Developing the whole child? Tensions between sport and study in Australian independent schools

This paper reports on a research project that set out to examin the relationship between students' involvement in school co-curricular activities and their academic performance.  The warrant for the study emerges out of consistent claims made about the provision of co-curricular, naming sporting, activities and the development of a more rounded and successful student.  The primary question being asked here was: 'Are student's academic performances, as measured by their results for tertiary entrance in their final year of school, improved or reduced by their participation in co-curricular activities?'  The study used a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to interrogate this relationship.

Extending the Workers' Compensation Act 1987 (N.S.W.) to include independent contractors and to allow more highly paid workers to insure fully their income, with particular reference to engineers

In mid-1987, the existing workers’ compensation system in New South Wales was replaced by a new Scheme, called ‘WorkCover’. While WorkCover solved a number of the financial problems that had plagued its predecessor, its enactment created other issues. Furthermore, WorkCover has failed to deal with a number of gaps in providing compensation for occupational injuries, most notably those suffered by independent contractors. By combining a study of aspects of industrial law and industrial relations, this thesis will examine some of those problems and gaps, in particular: (a) Should WorkCover be amended to enable independent contractors to come within its ambit? (b) Should there be additional insurance cover available (known as ‘top-up’ insurance) to insure those parts of workers’ wages presently left unprotected by WorkCover? (c) Should workers be permitted to take out another form of ‘top-up’ insurance to increase the quantum of death cover presently provided by the Scheme? (d) Should independent contractors who arc permitted to enter WorkCover also be permitted to obtain the extended cover set out in (b) and (c) above? Where appropriate, the thesis compares WorkCover to the workers’ compensation schemes in other Australian jurisdictions. It develops each of the matters referred to above by referring to the results of the writer’s survey of members of the Institution of Engineers (NSW Branch) which was conducted in May and June 1991.

Communicating the 'unspeakability' of violent acts in cinema

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning‟s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker‟s „Trauma Cinema‟, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper‟s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein‟s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify „unspeakable‟ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein‟s violent acts, rather than Protti‟s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film‟s structure and content.

Language learning strategies of adult ESL learners using virtual independent learning environments

This case study explored the influence of the Virtual Independent Learning Centre on the preferred language learning strategies of adult immigrant English as a second language learners. Findings expand the understanding of English as a second language learners' use of language learning strategies within online independent learning environments.

The cinema of Kathryn Bigelow : Hollywood transgressor

Kathryn Bigelow has undoubtedly been one of Hollywood's most significant female players, well known in popular terms for films such as Point Breakand Blue Steel, yet relatively unexplored in academia. Soundbites about women and guns and speculation about the role of ex-husband James Cameron ( Aliens, Titanic) in her career have often helped obscure rather than elucidate an understanding of her work. This collection explores how Bigelow can be seen to provide a point of intersection to a whole range of issues at the forefront of contemporary film studies and of the transformation of Hollywood into a post-classical cinema machine, with a particular emphasis on her most ambitious and controversial picture, Strange Days. Her place within new Hollywood is as a filmmaker that blurs genre conventions, reinscribes gender identites, and produces a breathless cinema of attractions.