A History of Popular Indigenous Music

SINCE THE INVENTION OF recording technologies like the phonograph in the late 1800s, Indigenous music has been performed and recorded across Australia for a wide range of audiences. In the early twentieth century, for instance, music was recorded by anthropologists keen to capture the sounds of a culture that was believed to be in rapid decline (Thomas). Individual performers were not considered important in these recordings; their music was produced for scientific posterity rather than popular pleasure. And even though Aboriginal participation in local music festivals, touring vaudeville shows, and community gatherings was well documented throughout the twentieth century, it was not until the 1950s that Indigenous “pop stars” began to sell records for mass consumption(Dunbar-Hall and Gibson). Yet, with the persistence of recording artists like Jimmy Little over the past sixty years, Indigenous musicians have steadily gained prominence in Australia’s mainstream. This has been particularly true of the past twenty years, especially since the Sydney Olympics, where promotional strategies have brought about a new popular pride in musical achievements, based upon a celebrated history of diverse sounds and voices.

The laws of the virtual worlds

What if you could check out of your world, and enter a place where the social environment was different, where real world laws didn't apply, and where the political system could be anything you wanted it to be? What if you could socialize there with family and friends, build your own palace, go skiing, and even hold down a job there? And what if there wasn't one alternate world, there were hundreds, and what if millions of people checked out of Earth and went there every day? Virtual worlds - online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize - are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail. First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply - sometimes more strongly - in the virtual worlds. Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance. The issues of virtual property and avatar rights constitute legal challenges for our online future. Though virtual worlds may be games now, they are rapidly becoming as significant as real-world places where people interact, shop, sell, and work. As society and law begin to develop within virtual worlds, we need to have a better understanding of the interaction of the laws of the virtual worlds with the law of this world.

Undertaking practice-led research through a Queensland-wide women’s history project

This paper focuses on a practice-led research project where the author as artist/researcher participates in a Queensland-wide women’s history project to celebrate Queensland’s Suffrage Centenary in 2005. The author participated in the Women’s Historical Shoebox Collection, where Queensland women were invited to decorate and fill a shoebox with personal and symbolic items that speak about their lives and the lives of their women forebears. This paper explores the practice-led research process that enabled the artist/researcher to design and assemble her contribution. Fredericks describes the iterative process of developing the shoebox and the themes that developed through her artistic practice. She also describes the content of her shoebox and explains the symbolism underpinning the items. The Women’s Historical Shoebox Collection is now owned by the State Library of Queensland and the Jessie Street National Women’s Library.

Review: "Planning Asian cities : risks and resilience" edited by Stephen Hamnett and Dean Forbes, Planning, History and Environment Series, London, Routledge, 2011

Since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, cities have always been the cradle of civilisation, innovation and productivity, particularly as a result of the recent change factors affecting their (trans)formation, such as globalisation, the knowledge economy, technological advancements, climate change and so on. While in some parts of the world, cities are rapidly growing, in other parts, cities are shrinking, and their populations are aging. Even under the current pressure of constantly changing global conditions, the role of cities in influencing and partially shaping local, regional, national, supranational and even global level economy, society, environment and governance is undeniable. Global changes, while providing opportunities for cities and their administrations to reform and revisit existing planning and development processes and mechanisms, at the same time, challenge them by dealing with everincreasing risks and establishing resilience. At present, more than half of the world’s population...

Understanding negation and family history to improve clinical information retrieval

We present a study to understand the effect that negated terms (e.g., "no fever") and family history (e.g., "family history of diabetes") have on searching clinical records. Our analysis is aimed at devising the most effective means of handling negation and family history. In doing so, we explicitly represent a clinical record according to its different content types: negated, family history and normal content; the retrieval model weights each of these separately. Empirical evaluation shows that overall the presence of negation harms retrieval effectiveness while family history has little effect. We show negation is best handled by weighting negated content (rather than the common practise of removing or replacing it). However, we also show that many queries benefit from the inclusion of negated content and that negation is optimally handled on a per-query basis. Additional evaluation shows that adaptive handing of negated and family history content can have significant benefits.

Beyond Bilbao : rethinking flagship cultural development and planning in three California cities

Since the widely publicized revitalization success story of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, local governments have been scrambling to create their own flagship cultural projects. Because of the broad public sponsorship of such projects, urban planners need a full understanding of the associated potentials and problems. However, little research specifically examines the localized complexities of the flagship cultural strategy. Examining projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, the article illustrates that much more than impressive architecture influences their catalytic ability. Flagship cultural projects are highly dependent on a variety of contextual factors and, therefore, should be positioned to build on existing arts and related commercial activity rather than gamble that they will generate new development from scratch.

The importance of science fiction and other STEM-related mass media in young people’s decisions to enrol in university STEM courses

This paper presents Australian results from the Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) study with respect to the influence of STEM-related mass media, including science fiction, on students’ decisions to enrol in university STEM courses. The study found that across the full cohort (N=2999), students tended to attribute far greater influence to science-related documentaries/channels such as Life on Earth and the Discovery Channel, etc. than to science-fiction movies or STEM-related TV dramas. Males were more inclined than females to consider science fiction/fantasy books and films and popular science books/magazines as having been important in their decisions. Students taking physics/astronomy tended to rate the importance of science fiction/fantasy books and films higher than students in other courses. The implications of these results for our understanding of influences on STEM enrolments are discussed.

Whose story is it anyway? : the screenwriter as author in the process of adaptation

This project explores issues confronted when authoring a previously authored story, one received from history. Using the defection of Soviet spies, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov as its focal point, it details how a screenwriter addresses issues arising in the adaptation of both fictional and biographical representations suitable for contemporary cinema. Textual fidelity and concepts of interpretation, aesthetics and audience, negotiating factual and fictional imperatives, authorial visibility and invisibility, moral and ethical conundrums are negotiated and a set of guiding principles emerge from this practice-led investigation.

Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 2 : A golden era begins : Football in 'Marvellous Melbourne', 1877 to 1885

This is the second volume of a five volume series that describes, assesses, and analyses football in Victoria during the nineteenth century. This volume looks at the cultural contexts of the sport in the late 1870s and early 1880s, describes the important matches played, and provides a full statistical account of this time period. This book is the first comprehensive discussion of the early period in Australian football's development.

Using a visually-based assignment to reinforce and assess design history knowledge and understanding

This paper presents a visual timeline-based assignment used in an undergraduate Industrial Design History, Theory and Critcism unit. The assignment was developed in order to find a better way of supporting design history learning than an exam or essay assessment. It was developed using constructive alignment and it allows design students to use their strong visual thinking skills to understand unfamiliar content, develop their visual literacy of design history, and think deeply about the links between the designs, styles, movements, events and people in their timeline. The task produced a variety of responses, from websites and electronic presentations to large paper timelines, scrolls and 3D models. These have been admired by peers and used for end of year shows and permanent displays. Questionnaires were issued to students to gain feedback about the assessment. Students stated that the visual nature of the assignment helped them to understand how different aspects of design history related to each other, assisted with retaining the information, and that it was more interesting and fun than a report or an exam. This paper explores the theories behind and the benefits of using such methods of assessment for design history courses.

Investigating early childhood education for sustainability : insights from history and literature

Seemingly straightforward tasks often have a way of becoming complex. This was the case for our guest editorial team charged with creating Early Childhood Australia’s Best of Sustainability publication drawn from the the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood and Every Child. The complexities we encountered ranged from the varied terminologies and understandings of constructs such as education for sustainable development, environmental education and education for sustainability, through to the fundamental lack of published research on which to draw as the basis for a special issue. It is timely to explore these complexities as we face the global challenges of The Critical Decade (DCCEE, 2011) including rising sea levels, extreme weather events and food security. At a local level, the early childhood field in Australia is seeking to interpret sustainability with systemic support from the National Quality Standards(NQS) (ACECQA, 2011), while elsewhere environmental/sustainability education is encouraged through national curricula documents (for example, Singapore Ministry of Education, 2008; Swedish National Agency for Education,2010; Ministry of Education of Korea, 2011). Both The Critical Decade and the NQS provide imperatives to drive early childhood education’s engagement with sustainability. In other words, sustainability in early childhood education is no longer optional, but essential (Elliott, 2010). While some twenty years of advocacy has led to this somewhat subdued celebratory position, in this publication we do recognise the historical contexts that have led to early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS), as we (Elliott & Davis) phrase it, becoming almost ‘mainstream not marginal’ (Davis, 1999)— a stitching together of the isolated ‘patches of green’, first identified a decade ago by Elliott (NSW EPA, 2003). Here we weave together, through these articles, a story of the evolving history of ECEfS from our particular perspective. In so doing, we also acknowledge that there are other perspectives or ‘paths’ for this field as identified by Edwards and Cutter-McKenzie in their concluding paper to this compilation.

Pasture Degradation and Recovery in Australia's Rangelands : Learning from History

"The extended drought periods in each degradation episode have provided a test of the capacity of grazing systems (i.e. land, plants, animals, humans and social structure) to handle stress. Evidence that degradation was already occurring was identified prior to the extended drought sequences. The sequence of dry years, ranging from two to eight years, exposed and/or amplified the degradation processes. The unequivocal evidence was provided by: (a) the physical 'horror' of bare landscapes, erosion scalds and gullies and dust storms; (b) the biological devastation of woody weeds and animal suffering/deaths or forced sales, and; (c) the financial and emotional plight of graziers and their families due to reduced production in some cases leading to abandonment of properties or, sadly, deaths (e.g. McDonald 1991, Ker Conway 1989)."--Publisher website

Dirt Circus League : power and belonging in posthuman young adult fiction

This creative practice-led thesis consists of a creative work titled Dirt Circus League, which tells of a female teenaged medical intuitive who follows an enigmatic cult leader to his isolated home in Cape York, and an exegesis. The exegesis explores the representations and complexities of neuroscience and posthumanism in contemporary young adult fiction. The exegesis also discusses how the mechanics of storytelling changed the novel's original focus from one of neuroscience in relation to impacts and effects on teenage brains to the broader social concerns of posthumanism.