International students in Australia: read ten thousand volumes of books and walk ten thousand miles

A number of international students, predominately from Asian countries, are present in universities in the UK, United States, and Australia. There is little research exploring their experiences as they negotiate the disciplinary requirements of their courses. This paper investigates students' agency as they write their first assignment for their Master's of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages course and the academics who teach them. Talk around texts and the positioning theory are used to analyse the data. It is argued that the students demonstrate strategic agency, which allows them to better understand the academic requirements of their disciplines. The analysis reveals the complexities involved in international students' adaptation to disciplinary discourse and the implications for teaching and learning in higher education.

“Never read anything that can at all unsettle your religious faith”: reading and writing in the monthly packet

The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church (1851–99) reveals the interest that Charlotte Yonge had in promoting and supporting girls as readers and writers. As the editor and as a major contributor, Yonge provided a variety of material for the magazine as part of a strategy for the development of girls' reading and writing habits in ways that were consistent with their High Anglican beliefs and that would never cause them to question their faith.

The ‘Australian Girl’ and the domestic ideal in colonial women’s fiction

The vast majority of novels and periodicals read by colonial Australian girls were written and published in Britain. ‘Daughters of the Southern Cross’ were more likely to have access to the Girl’s Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that had proven popular with British girl readers than any locally produced depictions of girlhood. From the 1880s, however, Australian authors produced several milestone fictions of girlhood for both adult and juvenile audiences. Rosa Praed's An Australian Heroine (1880) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890)  gave voice to the lived experience of Australia for young women, and their publication in Britain contributed to an emergent reciprocal transpacific flow of literary culture.

Two canonical Australian novels that focus on the maturation of girl protagonists who live on bush homesteads were also published in this period. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) feature intelligent girls who are not able to be effectively socialised to embrace domesticity. Turner’s Judy Woolcot is distinct among her six siblings as a plucky girl who instigates trouble, while Franklin’s aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn is informed that ‘girls are the helplessest, uselessest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.’

The 1890s saw an agricultural depression in Australia that only fuelled the urban perpet-uation of the idealised and nationalistic bushman myth in literary and popular culture. The ubiquity of the myth problematised any attempt to situate women heroically within the nation outside of the home. British fictional imaginings of Australian girls lauded their lack of conformity and physical abilities and often showed them bravely defending the family property with firearms. In contrast, Australian domestic fiction, this chapter argues, is unable to accommodate bracing female heroism, postulating ambiguous outcomes at best for heroines who deviate from the feminine ideal.

Judy’s grandmother describes her ‘restless fire’ as something that ‘would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her’, or ‘would flame up higher and higher and consume her’. Turner does not allow Judy’s unconventionality to prosper. Instead, she is killed by a falling gum tree while saving the life of her brother, leaving the future fulfilment of the domestic ideal to her sister, Meg, whose subsequent story occupies Little Mother Meg (1902). Franklin’s Sybylla expresses her inability to be content with the simple pleasures of keeping a home, and this informs her decision to reject a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor. The novel’s indeterminate conclusion does not allow fulfilment of Sybylla’s writing aspirations, situating her outside the feminine ideal yet not affirming the merits of her desire to reject married life.

While Sharyn Pearce suggests that Judy’s tragic end follows a narrative pattern that sup-ports the glorification of male heroes and renders ‘over-reaching women’ as ‘noble failures’, the novel might also productively be read within the context of other fictions featuring girl protagonists of the period, such as Praed and Martin's novels. This chapter makes the case that Turner and Franklin’s thwarted heroines critique the containment of Australian girls to the banalities of the home by exposing the negative and uncertain outcomes for those who desire the freedoms and aspirations permitted to boys and men. Unlike British fictions that champion adventurous girls, these Australian fictions critique the continuation of gendered restrictions in the colonies by proposing that girls who desire excitement and independence ‘should have been…boy[s]’ (as Sybylla’s mother remarks).

Non-referenced genome assembly from epigenomic short-read data

Current computational methods used to analyze changes in DNA methylation and chromatin modification rely on sequenced genomes. Here we describe a pipeline for the detection of these changes from short-read sequence data that does not require a reference genome. Open source software packages were used for sequence assembly, alignment, and measurement of differential enrichment. The method was evaluated by comparing results with reference-based results showing a strong correlation between chromatin modification and gene expression. We then used our de novo sequence assembly to build the DNA methylation profile for the non-referenced Psammomys obesus genome. The pipeline described uses open source software for fast annotation and visualization of unreferenced genomic regions from short-read data.

Re-encountering Christina Stead : Why read ‘Workshop in the novel’?

Despite waves of interest in the work of Christina Stead, one aspect of her writing life has been largely neglected. From September 1943, she taught three series of extended writing workshops in New York and in the process left more than three hundred pages documenting her teaching. The question motivating this paper is: Why should we, as writers and teachers of writing, read her writing workshop notebooks nowadays? This paper will place Stead’s workshop in the context of the development of institutional teaching of novel writing and her emergence as a major writer. It will briefly examine how the notebooks have previously been understood and offer a closer analysis than has been made to date of the notebooks and their content and of the key issues raised by them. In particular, we shall explore her pedagogic focus upon workshop participants developing a rigorous, analytical approach to crafting novels and her extensive use of Georges Polti’s Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations to achieve this. That, in turn, will enable us to assess what the notebooks independently reveal about her beliefs regarding the novel and its purpose.