Woodcutter's son

Allan is 45 years old and a published poet. At 17, Allan's father told him if he ever went to gaol he would lose his family. Allan became a notorious bank robber and his dad was proved right. Thirty years later, his father is dead and Allan is seeking reconciliation with his mother and sister. In the meanwhile, he found substitute families in gaol and latterly at Ozanam Community Centre, where Allan has spent time since his release from Pentridge.

Two mums and a dad

2 Mums and a Dad is the story of the rocky road of 3-way parenting, a unique exploration of the nature of family in today’s complicated society, as well as an insightful resource for everyone concerned with issues regarding the raising of children such as access, parent’s rights and family conflict. Fiona is 33 and wants to have a baby. But her partner, Kellie, is a woman and sperm isn’t handy. Fiona has a solution: an English gay guy from work wants to be a dad. Fiona and Kelly want their child to have a father. It seems perfect…but is it?

Re-emergence of the public accounting profession in China : a hegemonic analysis

This paper draws on Gramsci's concept of hegemony to examine and explain the circumstances leading to the re-emergence of the public accounting profession in China in the early 1980s. In particular, the paper attempts to understand the political and ideological influence upon the professionalisation process of the Chinese accountants. The paper not only highlights a major difference between the professionalisation process of the public accounting profession in China as compared to the West, but also the authoritative and dominant role assumed by the Chinese state in the whole societal set-up. Through effectively exercising its political and ideological leadership, the state successfully mobilised the Chinese accountants in the implementation of its economic-related agenda. The paper demonstrates that the state has clearly achieved hegemony within the accounting community, and further suggests that the state-accounting profession relationship could be likened to the father–son relationship as encompassed within the Confucian notion of wu lun.

The role of sisters in body image dissatisfaction and disordered eating

The Tripartite Influence Model (TIM) argues sociocultural agents affect body image dissatisfaction (BID) via the mediators of social comparison and internalization. BID subsequently influences disordered eating. Forty-seven Australian sister pairs (18–25 years) provided self-reports of perceived familial modeling and pressure by the sociocultural agents of mother, father and sister, social comparison, internalization, BID, bulimic behaviors, and dietary restriction. Sisters were correlated on internalization, BID, disordered eating, and parental modeling and pressure. Mothers and sisters were equally important modeling agents. Sisters were an equivalent social comparison target to peers. Consistent with the TIM, internalization and social comparison mediated familial pressure on BID. Contrary to the model, sister modeling directly affected bulimic behaviors and dietary restriction.

Internal auditors' assessment of their contribution to financial statement audits : the relation with audit committee and internal audit function characteristics

This paper examines the relation between audit committee characteristics, internal audit function characteristics and internal auditors' assessment of their contribution to financial statement audits. Using survey data from chief internal auditors of 76 Malaysian publicly-listed firms, we provide evidence of a positive relationship between internal auditors' assessment of their contribution to financial statement audits and three audit committee characteristics: the proportion of independent audit committee members, their knowledge and experience of accounting and auditing, and the extent of audit committee review of internal audit programmes, budget and coordination proposals. Further, a positive relationship is found between internal auditors' evaluation of their contribution to the financial statement audit and internal audit function characteristics including size, prior experience of staff in auditing, time availability and the closeness of the function's relationship with the external auditor. The results indicate that more effective audit committees and well-resourced internal audit units tend to be positively associated with the internal auditors' assessment of their contribution to the external audit.

Testimony and memory : re-writeable video memoirs

In Chris Marker’s Sunless (1985), the narrator states: “We do not remember, we re-write memory much as history is rewritten.” This presentation considers the ways in which my parents’ stories have been (and can be) re-written. In 1996, my father and mother engaged in a process of remembering, narrating and re-considering their histories when their video testimonies were recorded for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. They experienced much of World War II in different locations – only re-united after many months. For these video testimonies, they were recorded separately – once again, with a distance of many months between. Whenever there is an attempt to protect a story from interruption and contradiction, narrative multiplicity arises. By comparing and analysing their separate stories in terms of what was said, what was not said, what was unspeakable, and what was unknowable, I am interested in the uncertainties, the gaps, and the different ways in which they attempted to re-make their own histories whilst in the midst of storytelling. I am also interested in re-editing these memoirs into a multi-perspectival family video album, in which the stories and storytellers re-inhabit a shared and re-writeable space of storytelling.

Conversations with my mother

An intense and sometimes disturbing series of encounters between the filmmaker and his mother as they relive the traumatic years of his childhood and adolescence. Following the migration of the family to Australia from Holland in the difficult postwar years they had to grapple with problems of housing, social injustice and adjustment made more difficult by the father's mental illness. For the filmmaker 'the sentiment had to be uncompromisingly true' although he became aware that 'all film is fiction'.

An interview with the Very Rev. Dr. Themistocles Adamopoulo, Apostle to the Poor and Oppressed

Father Themistocles is an inspiration to many people in many parts of the world. He has led an extraordinarily colourful and rich life, one that reflects his own colourful and buoyant personality. Unfortunately, very little of his fascinating life is known to people, who are usually aware only of his current passionate commitment to serving the poor and oppressed in Africa. But underlying this commitment is a wealth of experience and knowledge that few of us can hope to match.

I first came into contact with Fr Themistocles as a theology student in Sydney over ten years ago, where ‘Brother Themi’ (as he was affectionately known to students) would guide us through the intricacies of New Testament scholarship, Hellenistic philosophy, the Hebrew language, and the academic world in general. My friendship with Fr Themistocles has continued to grow since then, and I have always thought it worthwhile that the life and adventures of ‘the polytropic Themi’ (to borrow a phrase he likes to apply to his great mentor, the apostle Paul) should be more readily known than they presently are. I hope, therefore, that the interview that follows goes some way towards fulfilling this objective (though I also hope that a more detailed account of Fr Themistocles’ life will someday be written, preferably by Fr Themistocles himself).

There is something about pairs trading

The process of pairs trading involves exhaustively matching and ranking pairwise stocks based on some prespecified measure of closeness; e.g., correlation, cointegration, sum-of-squared price difference. Pairs trading is popular for various reasons. It is simple to follow and execute. The pairwise portfolio can be nearly market-neutral, such that it does not require the comprehensive analysis of macroeconomic news. Since it is based on relative valuation, the actual worth of individual firms is not a pertinent consideration. The strategy is sufficiently flexible to accommodate various investment styles. Lastly, it does not evoke frequent intraday rebalancing, such that pairs trading can be automated to a certain extent and be cost-feasibly profitable. Despite its long history on Wall Street, pairs trading remains elusive in nature. The academic attention it attracts is modest compared to contrarian and momentum trading.

Social control, self-control and psychosocial problems in adolescent males

‘Psychosocial problems’ are psychological problems that are regarded as resulting from the interaction between the adaptive capacities of individuals and the demands of their physical and social environments. Many different factors have been theoretically proposed, and empirically established, as predictors of a range of psychosocial problems in adolescents. However, a problem exists in that this literature appears to lack an integrative framework that has validity across the range of problems that are observed. The purpose of the current research is to propose and test a model that draws together three clusters of factors that are useful in predicting the incidence of adolescent psychosocial problems. These are family structural background factors, family functioning variables and control beliefs. Data were collected from 155 adolescent males aged between 12 and 19 by a single concurrent and retrospective self-report questionnaire. This included data about the respondent (age, involvements with mental health or juvenile justice agencies) and family structural background factors (days per week worked by mother/father, occupational status for mother/father, residential mobility, number of persons in the family home). The questionnaire also incorporated the Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker, Tupling & Brown, 1979) to quantify the levels of perceived parental care and overprotection, and an adaptation of the Parental Discipline Style Scale (Shaw & Scott, 1991), to assess punitive, love withdrawing and inductive discipline practices. In addition, the (Low) Self-control Scale (Grasmick, Tittle, Bursick & Arneklev, 1993) and the Locus of Control of Behaviour Scale (Craig, Franklin, & Andrews, 1984) were used to collect data concerning adolescents’ perceived behavioural self-control and locus of control. Finally, selected sub-scales of the Child Behavior Checklist Youth Self-Report (Achenbach, 1991b) were used to collect data on the incidence of social withdrawal, somatisation, anxiety and depression, aggression and delinquency among the respondents, and in aggregated form, the incidence of ‘total problems’ and internalising and externalising behaviours. Results indicated family structural background factors, family functioning variables and control beliefs possess limited predicted validity and that the usefulness of the proposed model varies between specific psychosocial problems. Family functioning variables were generally stronger predictors than family structural background factors, particularly for internalising behaviours. Of these, levels of parental care and overprotection were generally the strongest predictors. Perceived self-control and locus of control were also generally strong predictors, but were particularly powerful with respect to externalising behaviours. The strength of predictive relationships was observed to vary between specific internalising and externalising behaviours, suggesting that individual difference variables not assessed in the current research were differentially influential. Finally, the parental and individual characteristics that predicted maximal levels of adjustment (defined in terms of minimal levels of internalising and externalising behaviours) were explored and the correlates of various parenting style typologies (Parker et al., 1979) were investigated. These results strongly confirmed the importance of family functioning and control beliefs with respect to the prediction of internalising, externalising and well-adjusted behaviours. In all analyses, substantial proportions of the variance in the incidence of problem behaviours remain unexplained. The findings are examined in relation to previous research focused on (familial) social control and (individual) self-control with respect to psychosocial problems in adolescents. In addition, methodological considerations are discussed and the implications of the findings for clinical and community interventions to address problem behaviours, and for further study, are explored.

Presbyterian ethos and environment in the novels of John Buchan : a religious and historical study

The aim of this thesis is to establish, from a historical and religious perspective, that the Presbyterian ethos and environment in which John Buchan was reared was the predominating influence in the writing of his novels. Presbyterianism was not the only influence on Buchan that determined the character of his stories. Buchan was by temperament a romantic, and this had considerable influence on his literature. His novels are romances, peopled by romantic figures who pursue romantic adventures. There are the signs of Buchan's romantic nature in the contents of the novels: creative imagination, sensitivity to nature, and expectations of the intrusion of other worlds, with destiny-determining events to follow. But Buchan had also an acquired classicism. His studies at Glasgow and Oxford Universities brought him in touch with a whole range of the master-pieces of classical literature, especially the works of Plato and Virgil. This discipline gave him clarity and conciseness in style, and balanced the romantic element in him, keeping his work within the bounds of reason. At the heart of Buchan's life and work, however, was his deeply religious nature and this, while influenced by romanticism and classicism, was the dominant force behind his work. Buchan did not accept in its entirety the Presbyterian doctrine conveyed to him by his father and his Church. He was moderate by temperament and shrank from excesses in religious matters, and, being a romantic, he shied away from any fixed creeds. He did embrace the fundamentals of Christianity, however, which he learned from his father and his Church, even if he did put aside the Rev. John's orthodox Calvinism. The basic Christianity which underlies all Buchan's novels has the stamp of Presbyterianism upon it, and that stamp is evident in his characters and their adventures. The expression of Christianity which Buchan embraced was the Christian Platonism of seventeenth century theologians, who taught and preached at Cambridge University, They gave prominence to the place of reason and conscience in man's search for God, They believed that reason and conscience were the ‘candle of the Lord’ which was existed every one. It was their conviction that, if that light was followed, it would lead men and women to God. They were against superstition and fanaticism in religion, against all forms of persecution for religious beliefs, and insisted that God could only be known by renouncing evil and setting oneself to live according to God’s will. This teaching Buchan received, but the stamp of his Presbyterianism was not obliterated. The basic doctrines which arose from his father's Presbyterianism and are to be found in Buchan's novels are as follows: a. the fear (or awe) of God, as life's basic religious attitude; b. the Providence of God as the ultimate determinative force in the outcome of events; c. the reality, malignity and universality of evil which must be forcefully and constantly resisted; d. the dignity of human beings in bearing God's image; e. the conviction that life has meaning and that its ultimate goal, therefore, is a spiritual one - as opposed to the accumulation of wealth, the achieving of recognition from society, and the gaining access to power; f. the necessity of challenge in life for growth and fulfilment, and the importance of fortitude in successfully meeting such challenge; g. the belief that, in the purpose of God, the weak confound the strong. These emphases of Presbyterianism are to be found in all Buchan's novels, to a greater or lesser degree. All his characters are serious people, with a moral purpose in life. Like the pilgrims of the Bible, they seek a country: true fulfilment. This quest becomes more spiritual and more dearly defined as Buchan grows in age and maturity. The progress is to be traced from his early novels, where fulfilment is sought in honour and self-approving competence, as advocated by classicism; to the novels of his middle years, where fulfilment is sought in adventures suggested by romanticism. In his final novel Sick Heart River. Buchan appears to have moved somewhat from his earlier classicism and his romanticism as the road to fulfilment. In this novel, Buchan expresses what, for him, is ultimate fulfilment: a conversion to God that produces self-sacrificing love for others. The terminally-ill Edward Leithen sets out on a romantic adventure that will enable him to die with dignity, and so, in classic style, justify his existence. He has a belief in God, but in a God who is almighty, distant and largely irrelevant to Leithen's life. In the frozen North of Canada, where he expects to find his meagre beliefs in God's absolute power confirmed by the icy majesty of mountain and plain, he finds instead God's mercy and it melts his heart. In a Christ-like way, he brings life to others through his death, believing that, through death, he will find life. There is sufficient evidence to give plausibility to the view that Buchan is describing in Leithen his own pilgrimage. If so, it means that Buchan found his way back to the fundamental experience of the Christian life, conversion, so strongly emphasised in his orthodox Presbyterianism home and Church. However, Buchan reaches this conclusion in a Christian Platonist way, through the natural world, rather than through the more orthodox pathway of Scripture.

Pappadums in paradise? : journeys of Indian migrant women to Australia

The blue glass is always the hardest to find. On the beach you catch the waves bringing back the glass from forgotten tossed bottles, frosted green, clear, or mottled pale brown. But the blue glass - that's the real thing. I search for days without finding any. Sometimes there are slivers; other days, small chunks. Like a beachcomber, I comb the sands for it. I take the glass home and make some into jewellery and touchstones for people to hang on to; pour essential oils on others so the scents waft heavenward and meld together with the glass to form a bond. Words are like that. They can fuse with each other and ignite, or just quietly combine, On sunny days, I take my books with me to the beach. I toss words back and forth in my mind, like churning waves. I cobble them together, A phrase here. A sentence there. The water. The sun. The sand. The glass. The words. The paper. The Connection. I find myself enveloped in it all. The glass is from bottles tossed into the surf by unthinking people - picnickers, vacationers, those who don't have to return here and live with the remnants of their actions. Over time, the broken glass is ground and moulded by the action of the waves; the sharp edges are softened and etched by the sand and water, The sea glass is washed up on shore and picked up by beachcombers. Some recycle it for other uses like me; others just keep it as a reminder of a day at the beach. The words I sift through as I sit on the sand are measured in the sea glass. I pick each word up and look through it to see how much light shines through. What use do 1 have for it? A poem? An essay? A fragment of a sentence, for something to be said in the future? I watch the sun rest uneasily on its bed of water and slide slowly, farther down. I know the hot summer is coming to a close and I am loath to let go of the closeness I feel with nature. I live to find the blue glass, and sometimes it just happens. My search for Indian migrant women was like my quest for the blue glass. It was not an easy task. It became a process of rummaging through other people's lives, searching for fragments and relics. Eventually I was able to fit pieces together to form a mosaic of their lives in that other time, that other place. And also in this present time, in this place they now call home, Australia.

Risk of prostate cancer associated with a family history in an era of rapid increase in prostate cancer diagnosis (Australia)

OBJECTIVE: We conducted a case-control study of prostate cancer and familial risk of the disease in Australia between 1994 and 1998, a period during which the incidence of prostate cancer increased dramatically with widespread use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. METHODS: 1475 cases and 1405 controls were asked about prostate cancer in their first-degree relatives. Odds ratios (OR) were calculated using logistic regression. RESULTS: Cases were more likely to report a family history of prostate cancer than controls (OR 3.0; 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.3-3.9) and cases reporting an affected relative were younger (58.8 versus 60.9 years, p < 0.0001). The OR for an affected first-degree relative increased with increasing number of affected relatives and decreased with increasing age of the case. The OR for more than one affected first-degree relative was 6.9 (95% CI 2.7-18). The OR for an affected brother was 3.9 (95% CI 2.5-6.1) and for an affected father was 2.9 (95% CI 2.1-3.9) but these were not significantly different (p = 0.2). When analyses were repeated including only diagnoses made in relatives prior to 1992, the risks were generally similar except that the OR for an affected brother decreased to 3.1 (95% CI 1.2-3.9). When only relatives' diagnoses made after 1991 were included results were again similar to those for all relatives, although the effect for brothers was greater and the attenuation with age at diagnosis dissipated. CONCLUSIONS: The recent introduction of PSA testing that has resulted in a greater prevalence of apparent prostate cancer, does not appear to have substantially altered familial risks of disease, although effects associated with brothers may be inflated.

The letter S

In 'The Letter S' Paul Carter overlays a number of parallel journeys. A group of actors meet with a young playwright to work on a his new play: theirs is an artistic journey. The playwright's father wrote a radio play which they listen to: it is Memory As Desire about the journey in search of the inland sea, and the mutual incomprehension of indigenous and European cultures. His new play is based on the Odyssey and in particular the relationship between father and son: the son searching for the lost father. Just as the search for the inland sea is ill-fated, so to the cast of actors conclude that their search for a new theatre is futile. The indigenous people had no letter 'S', leading to misunderstanding. The explorers failed to listen to the land. The characters in the version of the Odyssey are washed away in a sea of sibilants. This is a work packed full of ideas, puns, and concrete poetry propelled by desire and loss, but also hope.

Colour of walls : incorporating the exegesis "Unfit for publication"

The thesis is presented in two parts: a novel and a theoretical essay. It is a broadly autobiographical work, concerning issues and events surrounding father-daughter rape. It is written from the mother's perspective, and deals with the impact of child sexual assault on the lives of two generations of working-class women.