Reassessing the Effects of Early Adolescent Alcohol Use on Later Antisocial Behavior : A Longitudinal Study of Students in Victoria, Australia and Washington State, United States

The effect of early adolescent alcohol use on antisocial behavior was examined at one- and two-year follow-up in Washington, United States and Victoria, Australia. Each state used the same methods to survey statewide representative samples of students (N = 1,858, 52% female) in 2002 (Grade 7 [G7]), 2003 (Grade 8 [G8]), and 2004 (Grade 9 [G9]). Rates of lifetime, current, frequent, and heavy episodic alcohol use were higher in Victoria than Washington State, whereas rates of five antisocial behaviors were generally comparable across states. After controlling for established risk factors, few associations between alcohol use and antisocial behavior remained, except that G7 current use predicted G8 police arrests and stealing and G9 carrying a weapon and stealing; G7 heavy episodic use predicted G8 and G9 police arrests; and G7 lifetime use predicted G9 carrying a weapon. Hence, risk factors other than alcohol were stronger predictors of antisocial behaviors.

An assessment of riparian restoration outcomes in two rural catchments in south-western Victoria: Focusing on tree and shrub species richness, structure and recruitment characteristics

Riparian ecosystems are among the most degraded systems in the landscape,and there has been substantial investment in their restoration. Consequently, monitoring restoration interventions offers opportunities to further develop the science of riparian restoration, particularly how to move from small-scale implementation to a broader landscape scale. Here, we report on a broad range of riparian revegetation projects in two regions of south-western Victoria, the Corangamite and Glenelg-Hopkins Catchment Management Areas. The objectives of restoration interventions in these regions have been stated quite broadly, for example, to reinstate terrestrial habitat and biodiversity, control erosion and improve water quality. This study reports on tree and shrub composition, structure and recruitment after restoration works compared with remnant vegetation found regionally. Within each catchment, a total of 57 sites from six subcatchments were identified, representing three age-classes: <4, 4–8 and >8–12 years after treatment, as well as untreated (control) sites. Treatments comprised fencing to exclude stock, spraying or slashing to reduce weed cover, followed by planting with tube stock. Across the six subcatchments, 12 reference (remnant) sites were used to provide a benchmark for species richness, structural and recruitment characteristics and to aid interpretation of the effects of the restoration intervention. Vegetation structure was well developed in the treated sites by 4–8 years after treatment. However, structural complexity was higher at remnant sites than at treated or untreated sites due to a higher richness of small shrubs. Tree and shrub recruitment occurred in all remnant sites and at 64% of sites treated >4 years ago. Most seedling recruitment at treatment sites was by Acacia spp. This assessment provides data on species richness, structure and recruitment characteristics following restoration interventions. Data from this study will contribute to longitudinal studies of vegetation processes in riparian landscapes of south-western Victoria.

A plant macrofossil identification tool for south-west Victoria

The ‘Seeds of South-Western Victoria’ database is presented here. The database is a digital collection of seed information that can be searched based on a range of seed morphological characters. Additionally it provides colour photographs of seeds and ecological detail of the plant species. It aims to facilitate plant macrofossil studies in Australia by aiding the identification of unknown sub-fossil seed material. It contains descriptions of 156 commonly occurring species of the Victorian Volcanic Plain, but design allows for continual addition of species from this region and elsewhere. The application of the database system to plant macrofossil identification, from both surface and fossil samples allows, for the first time, comparability of fossil assemblages and modern vegetation at a resolution of relevance to ecologists and conservationists. The taxonomic refinement of the pollen data provided by the macrofossils adds to a better understanding of recent vegetation dynamics and management, demonstrating the applicability of the technique to palaeoenvironmental analyses. A current application is to better understand the past environments and activities of Indigenous people on the Mt Eccles lava flow and assist in landscape restoration for potential World Heritage listing.

Graduate Nurse Program Coordinators' perspectives on graduate nurse programs in Victoria, Australia: A descriptive qualitative approach

Aims: The purpose of this study was to describe the formal preparation nursing graduates are given throughout their first year of nursing in terms of educational structure and content of work-based year-long graduate nurse programs, from the perspectives of Graduate Nurse Program Coordinators. Background: In Australia, graduate nurse programs aim to provide a supportive learning environment, assisting nursing graduates in applying their theory to practice and supporting them in becoming safe, competent and responsible professionals. Internationally, research has demonstrated an increase in the job satisfaction and more importantly retention rates of newly qualified nurses who are supported in their first year of employment in some type of transition program. Method: Using a descriptive qualitative approach, individual semi-structured interviews were used. These interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematically analysed to reveal themes and sub-themes. Results: The interviews provided an insight into the various aspects of preparation that nursing graduates are given in their first year of practice with the main theme to emerge from analysis, nature of transition programs. The three subthemes associated with nature of transition programs consisted of composition of rotations and study days and supernumerary strategies. Findings indicate variation in pedagogical models underpinning graduate nurse programs across Victoria. Clinical rotations varied between three to twelve months, the number of study days offered were between four and thirteen days and there was variation in supernumerary time and strategies within the programs investigated.

Mapping 100 years of Thornthwaite moisture index: Impact of climate change in Victoria, Australia

Geographer C. W. Thornthwaite proposed in 1948 a moisture index called Thornthwaite Moisture Index (TMI) as part of a water balance model for a new classification system for climate. The importance of TMI climatic classification has been recognised in many areas of knowledge and practice worldwide over the last 60 years. However, although past climate research was focused on developing adequate methods for climate classification, current research is more concerned with understanding the patterns of climate change. The use of TMI as an indicator for climate change is still an incipient area of research. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it is to fully document a methodology based on geostatistics adopted to produce a time series of TMI maps that are accurate and have high spatial resolution. The state of Victoria, in Australia, over the last century, is used as the case study. Second, by analysing these maps, the paper presents a general evaluation of the spatial patterns found in Victoria related to moisture variability across space and over time. Some potential implications of the verified moisture changes are discussed, and a number of ideas for further development are suggested. © 2014 Institute of Australian Geographers.

Just another meeting?: Investigating mentoring for early childhood teachers in Victoria

IN A TIME OF REFORM FOR children’s services in Australia, this paper explores the currentmentoring programs on offer to the early childhood sector in the state of Victoria. Thecommissioned research involved the mapping of existing mentoring programs, supported byan extensive literature review. A thematic analysis of the data identified the following aspectsas impacting on the success of the programs: the value placed on mentoring; the mentor’s role;the level of support and training for mentors; the availability of resources; the divisions betweenmentoring and other management functions; tailoring of mentoring to individual professionaldesires and needs; and the presence or absence of formal evaluations to inform the futuresuccess of programs. The questions raised by this research prompt further consideration as towhat mentoring for early childhood practitioners should look like in the future, especially relatedto collaborative practice and the balance between autonomy and guidance.

Bushfire catastrophe in Victoria, Australia : public record, accountability, commemoration, memorialization and heritage protection

In Australia, 7 February 2009 has become known as ‘Black Saturday’ because of the bushfire catastrophe that took 173 lives and devastated communities in the central parts of the State of Victoria. The paper considers how the 2009 fires have been recorded, how the issue of accountability has been dealt with, particularly in relation to the State and its agencies but also individual residents in the fire-devastated areas, and how bushfire deaths and other losses have been commemorated through remembrance events and museum collection projects and memorialized through the creation of new monuments and the protection of remaining physical structures as official heritage. Despite the major impact of bushfires on the State, to date few bushfire-related places have been protected. The former Cockatoo Kindergarten, which acted as a community refuge during an earlier catastrophic Victorian bushfire on Ash Wednesday, 16 February 1983, is an exception. Inscribed in 2012, the former kindergarten is the only bushfire-related place inscribed on the Victorian Heritage Register, in this case for its historical and social value as a place resonating with other communities affected by other bushfires and helping the broader Victorian public to come to terms with bushfire catastrophe. But, while bushfire commemoration activities and physical memorials, like those relating to war, help many societies remember individual and community pain and suffering, they can divert attention from the more fundamental questions of why they were there in the first place and what must be done to ensure the same catastrophe does not recur in the future. In this regard, the paper questions the oft-cited claim that bushfires are embedded in the Australian psyche, seeing links between the rhetoric around bushfire survival and Australian myth-making and nation-building.

Longitudinal effects of school drug policies on student marijuana use in Washington State and Victoria, Australia

OBJECTIVES: We examined the longitudinal effect of schools' drug policies on student marijuana use. METHODS: We used data from the International Youth Development Study, which surveyed state-representative samples of students from Victoria, Australia, and Washington State. In wave 1 (2002), students in grades 7 and 9 (n = 3264) and a school administrator from each participating school (n = 188) reported on school drug policies. In wave 2 (2003), students reported on their marijuana use. We assessed associations between student-reported and administrator-reported policy and student self-reported marijuana use 1 year later. RESULTS: Likelihood of student marijuana use was higher in schools in which administrators reported using out-of-school suspension and students reported low policy enforcement. Student marijuana use was less likely where students reported receiving abstinence messages at school and students violating school policy were counseled about the dangers of marijuana use. CONCLUSIONS: Schools may reduce student marijuana use by delivering abstinence messages, enforcing nonuse policies, and adopting a remedial approach to policy violations rather than use of suspensions.

The discourse of public education: an urban campaign for a local public high school in Melbourne, Victoria

This paper explores the metonymic slippage surrounding the discourse of public education, through observations and interviews with Lawson High School active campaigners in the state of Victoria, Australia. The notion of campaigning for public education has become an ever-present issue on an international scale, and this article aims to contribute qualitative knowledge regarding the key concepts that lobbyists produce and articulate within their meetings concerning public education. Data have been obtained through direct participatory observation within a contextually specific campaigning site, lobbyists' publications and one-on-one interviews with active campaigners. Findings indicate that campaigners present distinct conceptualisations of public education as a discourse and a well-defined model of their school-of-choice.

Graduate teacher preparation for rural schools in Victoria and Queensland

Graduate teachers' preparedness for working in rural settings are mediated by the development of pedagogical expertise, professional engagement with parents and the community, and broader notions of preparation to teach in rural contexts. The Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE) project is a four-year longitudinal study tracking teacher education graduates in Queensland and Victoria to investigate the effectiveness of their programs in equipping them to meet the learning needs of students in a diverse range of school settings. A sub-set of the SETE data was examined to explore graduate teacher preparation for rural schools, specifically the authors analysed 1,539 point-in-time survey responses (April 2013) and findings from a case study exploring two teachers' transitions from teacher education into teaching positions at a rural primary school in Victoria. The case study is read iteratively with survey analysis to grapple with the issues associated with graduate teacher preparation for rural schools.

Cost and outcomes associated with participating in the community fireguard program: experiences from the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia

There is increasing recognition of the importance of shared responsibility between community and government in supporting community preparedness in disaster risk reduction programs. However, there is limited evidence to support decision making about how best to allocate resources. This paper presents an economic analysis of the Community Fireguard Program coordinated by the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, Australia. The economic analysis evaluates the costs and benefits of the Community Fireguard program (estimated in 2012 Australian dollars) to determine the efficiency of the program in terms of its outcomes of loss of life and property loss in the event of a bushfire. We take a societal perspective, including all costs and benefits regardless of who bears the costs, who receives the benefits or who provides the resources. The analysis uses data from a previous review of the program and estimates of costs and benefits over ten years, assuming each region faces a 10-year risk of major bushfire and the CFG group learnings would last ten years. Totalled over ten years, the cost per Fireguard Group for the program is $10,884, with a range of $2697-$19,071, and in the event of a major bushfire the predicted savings from reduced property loss is $732,747 and from reduced fatality $1.4 million. Even if the risk of major bushfire event in a region were one in 100 years, the estimated cost savings in a 100-year period is $217,116 per group. The value of the psychosocial impacts was not calculated, as quantitative data are currently not available.

A delayed inheritance: The Medical Board of Victoria's 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect"

The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register “legally qualified medical practitioners”. It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in “infamous conduct in a professional respect” (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board’s inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments’ distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century. The article maintains that the granting of the power to the Board was a crucial event in the history of the regulation of the Victorian medical profession. This is illustrated both by the difficulty encountered by the medical profession in dealing with doctors’ unethical conduct before 1933, and the Board’s concern to use its new authority responsibly and appropriately to protect the public and the profession in the three years after it attained the power.