat complexity at the site level and geology at the landscape level were the best predictors of where we observed brush-tailed rock-wallabies. Our study showed that the distribution of the species is affected by both site scale and landscape scale factors, reinforcing the need for a multi-scale approach to understanding the relationship between a species and its environment. We demonstrate that careful design of data collection, using coarse scale spatial datasets and finer scale field data, can provide useful information for identifying the ecologically relevant scales for studying species–environment relationships. Our study highlights the need to determine patterns of environmental influence at multiple scales to conserve specialist species such as the brush-tailed rock-wallaby in naturally fragmented landscapes.

Synopolies: The use of cryptographic technologies to impede competition in multiple jurisdictions

Many jurisdictions have developed mature infrastructures, both administratively and legislatively, to promote competition. Substantial funds have been expended to monitor activities that are anticompetitive and many jurisdictions also have adopted a form of "Cartel Leniency Program", first developed by the US Federal Trade Commission, to assist in cartel detection. Further, some jurisdictions are now criminalizing cartel behaviour so that cartel participants can be held criminally liable with substantial custodial penalties imposed. Notwithstanding these multijurisdictional approaches, a new form of possibly anticompetitive behaviour is looming. Synergistic monopolies („synopolies‟) involve not competitors within a horizontal market but complimentors within separate vertical markets. Where two complimentary corporations are monopolists in their own market they can, through various technologies, assist each other to expand their respective monopolies thus creating a barrier to new entrants and/or blocking existing participants from further participation in that market. The nature of the technologies involved means that it is easy for this potentially anti-competitive activity to enter and affect the global marketplace. Competition regulators need to be aware of this potential for abuse and ensure that their respective competition frameworks appropriately address this activity. This paper discusses how new technologies can be used to create a synopoly.