Under the forest and Ladyswamp ( a radio play and a sonic poem)

'Under the Forest'  and 'Ladyswamp' are audio recordings created in collaboration with musician/ sound artist Tom Kazas. As the first outputs of the ongoing Lyrebird project (fully documented at writingfix.com.au) both works reinvent history in artistic form. At the same time they consider the aftermath of inappropriate farming techniques, representing the sense of disconnection the settlers immediately have from any historical continuity or indigenous relationship to land. In focussing on a regional area in Victoria and the stories that emerge from here, this practice-led research has implications for all other regional areas in countries throughout a world in a time of climate change. The two pieces, linked by the flow of water from the upper catchment of the Tarwin River, to the river flats near the South Gippsland coast, embody the presence of location via poetic means; the flow is from erosion to silt: of land becoming water, becoming land. In the sound design the locations are also represented poetically without losing the actuality of their haunting geography.
The two audio works were first presented at the Double Dialogues Conference: 'The 21st century - The Event, The Subject, The Artwork', Fiji, 2012, and are published in In/Stead, Issue 4, 2013 alongside a discursive article, ‘Under the forest & Ladyswamp: a radio play & a sonic poem’. Extracts of the audio appear on Youtube. The process of ‘Ladyswamp’ appears on an educational video currently in production by Deakin University.

Generating repudiable, memorizable and privacy preserving security questions using the Propp Theory of Narrative

 Security questions are often based on personal information that is limited in variety, available in the public record and very difficult to change if compromised. A personalized folktale shared only by the communicating parties provides memorizable basis for individualized security questions that can be readily replaced in the event of a security breach. We utilize the Propp theory of narrative to provide a basis of abstraction for story generation systems. We develop a proof-of-concept system based on placeholder replacement to demonstrate the generation of repudiate and memorizable questions and answers suitable for online security questions. A 3-component protocol is presented that demonstrates the use of this process to derive a shared secret key through privacy amplification. This combination of story generation and communication security provides the basis for improvements in current security question practice.

Love and leadership: constructing follower narrative identities of charismatic leadership

Most extant research on charismatic leadership has an essentialist orientation that characterises it as leader behaviour, leader communication or follower dependency. Our approach is more discursively oriented. To research charismatic leadership, we used aesthetic narrative positivism, which undertook utilitarian as well as critical method. We examined followers' implicit narratives of their lived experiences of charismatic leadership in organisational settings. We examined metaphors for this experience. Most respondents identified with positive affect, a form of love story; a minority experienced negative affect, especially anger; and some experienced both positive and negative emotions. We posit that if one adopts a certain identity within the context of a dramatic narrative, one might be attributed with charismatic qualities by followers. In this way, we suggest that charismatic leadership might be less a gift from God and more a 'gift from followers'. © The Author(s) 2013.

Viewing the leadership narrative through alternate lenses: an autoethnographic investigation

This conceptual-theoretical article revisits the work of Parry and Hansen on the nature of the organizational story as leadership. The present article is written in the autoethnographic style. The original narrative work is re-examined through the lenses of autoethnography, narrative theory, metaphor/discourse, critical realism and conventional quantitative research. The insights provided by this methodological triangulation are examined. The conclusion is that organizational stories will reflect leadership if they are plausible to the intended audience, give all organizational members an empowered part in the story, have a moral to the story, and have a happy ending. The overarching theme that is proposed is of leadership as the generation of individual hope for a better existence.

Quality of pre-school children's pretend play and subsequent development of semantic organization and narrative re-telling skills

Purpose: This study investigated if the quality of pre-school children's pretend play predicted their semantic organization and narrative re-telling ability when they were in early primary school. It was hypothesized that the elaborateness of a child's play and the child's use of symbols in play were predictors of their semantic organization and narrative re-tell scores of the School Age Oral Language Assessment. Method: Forty-eight children were assessed using the Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment when they were aged 4-5 years. Three-to-five years after this assessment their semantic organization and narrative re-telling skills were assessed. Results: Results indicate that the elaborateness of a child's play and their ability to use symbols was predictive of semantic organization skills. Use of symbols in play was the strongest play predictor of narrative re-telling skills. The quality of a pre-school child's ability to elaborate complex sequences in pretend play and use symbols predicted up to 20% of a child's semantic organization and narrative re-telling skills up to 5 years later. Conclusions: The study provides evidence that the quality of pretend play in 4-5 year olds is important for semantic organization and narrative re-telling abilities in the school-aged child.

Cross-continental comparison of national food consumption survey methods—A narrative review

Food consumption surveys are performed in many countries. Comparison of results from those surveys across nations is difficult because of differences in methodological approaches. While consensus about the preferred methodology associated with national food consumption surveys is increasing, no inventory of methodological aspects across continents is available. The aims of the present review are (1) to develop a framework of key methodological elements related to national food consumption surveys, (2) to create an inventory of these properties of surveys performed in the continents North- America, South-America, Asia and Australasia, and (3) to discuss and compare these methodological properties cross-continentally. A literature search was performed using a fixed set of search terms in different databases. The inventory was completed with all accessible information from all retrieved publications and corresponding authors were requested to provide additional information where missing. Surveys from ten individual countries, originating from four continents are listed in the inventory. The results are presented according to six major aspects of food consumption surveys. The most common dietary intake assessment method used in food consumption surveys worldwide is the 24-HDR (24 h dietary recall), occasionally administered repeatedly, mostly using interview software. Only three countries have incorporated their national food consumption surveys into continuous national health and nutrition examination surveys.

'Unconscionable mystification'? : rooms, spaces and the prose poem

Since the 19th century, when a number of French writers—most conspicuously Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud—introduced what we may think of as the modern prose poem into European literature, prose poetry has been part of a significant debate about the contemporary usefulness of existing literary modes and genres. While early French practitioners partly used the form to subvert and problematise traditional poetic prosody, once this aim was achieved prose poetry remained a significant contemporary literary form, achieving wide acceptance. In the context of contemporary developments and manifestations of prose poetry, this article discusses John Frow’s comments that texts might “‘perform’ a genre, or modify it in ‘using’ it, or only partially realise a generic form, or … be composed of a mix of different genres” (2015: 11). It also discusses the authors’ Rooms and Spaces project, which explores—and exemplifies through its component of creative practice—ways in which prose poetry may be considered “poetic”; how the forms of prose poetry may be room-like and condensed; or open and highly suggestive (sometimes both at once); how prose poetry is intertextual and polysemous; and how prose poetry frequently conveys a sense of completeness despite tending to be fragmentary. Prose poetry may generically problematic but the authors suggest that this may make it an exemplary post-postmodern form of writing; and that reading prose poetry may provide significant insights into understanding how unstable genre boundaries really are.

Beyond narrative: sound design as dramaturgy in contemporary performance

Autobiographical performance is often characterised by a linguistic approach to storytelling. This paper presents discoveries from a practice-led research inquiry into the mediated translation of narrative elements within the making of autobiographical performance Train Tracks and Rooftops. Specifically, it presents the way sonic texts emerged within the process of translating away from narrative form. The paper sets out the technical aspects of the process and critiques the shift in meaning that comes from an understanding of sound dramaturgy and sound as performance architecture. The experience of the maker/performers' relationship to their live and mediated voice is discussed.

The effects of practice on children's ability to apply ground rules in a narrative interview

Despite the widespread use of ground rules in forensic interview guidelines, it is unknown whether children retain and apply these rules throughout narrative interviews. We evaluated the capacity of 260 five- to nine-year-olds to utilize three ground rules. At the beginning of the interview all children heard the rules; half also practiced them. Children then responded to open-ended prompts about a repeated laboratory event and were assessed for their application of the rules. Logistic regressions revealed that practice only benefitted the use of the "don't know" rule. Although the children accurately answered "don't understand" and "correct me" practice questions, practice appeared to give no greater benefit than just hearing the rules. Results suggest that the current format of ground rule practice in interview guidelines is appropriate for the "don't know" rule, but the other rules may require more extensive practice with this age group. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.