Airwaves: 100 years of radio

Music composition using prominent broadcast speeches across the whole twentieth century in commemoration of the centenary of Marconi's first transatlantic radio transmission. The work is based on creating music from the found objects of melody derived from spoken intonation. Recordings of the speeches are accompanied throughout by live instrumental music.

Re-imagining school through young people’s drawings

Children’s drawings provide rich qualitative data (Walker, 2008) and “valuable information for the assessment of children's environmental perceptions” (Barraza, 1999, p. 49). They are the primary data source being used to re-imagine school from a student perspective (Schratz & Steiner-Löffler, 1998) in a research project being carried out with primary school students in Queensland, Australia. This paper will report on the progress of this project which addresses a mostly unmet need for students’ perspectives to be included in school design (Rudduck & Flutter, 2004). Grade 5/6 students in a number of primary schools have been invited to submit annotated drawings with up to 200 words of text illustrating their ideal educational spaces. Using purpose-designed analytical tools, the submissions will be compared across student backgrounds and school types to obtain a better understanding of the needs and educational desires of young people in relation to changing learning environments. The findings will inform consideration of the design and use of educational spaces with all work exhibited through a dedicated website. The term ‘educational spaces’ avoids restrictive notions of what the concept of ‘school’ means, referring to any real or virtual space in which teaching and learning may occur or, as Ferguson and Seddon (2007) have referred to it, “the shifting imagery of education” that includes red brick schools and dispersed learning networks. The theoretical framework for this study is grounded in the work of Greene (1995) and Wright-Mills (2001) who cited the deployment of critical and empathic imagination in addressing education reform.

Visuacy, imagination, and engagement

Australia’s National Review of Visual Education (DEEWR, 2009) asserts the primacy of visual language ability, or ‘visuacy” in problem-solving. This paper reports on a recent university/schools research project with ‘at risk’ middle school students in which visuacy was promoted as a primary medium for obtaining data relating to issues of immediate concern to the students. Using a students-as-researchers approach, the project investigated middle school students’ perspectives on school engagement and disengagement. In this project, novice researchers used a variety of data gathering methods including photography, video interviews and drawn images as well as more traditional verbal methods, such as interviews, and quantitative methods, such as questionnaires. Engaging student imagination was a key focus of the approach taken by the project, acknowledging that student participants may be reluctant to enter dialogue with teachers and researchers on matters to which they have previously had little input. Students who have previously been marginalized and prevented from contributing their voices to educational forums often have difficulty in adjusting to the novelty of collaborative research with adults (Rudduck, 2003) and may be uncertain of their own place in the relationship that defines teacher/student interactions. It is argued that the project’s promotion of visuacy, alongside more traditional literacies and numeracy in education research, helped to overcome these concerns, engaged the imaginations of the student researchers, and provided a medium for the expression of the voices of marginalised young people.

Testing the accuracy of luminance maps acquired by smart phone cameras

This paper looks at the accuracy of using the built-in camera of smart phones and free software as an economical way to quantify and analyse light exposure by producing luminance maps from High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. HDR images were captured with an Apple iPhone 4S to capture a wide variation of luminance within an indoor and outdoor scene. The HDR images were then processed using Photosphere software (Ward, 2010.) to produce luminance maps, where individual pixel values were compared with calibrated luminance meter readings. This comparison has shown an average luminance error of ~8% between the HDR image pixel values and luminance meter readings, when the range of luminances in the image is limited to approximately 1,500cd/m2.

Treaty talk : past, present and future -- [Edited version of the inaugural Ngunnawal Lecture at the University of Canberra]

WELL I HEARD it on the radio and I saw it on the television. John Howard said there would be no talk of a treaty between his government and Indigenous people. He is not the first government leader to hold such views. Let me consider some of the public and official conversations that the concept of a treaty has invoked and what they reveal about white sovereignty. My interest in such dialogues stems from the fact that the idea of a treaty between white Australia and Indigenous people is not new and in the year of the centenary of Federation the Australian nation is still having trouble discussing it. Australian culture is less white than it used to be, but Anglicised whiteness forms the centre where white men established and defend institutions encouraging a possessive investment in white sovereignty. My intention is to invoke critical thought about these conversations. White sovereignty is a subject that asserts its dominance on social, political...

Undertaking practice-led research through a Queensland-wide women’s history project

This paper focuses on a practice-led research project where the author as artist/researcher participates in a Queensland-wide women’s history project to celebrate Queensland’s Suffrage Centenary in 2005. The author participated in the Women’s Historical Shoebox Collection, where Queensland women were invited to decorate and fill a shoebox with personal and symbolic items that speak about their lives and the lives of their women forebears. This paper explores the practice-led research process that enabled the artist/researcher to design and assemble her contribution. Fredericks describes the iterative process of developing the shoebox and the themes that developed through her artistic practice. She also describes the content of her shoebox and explains the symbolism underpinning the items. The Women’s Historical Shoebox Collection is now owned by the State Library of Queensland and the Jessie Street National Women’s Library.

Remembering the past through picture books

In anticipation of the commemorations around the centenary of World War 1 (2014-2018) this chapter examines the ways in which war and its effects have been represented in picture books for children. It looks at the ways in which these picture books create “textual monuments” as points of reference through which younger generations can “develop a narrative of the past” and “explore different points of view”. The focus of the discussion centres on a number of recent picture books and their application to aspects of the F-2 Australian History curriculum.

Art and science as creative catalysts

Science, Art and Science Art collaborations are generally presented and understood in terms of their products. We argue that the process of Science art can be a significant, even principal benefit of these collaborations, even though it may be largely invisible to anyone other than the collaborators. Hosting the Centenary of Canberra Science Art Commission at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has shown us that while Science and Art pursue orthogonal dimensions of creativity and innovation, collaborators can combine these directions to access new areas of imagination and ideas.

Bloomsday: Copyright estates and cultural festivals

Copyright estates have been unduly empowered by the extension of the term of copyright protection in Europe, the United States, Australia and elsewhere. The Estate of the Irish novelist, James Joyce, has been particularly aggressive in policing his revived copyrights. The "keepers of the flame" have relied upon threats of legal action to discourage the production of derivative works based upon the canonical texts of the novelist. The Estate has also jealously guarded the reputation of the author by vetoing the use of his work in various scholarly productions. Most radically of all, the grandson Stephen Joyce threatened to take legal action to prevent the staging of "Rejoyce Dublin 2004", a festival celebrating the centenary of Bloomsday. In response, the Irish Parliament rushed through emergency legislation, entitled the Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2004 (Ireland) to safeguard the celebrations. The legislation clarified that a person could place literary and artistic works on public exhibition, without breaching the copyright vested in such cultural texts. Arguably, though, the ad hoc legislation passed by the Irish Parliament is inadequate. The Estate of James Joyce remains free to exercise its suite of economic and moral rights to control the use and adaptation of works of the Irish novelist. It is contended that copyright law needs to be revised to promote the interests of libraries and other cultural institutions. Most notably, the defence of fair dealing should be expanded to allow for the transformative use of copyright works, particularly in respect of adaptations and derived works. There should be greater scope for compulsory licensing and crown acquisition of revived copyrights.

Rejoyce Dublin 2004: Revived copyrights and public exhibitions

This article considers the impact of the copyright term extension upon public exhibitions in libraries and cultural institutions. It focuses upon the legal action taken by the Joyce Estate to prevent the staging of "Rejoyce Dublin 2004", a festival celebrating the centenary of Bloomsday. It evaluates the emergency legislation rushed through by the Irish Parliament, Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2004 (Ireland) to safeguard the celebrations. It concludes that copyright law needs to be revised to promote the interests of libraries and other cultural institutions.

Legacies of War--[Ten percent terror]

Ten Percent Terror brings together leading creatives from the fields of contemporary theatre, contemporary dance, music theatre, circus and digital arts in the first collaboration of its kind. Commissioned by Brisbane Powerhouse, with support from the Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund and in partnership with Dancenorth and Company 2, this is an inter-disciplinary work that combines theatrical narrative with eloquent physicality, through circus and dance, to express certain truths of the soldiers' experience. This production will be a circus-narrative that uses the form and language of circus to express the key themes of risk, panic and brotherhood. Ten Percent Terror is intended to be a work of scale, yet also intimacy: of stillness and panic, inertia and chaos. Project partners, Dancenorth and Company 2, share the vision to use contemporary artistic disciplines to connect younger and modern audiences to the ANZAC legacy, perhaps offering a connection for those audiences that they may not find through more traditional art forms. The development process has included a community research project in Townsville, conducted by Shane Pike, which explored contemporary Australians’ stories through interviews with serving military personnel and the local community, as well as collecting photographic documentation and other artefacts from around Townsville. This was followed by an archival research project in Brisbane, where Pike reviewed letters, photographs and personal accounts of soldiers from WW1. The results of these projects will be used by the creative team to inform the development of Ten Percent Terror. Given Townsville’s reputation as Australia’s ‘garrison’ city, the project partners plan to deliver the world premiere performance of Ten Percent Terror in Townsville in late 2015. It is intended that Ten Percent Terror will receive its Brisbane premiere in November 2015 at Brisbane Powerhouse, as part of a four-performance season. This expert panel included discussion of the project and its place in analysing key aspects of Australia's wartime history.