Masculinity and young adult fiction

The thesis 'Masculinity and young adult fiction' analyses the forces that shape the construction of masculinity within young adult texts. The core of the thesis is a creative novel 'Broken glass' which deals with the consequences of masculine mythology within the context of a small town.

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.

Fiction in oils

Comprises a collection of seventeen stories based on Australian women's paintings and a critical exegesis that together represent a creative and theoretical response to the ways in which short fiction writing can be informed by visual art.

Discriminating DDoS flows from flash crowds using information distance

Discriminating DDoS flooding attacks from flash crowds poses a tough challenge for the network security community. Because of the vulnerability of the original design of the Internet, attackers can easily mimic the patterns of legitimate network traffic to fly under the radar. The existing fingerprint or feature based algorithms are incapable to detect new attack strategies. In this paper, we aim to differentiate DDoS attack flows from flash crowds. We are motivated by the following fact: the attack flows are generated by the same prebuilt program (attack tools), however, flash crowds come from randomly distributed users all over the Internet. Therefore, the flow similarity among DDoS attack flows is much stronger than that among flash crowds. We employ abstract distance metrics, the Jeffrey distance, the Sibson distance, and the Hellinger distance to measure the similarity among flows to achieve our goal. We compared the three metrics and found that the Sibson distance is the most suitable one for our purpose. We apply our algorithm to the real datasets and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm can differentiate them with an accuracy around 65%.

Distinguishing DDoS attacks from flash crowds using probability metrics

Both Flash crowds and DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks have very similar properties in terms of internet traffic, however Flash crowds are legitimate flows and DDoS attacks are illegitimate flows, and DDoS attacks have been a serious threat to internet security and stability. In this paper we propose a set of novel methods using probability metrics to distinguish DDoS attacks from Flash crowds effectively, and our simulations show that the proposed methods work well. In particular, these mathods can not only distinguish DDoS attacks from Flash crowds clearly, but also can distinguish the anomaly flow being DDoS attacks flow or being Flash crowd flow from Normal network flow effectively. Furthermore, we show our proposed hybrid probability metrics can greatly reduce both false positive and false negative rates in detection.

Post-disaster fiction for young adults : some trends and variations

In the forty years or so since it began to develop as a sub-genre of young adult fiction, post-disaster fiction has commented on a range of issues, including perceived social fears of the time, the nature of various types of society, and what people need in order to be truly human. This paper explores how young adult post-disaster fiction makes comment on these and other issues. It argues that within this genre there are three connected sub-genres, with the disaster having a different function in each, and the nature of the comments made by each of these sub-genres tending also to be different. As its title suggests, this paper includes texts in which the focus is on life after the disaster. The genre’s strong link with both the nature of young adult fiction and with adolescence itself suggests that it will continue to flourish as a sub-genre.

Re-framing the riot : journalism, creative non-fiction and telling the story of Australia's black history

On 19 November 2004, an Aboriginal man was arrested on Palm Island, off the coast of Townsville in northern Queensland. He was taken to the local watch house on a drunk and disorderly charge. An hour later, he lay dead on a cell floor. His liver, an autopsy showed, had been split in half and his spleen ruptured. But when that autopsy report also found that Mulrunji Doomadgee’s severe injuries were not caused by force, the Palm Island Indigenous community, enraged and grief-stricken, went looking for payback.

The Palm Island “riots” ensured that this Aboriginal death in custody made international news headlines where others barely got a mention, if at all (Hollinsworth, 2005). The ensuing Coronial Inquest and criminal prosecution of the arresting Queensland police officer, Chris Hurley, also were covered consistently by the news media. Senior Sergeant Hurley has, however, so far escaped punishment and the Queensland media’s most recent report of the case was to tell how the Qld Police Union now funds a legal bid to clear his name. Meanwhile, little is heard in the news media of the Doomadgee family, the Palm Island community, or of other deaths in custody occurring steadily through the 18 years since the Royal Commission that was supposed to implement a raft of preventative recommendations.

While the news media’s framing of these issues has most often followed historically predictable and ultimately racist lines, a work of creative non-fiction tells the story with warranted complexity and power. Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island documents Cameron Doomadgee’s death, the riots, and the ensuing legal farce from the front row. Hooper, in the tradition of Truman Capote, arrived at Palm Island as a white writer from a big city. But by “walking the talk” – being with the Doomadgee family and their community through the hearings and after, Hooper was given extraordinary access to community, history, and significant cultural nuance barely identified by, let alone understood by, non-Indigenous readers.

By focussing on Hooper’s experience with sources and court reporting, compared with some print media coverage, this paper will consider the comparative roles of journalism and creative non-fiction in re-framing the Palm Island “riot”. It will suggest that Hooper’s work subverts some dominant (and racist) news media representations of Australian Indigenous peoples through its use of source relationships in an extended narrative structure.