Nhill

Nhill is a short story that gently echoes a sense of anxiety. The very title  suggests emptiness and is a gentle exploration of a middle-class white couple's sense of not belonging to this landscape. Although they travel to the centre of the Little Dessert of western Victoria, it's 'heart of salt', everything in this gorgeous haze of a story of conspires to convey a sense of fragility and unreality.

Papers from Marrakech : a post-colonial reading of western women's travel writing in North Africa and the Middle East

This thesis takes the form of a collection of theoretical and fictional documents comprising a journal, letters and essays sent home to Australia by a woman travelling in Morocco. In different modes, these papers examine issues of colonialism, gender and desire in western women's travel writing about North Africa and the Middle East.

Sounding alien, touching the future : beyond the sonorous limit in science fiction film

In this paper I examine two particular aspects of sounding science fiction film: first, the ulterior, Othering sounds of the alien, whether it is creature, object, technology or environment; and second, the soundscape that accompanies or underscores the type of space travel that crosses temporal and spatial thresholds. In both instances of sounding science fiction film I suggest that human limits are reached and breached, leading to a deterritorialization of the self and a hearing that touches the future which is a moment of pure becoming. I focus on the womanly sonority of the alien to suggest that patriarchal and heterosexist sound devices can be ultimately corrupted. In the analysis of sounding space travel I suggest that science film can create a series of moments in which one experiences the double sublime. This spectacular rendering of a liquid chaos enables the viewer to experience the logic of sensation beyond bodily integrity. In this paper my over-arching position is one that hears in science fiction film the profound potential of a radical alterity that exists beyond the sonorous limit.

Introduction to the special issue on science fiction

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

Feudal tenure and native title: revising an enduring fiction

This article argues that the feudal doctrine of tenure continues to endure as the foundation for Australian land law despite its obvious social and historical irrelevance. The doctrine of tenure is a derivation of feudal history. The article examines some of its historical foundations with the aim of highlighting the disparity between the fiction of this inherited form and the reality of a colonial Australian landscape. Particular attention is given to the fact that Australian feudal tenure was always a passive framework. It was disconnected with the landscape and therefore incapable of responding to the needs of colonial expansion. This resulted in a clear disparity between feudal form and the reality of a land system populated by statutory grants. The article argues that feudal tenure was never truly devised as a responsive land system but rather, adopted as a sovereignty device. In this sense, legal history was utilised with the aim of promoting imperial objectives within colonial Australia. Tenure was equated with absolute Crown ownership over all Australian territory despite the fact that this was inconsistent with the orthodox tenets of feudal tenure.
The article argues that the consequence of adopting feudal tenure and absolute Crown ownership has been the estrangement of indigenous rights, title and culture. The creation and legitimisation of a land framework with a fundamentally Eurocentric perspective completely destroyed indigenous interests during the settlement and colonial era. It created an imperial ideology where colonists silently accepted the denial of indigenous identity. The decision of the Mabo High Court to reassess this historical perspective and accept the validity of proven native title claims clearly disturbed tenurial assumptions. However, the High Courts' reification of the feudal form created a fundamental paradox: indigenous title was accepted as a proprietary right within a framework incapable of and unequipped to recognise the fundamentally different cultural perspectives of customary ownership. The article argues that native title cannot evolve within a common law framework that regards ownership as a derivation of the English Crown. It is suggested that ultimately, a pluralist property culture, where indigenous and non-indigenous title exist as equalised entities, can only be properly nurtured with the full and absolute abolition of the feudal doctrine of tenure.

Estimating the economic value of Mount Buffalo National Park with the travel cost and contingent valuation models

The Mount Buffalo National Park is the oldest national park in Victoria, Australia. There has been a rapid increase in the number of visitors to the park during the last decade and park management has been a concern, especially in the light of declining budgetary allocations and potential damage due to the increased visitor numbers. Policy options to increase park revenue remain unclear because of a lack of information on demand parameters and user costs. This study estimates the economic value of the park using the travel cost method (TCM) and the contingent valuation method (CVM). The TCM gives higher consumer surplus (CS) than the CVM. The CS shows that the economic value of the park is high and that there are opportunities to introduce innovative fee schemes to enhance its revenue. Present entry fee systems do not capture the economic value of the park.