Responses to Australian society and culture by Greek-Australian writers

Focuses on the themes and preoccupations in Greek-Australian literature that reflect the influence of Australia on the traditional sense of identity of Greek migrants. Predominant concerns connected with identity are those of nostalgic references to the homeland, feelings of alienation and discrimination. These themes are related to what is recognised in life and in literature as "xenitia". Second generation writers reveal an acceptance of belonging to two cultures and having dual identities.

Australian subject gateways, the successes and the challenges

The paper provides an overview of subject gateway development in Australia and takes a closer look at three subject gateways coordinated by the University of Queensland: AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway; AVEL Sustainability Knowledge Network, an engineering and sustainable development gateway; and WebLaw, a gateway for legal professionals. The challenges facing subject gateways are examined, including interoperability, coordination and most significantly, sustainability. The paper concludes with the overarching questions being considered by gateway coordinators such as the place of subject gateways and their future given trends in the evolution of the web.

Using mobile phones as placed resources for literacy learning in a remote Indigenous community in Australia

Despite massive funding from the Australian government, the literacy achievement of Australian Indigenous children remains significantly lower than for non-Indigenous. With the aim of identifying innovative ways to improve Indigenous children's literacy achievement, this study explored the social practices surrounding everyday mobile phone use by Indigenous people in a remote Australian community. Informed by the notion of ‘placed resources’, which highlights the understanding that digital literacies are best considered as resources situated by social practices that have local effect, the study surveyed 95 people living in a remote Indigenous community about their mobile phone practices. The study also examined a video of a literacy event between a mother and her child around the use of a mobile phone. The findings revealed the strong relational aspects of phone use in remote communities. Integral to the concept of placed resources is a respect for the practices communities find important as they adopt artefacts for their everyday communication.

Contemporary planning education and Indigenous cultural competency agendas : erasing terra nullius, respect and responsibility

As noted in Universities Australia’s (2011a, 2011b) investigations into Indigenous Cultural Competency, most universities have struggled with successfully devising and achieving a translation of Indigenous protocols into their curricula. Walliss & Grant (2000: 65) have also concluded that, given the nature of the built environment disciplines, including planning, and their professional practice activities, there is a “need for specific cultural awareness education” to service these disciplines and not just attempts to insert Indigenous perspectives into their curricula. Bradley’s policy initiative at the University of South Australia (1997-2007), “has not achieved its goal of incorporation of Indigenous perspectives into all its undergraduate programs by 2010, it has achieved an incorporation rate of 61%” (Universities Australia 2011a: 9; http://www.unisa.edu.au/ducier/icup/default.asp).

Contextually, Bradley’s strategic educational aim at University of South Australia led a social reformist agenda, which has been continued in Universities Australia’s release of Indigenous Cultural Competency (2011a; 2011b) reports that has attracted mixed media criticism (Trounson 2012a: 5, 2012b: 5) and concerns that it represents “social engineering” rather than enhancing “criticism as a pedagogical tool ... as a means of advancing knowledge” (Melleuish 2012: 10). While the Planning Institute of Australia’s (PIA) Indigenous Planning Policy Working Party has observed that fundamental changes are needed to the way Australian planning education addresses Indigenous perspectives and interests, it has concluded that planners “! perceptual limitations of their own discipline and the particular discourse of our own craft” were hindering enhanced learning outcomes (Wensing 2007: 2). Gurran (PIA 2007) has noted that the core curriculum in planning includes an expectation of “knowledge of ! Indigenous Australian cultures, including relationships between their physical environment and associated social and economic systems” but that it has not been addressed. This paper critiques these discourses and offers an Indigenous perspective of the debate.

Climate change and non-Indigenous belonging in postcolonial Australia

The constitution of climate change as an ‘emergency’ invites an appeal to sovereign
power that is troubling in the context of Australia’s colonial history. Climate change is
an unsettling and dispossessing force that, while unprecedented in many ways, can be situated among a series of environmental and social crises that have shaped a discourse of anxious or insecure non-Indigenous belonging in this country. This discourse seeks to render non-Indigenous Australian place as secure and absolute, and understands environmental change as a threat to this goal. This threat appeals to an emergency framing, and in turn to a reassertion, in line with the insights of Agamben, of an exclusive sovereignty that rehearses the foundational dispossessions of colonization. At the same time, climate change is initiating new ways of conceptualizing human relations with place that challenge the value of sovereign status. It enacts realities that refuse a singular emergency and instead generate community from a reorientation of places, times and more-than-human relations. Thought in this way as a creative force that is shaping communities and environments, climate change becomes a source of critical insight for the possibilities of a decolonized future.

Loss and grief in the workplace. What can we learn from the literature?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine how Australian workplaces, their managers and employees respond to those who are grieving at work, as a result of chronic or terminal illness, or caring for those with chronic or terminal illness. The review draws on Australian and relevant international literature and seeks to answer this question.
Design/methodology/approach – A literature review was undertaken in preparation for an Australian study examining workplace supports for people who are grieving – because they are carers, have experienced a death, or are balancing their own illness with their work. Using a range of search terms, the literature was searched for relevant work between 1980 and 2010. The search found examples of workplace supports throughout the world and some developing Australian literature.
Findings – Despite illness and death occurring at any stage of a person's life, there is little research that identifies workplace issues associated with grief and loss. And while workplace legislation allows for minimal supports, there was evidence that some workplaces have begun to offer flexibility for work life balance.
Practical implications – Effective workplace supports will involve individual and workplace responses, but also require legislative approaches in order to effect broad-based system change.
Originality/value – The paper compares Australian and international literature about workplace supports and provides an overview of the issues arising.

Reading the local and global: teaching literature in secondary schools in Australia

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within  a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia’s place  in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of  themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the  recently published Australian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of ‘enduring artistic and cultural value’ that are drawn from  'world and Australian literature’. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ have when  young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers’  and students’ interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a  ‘literary’ education, whether conceived in ‘local’, 'national’ or ‘global’  terms, have in the twenty-first century?

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.

Like a volcano waiting to erupt : The Australian Yiddish writer Pinchas Goldhar (1901-1947)

 Biographical essay outlining the tragic career of the Australian Yiddish writer Pinchas Goldhar.

Patterns and correlates of self-reported racial discrimination among Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults, 2008–09: analysis of national survey data

Background
There is now considerable evidence that racism is a pernicious and enduring social problem with a wide range of detrimental outcomes for individuals, communities and societies. Although indigenous people worldwide are subjected to high levels of racism, there is a paucity of population-based, quantitative data about the factors associated with their reporting of racial discrimination, about the settings in which such discrimination takes place, and about the frequency with which it is experienced. Such information is essential in efforts to reduce both exposure to racism among indigenous people and the harms associated with such exposure.

Methods
Weighted data on self-reported racial discrimination from over 7,000 Indigenous Australian adults participating in the 2008–09 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, were analysed by socioeconomic, demographic and cultural factors.

Results
More than one in four respondents (27%) reported experiencing racial discrimination in the past year. Racial discrimination was most commonly reported in public (41% of those reporting any racial discrimination), legal (40%) and work (30%) settings. Among those reporting any racial discrimination, about 40% experienced this discrimination most or all of the time (as opposed to a little or some of the time) in at least one setting. Reporting of racial discrimination peaked in the 35–44 year age group and then declined. Higher reporting of racial discrimination was associated with removal from family, low trust, unemployment, having a university degree, and indicators of cultural identity and participation. Lower reporting of racial discrimination was associated with home ownership, remote residence and having relatively few Indigenous friends.

Conclusions
These data indicate that racial discrimination is commonly experienced across a wide variety of settings, with public, legal and work settings identified as particularly salient. The observed relationships, while not necessarily causal, help to build a detailed picture of self-reported racial discrimination experienced by Indigenous people in contemporary Australia, providing important evidence to inform anti-racism policy.

Polities and poetics: a ‘place’ for reconciliation

The thesis analysed the ways in which Australian literature written between 1990 - 2010 has informed concepts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation. There is a ‘place’ for reconciliation in postcolonial Australia, and literature is one such ‘place’, with its ability to construct, incorporate and promote postcolonial race relations through reimaginings of history, place, bodies and the sacred.

Colonial feminism and Australian literary culture in Ethel and Lilian Turner's the Parthenon (1889–92)

The Parthenon is a unique example of a colonial Australian magazine published for girl readers by two aspirant writers, Ethel and Lilian Turner. In addition to its domestic content, typical of women's magazines, it also sought to contribute to nascent Australian literary culture. This article locates the Parthenon within the history of colonial women's publishing and literary culture, and situates its content within the context of the Woman Movement of the period. It reads the Parthenon's telling picture of young women's perceptions of colonial literary culture and of the need to balance literary aspirations with domestic responsibilities through the lens of the “expediency feminism” advocated by the Dawn, a women's magazine published by Louisa Lawson from 1888. The article argues that the Parthenon's superficially conservative opinion of women's supreme calling being in the home rather than the newspaper office or university library was in alignment with the arguments made by the Woman Movement to advocate for women's greater participation in the public sphere. The comparison of these contemporaneous monthly publications written and produced by women enables an understanding of the ways in which late nineteenth-century attempts to encourage women's careers and independence were grounded in domesticity.