Can Beijing become a global media capital?

The commercialization of Chinese media has taken place over the past two decades; it has become a significant force since 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organisation. With demand for original content increasing and China contemplating a cultural trade deficit in media content, there is much discussion of agglomeration and clustering. Beijing, as the national media centre of China, witnesses a process of media agglomeration while bearing the problem of cultural export during the media commercialization. Michael Curtin‟s idea of media capital, which absorbs media resources and personnel and exports media products transnationally, provides a dynamic perspective of understanding media agglomeration and dispersion under different political social and cultural circumstances. Hence the question whether Beijing is going to transform into a transnational media capital is worth studying, in order to observe and comprehend China‟s media industry in transition. Drawing on Michael Curtin‟s three media capital trajectories, the paper interprets tensions and challenges generated in the process of media industry agglomeration and growth in Beijing. Emphasis is placed on the third trajectory, socio-cultural variation.

Emergent innovation through the co-evolution of informal and formal media economies

Well-established distinctions between amateur and professional are blurring as the impact of social media, changes in cultural consumption, and crises in copyright industries’ business models are felt across society and economy. I call this the increasingly rapid co-evolution of the formal market and informal household sectors and analyse it through the concept of ‘social network markets’ – individual choices are made on the basis of other’s choices and such networked preferencing is enhanced by the growing ubiquity of social media platforms. This may allow us better to understand sources of disruption and innovation in audiovisual production and distribution in wealthy Western markets which are as significant as those posed by informal practices outside the West. I examine what is happening around the monetization and professionalization of online video (YouTube, for example) and the socialization of professional production strategies (transmedia, for example) as innovation from the margins.

Kaleidoscopes and contradictions : the legitimacy of social media for public relations

If the current discourses of progress are to be believed, the new or social media promise a kaleidoscope of opportunity for connecting and informing citizens. This is by allegedly revitalizing the fading legitimacy and practice of institutions and providing an agent for social interaction. However, as social media adoption has increased, it has revealed a wealth of contradictions both of its own making and reproduction of past action. This has created a crisis for traditional media as well as for public relations. For example, social media such as WikiLeaks have bypassed official channels about government information. In other cases, social media such as Facebook and Twitter informed BBC coverage of the Rio Olympics. Although old media are unlikely to go away, social media have had an impact with several large familybased media companies collapsing or being reintegrated into the new paradigm. To use Walter Lippman’s analogy of the phantom public, the social media contradictorily serve to both disparate the phantom in part and reinforce it...

Terra Preta : bioenergy, soil restoration, urban agriculture, art algorithm

The 2010 LAGI competition was held on three underutilized sites in the United Arab Emirates. By choosing Staten Island, New York in 2012 the competition organises have again brought into question new roles for public open space in the contemporary city. In the case of the UEA sites, the competition produced many entries which aimed to create a sculpture and by doing so, they attracted people to the selected empty spaces in an arid climate. In a way these proposals were the incubators and the new characters of these empty spaces. The competition was thus successful at advancing understandings of the expanded role of public open spaces in EAU and elsewhere. LAGI 2012 differs significantly to the UAE program because Fresh Kills Park has already been planned as a public open space for New Yorkers - with or without these clean energy sculptures. Furthermore, Fresh Kills Park is already an (gas) energy generating site in its own right. We believe Fresh Kills Park, as a site, presents a problem which somewhat transcends the aims of the competition brief. Advancing a sustainable urban design proposition for the site therefore requires a fundamental reconsideration of the established paradigms public open space. Hence our strategy is to not only create an energy generating, site specific art work, but to create synergy between the public and the site engagement while at the same time complement the idiosyncrasies of the pre-existing engineered landscape. Current PhD research about energy generation in public open spaces informs this work.

Reading images : the book club in the art gallery

This paper seeks to document and understand one instance of community-university engagement: that of an on-going book club organised in conjunction with public art exhibitions. The curator of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum invited the authors, three postgraduate research students in the faculty of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at QUT, to facilitate an informal book club. The purpose of the book club was to generate discussion, through engagement with fiction, around the themes and ideas explored in the Art Museum’s exhibitions. For example, during the William Robinson exhibition, which presented evocative images of the environment around Brisbane, Queensland, the book club explored texts that symbolically represented aspects of the Australian landscape in a variety of modes and guises. This paper emerges as a result of the authors’ observations during, and reflections on, their experiences facilitating the book club. It responds to the research question, how can we create a best practice model to engage readers through open-ended, reciprocal discussion of fiction, while at the same time encouraging interactions in the gallery space? To provide an overview of reading practices in book clubs, we rely on Jenny Hartley’s seminal text on the subject, The Reading Groups Book (2002). Although the book club was open to all members of the community, the participants were generally women. Elizabeth Long, in Book Clubs: Woman and the Uses of Reading in the Everyday (2003), offers a comprehensive account of women’s interactions as they engage in a reading community. Long (2003, 2) observes that an image of the solitary reader governs our understanding of reading. Long challenges this notion, arguing that reading is profoundly social (ibid), and, as women read and talk in book clubs, ‘they are supporting each other in a collective working-out of their relationship to a particular historical movement and the particular social conditions that characterise it’ (Long 2003, 22). Despite the book club’s capacity to act as a forum for analytical discussion, DeNel Rehberg Sedo (2010, 2) argues that there are barriers to interaction in such a space, including that members require a level of cultural capital and literacy before they feel comfortable to participate. How then can we seek to make book clubs more inclusive, and encourage readers to discuss and question outside of their comfort zone? How can we support interactions with texts and images? In this paper, we draw on pragmatic and self-reflective practice methods to document and evaluate the development of the book club model designed to facilitate engagement. We discuss how we selected texts, negotiating the dual needs of relevance to the exhibition and engagement with, and appeal to, the community. We reflect on developing questions and material prior to the book club to encourage interaction, and describe how we developed a flexible approach to question-asking and facilitating discussion. We conclude by reflecting on the outcomes of and improvements to the model.

Improvisation, process drama and dramatic art

This paper re-conceptualises the notion of improvisation as it has developed in schools since the 1960s. It outlines the theoretical case for naming the distinctive improvisational practice that has emerged in schools - namely Process Drama. The paper sketches seven characteristics of Process Drama and then outlines the case for seeing it as an emerging but robust form of dramatic art. It concludes by arguing that drama teachers, in developing process drama, have created a new form of both education and art.

The Convergent Media Policy Moment

This paper will consider some of the wider contextual and policy questions arising out of four major public inquiries that took place in Australia over 2011–2012: the Convergence Review, the National Classification Scheme Review, the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the National Cultural Policy. This paper considers whether we are now witnessing a ‘convergent media policy moment’ akin to the ‘cultural policy moment’ theorized by Australian cultural researchers in the early 1990s, and the limitations of various approaches to understanding policy – including critiques of neoliberalism – in understanding such shifts. It notes the rise of ‘soft law’ as a means of addressing the challenges of regulatory design in an era of rapid media change, with consideration of two cases: the approach to media influence taken in the Convergence Review, and the concept of ‘deeming’ developed in the National Classification Scheme Review.

Review: Barbara T. Hoffman (ed) - Art and Cultural Heritage : Law, Policy and Practice

In Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice Barbara Hoffman as editor brings together an impressive array of practitioners from a variety of fields (from archaeologists to lawyers), to present in single volume aspects of policy, law and practice relevant to cultural heritage, which are not normally addressed in such texts. The book is indeed a comprehensive work to be recommended to policy makers, practitioners, students and other interested readers...

A dual-scale modelling approach for drying hygroscopic porous media

A new dualscale modelling approach is presented for simulating the drying of a wet hygroscopic porous material that couples the porous medium (macroscale) with the underlying pore structure (microscale). The proposed model is applied to the convective drying of wood at low temperatures and is valid in the so-called hygroscopic range, where hygroscopically held liquid water is present in the solid phase and water exits only as vapour in the pores. Coupling between scales is achieved by imposing the macroscopic gradients of moisture content and temperature on the microscopic field using suitably-defined periodic boundary conditions, which allows the macroscopic mass and thermal fluxes to be defined as averages of the microscopic fluxes over the unit cell. This novel formulation accounts for the intricate coupling of heat and mass transfer at the microscopic scale but reduces to a classical homogenisation approach if a linear relationship is assumed between the microscopic gradient and flux. Simulation results for a sample of spruce wood highlight the potential and flexibility of the new dual-scale approach. In particular, for a given unit cell configuration it is not necessary to propose the form of the macroscopic fluxes prior to the simulations because these are determined as a direct result of the dual-scale formulation.

A variable-stepsize Jacobian-free exponential integrator for simulating transport in heterogeneous porous media : application to wood drying

A Jacobian-free variable-stepsize method is developed for the numerical integration of the large, stiff systems of differential equations encountered when simulating transport in heterogeneous porous media. Our method utilises the exponential Rosenbrock-Euler method, which is explicit in nature and requires a matrix-vector product involving the exponential of the Jacobian matrix at each step of the integration process. These products can be approximated using Krylov subspace methods, which permit a large integration stepsize to be utilised without having to precondition the iterations. This means that our method is truly "Jacobian-free" - the Jacobian need never be formed or factored during the simulation. We assess the performance of the new algorithm for simulating the drying of softwood. Numerical experiments conducted for both low and high temperature drying demonstrates that the new approach outperforms (in terms of accuracy and efficiency) existing simulation codes that utilise the backward Euler method via a preconditioned Newton-Krylov strategy.

Performance evaluation of onsite sewage treatment : Evaluation of current research

Efficient management of domestic wastewater is a primary requirement for human well being. Failure to adequately address issues of wastewater collection, treatment and disposal can lead to adverse public health and environmental impacts. The increasing spread of urbanisation has led to the conversion of previously rural land into urban developments and the more intensive development of semi urban areas. However the provision of reticulated sewerage facilities has not kept pace with this expansion in urbanisation. This has resulted in a growing dependency on onsite sewage treatment. Though considered only as a temporary measure in the past, these systems are now considered as the most cost effective option and have become a permanent feature in some urban areas. This report is the first of a series of reports to be produced and is the outcome of a research project initiated by the Brisbane City Council. The primary objective of the research undertaken was to relate the treatment performance of onsite sewage treatment systems with soil conditions at site, with the emphasis being on septic tanks. This report consists of a ‘state of the art’ review of research undertaken in the arena of onsite sewage treatment. The evaluation of research brings together significant work undertaken locally and overseas. It focuses mainly on septic tanks in keeping with the primary objectives of the project. This report has acted as the springboard for the later field investigations and analysis undertaken as part of the project. Septic tanks still continue to be used widely due to their simplicity and low cost. Generally the treatment performance of septic tanks can be highly variable due to numerous factors, but a properly designed, operated and maintained septic tank can produce effluent of satisfactory quality. The reduction of hydraulic surges from washing machines and dishwashers, regular removal of accumulated septage and the elimination of harmful chemicals are some of the practices that can improve system performance considerably. The relative advantages of multi chamber over single chamber septic tanks is an issue that needs to be resolved in view of the conflicting research outcomes. In recent years, aerobic wastewater treatment systems (AWTS) have been gaining in popularity. This can be mainly attributed to the desire to avoid subsurface effluent disposal, which is the main cause of septic tank failure. The use of aerobic processes for treatment of wastewater and the disinfection of effluent prior to disposal is capable of producing effluent of a quality suitable for surface disposal. However the field performance of these has been disappointing. A significant number of these systems do not perform to stipulated standards and quality can be highly variable. This is primarily due to houseowner neglect or ignorance of correct operational and maintenance procedures. The other problems include greater susceptibility to shock loadings and sludge bulking. As identified in literature a number of design features can also contribute to this wide variation in quality. The other treatment processes in common use are the various types of filter systems. These include intermittent and recirculating sand filters. These systems too have their inherent advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore as in the case of aerobic systems, their performance is very much dependent on individual houseowner operation and maintenance practices. In recent years the use of biofilters has attracted research interest and particularly the use of peat. High removal rates of various wastewater pollutants have been reported in research literature. Despite these satisfactory results, leachate from peat has been reported in various studies. This is an issue that needs further investigations and as such biofilters can still be considered to be in the experimental stage. The use of other filter media such as absorbent plastic and bark has also been reported in literature. The safe and hygienic disposal of treated effluent is a matter of concern in the case of onsite sewage treatment. Subsurface disposal is the most common and the only option in the case of septic tank treatment. Soil is an excellent treatment medium if suitable conditions are present. The processes of sorption, filtration and oxidation can remove the various wastewater pollutants. The subsurface characteristics of the disposal area are among the most important parameters governing process performance. Therefore it is important that the soil and topographic conditions are taken into consideration in the design of the soil absorption system. Seepage trenches and beds are the common systems in use. Seepage pits or chambers can be used where subsurface conditions warrant, whilst above grade mounds have been recommended for a variety of difficult site conditions. All these systems have their inherent advantages and disadvantages and the preferable soil absorption system should be selected based on site characteristics. The use of gravel as in-fill for beds and trenches is open to question. It does not contribute to effluent treatment and has been shown to reduce the effective infiltrative surface area. This is due to physical obstruction and the migration of fines entrained in the gravel, into the soil matrix. The surface application of effluent is coming into increasing use with the advent of aerobic treatment systems. This has the advantage that treatment is undertaken on the upper soil horizons, which is chemically and biologically the most effective in effluent renovation. Numerous research studies have demonstrated the feasibility of this practice. However the overriding criteria is the quality of the effluent. It has to be of exceptionally good quality in order to ensure that there are no resulting public health impacts due to aerosol drift. This essentially is the main issue of concern, due to the unreliability of the effluent quality from aerobic systems. Secondly, it has also been found that most householders do not take adequate care in the operation of spray irrigation systems or in the maintenance of the irrigation area. Under these circumstances surface disposal of effluent should be approached with caution and would require appropriate householder education and stringent compliance requirements. However despite all this, the efficiency with which the process is undertaken will ultimately rest with the individual householder and this is where most concern rests. Greywater too should require similar considerations. Surface irrigation of greywater is currently being permitted in a number of local authority jurisdictions in Queensland. Considering the fact that greywater constitutes the largest fraction of the total wastewater generated in a household, it could be considered to be a potential resource. Unfortunately in most circumstances the only pretreatment that is required to be undertaken prior to reuse is the removal of oil and grease. This is an issue of concern as greywater can considered to be a weak to medium sewage as it contains primary pollutants such as BOD material and nutrients and may also include microbial contamination. Therefore its use for surface irrigation can pose a potential health risk. This is further compounded by the fact that most householders are unaware of the potential adverse impacts of indiscriminate greywater reuse. As in the case of blackwater effluent reuse, there have been suggestions that greywater should also be subjected to stringent guidelines. Under these circumstances the surface application of any wastewater requires careful consideration. The other option available for the disposal effluent is the use of evaporation systems. The use of evapotranspiration systems has been covered in this report. Research has shown that these systems are susceptible to a number of factors and in particular to climatic conditions. As such their applicability is location specific. Also the design of systems based solely on evapotranspiration is questionable. In order to ensure more reliability, the systems should be designed to include soil absorption. The successful use of these systems for intermittent usage has been noted in literature. Taking into consideration the issues discussed above, subsurface disposal of effluent is the safest under most conditions. This is provided the facility has been designed to accommodate site conditions. The main problem associated with subsurface disposal is the formation of a clogging mat on the infiltrative surfaces. Due to the formation of the clogging mat, the capacity of the soil to handle effluent is no longer governed by the soil’s hydraulic conductivity as measured by the percolation test, but rather by the infiltration rate through the clogged zone. The characteristics of the clogging mat have been shown to be influenced by various soil and effluent characteristics. Secondly, the mechanisms of clogging mat formation have been found to be influenced by various physical, chemical and biological processes. Biological clogging is the most common process taking place and occurs due to bacterial growth or its by-products reducing the soil pore diameters. Biological clogging is generally associated with anaerobic conditions. The formation of the clogging mat provides significant benefits. It acts as an efficient filter for the removal of microorganisms. Also as the clogging mat increases the hydraulic impedance to flow, unsaturated flow conditions will occur below the mat. This permits greater contact between effluent and soil particles thereby enhancing the purification process. This is particularly important in the case of highly permeable soils. However the adverse impacts of the clogging mat formation cannot be ignored as they can lead to significant reduction in the infiltration rate. This in fact is the most common cause of soil absorption systems failure. As the formation of the clogging mat is inevitable, it is important to ensure that it does not impede effluent infiltration beyond tolerable limits. Various strategies have been investigated to either control clogging mat formation or to remediate its severity. Intermittent dosing of effluent is one such strategy that has attracted considerable attention. Research conclusions with regard to short duration time intervals are contradictory. It has been claimed that the intermittent rest periods would result in the aerobic decomposition of the clogging mat leading to a subsequent increase in the infiltration rate. Contrary to this, it has also been claimed that short duration rest periods are insufficient to completely decompose the clogging mat, and the intermediate by-products that form as a result of aerobic processes would in fact lead to even more severe clogging. It has been further recommended that the rest periods should be much longer and should be in the range of about six months. This entails the provision of a second and alternating seepage bed. The other concepts that have been investigated are the design of the bed to meet the equilibrium infiltration rate that would eventuate after clogging mat formation; improved geometry such as the use of seepage trenches instead of beds; serial instead of parallel effluent distribution and low pressure dosing of effluent. The use of physical measures such as oxidation with hydrogen peroxide and replacement of the infiltration surface have been shown to be only of short-term benefit. Another issue of importance is the degree of pretreatment that should be provided to the effluent prior to subsurface application and the influence exerted by pollutant loadings on the clogging mat formation. Laboratory studies have shown that the total mass loadings of BOD and suspended solids are important factors in the formation of the clogging mat. It has also been found that the nature of the suspended solids is also an important factor. The finer particles from extended aeration systems when compared to those from septic tanks will penetrate deeper into the soil and hence will ultimately cause a more dense clogging mat. However the importance of improved pretreatment in clogging mat formation may need to be qualified in view of other research studies. It has also shown that effluent quality may be a factor in the case of highly permeable soils but this may not be the case with fine structured soils. The ultimate test of onsite sewage treatment system efficiency rests with the final disposal of effluent. The implication of system failure as evidenced from the surface ponding of effluent or the seepage of contaminants into the groundwater can be very serious as it can lead to environmental and public health impacts. Significant microbial contamination of surface and groundwater has been attributed to septic tank effluent. There are a number of documented instances of septic tank related waterborne disease outbreaks affecting large numbers of people. In a recent incident, the local authority was found liable for an outbreak of viral hepatitis A and not the individual septic tank owners as no action had been taken to remedy septic tank failure. This illustrates the responsibility placed on local authorities in terms of ensuring the proper operation of onsite sewage treatment systems. Even a properly functioning soil absorption system is only capable of removing phosphorus and microorganisms. The nitrogen remaining after plant uptake will not be retained in the soil column, but will instead gradually seep into the groundwater as nitrate. Conditions for nitrogen removal by denitrification are not generally present in a soil absorption bed. Dilution by groundwater is the only treatment available for reducing the nitrogen concentration to specified levels. Therefore based on subsurface conditions, this essentially entails a maximum allowable concentration of septic tanks in a given area. Unfortunately nitrogen is not the only wastewater pollutant of concern. Relatively long survival times and travel distances have been noted for microorganisms originating from soil absorption systems. This is likely to happen if saturated conditions persist under the soil absorption bed or due to surface runoff of effluent as a result of system failure. Soils have a finite capacity for the removal of phosphorus. Once this capacity is exceeded, phosphorus too will seep into the groundwater. The relatively high mobility of phosphorus in sandy soils have been noted in the literature. These issues have serious implications in the design and siting of soil absorption systems. It is not only important to ensure that the system design is based on subsurface conditions but also the density of these systems in given areas is a critical issue. This essentially involves the adoption of a land capability approach to determine the limitations of an individual site for onsite sewage disposal. The most limiting factor at a particular site would determine the overall capability classification for that site which would also dictate the type of effluent disposal method to be adopted.

Australian Media Law [4th ed.]

"This book covers media law subjects for legal practitioners and for tertiary law students or students in tertiary media courses." -- Libraries Australia.

Pornography as entertainment

For the majority of its producers and consumers, pornography functions as entertainment rather than art. This paper draws on my recent work mapping out entertainment as an area of study (for the new Entertainment Industries programme at Queensland University of Technology) to explore what it means for this object of study to treat it as adult entertainment. Entertainment is audience-centred culture. It is commonly based around characters and story. It encourages seriality, and is unafraid of adaptation. Its dominant mode is fun, its favourite narrative resolution the happy ending. It commonly encourages audience activity and its aesthetics are organized around fast-moving, vulgar spectacle. Its primary purpose is to create an emotional response. In this article I test mainstream pornography against each of these characteristics as a way of mapping out the shape of pornography as it functions in its everyday form, and explain the advantages of such an approach.

Studies of assisted reproduction in the spotted grass frog Limnodynastes tasmaniensis: ovulation, early development and microinjection (ICSI)

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) offer a wide range of techniques that have the potential to augment efforts to conserve and manage endangered amphibians and improve wild and captive population numbers. Gametes and tissues of species nearing endangered or extinct status can be cryopreserved and stored in gene banks, to provide material that can be utilised in the future as ART methods are refined. The Spotted Grass Frog, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis, is an abundant amphibian species in South-Eastern Australia of the family Myobatrachidae, that is suitable for the development of ART systems that can be applied to the threatened and endangered myobatrachid and other amphibian species native to Australia. The aim of this study was to advance the understanding of ovulation, fertilisation and embryo nic development of Lim. tasmaniensis and in vitro manipulations of reproduction and development for use in the development of advanced ART procedures such as intracytoplasmic spermatozoon injection (ICSI), androgenesis and nuclear transfer. Ovulation in amphibians can be induced by protocols utilising natural or synthetic hormones. All protocols tested on Lim. tasmaniensis in this study required two injections and the most effective protocols continued to require a first injection of pituitary extracts to induce ovulation. The second injection was, however, successfully replaced by synthetic chorionic gonadotrophin at a threshold dosage of 100 iu and halved the number of cane toads required to source the pituitaries. A combination of LHRH and Pimozide offered a less effective protocol, that did not require the use of pituitary extracts, and avoided the risk of pathogen transfer associated with unsterilised pituitary extracts. Unfertilised eggs of Lim. tasmaniensis were exposed to media of various osmolalities to determine media effects on eggs and their surrounding jelly layers that might impact on egg viability and fertilisability. Osmolality had no effect upon the egg diameter, however, rapid swelling of the jelly layers occurred within 15 minutes of exposure to various media treatments and plateaued from 30-90 minutes without further expansion. Swelling of the jelly layers was increased in hypotonic media (2.5% SAR, H2O) and minimised in the isotonic media (100% SAR). The optimal conditions for the culture of Lim. tasmaniensis eggs were identified as a holding media of 100% SAR, followed by a medium change to 2.5% SAR at insemination. This sequence of media minimised the rate of swelling of the jelly layers prior to contact with the spermatozoa, and maximised the activation of spermatozoa and eggs throughout fertilisation and embryonic development. Embryos of Lim. tasmaniensis were cultured at four temperatures (13 C, 17 C, 23 C and 29 C), to determine the effect of temperature on cleavage and embryonic development rates. Embryonic development progressed through a sequence of stages that were not altered by changes in temperature. However cleavage rates were affected by changes in temperature as compared with normal embryonic growth at 23 C. Embryonic development was suspended at the lowest temperature (13 C) while embryonic viability was maintained. A moderate decrease in temperature (17 C) slowed cleavage, while the highest temperature (29 C) increased the cleavage rate, but decreased the embryo survival. Rates of embryonic development can be manipulated by changes in temperature and this method can be used to source blastomeres of a specific size/stage at a predetermined age or halt cleavage at specific stages for embryos or embryo derived cells to be included in ART procedures. This study produced the first report of the application of Intracytoplasmic Spermatozoon Injection (ICSI) in an Australian amphibian. Eggs that were activated by microinjection with a single spermatozoon (n=50) formed more deep, but abnormal, cleavage furrows post-injection (18/50, 36%), than surface changes (12/50, 24%). This result is in contrast to eggs injected without a spermatozoon (n=42), where the majority of eggs displayed limited surface changes (36/42, 86%), and few deep, abnormal furrows (3/42, 7%). Three advanced embryos (3/50, 6%) were produced by ICSI that developed to various stages within the culture system. Technical difficulties were encountered that prevented the generation of any metamorphs from ICSI tadpoles. Nevertheless, when these blocks to ICSI are overcome, the ICSI procedure will be both directly useful as an ART procedure in its own right, and the associated refinement of micromanipulation procedures will assist in the development of other ART procedures in Lim. tasmaniensis. A greater understanding of basic reproductive and developmental biology in Lim. tasmaniensis would greatly facilitate refinement of fertilisation by ICSI. Assisted Reproductive Technologies, in conjunction with gene banks may in the future regenerate extinct amphibian species, and assist in the recovery of declining amphibian populations nationally and worldwide.