The national railway of Sarah Island : Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the railway became an emblem of technological advancement, stood for the improvement and progression of European life, and became a recognizable symbol for the achievements of governments and citizens. The implementation and use of the railway became closely linked with notions of national identity and character. The railway became an identifiable artefact in official history but at the same time it became a part of everyday life. Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish retells the life-story of a fictionalized convict sent to Sarah Island and who paints fish, eventually he metamorphoses into one. It could be thought that a novel set in convict times would have little to do with notions of national identity, technological advancement, and railway travel. However, Richard Flanagan, in this very complex, almost surreal, novel, has used the construction of a fictional national railway as one of the ways to explore Australia's complex relationship with history and space. The novel tells of the plans of a history-loving Commandant and his desire to build a national railway on Sarah Island. This paper explores how Sarah Island becomes a metonym for Australia as a whole and Flanagan's novel takes on a metaphysical dimension as he reveals the struggles that emerge when official history collides with non-official versions. The fabulations of the novel contribute to an historical reconstruction of the spatial/architectural history of the Tasmanian colonial project.

Twitter and Sports : Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets

Twitter and other social media have become increasingly important tools for maintaining the relationships between fans and their idols across a range of activities, from politics and the arts to celebrity and sports culture. Twitter, Inc. itself has initiated several strategic approaches, especially to entertainment and sporting organisations; late in 2012, for example, a Twitter, Inc. delegation toured Australia in order to develop formal relationships with a number of key sporting bodies covering popular sports such as Australian Rules Football, A-League football (soccer), and V8 touring car racing, as well as to strengthen its connections with key Australian broadcasters and news organisations (Jackson & Christensen, 2012). Similarly, there has been a concerted effort between Twitter Germany and the German Bundesliga clubs and football association to coordinate the presence of German football on Twitter ahead of the 2012–2013 season: the Twitter accounts of almost all first-division teams now bear the official Twitter verification mark, and a system of ‘official’ hashtags for tweeting about individual games (combining the abbreviations of the two teams, e.g. #H96FCB) has also been instituted (Twitter auf Deutsch, 2012).

Language and mobility : unexpected places [Book Review]

Language and Mobility is the latest monograph by Alastair Pennycook. It is part of the series, Critical Language and Literacy Studies. Co-edited by Pennycook, along with Brian Morgan and Ryuko Kubota, the series looks at relations of power in diverse worlds of language and literacy. As the title indicates, Pennycook’s own volume explores the idea of language turning up in ‘unexpected’ places, for example, Cornish in Moonta, South Australia, a century or two after it supposedly died with its last speaker. Why is it, Pennycook asks, that we expect to find a (particular form of a) language in a particular place? This question is generated by a critical project that seeks to leverage the educational potential of everyday moments of language use...

Pancreatic cancer – a patient and his doctor balance hope and truth [Book Review]

This book comprises 11 chapters, alternating between two authors (a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer and an oncologist)...

Book review: 'The Cornea' edited by H.E. Kaufman, B.A. Baron, M.B. McDonald and S.R. Waltman.

Parsons' Diseases of the Eye, first published in 1907, is one of the foundation texts of modern ophthalmology. It has seen a new edition at approximately 5-year intervals throughout the century. This latest edition incorporates developments that have taken place within the specialty since the 1984 impression, but remains in a virtually unchanged format...

Book review: 'Contact lenses: The Story', by T. Bowden. Bower House Publications, Kent 2009.

This book had to be written. Congratulations to British dispensing optician Timothy Bowden for his dogged determination in researching, writing and essentially self-publishing this hefty tome. How does one tackle the monumental task of tracking the complex history of the development of the contact lens, from the production of the first human artificial glass eyes by Ludwig Müller-Uri in Germany in 1835 to the sophisticated, high-technology, multi-billion dollar contact lens industry of today? The superficial answer may seem simple: do it chronologically, but it is much more difficult than that. Multiple contemporaneous and seemingly unconnected events often converged to result in ideas that elevated contact lens technology to the next level and many developments revolved around the deliberate and sometimes accidental activities of a long list of enthusiasts, inventors, entrepreneurs, businessmen, technicians, scientists, engineers, polymer scientists, opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists.

Book review: ‘Anterior Eye Disease and Therapeutics A-Z' [2nd ed.] Edition, by A. Bruce and M. Loughnan. Churchill Livingstone (Elsevier), Edinburgh 2011

With the ever-increasing emphasis on ocular disease recognition in the practice of optometry and especially anterior eye disease management and therapeutics, any book addressing such issues is bound to have a captive audience. This second edition of Anterior Eye Disease and Therapeutics A–Z provides a succinct yet comprehensive coverage of this topic.

Book review: ‘Cornea. Color Atlas & Synopsis of Clinical Ophthalmology. Wills Eye Institute’, by C.J. Rapuano. Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia 2012

This book is one in a series of seven atlases covering the ophthalmic sub-specialties: cornea, retina, glaucoma, oculoplastics, neuro-ophthalmology, uveitis and paediatrics. The author of Cornea and editor of the series is Christopher Rapuano, Attending Surgeon and Director of the Cornea Service at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. In the introduction to the book, Rapuano states ‘The goal of this series is to provide an up-to-date clinical overview of the major areas of ophthalmology for students, residents and practitioners in all the healthcare professions’...

Boken, berättelsen, pengarna I den digitala tidsåldern [The book, the story and the money in the digital age]

År 2012 är distribution av litteratur via internet inte längre en framtidsvision, utan ett etablerat format vid sidan av traditionella format som exempelvis pocketboken, den inbundna boken och ljudboken (AAP 2011; Amazon 2011; PaidContent 2011). Men den digitala tekniken etablerar inte enbart ett nytt format, utan förändrar också grundförutsättningarna för litterära konstformer och marknader. Detta kapitel behandlar en betydelsefull aspekt av denna förändring, nämligen hur den digitala tekniken påverkar relationen mellan läsare och författare och ökar läsarens inflytande över den kreativa processen. I den digitala tidsåldern är det möjligt att skapa berättelser online i en interaktiv process som involverar både läsare och författare. Kapitlet presenterar modeller för hur sådan “samproducerad e-litteratur” förändrar marknaden för litteratur och hur den påverkar den traditionella litteraturen.

TEXTA Book Club in the QUT Art Museum

TEXTA runs as a type of book club that we have previously labelled as ‘bespoke’ (Ellison, Holliday and Van Luyn 2012). We visualise TEXTA as a meeting place between the community and the university, as a space for discussion and engagement with both visual art forms and written texts. In today’s presentation, we shall briefly establish the ‘bespoke’ bookclub. We then want to introduce the idea of TEXTA as an example of a book club that negotiates Edward Soja’s Thirdspace (1996) – a space that incorporates and extends concepts of First and Secondspace (or perceived and conceived spaces). In doing so, we showcase two recent sessions of TEXTA as case studies. We will then illustrate some ideas we have for expanding TEXTA beyond the boundaries of Brisbane city, and invite feedback on how to further extend the opportunities for community engagement that TEXTA can offer in regional areas.

An opening : twelve love stories about art [Book Review]

Review(s) of: An opening: Twelve love stories about art, by Stephanie Radok 2012, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, xiv, 168 p., ISBN 9781743050415 (pbk).

Settling the Pop Score : Pop Texts and Identity Politics [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics, Stan Hawkins, Aldershot, Hants. : Ashgate, 2002, ISBN 0 7546 0352 0; pb, 234pp, ill, music exx, bibl. , discog. , index. The scholarly study of popular music has its origins in sociology and cultural studies, disciplinary areas in which musical meaning is often attributed to aspects of economical and sociological function. Against this tradition, recent writers have offered what is now referred to as ‘popular musicology’: a method or approach that tends towards a specific engagement with ‘pop texts’ on aesthetic, and perhaps even ‘musical’ terms. Stan Hawkins uses the term popular musicology ‘at his own peril,’ clearly recognising the implicit scholarly danger in his approach, whereby ‘formalist questions of musical analysis’ are dealt with ‘alongside the more intertextual discursive theorisations of musical expression’ (p. xii). In other words, popular musicologists dare to tread that fine line between text and context. As editor of the journal Popular Musicology Online, Hawkins is a leading advocate of this practice, specifically in the application of music-analytical techniques to popular music. His methodology attests to the influence of other leading figures in the area, notably Richard Middleton, Allan F. Moore and Derek Scott (general editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series in which this book is published).