(Un)belonging in Australia : poetry and nation

What kind of appetite does poetry have for creating new discourses about the nation? This essay will ask if poetry can re-imagine and rewrite what are often oppressive and exclusionary national discourses, asking how – historically and in contemporary work – poetry has been concerned with national forms of belonging and unbelonging. Further, the essay will ask whether Australian poetry is able to generate new and even hopeful language in which to think about the nation.

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.

Behind the eyes: poetry of witness

 A review of Susie Utting's poetry collection, Flame in the Fire, 2012.

The association of cycling with all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality: findings from the population-based EPIC-Norfolk cohort

Objectives
To investigate associations between modest levels of total and domain-specific (commuting, other utility, recreational) cycling and mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Design
Population-based cohort study (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study-Norfolk).

Setting
Participants were recruited from general practices in the east of England and attended health examinations between 1993 and 1997 and again between 1998 and 2000. At the first health assessment, participants reported their average weekly duration of cycling for all purposes using a simple measure of physical activity. At the second health assessment, participants reported a more detailed breakdown of their weekly cycling behaviour using the EPAQ2 physical activity questionnaire.

Participants
Adults aged 40–79 years at the first health assessment.

Primary outcome measure
All participants were followed for mortality (all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer) until March 2011.

Results
There were 22 450 participants with complete data at the first health assessment, of whom 4398 died during follow-up; and 13 346 participants with complete data at the second health assessment, of whom 1670 died during follow-up. Preliminary analyses using exposure data from the first health assessment showed that cycling for at least 60 min/week in total was associated with a 9% reduced risk of all-cause mortality (adjusted HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.84 to 0.99). Using the more precise measures of cycling available from the second health assessment, all types of cycling were associated with greater total moderate-to-vigorous physical activity; however, there was little evidence of an association between overall or domain-specific cycling and mortality.

Conclusions
Cycling, in particular for utility purposes, was associated with greater moderate-to-vigorous and total physical activity. While this study provides tentative evidence that modest levels of cycling may reduce the risk of mortality, further research is required to confirm how much cycling is sufficient to induce health benefits.

Borrowings; or ways of making poetry by taking, working and returning: a study in creative practice

The collaborative poetry project ‘Borrowings’ investigates and theorises some of the processes of poetic composition. Two collaborators, by making use of incepts from each other's work, have generated new poems by exploring the nature of intertextual genesis. This paper presents key ideas generated by this activity and, in doing so, applies Deleuze's analysis of games to its consideration of the nature of poetic composition, along with his contention that ‘[t]o pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression … It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes’. The project explores some of the ways in which poetry makes ‘sense’, both to the writer and reader; as well as questioning the extent to which poetry depends on its author's ‘decision’ about what to write. It also teases out some of the implications for how we understand authorship if authorial decisions may be generated by incepts of one kind or another that occur to the poet apparently randomly, or may be given to them by a line or phrase that they encounter while reading. This paper's ultimate wager, and one put to the test in the project itself, is that limitation has an expansive effect on the generation of creative work.

The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry [book review]

Review of: The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry, by Irene de Angelis, Houndmills, Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 216 pp. ISBN 9780230248953.

Transforming Paramythi in diasporic literature : five Greek Australian writers

 This thesis examines how paramythi, as a literary trope, circulates in different ways in the texts of five Greek Australian writers and what this reveals about diasporic subjectivities.

Home space : youth identification in the Greek diaspora

This article draws on a larger study on schooling and diaspora using the case of the Greek community of Melbourne, Australia to examine processes of identification of young people with access to minority cultures. The Melbourne Greek community is long-standing, diverse, and well-established. Because of this, the young people involved in this study provide insights into cultural processes not related in any direct sense to migration. In most cases, it was their grandparents or great-grandparents who migrated. Many have 1 parent with no ancestral link to Greece. In this context, the motivations for and ways of expressing Greekness have the potential to illustrate identification as ambivalent. This article explores the centrality of “home” in these young people's representations of self. Following de Certeau, the argument is made that their everyday experience can be interpreted as an act of “anti-discipline.” As “users” of the Greekness, they are bequeathed through family, community, and schooling; and they use “tactics” of cultural redeployment that allow creative resistance and reinterpretation of both “Greekness” and “Australianness.”

This voice: the poetry of knowing and not knowing

This essay is concerned with how poetry—reading it, writing it, and adapting it—relies on a dialectic between knowing and not knowing, a flickering movement between understanding and ignorance that is central to the production of poetry and its effects. To illustrate this, I discuss my poem, ‘This Voice’, and its subsequent adaptation into what I call a ‘poetry soundtrack’, a form of digital audio poetry employing poetry, music, and sound design. The essay illustrates the centrality of the knowing/not-knowing dialectic to poetry by considering the following with regard to my works: the thematics of nescience; the liminal and virtual space of interpretation and play (the latter as theorised by D.W. Winnicott); ‘nocturnal poetics’; and sampling (both sonic and lexical).

The Greek Diaspora of Melboure, Australia, through the eyes of the second generation Greek Australians

Melbourne has a large and dynamic Greek community that began to form in the 1950s with migration to Australia in the years following the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. The elders of this community, in particular, have tried to ensure that their culture and traditions are kept alive and are handed down from generation to generation. The long history and cultural richness of the Greek tradition is a great source of pride to its members, and this is a key characteristic of the Greek community of Australia. Young and old Greek Australians speak of their country of origin with great pride and passion, as it remains central to their perception of nationality and ethnicity. This importance placed on the retention of the language and culture of their nation of origin means that cultural transmission across generations is of great significance to the community and can provide valuable insight into their interpretation of their own experiences. This paper will present findings from a three generation study about health beliefs and practices of women in the Melbourne Greek community. The experience of granddaughters, who represent the second Australian generation, and how they see their grandmothers’ experience as migrants to Australia will be discussed. The impact of the Diaspora phenomenon and the creation of a Greek community in Melbourne will be considered in the context of health, memory, religion, Greek culture, food, and personal and group identity.