Jack's Bay (the architecturalisation of memory)

Jack's Bay (the architecturalisation of memory) is a key work of the author's exhibition Lightsite, which toured Western Australian galleries from February 2006 to November 2007. It is a five-minute-long exposure photographic image captured inside a purpose-built, room-sized pinhole camera which is demountable and does not have a floor. The work depicts octogenarian Jack Morris, who for forty years held the professional salmon fishing license in the hamlet of Bremer Bay, on the SE coast of Western Australia. The pinhole camera-room is sited within sand dunes new Jack's now demolished beachside camp. Three generations of Jack's descendents stand outside the room - from his daughter to his great grand children. The light from this exterior landscape is 'projected' inside the camera-room and illuminates the interior scene which includes that part of the sand dune upon which the floorless room is erected, along with Jack who is sitting inside. The image evokes the temporality of light. Here, light itself is portrayed as the primary medium through which we both perceive and describe landscape. In this way it is through the agency of light that we construct our connectivity to landscape.

A preliminary OSL chronology for coastal dunes on Moreton island, Queensland, Australia – Marginal deposits of A large-scale quaternary shelf sediment system

Moreton Island and several other large siliceous sand dune islands and mainland barrier deposits in SE Queensland represent the distal, onshore component of an extensive Quaternary continental shelf sediment system. This sediment has been transported up to 1000 km along the coast and shelf of SE Australia over multiple glacioeustatic sea-level cycles. Stratigraphic relationships and a preliminary Optically Stimulated Luminance (OSL) chronology for Moreton Island indicate a middle Pleistocene age for the large majority of the deposit. Dune units exposed in the centre of the island and on the east coast have OSL ages that indicate deposition occurred between approximately 540 ka and 350 ka BP, and at around 96±10 ka BP. Much of the southern half of the island has a veneer of much younger sediment, with OSL ages of 0.90±0.11 ka, 1.28±0.16 ka, 5.75±0.53 ka and <0.45 ka BP. The younger deposits were partially derived from the reworking of the upper leached zone of the much older dunes. A large parabolic dune at the northern end of the island, OSL age of 9.90±1.0 ka BP, and palaeosol exposures that extend below present sea level suggest the Pleistocene dunes were sourced from shorelines positioned several to tens of metres lower than, and up to few kilometres seaward of the present shoreline. Given the lower gradient of the inner shelf a few km seaward of the island, it seems likely that periods of intermediate sea level (e.g. ~20 m below present) produced strongly positive onshore sediment budgets and the mobilisation of dunes inland to form much of what now comprises Moreton Island. The new OSL ages and comprehensive OSL chronology for the Cooloola deposit, 100 km north of Moreton Island, indicate that the bulk of the coastal dune deposits in SE Queensland were emplaced between approximately 540 ka BP and prior to the Last Interglacial. This chronostratigraphic information improves our fundamental understanding of long-term sediment transport and accumulation on large-scale continental shelf sediment systems.

High body mass index is not a barrier to physical activity: Analysis of international rugby players' anthropometric data

Recent data indicate that levels of overweight and obesity are increasing at an alarming rate throughout the world. At a population level (and commonly to assess individual health risk), the prevalence of overweight and obesity is calculated using cut-offs of the Body Mass Index (BMI) derived from height and weight. Similarly, the BMI is also used to classify individuals and to provide a notional indication of potential health risk. It is likely that epidemiologic surveys that are reliant on BMI as a measure of adiposity will overestimate the number of individuals in the overweight (and slightly obese) categories. This tendency to misclassify individuals may be more pronounced in athletic populations or groups in which the proportion of more active individuals is higher. This differential is most pronounced in sports where it is advantageous to have a high BMI (but not necessarily high fatness). To illustrate this point we calculated the BMIs of international professional rugby players from the four teams involved in the semi-finals of the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) cut-offs for BMI, approximately 65% of the players were classified as overweight and approximately 25% as obese. These findings demonstrate that a high BMI is commonplace (and a potentially desirable attribute for sport performance) in professional rugby players. An unanswered question is what proportion of the wider population, classified as overweight (or obese) according to the BMI, is misclassified according to both fatness and health risk? It is evident that being overweight should not be an obstacle to a physically active lifestyle. Similarly, a reliance on BMI alone may misclassify a number of individuals who might otherwise have been automatically considered fat and/or unfit.