Owl song : a study in tragedy

The thesis is a creative work with exegesis. The creative component is a playscript exploring European tragic form within a mythologised Australian context. The exegesis examines the research material that informed the playwriting process; including tragic theory, dramatic character, place and landscape, and the use of landscape in theatre.

(Queer) Deleuzean readings of desire in Australian young adult fiction

This thesis analyses the representation of adolescent girls' friendships in Australian young adult fiction. Through Deleuzean philosophy, the relationships between girls are read as spaces of empowering and unbounded passions which defy binarised distinctions and categorisations. The analysis of these fictional relationships disentangles desire from psychoanalytic lack and uncovers its productivity.

Literature and environmental ethics

This thesis contends that literature which reflects, and is informed by (whether consciously or not), reconstructive postmodern ecology is not a static literature but by representing and confronting the underpinning causes that have led humanity to violence, literature generates new engagements and the potential to reconstruct - ethically, cognitively, perceptually- alternative ways of being-in-the-world for political ends.

Transformations : landscape in recent Australian fiction / Gillian Mary Tyas

Focusing on novels written since 1980 by Australian authors Rodney Hall, Liam Davison, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley and Gerald Murnane, and engaging with responses to the land by visual and performing artists, this thesis explores the idea that the writer and artist are mediators in the multitude of experiences that constitutes landscape.

Poetry, politics and place : black and white perceptions of landscape in modern Australian poetry 1965-1990

Argues that the most influential landscape poetry deals with landscape as an aesthetic concept, and also with the politics of land ownership. Several "landscape poets". Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, have given voice to some of the most compelling social currents in society, and their work has an important place in contemporary political debate.

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.

Consumer loyalty in South Asia: A double edged sword?

Within the growing literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries, almost no attention has been paid to the link between consumer awareness about their rights, adoption of socially responsible (SR) practices by small scale individual entrepreneurs (SIEs) and how these impact on consumer loyalty in a developing country context thus leaving a significant knowledge gap. This paper builds on the work of Azmat and Samaratunge (2009) on SIEs to address this gap in literature in the context of South Asia. South Asia as a region is growing rapidly and is moving to become a new powerhouse of economic development, yet the responsible business practices of SIEs who form a significant proportion of businesses operating in this region remain severely under-researched. We draw upon the existing literature to develop a comprehensive framework which presents a set of propositions specifying the relationship between consumer awareness, socially responsible business practices adopted by SIEs and consumer loyalty. The framework offers insight into understanding consumer loyalty in the context of developing countries.

Representation and judgement : 'privileged' Jews in Holocaust writing and film

This thesis analyses the ways in which moral judgements of so-called privileged Jews are constructed in Holocaust representations. ‘Privileged’ Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have often been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood and hastily judged facet of the Holocaust. Scholars have neglected the problem of judgement in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews; nonetheless, Holocaust texts frequently portray these liminal figures.

Of crucial importance to the thesis is Primo Levi’s paradigmatic essay entitled ‘The Grey Zone,’ which directly engages with the complex and sensitive issue of ‘privileged’ Jews. Levi argues that due to the extreme ethical dilemmas that ‘privileged’ Jews confronted, any judgement of these victims needs to be suspended. However, if, as Levi suggests, judgement is at times impossible, the thesis challenges Levi’s assumption by contending that representations of ‘privileged’ Jews inevitably take a moral position. In this way, the thesis conceptualises judgement as a ‘limit’ of representation. Indeed, it is shown that Levi himself cannot abstain from judging those for whom he argues judgement should be suspended.

The thesis takes Levi’s concept of the ‘grey zone’ as a point of departure in order to examine the problems of judgement and representation in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews. Analysis focuses on Raul Hilberg’s influential historical work and examples of documentary and fiction films. The thesis examines how Hilberg and several filmmakers employ conventions as a means of conveying judgement. It is argued that self-reflexive representations of ‘privileged’ Jews in film, particularly fictional dramatisation, have the potential to provide a nuanced representation of ‘privileged’ Jews, which engages with Levi’s ideas by questioning the possibility of judgement.

Thermodynamics approach to the hydrogen diffusion and phase transformation in titanium particles

The hydrogen diffusion and phase transformation in a titanium particle were studied based on thermodynamic calculation. The mechanisms of hydrogen diffusion in different phases (alpha-Ti, beta-Ti and TiHx) were analyzed. A mobility database was developed for titanium– hydrogen system based on the experimental works on hydrogen diffusion coefficient reported in literature and the fundamental of diffusion. To implement the calculation, a commercial software package for the simulation of diffusion-controlled phase transformation was used. The hydrogen diffusion process, hydrogen distribution, phase transformation and phase growth rate during hydrogenization of a titanium particle at temperatures of 560 K, 800K and 1000K were discussed. The thermodynamics and kinetics analysis provided quantitative insight into the diffusion process and improved the understanding of diffusion mechanism and phase transformation.

Wandering Rocks : truth and purity in the Australian Irish diaspora

This thesis comprises a novel, Wandering Rocks, and a discursive component concerning the Australian Irish diaspora. Diaspora theory, loss of culture, rememory and silence (especially around accounts of Irish women), sentimental and creative forces perpetuating identity, and the importance of written works as artefacts imbued with ;milieu effects' are explored.

Flexible multibody approach in forward dynamic simulation of locomotive strains in human skeleton with flexible lower body bones

A method for bone strain estimation is examined in this article. The flexibility of a single bone in an otherwise rigid human skeleton model has been studied previously by various authors. However, in the previous studies, the effect of the flexibility of multiple bones on the musculoskeletal model behavior was ignored. This study describes a simulation method that can be used to estimate the bone strains at both tibias and femurs of a 65-year old Caucasian male subject. The verification of the method is performed by the comparison of the results with other studies available in literature. The results of the study show good correlation with the results of previous empirical studies. A damping effect of the flexible bones on the model is also studied in this paper.

A procedural, minimal input, natural terrain plug-in for Blender

This project uses methods of terrain representation, creation and realism described in literature. We find that using a combination of Fractional Brownian Motion and procedural formation of rivers via squig curves to form initial terrain, with hydraulic erosion for post processing, we have full control over the style of terrain: from jagged mountains to flat regions; and the phase of river from tightly rock controlled to flood plain regions.

Fatal women in renaissance tragedy, 1550-1650

Drawing upon the femme fatale of film noir, this thesis examines the presence of a fatal woman on the Renaissance stage. The thesis analyses the representation of emotionally and sexually independent women as fatally attractive to, yet ultimately destructive of, the men they entrap and seduce.

Manipulating Islam and democracy in Iraq’s ‘Pluralised Authoritarianism’

With the realisation that the initial motives for the 2003 invasion of Iraq – Saddam’s alleged stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and his links to Al-Qaeda – were grievous intelligence errors the Bush administration, with varying degrees of success, were able to spin the war’s rasion d’etre and redefine the parameters of victory. A central tenet of this approach was to begin speaking about democracy as if it had always been one of the aims of the war itself. For the first few years, the effort to democratise Iraq appeared to gain some credible momentum: a complex array of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions formed political parties and civil society movements; uncensored news was enthusiastically consumed across the nation; Iraqi citizens took to the streets to protest key government decisions; and millions of Iraqis voted in relatively free and fair national elections (Davis, 2004, 2007, Isakhan, 2008, 2011b). Central to each of these developments were various Iraqi religious establishments – but especially those of the Shia Arab population of Iraq – who saw no distinction between their Islamic faith and the notion of democracy. Not surprisingly, a body of literature has emerged which has been very optimistic about Iraq’s engagement with both ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ in the post-Baathist period, while acknowledging the challenges it faces in creating a stable, egalitarian and democratic society (Al-Musawi, 2006, Cole, 2006, Davis, 2005, Dawisha, 2009, Isakhan, 2011a, Stansfield, 2007).

However, there have been virtually no studies which have sought to question this optimism in the light of more recent events. Addressing this lacuna, this paper documents the last few years (2006- 2011) which have seen many elements within the Iraqi political elite – most notably the Maliki government and his State of Law Coalition (SLC) – demonstrate what has been referred to in literature on other Arab states alternatively as ‘liberalised autocracy’ (Brumberg, 2002), ‘semi-authoritarianism’ (Ottaway, 2003) or ‘pluralised authoritarianism’ (Posusney and Angrist, 2005). That is to say, that these states consolidate their incumbency while putting in place measures that can be considered more or less liberal. To do this, the regime actually utilises (and controls) nominally democratic mechanisms such as elections, media freedoms, political opposition and civil society as part of their strategy to retain power. Of particular interest here are the ways in which the Maliki government – and Shia Arab Iraqi political factions more broadly – have manipulated both ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ towards such ‘pluralised authoritarianism’.