The politics of Ancient Mesopotamia : prelude to democracy?

Conventional wisdom asserts that the empires of ancient Mesopotamia were ruled by blood-thirsty tyrants with a penchant for megalomania and a lust for power.
However, archaeological work conducted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has begun to unearth a more sophisticated political landscape. Many of the empires of ancient Mesopotamia can in fact be seen to have practised forms of governance remarkably similar to the democratic systems employed by the Greeks many centuries later.
This lecture will examine the democratic tendencies of various Mesopotamian empires and trace their influence on later Grecian developments.

Sharing ownership in multicultural music : a hands-on approach in teacher education in South Africa

South Africa prides itself in a rich and colorful array of the Arts where music plays a significant role in social regeneration, unity and reconciliation. Little research has been undertaken in teacher education courses in South Africa regarding the inclusion of African music within multicultural music practice. Using the theoretical frameworks of understanding multiculturalism, I report on the teaching and learning of multicultural music at Pretoria University. My narrative highlights what I had learned and reports on the interview data with the tertiary music educator in October 2010. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, two themes are discussed: the need for multicultural music and the inclusion of students as indigenous culture bearers. Lessons learnt at Pretoria University can be replicated elsewhere in Australia where the sharing of ownership in multicultural music as a hands-on approach is viewed positively, promoting understanding and respect in a shared space and place.

Prose fiction’s infinite playlist : encountering music in fiction narrative

This paper will argue that reference to music in young-adult prose fiction stimulates movement across narrative and artistic boundaries in ways that facilitate a unique reading encounter. The inclusion of musical reference opens up a space for a multisensory experience that is beyond that of the reading experience devoid of musical association, even when the audio is not immediately available at the time of reading. This experience is bound to the role of the reader, however, be it through the remembered or imagined experience of the music that is signaled in-text, or even the reader’s pursuit of the audio in response to the reading. As ‘a threshold literature’ (Eaton 2010, np) that targets a young audience for whom ‘popular music is globally acknowledged as affectively and culturally central’ (Bloustien & Peters 2011, 4), young-adult fiction is an apt space for explorations into the potential that exists when a text includes musical reference. In particular, Gerard Genette’s paratexts (1997), J Hillis Miller’s ‘membranes’ (2005) and T Austin Graham’s ‘literary soundtrack’ (2009) will be used to examine how Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult fiction novel Nick and Norah’s infinite playlist (2006) functions as an ‘infinite playlist’ in itself via a series of paratextual and epitextual elements. Discussion of the latticework of music-narrative interaction that exists as a part of this text will facilitate an understanding of how musical reference can encourage movement within and beyond the narrative towards a potentially unique reading experience.

Community music making in Australia : creating, improvising and performing at the 2012 Lake Bolac Eel Festival

Lake Bolac is a freshwater lake, resulting from one of the volcanic eruptions in the Western district of regional Victoria (Australia). There is an annual migration of eels to it and they have been a local indigenous food source for very many years. Since 2004 there has been a festival to celebrate this event culminating at the Lake Bolac Eel Festival (LBEF). Since 2012, the festival included creative art works and a music workshop by academics from Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia) as a regional partnership with Lake Bolac. The opportunity to exhibit, workshop and perform works as academics and practitioners brought the community together where both contemporary and traditional arts can be preserved, protected and promoted. My paper forms part of a larger creative research project called Flows and Catchments at Deakin University which started in 2011. My study situates itself in creative music making and soundscape within the larger project.

Application of white-beam X-ray microdiffraction for the study of mineralogical phase identification in ancient Egyptian pigments

High-brightness synchrotron X-rays together with precision achromatic focusing optics on beamline 7.3.3 at the Advanced Light Source have been applied for Laue microdiffraction analysis of mineralogical phases in Egyptian pigments. Although this task is usually performed using monochromatic X-ray diffraction, the Laue technique was both faster and more reliable for the present sample. In this approach, white-beam diffraction patterns are collected as the sample is raster scanned across the incident beam (0.8 µm × 0.8 µm). The complex Laue diffraction patterns arising from illumination of multiple grains are indexed using the white-beam crystallographic software package XMAS, enabling a mineralogical map as a function of sample position. This methodology has been applied to determine the mineralogy of colour pigments taken from the ancient Egyptian coffin of Tjeseb, a priestess of the Apis bull dating from the Third Intermediate to Late period, 25th Dynasty to early 26th Dynasty (747 to 600 BC). For all pigments, a ground layer of calcite and quartz was identified. For the blue pigment, cuprorivaite (CuCaSi4O10) was found to be the primary colouring agent with a grain size ranging from ∼10 to 50 µm. In the green and yellow samples, malachite [Cu2(OH)2CO3] and goethite [FeO(OH)] were identified, respectively. Grain sizes from these pigments were significantly smaller. It was possible to index some malachite grains up to ∼20 µm in size, while the majority of goethite grains displayed a nanocrystalline particle size. The inability to obtain a complete mineralogical map for goethite highlights the fact that the incident probe size is considerably larger than the grain size. This limit will continue to improve as the present trend is toward focusing optics approaching the diffraction limit (∼1000× smaller beam area).

School funding, public transport racism and the looming second-hand digital music battle

 SBS News radio interview with Amelia Johns about racism on public transport and the response of witnesses.

The complete fool: Insights and trajectories from an ancient path

This study presents a novel and accompanying exegesis which explore the fool behind the Fool by stripping away his usual costume and arenas of power and folly to expose an essence – an impulse of potentiality – that helps explain the Fool’s perpetuity and argues his critical significance as a catalyst for creative thinking.

Spirit-music unbound: Romanticism and print politics in Australian women's poetry 1830-1905

This thesis presents a re-mapping of Australian poetic tradition to reflect the presence of colonial women poets. The research recovers a wide range of neglected poetry, offering a new way of reading these important poets as politic and transnational, particularly through the significance of newspaper authorship and international women’s poetry.

Automatic attribution of ancient Roman imperial coins

Classification of coins is an important but laborious aspect of numismatics - the field that studies coins and currency. It is particularly challenging in the case of ancient coins. Due to the way they were manufactured, as well as wear from use and exposure to chemicals in the soil, the same ancient coin type can exhibit great variability in appearance. We demonstrate that geometry-free models of appearance do not perform better than chance on this task and that only a small improvement is gained by previously proposed models of combined appearance and geometry. Thus, our first major contribution is a new type of feature which is efficient in terms of computational time and storage requirements, and which effectively captures geometric configurations between descriptors corresponding to local features. Our second contribution is a description of a fully automatic system based on the proposed features, which robustly localizes, segments out and classifies coins from cluttered images. We also describe a large database of ancient coins that we collected and which will be made publicly available. Finally, we report the results of empirical comparison of different coin matching techniques. The features proposed in this paper are found to greatly outperform existing methods.

Reading ancient coins: automatically identifying denarii using obverse legend seeded retrieval

The aim of this paper is to automatically identify a Roman Imperial denarius from a single query photograph of its obverse and reverse. Such functionality has the potential to contribute greatly to various national schemes which encourage laymen to report their finds to local museums. Our work introduces a series of novelties: (i) this is the first paper which describes a method for extracting the legend of an ancient coin from a photograph; (ii) we are also the first to suggest the idea and propose a method for identifying a coin using a series of carefully engineered retrievals, each harnessed for further information using visual or meta-data processing; (iii) we show how in addition to a unique standard reference number for a query coin, the proposed system can be used to extract salient coin information (issuing authority, obverse and reverse descriptions, mint date) and retrieve images of other coins of the same type.