Empowering Art: Reconfiguring narratives of trauma and hope in the Australian national imaginary

Aboriginal art has been the source of much contention between art curators, gallery owners, art critics and Aboriginal artists themselves. Early aesthetic debates about whether so-called traditional works should be considered ethnographic or artistic have led, at times, to conflicts over the rights of Aboriginal people to have their works exhibited according to the criteria applied to other kinds of Western artworks. This article explores how the dilemmas of troubled ethno-histories are critically embodied and reconfigured in texture and colour. It considers the problems that silenced histories pose for those responsible for their display to the public. As Aboriginal images often conceal troubled intercultural encounters it asks how artworks can be used to provide a counter-polemic to national rhetoric as artists seek to reshape and improve intergenerational futures. This text is published as a counterpart to the contribution to Disturbing Pasts from the artist Heather Kamarra Shearer.

Staffing, status and subject knowledge: what does the construction of citizenship as a new curriculum subject in England tell us about the nature of school subjects?

Almost a decade ago, the new subject of citizenship was created in the English National Curriculum and several universities were funded to train teachers in this new subject. This presented a rare challenge, namely how to train people to teach a subject that did not exist in schools, and in which they were unlikely to have a specialist degree. In this article we have taken the opportunity afforded by the
tenth birthday of the report in which Crick recommended this curriculum reform to reflect on that experience from the perspective of teacher educators. Through reflecting on the case study of citizenship education in England we highlight several themes that are of more general interest to teacher educators. The key issues that have emerged in this case study relate to the general problems of translating central policy into classroom practice; the nature and aims of subjects in the curriculum; and the identities of teachers in secondary schools. The article illustrates how teacher educators responded to the formidable challenge of creating (or at least contributing to) a new subject and a subject community.

 Graphitization of Small Carbonate Samples for Paleoceanographic Research at the Godwin Radiocarbon Laboratory, University of Cambridge

A new radiocarbon preparation facility was set up in 2010 at the Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, at the University of Cambridge. Samples are graphitized via hydrogen reduction on an iron powder catalyst before being sent to the Chrono Centre, Belfast, or the Australian National University for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) analysis. The experimental setup and procedure have recently been developed to investigate the potential for running small samples of foraminiferal carbonate. By analyzing background values of samples ranging from 0.04 to 0.6 mg C along with similar sized secondary standards, the setup and experimental procedures were optimized for small samples. “Background” modern 14C contamination has been minimized through careful selection of iron powder, and graphitization has been optimized through the use of “small volume” reactors, allowing samples containing as little as 0.08 mg C to be graphitized and accurately dated. Graphitization efficiency/fractionation is found not to be the main limitation on the analysis of samples smaller than 0.07 mg C, which rather depends primarily on AMS ion beam optics, suggesting further improvements in small sample analysis might yet be achieved with our methodology.