Sonic loom : beginnings

An introduction to the Sonic Loom research project, presented at the Drama Australia Conference, 2006.

Australian cinema’s dark sun : the boom in Australian horror film production

There has been a boom in Australian horror movie production in recent years. Daybreakers (2010), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Undead (2003), Black Water (2008), and Storm Warning (2006) among others, have all experienced varying degrees of popularity, mainstream visibility, and cult success in worldwide horror markets. While Aussie horror’s renaissance is widely acknowledged in industry literature, there is limited research into the extent of the boom and the dynamics of production. Consequently, there are few explanations for why and how this surge has occurred. This paper argues that the recent growth in Australian horror films has been driven by intersecting international market forces, domestic financing factors, and technological change. In so doing, it identifies two distinct tiers of Australian horror film production: ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ production; though overlap between these two tiers results in ‘high-end indie’ films capable of cinema release. Each tier represents the high and low-ends of Australian horror film production, each with different financing, production, and distribution models.

Sonic loom (Volume 1)

Sonic Loom is a purpose built classroom tool for teachers and students of drama that will enable them to explore the use of music in live performance in theory and practice. It’s intended as a resource for drama classrooms, to encourage communication and exchange about the way music works on us so we can find new ways we can make it work for us. Working to consciously attend to music and how it’s used, particularly in cinema (as a popular way in to styles of western theatre and live performance) will allow students and teachers to use music in more subtle and complex ways an aid to narrative in performance. Sonic Loom encourages active listening, (aided but not encumbered by traditional musicology) so students (and teachers) can develop a ‘critical ear’ in the transformation and adaptation of music for their own artistic purposes, whether it’s soundtracking existing scene work, or acting as a pre-text for scenes which have yet to be created.

The resource boom's underbelly : criminological impacts of mining development

Australia is currently in the midst of a major resources boom. Resultant growing demands for labour in regional and remote areas have accelerated the recruitment of non resident workers, mostly contractors, who work extended block rosters of 12-hour shifts and are accommodated in work camps, often adjacent to established mining towns. Serious social impacts of these practices, including violence and crime, have generally escaped industry, government and academic scrutiny. This paper highlights some of these impacts on affected regional communities and workers and argues that post-industrial mining regimes serve to mask and privatize these harms and risks, shifting them on to workers, families and communities.

From bust to boom : towards a strategic cognition perspective on Australian mining firms’ adaption

While the role of executives’ cognition in organisations’ responses to change is a central topic in strategic cognition research, changes in firms’ environment are typically not measured directly but described either as an event (for example, new industry legislation) or represented by a time period (e.g. when a new technology impacted an industry). The Australian mining sector has witnessed a historically significant change in demand for its products and we begin by developing measures of changes in supply and demand for key commodities during the period 1992-2008. We identify sub-groups of firms based on their activities and commodity sector and examine the relation of these variables to executives’ cognition and to firms’ CapEx. We find industry, firm and cognitive variables are related to both strategic cognition and firms’ CapEx.

Class contestations and Australia’s resource boom : the emergence of the ‘cashed-up bogan’

This article examines the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’ or ‘Cub’ in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that ‘Bogan’, like that of ‘Chav’ in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, ‘Cubs’ have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub’s emergence, is linked to Australia’s resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as ‘other’ to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.

Crime talk, FIFO workers and cultural conflict on the mining boom frontier

Australia is experiencing an unprecedented expansion in mining due to intense demand from Asian economies thirsty for Australia’s non-renewable resources, with over $260 billion worth of capital investment currently in the pipeline (BREE 10). The scale of the present boom coupled with the longer term intensification of competitiveness in the global resources sector is changing the very nature of mining operations in Australia. Of particular note is the increasingly heavy reliance on a non-resident workforce, currently sourced from within Australia but with some recent proposals for projects to draw on overseas guest workers. This is no longer confined, as it once was, to remote, short term projects or to exploration and construction phases of operations, but is emerging as the preferred industry norm. Depending upon project location, workers may either fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) or drive-in, drive-out (DIDO), the critical point being that these operations are frequently undertaken in or near established communities. Drawing primarily on original fieldwork in one of Australia’s mining regions at the forefront of the boom, this paper explores some of the local impacts of new mining regimes, in particular their tendency to undermine collective solidarities, promote social division and fan cultural conflict.

The mining boom and Western Australia's changing landscape : towards sustainability or business as usual?

The practices and public reputation of mining have been changing over time. In the past, mining operations frequently stood accused of being socially and environmentally disruptive, whereas mining today invests heavily in ‘socially responsible’ and ‘sustainable’ business practices. Changes such as these can be witnessed internationally as well as in places like Western Australia (WA), where the mining sector has matured into an economic pillar of the state, and indeed the nation in the context of the recent resources boom. This paper explores the role of mining in WA, presenting a multi-disciplinary perspective on the sector's contribution to sustainable development in the state. The perspectives offered here are drawn from community-based research and the associated academic literature as well as data derived from government sources and the not-for-profit sector. Findings suggest that despite noteworthy attitudinal and operational improvements in the industry, social, economic and environmental problem areas remain. As mining in WA is expected to grow in the years to come, these problem areas require the attention of business and government alike to ensure the long-term sustainability of development as well as people and place.

Social Justice Impacts of the Resources Boom

Until the 1970s mining leases were issued by state governments subject to conditions that companies build or substantially finance local community infrastructure, including housing, streets, transport, schools, hospitals and recreation facilities. Townships and communities went hand in hand with mining development. However, in the past thirty years mining companies have moved progressively to an expeditionary strategy for natural resources extraction - operating a continuous production cycle of 12 hour shifts - increasingly reliant on non-resident, fly-in, fly-out or drive-in, drive-out (FIFO/DIDO) workers who typically work block rosters, reside in work camps adjacent to existing communities and travel large distances from their homes. This paper presents the key findings of our survey into the social impacts of this kind of mining development in Qld. Based on the results we argue that the social license to develop new mining projects is strong for projects requiring a 25% or less non-resident workforce, diminishes significantly thereafter and is very weak for projects planning to recruit a non-resident workforce in excess of 75%. This finding is significant because there are at least 67 new mining projects undergoing social impact assessment in Queensland, and many it appears are planning to hire significant proportions of non-resident workers. The paper considers the policy implications of this growing social justice issue concluding there is a clear need for national leadership in formulating a national policy framework for guiding socially responsible and sustainable mining development into the next millennium.

Bang and bust: almost everything you wanted to know about sex and the mining boom (but were afraid to ask)

Recent growth and expansion of the fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) model of mining in remote rural Australia has led to concerns about the health and well-being of those employed by the mines and those in the small rural communities where they are based. A particular concern has been the potential disruption to sexual norms in mining towns and increases in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV.

‘Pop Melayu vs. Pop Indonesia: Marketeers, producers and new interpretations of a genre into the 2000s’ in Sonic Modernities in Southeast Asia Leiden: Brill pp. 187- 215

Kangen Band, as an example of reclaiming of the derisive term kampungan. In it, I argue that this reclaiming represents an interesting case of genre manipulation, and consider what this can reveal about how Indonesian pop genres are constituted, what they ‘are’ and what they ‘do’. In so doing, I seek to rework existing scholarship relating to Indonesian pop genres and modernity, as well as interrogate some broader theories of genre. In this essay, I extend the argument that Indonesian pop genres are not purely technical categories, they touch on myths of class and nation (Wallach 2008; Weintraub 2010; Yampolsky 1989. As we shall see, in the New Order period, pop music genres reached out to these myths by positioning themselves variously vis-à-vis the capital city, Jakarta. Such positioning, achieved through use of the terms gedongan (a term that strives to infer refinement by stressing the non-masses’ central position in the urban environment) and kampungan (a term that strives to enforce subalterns’ marginal position in relation to the metropolis, see also the previous contribution by Weintraub), continues to haunt the constitution of genre in the post-New Order period, but in novel ways. These novel ways, I argue, may be seen to result from industrial transformation and new systems of knowledge production.

Someone else's boom but always our bust: Australia as a derivative economy, implications for regions

This paper examines the socio-economic impact of mineral and agricultural resource extraction on local communities and explores policy options for addressing them. An emphasis on the marketisation of services together with tight fiscal control has reinforced decline in many country communities in Australia and elsewhere. However, the introduction by the European Union of Regional Policy which emphasises ‘smart specialisation’ can enhance greatly the capacity of local people to generate decent livelihoods. For this to have real effect, the innovative state has to enable partnerships between communities, researchers and industry. For countries like Australia, this would be a substantive policy shift.

Making Money from Monsters

It seems Australia is the place to be at the moment when it comes to making and creating horror films. Mark David Ryan explains how you can get involved in this boom industry. If you’re a writer with a passion for scary movies, a wordsmith who watches the occasional horror flick and writing your own has crossed your mind, or a writer who terrifies readers with an interest in screenwriting, then there has never been a better time to write Aussie horror flicks. This article introduces the horror genre’s core characteristics, issues to consider when crafting a horror flick, and provides tips for getting scripts into the hands of producers.