The last post? Tracking the Australasian to Aussie Post, 1864-2002

Aussie Post, the flagship of ocker Australiana, folded in January 2002. Post began life as the Australasian, a middlebrow magazine steeped in a nineteenth century civics of stable citizenship with a modicum of diversionary leisure. The transformation began when the Australasian became Australasian Post in 1946 under George Johnston's brief 15-week editorship. Johnston's idealistic vision of Post as a voice of post-war Australian modernity was soon overtaken by commercial imperatives as Post's identity wavered between its civic antecedents and a new low-brow populism, a niche it had finally settled into by the mid-1950s. This tension between staid civics and risqué populism shaped the magazine's long evolution into its final realisation of the pictorial general interest genre. This paper, based on a close examination of the magazines themselves, tracks Post's generic evolution and focuses on the struggle to redefine the magazine’s identity during the post-war period when the axis of Australian identity was reluctantly shifting from the staid traditions of Rule Britannia to the flashy modernity of Pax Americana.

Legal ethics in a post-Westphalian world : building the international rule of law and otehr tasks

The emergence of strong sovereign states after the Treaty of Westphalia turned two of the most cosmopolitan professions (law and arms) into two of the least cosmopolitan. Sovereign states determined the content of the law within their borders – including which, if any, ecclesiastical law was to be applied; what form of economic regulation was adopted; and what, if any, international law applied. Similarly, states sought to ensure that all military force was at their disposal in national armies. The erosion of sovereignty in a post-Westphalian world may significantly reverse these processes. The erosion of sovereignty is likely to have profound consequences for the legal profession and the ethics of how, and for what ends, it is practised. Lawyers have played a major role in the civilization of sovereign states through the articulation and institutionalisation of key governance values – starting with the rule of law. An increasingly global profession must take on similar tasks. The same could be said of the military. This essay will review the concept of an international rule of law and its relationship to domestic conceptions and outline the task of building the international rule of law and the role that lawyers can and should play in it.

FDR and victims of family violence: Ensuring a safe process and outcomes

Family dispute resolution (FDR) is a positive first-stop process for family law matters, particularly those relating to disputes about children. FDR provides the parties with flexibility within a positive, structured and facilitated framework for what are often difficult and emotional negotiations. However, there are a range of issues that arise for victims of family violence in FDR that can make it a dangerous and unsafe process for them unless appropriate precautions are taken. This article discusses the nature of FDR and identifies the many positive aspects of it for women participants. The article then considers the nature and dynamic of family violence in order to contextualise the discussion that follows regarding concerns for the safety of participants in the FDR process. Finally, it offers some suggestions about how Australia could approach FDR differently to make it safer for victims of family violence.

Why do family firms congregate in certain industries?

We propose that family firm involvement and performance across industries is not random and is related to specific industry conditions. Using the population of listed companies on the Taiwan Stock Exchange over the period 1997-2007 we find that family firms are more involved in industries with more fixed assets, consistent with the long-term view of family owners, and in industry conditions that make it potentially easier for family owners to consume private benefits of control. Overall, we document a positive relationship between family firm involvement and performance, which indicates a net advantage for family firm shareholders in industries where family firms congregate. However, we also find that family firm performance is negatively affected when family firms use more debt and maintain a higher control wedge than their industry counterparts.

The meaning of home for Karen and Chin refugees from Burma: An interpretative phenomenological approach

Loss of home is common to all people from a refugee background yet we have little understanding of the diversity of meaning associated with this important concept. A phenomenological approach was used to explore experiences of home amongst Karen and Chin refugees residing in Brisbane. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine participants from Karen and Chin backgrounds. The participants comprised five females and four males (mean age 40 years, median length of time in Australia 1.33 years). Participants described their migration stories, including pre- and post-migration history. Analysis was conducted using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three superordinate themes, explicating the meaning of home for participants, were identified: home as the experience of a psychological space of safety and retreat; home as the socio-emotional space of relatedness to family; and home as geographical-emotional landscape. Loss of home was experienced as a multidimensional loss associated with emotional and physical disturbances. These findings, based upon a phenomenological paradigm, enhance understanding of the experience of being a refugee and of the suffering engendered by loss of home. They open up the possibility for conceptualizing refugee responses in terms of human suffering and meaning making.

The factor V HR2 haplotype: Prevalence and association of the A4070G and A6755G polymorphisms

Recently, a polymorphism was identified in exon 25 of the factor V gene that is possibly a functional candidate for the HR2 haplotype. This haplotype is characterized by a single base substitution named R2 (A4070G) in the B domain of the protein. A mutation (A6755G; 2194Asp→Gly) located near the C terminus has been hypothesized to influence protein folding and glycosylation, and might be responsible for the shift in factor V isoform (FV1 / FV2) ratio. This study investigated the prevalence of these two factor V HR2 haplotype polymorphisms in a cohort of normal blood donors, patients with osteoarthritis and women with complications during pregnancy, and in families of factor V Leiden individuals. A high allele frequency for the two polymorphisms was found in the blood donor group (6.2% R2, 5.6% A6755G). No significant difference in allele frequency was observed in the clinical groups (obstetric complications and osteoarthritis, 4.1-4.9% for the two polymorphisms) when compared with that of healthy blood donors. We confirm that the factor V A6755G polymorphism shows strong linkage to the R2 allele, although it is not exclusively inherited with the exon 13 A4070G variant and can occur independently. © 2001 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Assessment of pre- and post-flood groundwater recharge via 3D visualisation, Lockyer Valley, southeast Queensland

The Lockyer Valley in southeast Queensland supports important and intensive irrigation which is dependant on the quality and availability of groundwater. Prolonged drought conditions from ~1997 resulted in a depletion of the alluvial aquifers, and concern for the long-term sustainability of this resource. By 2008, many areas of the valley were at < 20% of storage. Some relief occurred with rain events in early 2009, then in December 2010 - January 2011, most of southeast Queensland experienced unprecedented flooding. These storm-based events have caused a shift in research focus from investigations of drought conditions and mitigation to flood response analysis. For the alluvial aquifer system of the valley, a preliminary assessment of groundwater observation bore data, prior to and during the flood, indicates that there is a spatially variable aquifer response. While water levels in some bores screened in unconfined shallow aquifers have recovered by more than 10 m within a short period of time (months), others show only a small or moderate response. Measurements of pre- and post-flood groundwater levels and high-resolution time-series records from data loggers are considered within the framework of a 3D geological model of the Lockyer Valley using Groundwater Visualisation System(GVS). Groundwater level fluctuations covering both drought and flood periods are used to estimate groundwater recharge using the water table fluctuation method (WTF), supplemented by estimates derived using chloride mass balance. The presentation of hydraulic and recharge information in a 3D format has considerable advantages over the traditional 2D presentation of data. The 3D approach allows the distillation of multiple types of information(topography, geological, hydraulic and spatial) into one representation that provides valuable insights into the major controls of groundwater flow and recharge. The influence of aquifer lithology on the spatial variability of groundwater recharge is also demonstrated.