Australia, Asia and cultural anxiety : inaugural AHA Anniversary Public Lecture, given at the Grand Hotel, Mildura on 29 September (2003).

My theme tonight is the recurrent idea that Australia could be expected to have an Asian future. From the 1880s there developed a speculative literature around the notion that Asia ('generic Asia' as I prefer to call it) would exert an increasing influence, possibly a determining influence, on the development and settlement of the Australian continent. There is a certain pathos about this story of a young, newly formed community on the threshold of nationhood finding Asia blocking its path. Would the ensuing contest be the making of white Australia; would the young nation define its national purpose and assert its right to exist or would it succumb to a force more powerful? Would white Australia become nothing more than a faint historical memory, a failed experiment in the complex and uncertain business of nation building? In short, would white Australia fail?

Investigating the influences on attendance and intention to rejoin with inaugural members of a new football team

This study investigated the effects of factors like member satisfaction and social rituals on desirable outcomes such as attendance, intention to rejoin and merchandise sales. This study focuses on the inaugural members of a new team in Australia’s A-League to gain insight into how loyalty develops amongst fans of new sporting organisations. The results show the importance to sports marketers of satisfying members and building ritual behaviour, as both are correlated with all of the positive outcomes investigated here.

Abstracts of the Inaugural Australian Conference for Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

The first Australian Conference for Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry was conducted by the School of Psychology at Deakin University, Geelong, from Friday, July 13 to Sunday, July 15 and was attended by over 50 cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists and speech pathologists from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK. The Conference aimed to bring together researchers from different disciplines including linguistics, psychology, philosophy and speech pathology to present research that relates (neuropsychological or psychiatric) impairment to theories of normal cognitive functioning. The scientific program of the conference included 24 papers of exceptional quality. They were organised into the following thematic sessions: Disorders of language comprehension and production; Semantic memory and category-specific disorders; Reading: development and acquired dyslexia; Writing: development and acquired dyslexia; Memory; Object and face recognition; Theory of mind; Misidentification syndromes. Keynote speakers were Professor Andy Young from the University of York, England and Professor Max Coltheart from the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Sciences, Sydney.