Refrigeration is the most important invention in the history of food. But while commercial and home refrigerators have only been used for the past 100 years or so, people have long used cool natural environments to store foods for extended periods.
Temperature is important for controlling microbial growth. Just as we find food wholesome, bacteria and fungi also enjoy the nutritional benefits of foods. They will consume the food and multiply, eventually “spoiling” the food (think mouldy bread or slimy lettuce).
If the microbe can cause disease – such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli or Listeria – you’re at risk of food poisoning. Most disease-causing microbes can grow to dangerous levels even before the food is noticeably spoiled without changing the smell, taste or appearance of the food.
How to stop bugs growing in our food
All forms of life require a few basic things to grow: a source of energy, (sugar for us, sunlight for plants), oxygen (for higher forms of life), water and simple chemical building blocks that provide nitrogen, phosphorous and sulphur – and the correct temperature. Water is key, and denying it severely restricts microbial growth.
That’s why salt has long been used as a preservative for perishable foods like meats; salt binds the water and makes it unavailable to microbes. Acid can also be used (via pickling or fermentation), as most microbes don’t like acidic conditions.
Of course, cooking kills the microbes of concern, but they can contaminate and grow in the food afterwards.
If the food can’t be salted or pickled, or you have leftovers of cooked food, you’ll need to store the food at a temperature microbes don’t like. Refrigeration is the most effective and economical option.
Typically, the greater the moisture level, the more perishable the food. That’s why we can store dry foods (such as nuts) in the cupboard but high-moisture foods (such as fresh meat, vegetables) will quickly spoil if unrefrigerated.
The “danger zone” is the temperature range between 5°C and 60°C, where most common food poisoning bacteria like to grow. To avoid the danger zone, keep hot foods above 60°C and store foods below 5°C.
The two-hour/four-hour guidelines can also help avoid food poisoning from leftovers. If perishable food has been in the danger zone for:
less than two hours, use it immediately or store it appropriately
two to four hours, use it immediately
longer than four hours, discard it.
So, if the food has been sitting on the table after a long lunch on a warm day, it’s probably best to discard or consume it soon afterwards.
If the food is OK, store it in small portions, as these will reach the right temperature sooner than larger volumes, before refrigerating or freezing.
Using some common sense, and understanding how microbes grow, can help avoid a nasty case of diarrhoea – or worse. All food business must comply with food safety standards but how we prepare, store and consume food in our homes is equally important in preventing food-borne illness.
In a new series, we look at under acknowledged women through the ages.
In 1913, at the age of 23, Elsie Masson was travelling on a steamer near Port Essington, 150 miles from Darwin, when it was approached by a small lugger. The boat was manned by one white man and two black men. As she later recounted,
The white man raised a sunburnt face, fierce with grief and excitement, and shouted hoarsely, ‘My mate – Jim Campbell – speared by blacks at Junction Bay’. It was curious what a thrill of rage the words brought to the hearers – a sudden instinctive spasm of hatred of white for black.
Masson’s account of her own and the steamer’s other passengers’ visceral response to this event remains unusual and powerful in its candid confession of race hate. Like the moment in Heart of Darkness when an African “boy” announces, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead”, for Masson, this moment marked a shocking moment of reckoning with the other.
Masson in 1917.Copyright unknown.
Yet Masson’s sympathy for the Territory’s Aboriginal people was actually awakened through this violent clash and its judicial aftermath. As a journalist, she attended the trial of those accused of murdering Campbell, reporting on the proceedings for the Northern Territory Times. Her growing advocacy for Aboriginal people expresses the contradictions of racial thought at this time.
As one of the “first white women” to travel in the Northern Territory, Masson’s newspaper articles and book An Untamed Territory – a profusely-illustrated narrative of life in the wild north – show how she popularized the “expert” views of her circle: an elite global network of colonial administrators, including the famous anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer.
Elsie Masson was born in Melbourne in 1890, the second daughter of Lady Mary and Professor Orme Masson, the chair of chemistry at Melbourne University. Masson senior was a close colleague and friend of Spencer, anthropologist and foundation chair of biology at the university.
Masson was clever and well-educated. At 16, she was taken to Europe for an extended tour with her mother and sister, studying music in Leipzig and art in Florence, and developing a good knowledge of French, German and Italian.
When the Commonwealth Government assumed control of the NT in January 1911, it appointed Spencer to lead a preliminary scientific expedition with three other scientists, including University of Melbourne veterinarian John Gilruth, a forthright Scot. Impressed with their findings, the government appointed Spencer to Darwin for a year as Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of Aborigines. Gilruth accepted the post of Administrator of the Territory in February 1912.
Elsie Masson joined Gilruth’s household as au pair in April 1913, departing toward the end of 1914. She was recruited on the promise of “pretty walks” and a comfortable verandah, but she managed to fit in considerable travel and observation of Territory life during this time, as well as taking and collecting many photographs now held by Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum.
The ‘first white woman’
Masson’s life entailed daily interaction with a large, multiracial servant workforce, many of whom she photographed. These photos are unusual in that she named the subjects and sometimes recorded details about their lives.
However, they are also racially segregated, locating their subjects within their place of work. Her photos include Dhobie, the picturesque Chinese cook and laundryman; white Residence staff, and a labourer called “No More”, pictured with his buffalo.
Masson’s photo of Dhobie.Wayne Collection, Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
As the “first white woman”, Masson travelled to outlying parts of the Territory, such as Pine Creek Railway Line, the Daly River, Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya) in Arnhem Land, and as far as the Roper River in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
She wrote a report for Spencer on the Roper River Mission, established in 1908 by the Church Missionary Society at Mirlinbarrwarr, now known as Ngukurr.
Baldwin Spencer, The Motor-Car in the Bush, in Masson’s An Untamed Territory.Author provided.
Masson’s relish of the exotic places and culture she saw disguised the harsh racial segregation implemented by Gilruth, Holmes and Spencer through new legislation and regulations. In her writings, Masson contrasted moments of modernity, such as the first car trip in the NT, with what she imagined to be a disappearing Indigenous way of life.
Household servants, Government Residence.Wayne Collection, Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
But today, the reader is struck most powerfully by Masson’s transition from dislike to respect, as she describes her developing relationships – with her Chinese hawker, whose strange vegetables the household learns to enjoy, the Aboriginal maidservants, and finally even black men accused of murder.
Her portrait of Aboriginal housemaid Nellie is framed by a humorous account of her “strange” dress sense. But Masson soon “forgets her first repulsion, and finds the good-humoured face almost comely, and an easy grace beneath”.
Recognising customary law
In 1913 Masson attended the trial of nine Aboriginal men accused of murdering James Campbell, a trepanger (fisher of sea cucumber). Despite her initial “thrill of rage” toward the accused black murderers, Masson’s views changed as she witnessed the men’s unfair treatment within the British legal system, due to the language barrier and cultural misunderstandings.
Masson’s account of this trial ultimately argued for the need to acknowledge the coherence of Indigenous tradition, and what today is termed customary law.
During the trial, one witness Ada, for instance, described how Campbell and his ten companions had been fishing one night when he was attacked. But she also explained that Campbell had been murdered in retaliation for his “punishing” an old Aboriginal man by putting him into a trepang boiler, causing a painful death.
Masson’s photograph of trepang boilers provided graphic testimony to this agonising assault, showing a crime scene, the aftermath of torture and death. Alongside portraits of the accused and their families, she effectively humanised these people for her audience, asking,
Who can blame them for what they did? … It is to be feared that only too often the savage black who commits an act of violence is only avenging equal outrages done to his own race by the savage white.
Many agreed with Masson. The judge sentenced five men to death, but after review, their sentences were commuted to imprisonment for life with hard labour. In the context of increasingly punitive “protection” policies, this was at least something.
While Masson never returned to the Territory, she married the famous Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, and they went on to live in six countries. Sadly her adventures ended all too soon, as Elsie was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1928, and died in 1935.
It’s that time of year when we all start to make promises to ourselves about how this year it’ll be different. This is the year I’ll get my health in order, exercise more, save money, cut that bad habit, do more of this, less of that, and just be better. But the fact is, change is hard. Most of us need help.
So, we found some.
Today, experts who have researched this terrain will be sharing with us insights into how to make a change – big or small – using evidence from the world of academic research.
We’ll hear from Amanda Salis, a professor of obesity research at the University of Sydney’s Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise and Eating Disorders in the Charles Perkins Centre. She explains exactly is happening inside your body when you get that feeling you’ve eaten too much this silly season, that it’s time to step away from the festive feasts, put down the bubbly beverages and do a bit of exercise:
If you’re interested in participating in one of Amanda Salis’ weight loss trials, please contact her.
Also on the podcast episode Lisa Williams, a social psychologist from UNSW, shares with us all the research-backed tips and tricks for setting a goal and meeting it:
We’ll also hear from Amy, our case study, on how she stuck to her goals and made some big changes in her life:
Trust Me, I’m An Expert is a podcast where we ask academics to surprise, delight and inform us with their research. You can download previous episodes here.
And please, do check out other podcasts from The Conversation – including The Conversation US’ Heat and Light, about 1968 in the US, and The Anthill from The Conversation UK, as well as Media Files, a podcast all about the media. You can find all our podcasts over here.
The segments in today’s podcast were recorded and edited by Sunanda Creagh, with additional editing by Dilpreet Kaur Taggar.
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Does it ever strike you as odd that you and a friend can experience the same event at the same time, but come away with different memories of what happened? So why is it that people can recall the same thing so differently?
We all know memory isn’t perfect, and most memory differences are relatively trivial. But sometimes they can have serious consequences.
There are three important aspects to memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
encoding is how we get information into the brain
storage is how we retain information over time
retrieval is how we get information out of the brain.
Differences in each or a combination of these aspects might help explain why memories differ from one person to another.
How different people encode memories
Memory encoding starts with perception — the organisation and interpretation of sensory information from the environment.
The salience of sensory information (for example, how bright a light is or loud a sound) is important – but perception does not rely on salience alone.
Rather, perception is strongly affected by what we have experienced in the past and our expectations of what we might experience in the future. These effects are called top-down processes, and have a big impact on whether we successfully encode a memory.
One of the most important top-down processes is attention — our ability to focus selectively on parts of the world, to the exclusion of other parts.
While certain visual items can be perceived or encoded into memory with little or possibly no attention, attending to items is hugely beneficial for perception and memory.
How different people focus their attention on an event will affect what they remember.
For example, your preference for a particular sporting team can bias your attention and memory. A study of American football found that sports fans tended to remember rough play instigated by their opponent, rather than their own side.
Age also contributes to differences in memory, because our ability to encode the context of memories diminishes as we get older.
Context is an important feature of memory. Studies show that if we attend to both an item and its context, we remember the item better than if we attend to the item alone.
For example, we are more inclined to encode the location of our car keys if we focus on both the keys and how we have placed them in a room, rather than just focusing on the keys alone.
How different people store memories
Memories are first encoded into a temporary memory store called short-term memory. Short-term memories decay quickly and only have a capacity of three or four bits at a time.
But we can group larger bits of information into manageable chunks to fit into memory. For instance, consider the challenging letter sequence:
C, I, A, A, B, C, F, B, I
This can be chunked into the easily memorised:
CIA, ABC, FBI
Information in short-term memory is held in a highly accessible state so we can bind features together. Techniques such as verbal rehearsal (repeating words aloud or in our head) allow us to consolidate our short-term memories into long-term memories.
Long-term memory has an enormous capacity. We can remember at least 10,000 pictures, according to a study from the 1970s.
Memories can differ between people on the basis of how we consolidate them. Many studies have investigated how memory consolidation can be improved. Sleep is a well-known example.
A study found that long-term memory can also be enhanced by taking caffeine immediately after learning. The study used caffeine tablets to carefully control dosage, but this builds on growing evidence for the benefits of moderate coffee consumption.
How different people retrieve memories
Retrieving episodic memories, our memory of events, is a complex process because we must combine objects, places and people into a single meaningful event.
The complexity of memory retrieval is exemplified by tip-of-the-tongue states — the common and frustrating experience that we hold something in long-term memory but we cannot retrieve it right now.
The emergence of brain imaging has meant we have identified many brain areas that are important for memory retrieval, but the full picture of how retrieval works remains mysterious.
There are many reasons that memory retrieval can differ from one person to another. Our ability to retrieve memories can be affected by our health.
For example, memory retrieval is impaired if we have a headache or are stressed.
Retrieval is also affected by the outside world; even the wording of questions can change how we recall an event. A study instructed people to view films of car accidents and then asked them to judge the speed the cars were moving. If people were asked how fast the cars were moving when they “crashed” or “smashed” into each other they judged the cars as moving faster than if the words “contacted” or “hit” were used.
Memory retrieval can also be affected by the presence of other people. When groups of people work together they often experience collaborative inhibition — a deficit in overall memory performance when compared to the same group if they work separately and their memories are pooled after each individual has recounted their version.
Effects such as collaborative inhibition highlight why memory differences occur but also why eyewitness testimony is so problematic.
Thankfully, the proliferation of smartphones has lead to the development of innovative apps, such as iWitnessed, that are designed to help witnesses and victims preserve and protect their memories.
Technology such as this and knowledge of memory encoding, storage, and retrieval can help us determine whom to trust when differences in memory occur.
If you feel you consistently fail at your New Year’s resolutions, you are not alone. Despite our good intentions, we’re pretty poor at changing our own behaviour. We continue to smoke, eat or drink too much, and exercise too little, all of which affect our health and well-being.
In trying to change behaviour (including our own), we need to reduce resistance. You’ve likely heard some of the pitfalls of setting unspecific or unrealistic goals. Another contributor to resistance is when our intended action is not something we are personally motivated to do.
Psychological studies show we can overcome resistance by setting goals that tap into what we find meaningful and that reflect our needs.
Why New Year’s resolutions fail
Why is it when we set a New Year’s resolution our behaviour doesn’t change, or it only changes for a limited time? There is a common obstacle that could underlie the failure of changing behaviour: resistance or more particularly inertia.
Inertia is a form of resistance where we can’t motivate ourselves to perform a behaviour. We know what we need to do, the intention is there, we just don’t do it.
One trap we can fall into is setting goals that aren’t really our own – they’re not personalised. Instead, we often set generic resolutions, such as to exercise more.
Are your goals what you expect others want from you, or are they your own?from shutterstock.com
These may have been adopted from someone else’s goal or may be based on what we feel we should change, as per social expectations or norms.
Adopting broad, generic goals may be a good starting point for change, but generic goals can also be conducive to resistance because they are low in personal relevance.
Setting goals that draw on personal motivations produces greater confidence in our ability to change and a greater sense of ownership over the process. These lead to larger and more lasting changes in behaviour.
The importance of ownership for personal motivation is captured nicely in what is known as the self-determination theory of motivation.
This places a high level of importance on doing what we find to be intrinsically motivating or working from what is inherently rewarding or satisfying. It’s in contrast to extrinsic or external motivations which can create feelings of coercion when we follow goals imposed by invisible others.
If you choose to exercise more as your New Year’s resolution because you think people will find you more attractive or because you feel guilty for not doing it, chances are you are working primarily from external sources of motivation.
If, on the other hand, you find exercise interesting and enjoyable or feel it expresses a personal value to be healthy, you are likely to be working from internal, personal motivations.
So, say your personal goal is to read 50 books in the year because you value knowledge. How do you put this into practice and make sure your resolution sticks?
One simple behaviour-change technique that can be applied to New Year’s resolutions is self-persuasion. This essentially involves generating an argument for why you would like to change a certain behaviour.
Try to consider what is most salient and personally motivating for you and what a certain change could bring that you value. Perhaps you value knowledge and empathy, and you believe the more books you read about people’s struggles, the greater understanding you will have of others.
Maybe exercising more, like getting involved in group sports, will help connect you with your friends. Or perhaps you enjoy alone time, and going for long hikes will give you more opportunities for quiet contemplation.
Although one of these examples may resonate with you, it’s possible these aren’t at all relevant to you. This is why it is important to examine what you find personally relevant.
The self-persuasion technique has been successfully applied in a variety of settings, including producing moderate, short-term reductions in smoking and work-related stress, and increases in tipping and intentions to help others.
Generating your own arguments is more effective in evoking change than reading multiple arguments generated by other people, even when the quality of the provided arguments is rated as being better than yours.
But when using the self-persuasion technique, remember less may be more. You are better off generating one to two reasons for your intended change than trying to generate a long list of arguments.
Also in studies that have tested this technique, participants have usually had to write their reasons down. This increased involvement may have also helped.
And then?
This is not the whole story of setting effective New Year’s resolutions. Changing behaviour takes time and effort – particularly if you are trying to change a well-established habit.
During the change process, reflect often: consider what is and what isn’t working, and how you could overcome obstacles that interfere with you achieving your goals.
This is where you can apply other goal-setting and behaviour-change techniques you may have learned about previously, such as understanding and altering what triggers and maintains your behaviour.
Implementation intentions are particularly helpful in setting goals and overcoming obstacles. This technique requires setting specific if-then plans for how you will respond in a particular situation — such as how you will ensure you get your daily dose of exercise if it is raining.
Five steps to setting personalised New Year’s resolutions:
Generate a broad resolution or goal as a starting point (exercise more)
reflect on your motivation for this goal: is it driven by internal motivations and aligned with other aspects of your personality? If not, revisit the first step
write down one or two reasons why the resolution is important for you
write down plans for achieving your goal, including if-then strategies
continue to review your progress and modify your personal goal as required.
The most beautifully constructed goals will be ineffective if they aren’t personally relevant. Before you consider how to turn over your new leaf, it might be worth examining which leaf you want to turn over, and why.
However, one medium sized dog produces about 180 kilograms of poo a year. With about 9 million dogs in Australia, it can really start to pile up.
Rather than wrap it in plastic and throw it away – where it eventually ends up in landfill – you can use dog poo as a sustainable source of fertiliser.
The waste products of humans and their associated animals have not always been a problem. In the past, even within the memory of people I met living on small Pacific islands, human poo was produced in relatively small amounts because the population was low, and could decompose naturally and safely within the soil. Healthy soil contains a vast number of microbes and organisms that thrive on organic material.
But burgeoning populations have changed this. Waste produced by humans is now an immense problem. Not only is there a waste issue, but human activities have caused soil pollution and degradation that kills soil microbes or impairs their capacity to process organic matter.
Dog poo is considered an environmental hazard. This is a consequence of its composition. It is comprised of three-quarters water plus undigested food including carbohydrates, fibre, proteins, and fats from the dog’s digestive system. Also present are a wide range of resident bacteria that are needed for digestion.
If dogs are infected with worms, or other disease-causing microbes, these can be present in their poo. Left on the street, dog poo is washed into waterways, creating a potential health hazard. Once pathogenic microbes from the poo get into waterways, they can find their way into other living things – including humans.
People also don’t like dog poo because of its smell. This is due to the volatile products produced by microbes in the gut that are involved in the digestion process. More than 100 different chemicals that could contribute to the bad smell have been identified.
The author’s pup, in a garden he helped fertilise.Author provided
Because poo smells bad we avoid dealing with it. Local councils offer plastic bags at parks and other public places to encourage dog owners to collect the poo. Bins, sometimes specifically for dog waste, are often placed nearby so the smelly package can be discarded as soon as possible.
But this is not the best solution, because ultimately the dog poo ends up going to landfill, contributing to our ongoing problem of waste accumulation.
Rather than becoming a pollutant, dog poo can become a nutrient for your garden, by being composted in your backyard.
If you have a garden you can make your own compost bin by adding the dog poo to grass clippings, plant or other organic waste, and even sawdust as a source of food for the microbes. The microbes then break down the organic material into humus. During this process the temperature in the compost mixture rises to 50-60℃. Over time, the heat will kill most canine bacteria, as they are adapted to live at lower temperatures in the dog’s gut.
Compost contains billions of microbes per gram of material and competition from these (as well as the environmental conditions of the compost that are very different from the dog digestive system) assist in promoting destruction of pathogenic canine microbes, if present.
The compost needs to be turned over weekly to ensure uniform composing and oxygenation. Over days or weeks the temperature in the compost drops, indicating when the decomposition process is complete.
Then it’s time to use your compost to improve your garden!
A couple of dog-do dont’s:
Don’t include waste from unknown dogs or from dogs that show signs of disease
Avoid using it on vegetables for human consumption.
If you live in an apartment and don’t have a garden or access to green waste, you can still compost dog poo and use the product. There are small compost bins commercially available for this purpose. Composted material from these can be used on your outdoor or indoor plants.
And if you don’t have any indoor plants, then you should think about getting some, as they can cut down on ozone in the air and even reduce indoor pollution.
This is a longer read at just over 1,300 words. Enjoy!
In 2018, the relationship between the Australian higher education sector and the federal government finished as it began: with the announcements of more funding cuts.
In between these financial bookends, the sector experienced somewhat of a culture war revival. Debate raged over Western civilisation values, academic freedom and what research was considered to be in the national interest.
We begin with a funding cut in late 2017
In late 2017, the federal government announced that funding for Commonwealth-supported places in 2018 would be capped at 2017 levels. This decision was designed to limit increases to higher education spending without needing to repeal the demand-driven system, a bill that the government believed might not pass the Senate.
Institutions could continue to enrol as many students as they wished. But they would not be funded for the extra numbers.
Almost one year on, the actual impact of the funding freeze is not yet clear. This is because official enrolment figures for 2018 will not be released until 2019.
Furthermore, as some universities had already made strategic decisions on future enrolment levels, it may take some time for the effects to fully flow through the system – should a future government not reverse the cuts.
Academic freedom … again
Money aside, two words sum up a year’s worth of interaction between the government and the Australian higher education sector: “academic freedom”.
In reality, this is a perennial debate. The only thing that changes from year to year is what issue will be the tinder and where the spark will come from.
In 2018, there were two primary sources. The first had its roots in a cultural battle dating back to 2011, when Tony Abbott – then opposition leader and future prime minister – reportedly started discussing with billionaire Paul Ramsay the possibility of funding a Western civilisation university program based around reading the “great books” of the tradition.
Former prime minister John Howard speaking at the launch of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation in Sydney.Peter Rae/AAP
The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was established in March 2017. In early 2018, negotiations began with the Australian National University (ANU) to develop and run course offerings.
From the outset critics of the program saw it as an ideological rather than educational venture. In evidence, they pointed to Abbott’s own statements, such as:
The key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it.
Concerns about the erosion of academic freedom and standards were raised and eventually ANU withdrew from negotiations, stating:
… alarm bells rang … as the Ramsay Centre continued to propose amendments to the evolving draft MOU, which amounted to more and more control over key academic matters.
Responding to this, Liberal Senator James Paterson called for universities to face fines for failing to uphold free speech. He argued financial penalties “would go some way to preventing the ‘administrative cowardice’ behind the Australian National University’s decision”.
The Ramsay Centre turned to the University of Sydney to host the program. A name change to the course was offered, but the same concerns arose.
The issue simmered throughout the latter half of the year until December, when the University of Wollongong announced it would host the centre. Wollongong academics immediately criticised the decision. The issue is almost certain to percolate into and beyond 2019.
While the Ramsay Centre issue revolved around the control exerted by private funders over higher education teaching, the second issue inflaming the culture wars debate in 2018 concerned taxpayer-funded research.
In October, many Australian scholars were outraged to discover the former federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, had personally intervened to reject several Australian Research Council (ARC) funding grants.
The ARC is one of the peak bodies for allocating research funds and being awarded an ARC research grant is akin to winning Olympic gold for many scholars. It’s not an overstatement to say that, in many cases, academic careers are made or broken by grants (or lack thereof) won through the ARC.
The fact that all the grants Birmingham had rejected were humanities projects didn’t go unnoticed. Attacking the decisions, ALP Senator Kim Carr tweeted:
I‘m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending A$223,000 on projects like ‘Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar’.
Many peak academic, research and teaching organisations issued denunciations of Birmingham’s action. They pointed out not only had the peer-reviewed funding recommendations been overturned, the researchers in question had not been told this was due to ministerial veto (as opposed, for example, to reasons of academic rigour or the quality of the research).
The public universities called on the new federal education minister, Dan Tehan, to follow expert advice and not veto any grants in the future. Tehan declined to offer this assurance, but said he would instruct the ARC to let researchers know in the future when the minister had vetoed their grant.
Australian universities rated on freedom of speech
The year-long debate surrounding academic freedom culminated in a report released in December by the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA). It rated each Australian university in terms of policies specifically enacted to protect free speech and/or policies hostile to free speech on campus.
The report headlined 35 out of Australia’s 42 universities were “red-rated” for policies and actions hostile to free speech on campus. This, said the IPA, was an increase from 33 in 2016 and 34 in 2017.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott speaking to an Institute of Public Affairs audience in Sydney.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Critics of the report, including Glyn Davis, the former vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, responded that the report was US-centric and not reflective of the Australian experience. On the wider issue of academic freedom, Davis noted that many times cases were offered as evidence of wider trends without providing evidence for those trends. He clarified that the separate issues of academic freedom and freedom of speech are frequently conflated.
More coal in university Christmas stockings
And finally, just as it did the year before, the government’s midyear budget update previewed a further A$328.5 million in funding cuts, this time to university research. The government claimed this would allow it to allocate additional spending for teaching at regional universities. But Universities Australia labelled it a “ram raid”.
Australians flock to the beach over the summer holidays: Bondi alone had 2.9 million visitors in 2017 – 2018. But while tourism campaigns often portray the beach as an idyllic, isolated haven, many of our beach stories depict it as a darker, more crowded and complex place.
Here are ten Australian beach stories (in no particular order) worth reading this summer.
Floundering by Romy Ash
Romy Ash’s debut novel Floundering, shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin award, is a captivating, sometimes chilling story of two young boys who are taken, without warning, by their mother to a beachside caravan park.
Left to their own devices, the boys must make the most of their time by the beach without anything but their school bags and uniforms.
The un-named regional beach in this novel is uncomfortable, “a location of risk and danger” as author Robert Drewe once described it, and sometimes reveals the worst ways in which nature and humanity meet. It’s a refuge for people looking to escape from city life, a stark comparison to more urbanised beaches.
Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey
When I tell people that I research the Australian beach, often their first response is to ask if I’ve watched Puberty Blues. Perhaps Australia’s most iconic beach text, the book (first published in 1979) is the story of two friends growing up in beachside suburbs of Sydney. It was adapted for film by Bruce Beresford in 1981.
Both the book and film, with their characteristic colloquialisms and Australian slang, capture a sense of Australian coastal identity while revealing uncomfortable truths about gender, sex, and drugs for the teenagers they depict.
Australian stories about the beach are often male-centred and written by men. Puberty Blues is an important contribution to beach literature because of Debbie and Sue, its female protagonists, and their perspectives on a blokey world.
Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr
In 1966, the three Beaumont children disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide. They were last seen in the company of a tall, blond man. Despite continued searching, even earlier this year, they have never been found.
Time’s Long Ruin (2010) is a fictionalised account of the disappearance of three children as told through the eyes of their young neighbour. Loosely based on the Beaumont story, Orr captures the dread of the aftermath for those left behind who knew and loved the children, the challenge of dealing with false leads and unreliable information, and the growing realisation that they will likely never be found.
The case of the Beaumont children had an enormous impact on Australian culture. My mother, who was a young girl when they disappeared, still recalls how her parents would worry about her momentarily being out of sight at the beach at this time.
On the surface, this novel is about surfing. But it asks deep questions about masculinity, and boys’ attitudes towards sex, while capturing the feel of Australian coastal life in the 1970s.
Winton’s writings often engage with the ocean, the coast, and the beach – usually in West Australia, where he lives. His memoirs have revealed his love for the coastal landscape. As he writes in Land’s Edge (1993): “There is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I’d rather be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings”.
The Empty Beach by Peter Corris
Peter Corris died in August, after publishing 102 novels. The Empty Beach (1983) was released early in his career and is the fourth novel featuring the private investigator Cliff Hardy – a homegrown, hard-boiled detective, firmly located in Sydney. It was adapted for film in 1985.
In this book, Hardy is investigating the disappearance of John Singer, missing and presumed dead. He begins his probe in the rough, working class Bondi of the early 1980s. Corris captures Bondi Beach through the eyes of his protagonist, depicting it as a seedy extension of the city.
Hassled by junkies, threatened by mobsters; Hardy spends much of the novel embroiled in the corrupt underbelly of Sydney’s criminal kingpins, never far from the now infamous shoreline.
The True Colour of the Sea, by Robert Drewe
Having lived in many coastal spots across the country, including Perth, Sydney, and Byron Bay, Robert Drewe’s stories regularly capture that very familiar, domestic sense of a beachside life.
Drewe’s The Bodysurfers (1987), a collection of short stories, became a bestseller.
His memoirs and short stories are all infused by the beach landscape, and this latest collection is no different.
As the narrator writes in Dr Pacific, the opening story in his new collection: “One thing’s for sure – it’s my love of the ocean that keeps me going. You know what I call the ocean? Dr Pacific. All I need to keep me fit and healthy is my daily consultation with Dr Pacific.”
Atomic City by Sally Breen
Sally Breen lives and works on the Gold Coast, and that strip of high density development on the beach works its way into much of her writing.
With its high rise skyline under a big sky, Surfers Paradise has been called a “pleasure dome” by Frank Moorhouse. But Atomic City (published in 2013), set largely in the lofty apartment buildings and businesses that abut, and look out on, the beach, captures perfectly the grift and graft of this place.
Jade arrives on the Gold Coast to make herself over and get rich. Together with shady croupier “The Dealer” this is a beach tale of cons, scams and identity theft.
Not Meeting Mr Right by Anita Heiss
Prominent Australian Indigenous author Anita Heiss straddles both fiction and non-fiction, with her work often grounded in ideas around Indigenous identity. Her series of “chick lit” novels includes Not Meeting Mr Right (first published in 2007).
In the novel, Alice lives beachside in Coogee and regularly walks the coastal path between it and Bondi. A proudly single, Indigenous woman, Alice has a change of heart about marriage and decides to get serious about settling down – which means embarking on the rocky road towards finding love. In contrast to the challenges – including racism – she encounters along the way, the beach is a comfortably ordinary presence in this novel. However, Heiss also parodied the white Australian beach experience in an earlier book Sacred Cows (1996).
After January by Nick Earls
If you grew up in Brisbane when I did, there was a high chance you were reading a Nick Earls novel or seeing one adapted into a play. After January (first published in 1996) is one of Earls’ first works for young adult readers, and is set in the long break after finishing high school.
Alex is on holidays at Caloundra in his family’s beach house, a teenage boy uncomfortable in his skin but comfortable in the ocean. Although now more than 20 years old, this story still captures the uncertainty of burgeoning adulthood and the comfort the ocean can bring.
Bluebottle by Belinda Castles
For many Australians, the beach can be wrapped up in childhood memory. These memories can blend and blur. In my mind, my summers spent at the beach with my grandparents were never-ending, from the moment school finished until the day before I was set to return. In reality, we spent some time there, often weekends, and certainly never the entire school holidays.
Belinda Castles’ Bluebottle tells the story of the Bright family, and is filled with that uncomfortable tension that arises when we realise memory is fallible. Siblings Jack and Lou recount key moments from their childhood, starting with the disappearance of a local school girl and their father’s unpredictable purchase of a beachside property in Bilgola, Sydney. However, they learn that growing older can change perspectives on the past and, like the beach, it can be hard to tell what’s under the surface while the waves distort our view.
Our senses are stuck in the past. There’s a flash of lightning, and then seconds pass until we hear the rumble of distant thunder. We hear the past.
We are seeing into the past too.
While sound travels about a kilometre every three seconds, light travels 300,000 kilometres every second. When we see a flash of lighting three kilometres away, we are seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago. That’s not exactly the distant past.
But as we look further afield, we can peer further back. We can see seconds, minutes, hours and years into the past with our own eyes. Looking through a telescope, we can look even further into the past.
A second back in time
If you really want to look back in time, you need to look up.
When we look at the Moon, we are seeing it as it was just over a second ago.ESO/G.Hüdepohl, CC BY
The Moon is our nearest celestial neighbour – a world with valleys, mountains and craters.
It’s also about 380,000km away, so it takes 1.3 seconds for light to travel from the Moon to us. We see the Moon not as it is, but as it was 1.3 seconds ago.
The Moon doesn’t change much from instant to instant, but this 1.3-second delay is perceptible when mission control talks to astronauts on the Moon. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so a message from mission control takes 1.3 seconds to get to the Moon, and even the quickest of replies takes another 1.3 seconds to come back.
Radio communications to the Moon have a perceptible time delay.
Minutes and hours
It’s not hard to look beyond the Moon and further back in time. The Sun is about 150 million km away, so we see it as it was about 8 minutes ago.
Even our nearest planetary neighbours, Venus and Mars, are tens of millions of kilometres away, so we see them as they were minutes ago. When Mars is very close to Earth, we are seeing it as it was about three minutes ago, but at other times light takes more than 20 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth.
This presents some problems if you’re on Earth controlling a Rover on Mars. If you’re driving the Rover at 1km per hour then the lag, due to the finite speed of light, means the rover could be 200 metres ahead of where you see it, and it could travel another 200 metres after you command it to hit the brakes.
The finite speed of light presents some challenges for driving on Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Let’s go a bit further out in space. At its closest to Earth, Saturn is still more than a billion kilometres away, so we see it as it was more than an hour ago.
The night sky is full of stars, and those stars are incredibly distant. The distances are measured in light years, which corresponds to the distance travelled by light in one year. That’s about 9 trillion km.
Alpha Centauri, the nearest star visible to the unaided eye, is at a distance 270,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. That’s 4 light years, so we see Alpha Centauri as it was 4 years ago.
Some bright stars are much more distant still. Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, is about 640 light years away. If Betelgeuse exploded tomorrow (and it will explode one day), we wouldn’t know about it for centuries.
Even without a telescope we can see much much further. The Andromeda galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds are relatively nearby galaxies that are bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.
The Large Magellanic cloud is a mere 160,000 light years away, while Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. For comparison, modern humans have only walked the Earth for about 300,000 years.
As light moves at finite speed, we can see bursts of light echo off interstellar dust.
Billions
With the unaided eye you can look millions of years into the past, but how about billions? Well, you can do that at the eyepiece of an amateur telescope.
3C 273 can be seen with a small telescope despite being billions of light years away.ESA/Hubble & NASA, CC BY
Quasar 3C 273 is an incredibly luminous object, which is brighter than individual galaxies, and powered by a huge black hole.
But it’s 1,000 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see because it’s 2.5 billion light years away. That said, you can spot it with a 20cm aperture telescope.
A bigger telescope allows you to peer even further into space, and I once had the pleasure of using an eyepiece on a 1.5-metre diameter telescope. Quasar APM 08279+5255 was just a faint dot, which isn’t surprising as it’s 12 billion light years away.
Earth is just 4.5 billion years old, and even the universe itself is 13.8 billion years old. Relatively few people have seen APM 08279+5255 with their own eyes, and in doing so they (and I) have looked back across almost the entire history of our universe.
With a big enough telescope you can see quasar APM 08279+5255 and look 12 billion years back in time.Sloan Digital Sky Survey, CC BY
So when you look up, remember you aren’t seeing things as they are now; you’re seeing things as they were.
Without really trying, you can see years into the past. And with the aid of a telescope you can see millions or even billions of years into the past with your very own eyes.
Women have long been subject to powerful social pressures to look a certain way. The “feminine ideal” – a svelte female figure – has dominated film, television and magazine culture.
The result is a narrow idea of what feminine beauty should look like and an associated crisis in body satisfaction.
The dominance of the feminine ideal has led to a body satisfaction crisis for many women.Mike Nelson/AAP
In recent years an “athletic ideal” – characterised by muscle tone and power – has emerged as an alternative conception of beauty. Female bodies on the track are as appealing as those on the catwalk.
This might be considered a good thing – a broader definition of beauty is more inclusive. More accepted body types, more body satisfaction, right?
From the perspective of former athletes, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Athletes are a useful population to explore in terms of the relationship between “athletic” and “feminine” ideals – they are exposed to both more than most women.
A recent study of 218 former athletes showed they found body image a difficult terrain to navigate. Gymnasts and swimmers, retired for between two and six years, were asked to identify what body changes they noticed, how they felt about them and how they coped.
Some former athletes embraced a new, less muscular body that emerged due to the retirement-induced reduction in training load.
Chelsea, a 26-year-old retired swimmer, commented:
Lost most of the heavier muscle I gained while training in college about six months after I stopped swimming. Due to the loss, I dropped about 15–20 pounds… I was surprised at how baggy my clothes felt and was pleasantly surprised that I could fit in smaller sizes. I didn’t feel as bulky or broad-shouldered.
With bulk and brawn confined to her former life, Chelsea rejoices in her increased sense of femininity. This suggests traditional conventions of feminine beauty remain the preference even for former athletes who often take pride in their physical strength and muscularity.
A stronger ideal doesn’t necessarily lead to a healthier body image.from shutterstuck.com
So, perhaps statements such as “strong is the new skinny” are overplayed and the feminine ideal remains powerful and difficult to resist.
Another finding was that the athletic ideal may be the alternative ideal, but it’s not necessarily a healthier ideal or one that will lead to a more positive body image.
Retired swimmer Abbey, 26, illustrated this point when she stated:
It took me a long time to realise that my body would never be what it was when I was an athlete… I still think back and use that image as a gauge to how I could look, but also know that my life does not revolve around working out 20-plus hours a week or needing to be in top shape to be successful. I still want to be as lean and as strong as I used to be.
Although Abbey remains committed to an athletic ideal, she is unable to fulfil it now she is no longer an athlete. Accepting this is a difficult process and she still pines for her former body.
An athletic ideal may not exclusively focus on thinness but it still demands stringent diets and training regimes and it has been linked to disordered eating and exercise behaviours.
Ideals, by definition, aren’t healthy because they demand the unachievable: perfection.
Some athletes were torn between the athletic ideal and the feminine ideal, identifying with both and attempting to walk a tightrope between a sporty look and a feminine one.
Many former athletics walk a tightrope between a feminine and sporty body.from shutterstock.com
For example, former swimmer Simone, 26, reflected:
My weight is pretty much the same as when I was swimming, but I am significantly less muscular. I’m glad I am not as muscular as I was when I was swimming and that my shoulders shrunk to a size that would fit into clothes, but I would like to be a little more muscular/toned than I am now.
And 25-year-old Carrie, a retired gymnast, echoed the “toned but not too toned” mantra:
I am less muscular and my butt has gotten a little saggy. I feel OK because I am still thin and feel energetic, but I would like to be more toned but not as bulky (muscular) as I was when I was competing in my sport.
Carrie and Simone desired athletic tone but not at the expense of conventional femininity. At the same time, they sought the thin ideal but not at the expense of an athletic look.
The athletic and feminine ideal represent two contradictory masters; to serve one is to reject the other. Finding the middle ground necessary to appease both is an almost impossible task.
It is naïve to view the athletic ideal as simply providing women with a different or new way to love their bodies; it might also provide a new way to hate them. The more ideals there are, the more ways there are to fall short.
Strong isn’t the new skinny quite yet. And, if it were, it would be nothing to brag about.
Many Australians will take a trip to one of our national parks over the holidays. In New South Wales alone, there are more than 51 million visits to national parks each year. Few if any of us would expect not to make it out of one alive.
But national parks claim lives around the world every year. In the United States, an average of 160 visitors each year die in a national park. Australia’s numbers are unsurprisingly smaller – there have been 13 deaths in national parks since 2013 – but the common theme is that these fatalities are usually avoidable.
Wherever death and injury are avoidable, it pays to alert people to the dangers. In Australia the main risks – falling off cliffs and waterfalls, deadly snakebites, getting lost – can all be reduced by one crucial piece of advice: stick to the path.
It sounds simple enough. But in fact, visitors failing to heed advice about walking trails is a significant problem for national park managers. Venturing off-trail poses significant danger to visitors, and puts unnecessary strain on emergency services and police.
Our 2017 study was the first to gather some hard numbers on the reasons why people tend to disobey the signs. We surveyed 325 visitors at Blue Mountains National Park on their attitudes to off-trail walking.
So, what’s behind our compulsion to get off the beaten track? First, 30% of respondents told us that off-trail walking can result in a shorter or easier walking route, whereas 20% said straying from the path can afford a closer look at nature.
Second, visitors are heavily influenced by other visitors and friends – the “monkey see, monkey do” effect. They are much more likely to leave the track if they see someone else do it first.
It might make for a great photo, but the dangers are obvious.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Third, in the absence of a handy toilet, many visitors venture off-trail for a private “comfort break”.
Finally, visitors rely heavily on signage to help them stay on the designated trail. Some 13% of our survey respondents said they would venture off-trail if there was a lack of adequate signs.
What might change our behaviour?
There are several tactics park authorities can use to reduce off-trail walking at national parks. They can use direct management techniques such as capping site capacity to avoid congestion – basically, regulating the maximum number of walkers in a given area, so the paths don’t feel too congested. They may consider zoning orders to permit or limit certain events to control capacity.
Ropes or low barriers along the walking trail can give a clear indication of the trail’s boundary. Of course, there is a fine balance between building structural barriers and maintaining the feeling of natural wilderness in a park.
Social media marketing might also work well. Suggested slogans such as “A true mate sticks to the trail” or “Be safe and stay on the trail with your mates” might help influence visitors’ behaviour. Park visitors are ever more connected to social media – Parks Australia’s social media channels reach an estimated 30 million people.
Signs should also let walkers know exactly what they are getting themselves into, by posting clearly the length and typical duration of walking tracks, and the distance to popular destinations such as lookout points. These signs should be posted both at the beginning of trails at at intervals along it, particularly at junctions or river crossings.
When it comes to our national parks it’s best to assume that, as with most things in life, humans will look for alternatives to what is expected. It’s human nature to want to bend the rules in what we might wrongly think is a harmless way.
Bushwalking in a national park is a great way to spend some time this summer. But when going off-trail could turn a tranquil walk into a deadly accident, it pays to stay on the beaten track.
If we think back to our own childhood days, most of us would agree making good friends in primary school was not always an easy task. Sometimes friendship occurred out of convenience or survival when there was a limited number of peers to choose from. Sometimes friendship was a utility to be bought and sold through the transaction of lollies or other interesting lunchbox snacks.
Sometimes friendship developed through shared interests and extra-curricular activities. But the friendships found to stand the test of time are those that work to enhance both lives through a mutual sense of humour, empathy, honesty, loyalty, trust and respect.
From this perspective, the best type of friendship is not based on utility, pleasure or convenience which may dissolve over time, but rather the character or virtues of both people. Such friendship needs to be given freely (rather than forced), reciprocal (rather than one-sided), and recognise the virtues both people contribute in getting to know each other and themselves more deeply.
What is developmentally normal?
From a psychological perspective, there are five stages of social competence that influence the formation of friendships:
stage one (three to seven years) involves momentary friendship with whoever is in close proximity
stage two (four to nine years) involves one-way friendship with someone who can help us achieve our own goals
stage three (six to 12 years) involves reciprocal friendship, but only under specific conditions
stage four (11-15 years) involves mutually close and supportive friendship
stage five (12 to adulthood) involves friendship which respects the autonomy of each individual even though they may share similar interests and deeper feelings.
From a sociological perspective, friendship is not a series of biologically determined hoops children are expected to jump through in sequential order. Children draw on social strategies to resist or create their own peer culture in ways that may differ from adult expectations. They don’t simply mimic adult socialisation.
Making friends in schools with more cultural diversity can minimise the risk of peer victimisation.from www.shutterstock.com
Yet, the members of select cliques still define what’s considered normal or acceptable within this peer culture. In fact, being chosen as friends by those of equal or higher peer status can decrease the risk of peer victimisation.
Given such complexity in friendship formation, it’s not surprising many parents are concerned with how their children can make quality friendships in primary school. Particularly as research has found a positive link between high-quality friendships and better academic results. They also experience less stress from peer exclusion.
So, if high-quality friendships are important for student academic results and stress reduction, what can parents and teachers do to facilitate this?
What parents can do
A magic formula doesn’t exist, but there are some general evidence-based strategies that have proven to assist in friendship formation without the risk of “bonsai parenting” (where parents over-nurture their children) or “bubble-wrapping” children. These include:
sending your child to a more culturally diverse school where no ethnic group represents the majority of the population and there is a lower risk of visibility and peer victimisation
encouraging your child to participate in school-based extra-curricular activities such as sport, creative arts or youth groups where they have the opportunity to broaden their social networks
organising play dates with peers who are socially competent and have similar interests to your child
supporting your child’s own strategies for making friends at school such as observing peers, making or accepting requests to play, initiating or participating in clubs or teams and intervening to include others.
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to maintain friendships all the way through adulthood.from www.shutterstock.com
What teachers can do
Given the large amount of time students spend at school, teachers also have a role to play in supporting students to make and maintain positive friendships through:
explicitly teaching interpersonal skills such as expressing opinions in constructive ways, respecting difference, and caring about the feelings of others
providing time, space and opportunities for students to work or play with others, identify new friends and maintain their own existing friendships
being aware of peer culture and attuned to changes, tensions and exclusions in student friendship groups in the classroom or on the playground
creating a safe space where children can discuss friendship issues such as regular “circle time”.
How to work through ending friendships in primary school
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to maintain friendships as we transition from primary to secondary school (and beyond). Research has shown this may have a positive effect on academic performance and mental health.
But sometimes we grow out of friendships as we evolve in different directions and our values and interests change. There may be times when friendships need to be dissolved if they breach our trust and/or damage our well-being. Children as well as adults, need to know when and how to dissolve such friendships and how to work through any sense of loss that may result.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Hu, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Design & Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra
The new economy and new technology are changing Canberra’s city centre, Walter Burley Griffin’s design legacy of 100 years ago. While the central area is becoming an innovation precinct and a dynamic place, it comes with a cost of social gentrification and unaffordability.
In Griffin’s design for Canberra, the city centre was planned to be a lively business centre with high-density retailing and commercial uses. The original idea included a citywide tram network supported by higher-density development along the corridors. City Hill was intended to be a heart for the city’s citizens.
Griffin’s vision was not truly fulfilled, however.
The new economy seems to provide an opportunity unforeseen by Griffin to revitalise the city centre.
Canberra is a knowledge city, despite its comparatively small population and employment sector. Knowledge is Canberra’s industry.
According to the Australian 2016 Census data, the city centre – known as the Civic – has the highest concentration of knowledge workers in the Canberra region (Figure 1). They are transforming the city centre’s functions, activities and spatial uses and pattern.
Figure 1. Spatial distribution of knowledge workers in Canberra.ABS 2016 Census
The transformation of city centres is a global phenomenon. It is happening in major Australian capital cities.
Canberra presents an extreme case to illustrate this point, as a planned city known for being a “bush capital” with suburban sprawl. The city of just over 400,000 people has an area of more than 800 square kilometres. But its compact centre is becoming more important in a globalised and networked society.
The city centre is more than a geographical or spatial centre. Its “centrality” is cultural, social, political and economical. Canberra’s city centre, a Modernist planning legacy, now exists in a setting of multiple global and local forces. These forces are intersecting with economic restructuring, ubiquitous information technology, knowledge diffusion and people movement.
As a result, the city centre is becoming more “centralised”: it is a cluster of functions, a magnet of activities.
The knowledge work and workers are reshaping the use of spaces and the public realm in the city centre. Innovation activities require more interaction and exchange, more access to public space and amenities, and more spatial and temporal flexibility. They are blurring the conventional division of land uses and space uses and challenging the old ways of design thinking.
One spatial impact of the new economy is the growing presence and practice of smart work in Canberra’s city centre. Creative workers are sharing spaces and facilities.
A smart work hub in Canberra city centre.
Creatives are moving in
In Canberra’s city centre, more well-designed and medium-density dwellings are being built and provided to meet the needs of the new creative workers who work and live there.
Population growth rate year ended March 31 2018.ABS, CC BY
This growth includes large-scale movement of knowledge workers to the inner-city areas. The poorer socio-economic groups are being displaced from these areas.
People working as managers and professionals are moving into the increasingly desirable inner-city areas. As a result, rising housing and rental prices are pushing out existing inhabitants. According to Census 2016, nearly 1200 managers and professionals lived and worked in inner areas of Civic and Braddon, but only 170 technicians and labourers who worked there also lived there.
Urban renewal for everyone
While the precinct is becoming more dynamic and active, in contrast to people’s long-held (mis)perception of Canberra as a humdrum place, the change comes at a social cost. People on low incomes are dislocated and many young people, the most valuable capital for the city’s future, find the place increasingly unaffordable.
Thus, the very transformations that present opportunities for the city’s economic diversification and urban renewal also bring challenges in maintaining it as an equitable city.
Canberra’s urban renewal strategy should not embrace or celebrate the creative transformations only. It should also appropriately manage the social implications to genuinely make the city a place for everyone.
From ground-breaking to game-changing, rule-breaking to near parliament-breaking – 2018 has been a big year for TV makers and audiences. Here are some of the most memorable moments.
Doctor Who is finally a woman
What would the 1963 makers of the BBC’s Dr Who have made of television in 2018? They imagined aliens, other worlds and alternate realities, but it took 55 years to imagine a woman in the show’s title role.
Despite some hesitation from a select group of die hards , the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, took the TARDIS to great effect this year. With a fantastic mix of innovation and respect for the show’s legacy, Whittaker and new showrunner Chris Chibnall have allowed Dr Who to explore known worlds from a new perspective.
Standout episodes included Rosa, in which The Doctor and her companions returned to civil rights era USA to meet Rosa Parks, and The Witchfinders, where The Doctor was caught up in the witch hunting season in Lancashire in the era of King James.
Hannah Gadsby shakes up stand up
Comedy specials have been niche television events for decades, especially championed by US cable outlets like HBO and Comedy Channel. With Netflix now in the mix, the scope for comedy has expanded, and through this global “post-television” network, alternative voices like Hannah Gadsby have found their people.
In Nanette, Gadsby rails against self-deprecating jokes, announces she’s quitting comedy, takes on the canon of Art History and exposes her own traumatic sexual abuse. All done while being funny as.
Praised by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and many others, Gadsby’s impact can be measured by the feathers she’s ruffled, too. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld have had to take note of Gadsby’s ability to go beyond “have you ever wondered why” jokes, and her boldness has also earned her a reputation as a strong voice amid whatever comes after #MeToo. A game changer for comedy, for international on-demand television, and for those who hold power generally.
A Honey Badger breaks The Bachelor
Reality television is, of course, never real, but it’s amazing how many real feelings these shows can evoke. Who knew that a quest for true love, staged in front of a national commercial TV audience, made up of a casting call of pretty young things with little in common might be doomed to fail?
This year’s Australian season of the American franchise The Bachelor added some extra spice with footballer Nick “The Honey Badger” Cummins, who dropped as many ocker sayings as possible while taking his shirt off. After all that, he broke the rules of the game by refusing to choose one of the show’s potential mates – leaving it a case of all sizzle, no steak; and making the show’s producers look like they couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. Cue outrage. Cue surprise. Cue discussions about the spin off series.
Parliament House – the soap opera
Backstabbing! Affairs! Denials of knowledge about constitutional citizenship requirements! While politicians all over the world have made for extreme television watching this year, Canberra has been particularly spicy in 2018.
There was Barnaby Joyce airing his dirty laundry in the first half of the year for a reported $150,000. Meanwhile the dual citizenship saga, first sparked by Greens senator Scott Ludlam’s resignation in July 2017, continued. It ate up public funds and airtime.
The show that keeps spinning sequels, “Leadership spill”, continued in August, with Scott Morrison snatching the top job from Malcolm Turnbull. A program that the Australian people are increasingly getting sick of – and it was a shame to see Julie Bishop leave the show.
A royal wedding that’s actually interesting
The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was a guilty TV pleasure for many, but also an important historical moment. Television has been a fundamental part of how the British Royal Family is understood (and tolerated) since 1957 when The Queen made her first televised Christmas address. The 2018 showstopper was not the bride’s dress or groom’s nod to his still beloved mother, but rather the sermon by Bishop Michael Curry and The Kingdom Choir’s version of Stand By Me.
Here the former oppressed and oppressors met and were brought together by what was an undeniably very sweet event. While there was some apparent uncomfortableness from certain members of the Royal Family, it was captivating viewing for those watching at home in tiaras and pyjamas.
Honourable mentions include the resignation of SBS newsreader and style icon Lee Lin Chin; American actor Roseanne fired from her own sitcom in a show of zero racism tolerance; ABC sketch show Tonightly coming, growing, then getting cut; (men’s) cricket being “ruined” by a ball tampering scandal and subsequent weepy press conferences; and NBC/Netflix’s The Good Place continuing to show that network sitcoms can be clever, philosophical, and still wonderfully funny.
2018 has been miserable in so many respects, yet it ends with hope, and from the least expected quarter: the Australian cricket team.
Australian cricket and Australian public life have declined in tandem over the past few years, dragged down by the same bogies. Their tempers became foul, the mindset and rhetoric malign, and winning at all costs, driven by a voracious hunger for money, became everything.
People with decent values had their stomachs turned. We turned off the cricket, and turned away from the Liberal and National parties, which have been, and look set to continue, getting the electoral hidings of their lives.
Then summer arrived and with it, the touring Indian Test team. The Adelaide Test was engaging. The unexpectedly tight, clean contest kept us – and this felt surprising – watching just another over, and then another, until we surprised ourselves even more by watching the whole match.
Who were these batsmen? Most of the surnames were barely known. Some looked barely old enough to shave. They were fresh-faced, unpocked by the pestilence that marked the big, old and now ugly names of Australian cricket tarnished by a toxic sledging culture and, in the case of former captain Steve Smith and former vice-captain David Warner, outright cheating that shamed the nation.
Travis Head from the little South Australian country town of Gawler, north of Adelaide, embodied this new moment in Australian cricket. The young left-hander walked onto Adelaide Oval with boyish hope quietly written on his face that he could make a century for his country playing on his home ground for the first time in only his third Test match ever. He top-scored in the first innings with a fighting 72. When he walked from the field, one felt like giving him a hug and telling him not to drop his head – to keep it high. He had done well, played cleanly, made the country proud.
Australian batman Travis Head celebrates another half-century in the second Test in Perth.AAP/Dave Hunt
Some of the reportage around Head created what seemed like a wormhole into a previous Australia. His family and friends were concerned about the train timetable between Gawler and Adelaide, and whether it meant they would have to stay overnight in Adelaide so as not to miss any play. Could they afford it if they had to? That Australia still exists, and to hear it discussed in the context of the glittering, money-soaked world of international cricket was just the sort of philosophical corrective of which it needs more.
The Australian fightback to nearly win the Adelaide Test from an apparently hopeless position was another surprise, the kind that brought us back to the second Test at the new Perth Stadium. The Perth wicket was an enigma: playing up then quietening down in an unpredictable pattern, keeping bowlers and batsmen on their mettle and interest high. As commentator and former England cricketer Isa Guha said, the Perth wicket had its own entire narrative in the game.
And that was another pleasant surprise, the normalisation of women commentators mixed in with the usual wall of men: Isa Guha on Foxtel, and presenter Mel McLaughlin, former Australian Test player Lisa Sthalekar and regular BBC cricket commentator Alison Mitchell on the Seven Network.
Tone really matters. Australian captain Tim Paine is the man of the hour. While the male cricket commentators gush over Virat Kohli, Paine is the one showing outstanding leadership in the best Australian tradition rather than the ugly one. He is getting little recognition for it.
The fact is, Paine is a better captain than Steve Smith ever was. The team is in good psychological shape and his pleasant, matter-of-fact persona doesn’t detract from an unequivocal competitiveness that delivered a convincing Australian win in the second Test.
Kohli looked ridiculous with his machismo-driven attempted chest bump when India couldn’t overwhelm the Australian batting line-up at Perth. Paine was magnificent, refusing to take the bait and instead just getting on with an emphatic win.
Compare and contrast with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s embarrassing performance on his visit to Australian troops in Iraq just before Christmas. “So how good’s the 7th Brigade?” he posed, both thumbs up Trump-style, to 7th Brigade ADF troops assembled uncomfortably for a prime ministerial picture opportunity.
Reluctant to be revved up, US-style, in Morrison’s political interest, they gave him a delayed and barely audible murmur in reply. “That wasn’t a very enthusiastic response!”’ he boomed back, raising his thumbs and his volume higher to demand again, forcefully: “How good is the 7th Brigade?”
Australians don’t like forced rah-rah. We don’t like cheats and clowns either. If the Australian cricket team can unexpectedly regenerate, after public revulsion made the wrongdoers pay a proper price and forced a clean-out of the administration that pushed them down the wrong path, maybe there is hope for Australian politics too. Happy Boxing Day and here’s to a good New Year.
This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome: find out how to enter at the bottom. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
How do ants make their own medicine? Thank you. – Anuva, age 5, Montreal.
Wow, what a wonderful question!
Ants are amazing animals. Even though they have brains smaller than a grain of sand, they know how to use chemicals in their environment to make themselves feel better when they are ill.
If an ant touches the spores (which are like seeds) of a fungus called Beauveria bassiana the fungus begins to grow inside their bodies. Soon, they grow very sick.
This moth got very sick and died because of a fungus called Beauveria bassiana, which is the white stuff.flickr/MK – fotky, CC BY
Ants can cure themselves by drinking small amounts of a chemical that kills the fungus. The chemical is called hydrogen peroxide.
Hydrogen peroxide is found in two things many ants love to eat: nectar and honey dew. Nectar comes from flowers and honeydew is a sweet liquid made by tiny insects called aphids. Ants even like to collect aphids and keep them in little aphid farms.
Scientists think sick ants in nature sometimes choose to drink nectar or honeydew that contains higher amounts of hydrogen peroxide.
A science experiment
You might be wondering how scientists found out that ants can cure themselves by drinking hydrogen peroxide. After all, it is very hard to watch what happens inside a wild ant nest.
The scientists did a very clever experiment where they gave sick ants and healthy ants a choice between honey water that contained hydrogen peroxide and plain honey water.
Sick ants preferred to drink honey water mixed with hydrogen peroxide while healthy ants preferred to drink plain honey water. Sick ants that drank the hydrogen peroxide were more likely to get better than those that drank plain honey water.
This experiment showed that sick ants could choose to eat foods that contained chemicals that helped them fight off the infection.
Leaf medicine for food fungus
Leafcutter ants are another type of ant that can use medicine to treat diseases. Leafcutter ants are common in South American jungles, where they can be seen marching in long lines, carrying leaves over their heads like little green umbrellas.
The ants do not eat the leaves. Instead, they mash them up into a paste and use them to feed a special fungus they keep in little gardens. Fungus gardens are very important to the ant colony as they provide almost all of the colony’s food.
Sometimes the fungus gardens get sick; when this happens, gardener ants get rid of the sickness using a special chemical called an “antibiotic”. Antibiotics work by killing the germs that make animals (including humans) sick.
Of course, leafcutter ants can’t just walk to the doctor’s office or chemist to get their antibiotics. Instead, they grow a special type of bacteria on their bodies. The bacteria makes the antibiotic that cures the fungus when it gets sick. The friendly, antibiotic-making bacteria are white, so gardener ants look as though they have been sprinkled with white powder.
Next time you are sick, just think of the ants and their amazing ant-ibiotics!
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The increasingly intricate entanglement of social media celebrity and popular music demands more of artists and their private lives than ever before. But in what has been dubbed the “post-truth” era, it should perhaps come as a comfort that what 2018’s biggest artists have in common is their willingness to lay their emotions bare.
2018 was a standout year for Australian singer-songwriters, with Gold Coast native Amy Shark dominating the airwaves – and the awards.
Shark’s triumphant synth-pop album Love Monster is an exultant exhale of breath for an artist who has fought for recognition for the better part of a decade. Shark is a candid narrator and her voice, which slips in and out of Australian accent in her unique singing style, compels repeated listening.
Her ability to elevate the mundane to the noteworthy – “And I chew my gum on the left side of my mouth/wondering when I’ll spit it out” – has also become a trademark of her work, which bears a sense of familiarity that is the unique bond between Australian artists and their native audience.
Sydney’s Dean Lewis likewise matched the 2017 success of his debut single Waves with another radio favourite, Be Alright. The song narrates, with tenderness and an unmistakeably Australian character, the breakdown of a relationship over infidelity.
“You say the cigarettes on the counter weren’t your friend’s/They were my mate’s/And I feel the colour draining from my face,” he sings. Lewis also seeks solace in his friends: “And my friends say,/I know you love her, but it’s over mate/It doesn’t matter/Put the phone away.”
It was a victorious year, too, for homegrown talent Troye Sivan, who surpassed the promise of his 2015 debut Blue Neighbourhood with his second album Bloom. Where Blue Neighbourhood saw the then 20-year-old Sivan grapple with his sexuality, his burgeoning fame, and the demands of a successful music career, the aptly-titled Bloom announced a strikingly mature and emboldened artist. The sleeker, sexier, and notably less melancholy production of Bloom made it especially radio friendly. It also established Sivan as an international success.
As Sivan told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I have got enough confidence now to make an album for myself, for people like me, who are going to hear this and understand.”
Sivan’s androgynous sex appeal and experimentation with styling this album have drawn comparisons to David Bowie, Madonna, and both Michael and Janet Jackson. But his ambition to make mainstream music about gay relationships – to refuse to obscure or mystify his music or identity – is in many ways quintessentially 2018.
The international hits
One of Bloom’s standout tracks, Dance to This, features pop superstar Ariana Grande, who has taken centre stage throughout 2018 both personally and professionally. Grande lived out much of her turbulent personal life on social media for the rabid consumption of gossip sites and internet trolls. After her five-month engagement to actor Pete Davidson abruptly ended, and in the wake of the death of her previous boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, Grande released the pop hit of 2018, thank u, next.
The song, which received 100 million streams on Spotify in a record-breaking 11 days, namedrops several of Grande’s famous ex-boyfriends and lays bare the soul-searching and daddy issues that apparently underpin her tumultuous relationships. It was as though Grande was responding directly to her Twitter mentions, stripping away the remaining divide between social media engagement and pop music artistry.
2018 saw several hip-hop heavyweights release albums: Kanye West, Drake, Nas, Nicki Minaj, and Eminem. But the year in hip-hop will be remembered for a few striking moments: Travis Scott’s single SICKO MODE, Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s cinematic Apeshit, and Childish Gambino’s masterful This is America video.
It was also a significant year for women in rap, as the irrepressible Cardi B took aim at the hip-hop throne with the release of her hotly anticipated debut album, Invasion of Privacy. The title captures Cardi’s overexposure since the success of her debut single Bodak Yellow in 2017.
Unpolished, unfiltered, and underestimated, Cardi B surprised critics and hip-hop fans alike with a decidedly decent album. Tracks like I Like It, as well as Cardi’s various features throughout the year on songs such as Bruno Mars’ hit Finesse, secured her position in the hip-hop limelight. Like Grande, she also invited fans – and haters – into her complicated personal life through social media.
Men bare their souls
Continuing the longstanding tradition of repackaging hip-hop trends for more mainstream audiences, singer/rapper Post Malone saturated 2018 with his curious blend of soulful crooning, grunge, and autotuned warbling on his record-breaking album, beerbongs and bentleys. The album broke Spotify streaming records in the 24 hours following its release as well as surpassing The Beatles and fellow rapper J.Cole for the most simultaneous top 20 hits on Billboard.
Tracks like Rich and Sad, and Paranoid, adhere to the popular formula of second albums in rap: an extended contemplation on the truism that fame and riches do not guarantee happiness. Malone’s ambivalence between lauding his success and viewing his new lifestyle with scepticism and paranoia is not unique.
Malone delivers lines – like “I been fuckin’ hos and poppin’ pillies/Man, I feel just like a rock star” – as though he’s barely conscious enough to muster the words. He is the latest in the tradition of so-called “mumble” rappers, including Future, 21 Savage, and Chief Keef. But beerbongs and bentleys is evidently the most pop-friendly iteration thus far of this burgeoning subgenre, and Malone’s success in 2018 may well pave the way for more of this sound.
The album has its share of run-of-the-mill rock star misogyny – for instance, “Population four million/How I see the same bitches?”. But Malone’s raw emotional indulgence, such as on the hit single Better Now, exemplifies the compelling shift in how hip-hop and its pop outgrowths are performing masculinity.
Khalid, another of 2018’s most successful pop/R&B artists, manifests a distinctly more fluid approach to masculinity than urban music has enjoyed since the advent of gangsta hypermasculinity.
In the video for his song Better, Khalid dances with a casual abandon that could be likened to Drake’s moves in “Hotline Bling.”
His collaboration with the DJ Marshmello, Silence, as well as hit singles like Better and Love Lies (featuring singer Normani) lend to 2018 a haunting, reflective, and soulful soundscape in which men are not afraid to dance – or cry.
Many diseases develop and become more likely as we age. Here are some of the most common conditions, and how you can reduce your risk of getting them as you clock over into a new decade.
In your 40s
Maintaining a healthy weight can reduce the risk of developing arthritis, coronary heart disease, and other common and related conditions, including back pain, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and many cancers. But almost one-third of Australians in their 40s are obese and one in five already have arthritis.
From the age of 45 (or 35 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders), heart health checks are recommended to assess risk factors and initiate a plan to improve the health of your heart. This may include changing your diet, reducing your alcohol intake, increasing your physical activity, and improving your well-being.
If you don’t already have symptoms of arthritis or if they’re mild, this decade is your chance to reduce your risk of the disease progressing. Focus on the manageable factors, like shedding excess weight, but also on improving muscle strength. This may also help to prevent or delay sarcopenia, which is the decline of skeletal muscle tissue with ageing, and back pain.
Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight will set you up for decades of better health.Sue Zeng
Most people will begin to experience age-related vision decline in their 40s, with difficulty seeing up close and trouble adjusting to lighting and glare. A baseline eye check is recommended at age 40.
In your 50s
In your 50s, major eye diseases become more common. Among Australians aged 55 and above, age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetes-related eye diseases and glaucoma account for more than 80% of vision loss.
A series of health screenings are recommended when people turn 50. These preventive measures can help with the early detection of serious conditions and optimising your treatment choices and prognosis. Comprehensive eye assessments are recommended every one to two years to ensure warning signs are detected and vision can be saved.
National cancer screening programs for Australians aged 50 to 74, are available every two years for bowel and breast cancer.
To screen for bowel cancer, older Australians are sent a test in the post they can do at home. If the test is positive, the person is then usually sent for a colonoscopy, a procedure in which a camera and light look for abnormalities of the bowel.
In 2016, 8% of people screened had a positive test result. Of those who underwent a colonoscopy, 1 in 26 were diagnosed with confirmed or suspected bowel cancer and one in nine were diagnosed with adenomas. These are potential precursors to bowel cancer which can be removed to reduce your future risk.
To check for breast cancer, women are encouraged to participate in the national mammogram screening program. More than half (59%) of all breast cancers detected through the program are small (less than or equal to 15mm) and are easier to treat (and have better survival rates) than more advanced cancers.
If you’re a smoker, quitting is the best way to improve both your lung and heart health. Using evidence-based methods to quit with advice from a health professional or support service will greatly improve your chances of success.
Quitting smoking is the best way to improve your health.Ian Schneider
The build-up of plaques in artery walls by fats, cholesterol and other substances (atherosclerosis) can happen from a younger age. But the hardening of these plaques and narrowing of arteries, which greatly increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, is most likely to occur from age 65 and above.
Exercise protects against atherosclerosis and research consistently shows any physical activity is better than nothing when it comes to heart health. If you’re not currently active, gradually build up to the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise on most, preferably all, days.
Other potentially modifiable risk factors for stroke include high blood pressure, a high-fat diet, alcohol consumption, and smoking.
Your 60s is also a common decade for surgeries, including joint replacements and cataract surgery. Joint replacements are typically very successful, but are not an appropriate solution for everyone and are not without risks. After a joint replacement, you’ll benefit from physiotherapy, exercise, and maintaining a healthy weight.
The treatment for cataracts is to surgically remove the cloudy lens. Cataract surgery is the most common elective surgery worldwide, with very low complication rates, and provides immediate restoration of lost vision.
In your 70s
Many of the conditions mentioned above are still common in this decade. It’s also a good time to consider your risk of falls. Four in ten people in their 70s will have a fall and it can lead to a cascade of fractures, hospitalisations, disability and injury.
Osteoporosis is one cause of falls. It occurs most commonly in post-menopausal women but almost one-quarter of people with osteoporosis are men. Osteoporosis is often known as a silent disease because there are usually no symptoms until a fracture occurs. Exercise and diet, including calcium and vitamin D, are important for bone health.
Older people are also vulnerable to mental health conditions because of a combination of reduced cognitive function, limitations in physical health, social isolation, loneliness, reduced independence, frailty, reduced mobility, disability, and living conditions.
In your 80s and beyond
Dementia is the second most common chronic condition for Australians in their 80s, after coronary heart disease – and it’s the most common for people aged 95 and above.
Early diagnosis is important to effectively plan and initiate appropriate treatment options which help people live well with dementia. But dementia remains underdiagnosed.
Around 70% of Australians aged 85 and above have five or more chronic diseases and take multiple medications to manage these conditions. Effective medication management is critical for people living with multiple conditions because medications for one condition may exacerbate the symptoms of a different coexisting condition.
“Do something for yourself, join the Army Reserve.”
This was one of the Army’s most iconic campaigns, broadcast on Australian television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The advertisements were set to Tchaikovsky’s rousing battle hymn, the 1812 Overture, and portrayed an Army that was as comfortable displaying its militarism as it was exhorting the perks of enlistment.
But as every child of that era knows, the ads were particularly memorable because of the irreverent lyrics they inspired. In households across Australia, a chorus of children’s voices entered the refrain “join the Army get your head blown off” into the annals of Australian history.
‘Do something for yourself’ Army campaign.
For a long time, the identity of the Army was inextricably connected to the landing at Gallipoli in 1915 and the sacred legends of the first world war. The institution stood for such ANZAC values as:
reckless valo[u]r in a good cause … enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat
This lore nourished the public’s broad-based support for the institution.
What Australians think of the Army today
But as the spectre of war has faded in recent years, the purpose of the Army has diverged from the priorities of broader Australian society. A tension between the two has become more apparent: civil society now has the expectation of peace, whereas the military is still preparing for possible war.
In truth, the process of dislocation was well underway when the “Do something for yourself” campaign was launched. Overall support for the armed forces was in decline, and a review conducted prior to the release of the 1987 Defence White Paper indicated the Army “was having difficulties adjusting to the post-Vietnam War era”.
As Australia’s strategic circumstances became more stable in the 1990s, the public shifted its focus to domestic priorities. National defence and security matters became detached from public discourse.
Today, the public’s connection with the Army is largely exercised through abstract or ceremonial means. ANZAC Day continues to capture the public’s imagination, as is demonstrated by the growing attendance at dawn services. This, however, has not translated into greater appreciation for the tasks and objectives of the institution. Australian society lacks an anchor by which to make sense of its own modern Army.
Under these circumstances, public attitudes towards the Army are influenced by ideology and politics, individual experience and contemporary values.
The Army is struggling to rebrand itself and attract new recruits.Francois Nascimbeni/EPA
To be sure, the Army is still praised for its courage and integrity, its aptitude to “punch above its weight,” and its readiness to fight hostile nations and protect vulnerable people in the region.
Extensive public consultations with everyday Australians prior to the release of the 2016 Defence White Paper showed that people viewed the armed services with a high degree of respect and took “pride in the professionalism, operational record and achievements” of military personnel.
Yet, the Army is also criticised for its adherence to outmoded traditions. As the media has exposed numerous scandals involving sexual harassment, bullying, hazing and allegations of rape in recent years, the Army has been chastised for allowing a toxic internal culture to develop.
In addition, the Army has increasingly been accused of involvement in “other people’s wars”, a reproach frequently heard during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to some historians, Australia’s participation in “unnecessary wars” is a distinguishing feature of the nation’s history.
Why this divide is problematic
Such conflicted characterisations are, in part, a product of the public’s segregation from military life. Unless one lives in Canberra or Townsville, where the Army is an ordinary and established part of daily existence, the military is seen as someone else’s remit.
This separation has been exacerbated by the Army itself. While the military shares the same core democratic values as civilians, it largely accepts the traditional ideological divide between its conservative leadership and liberal, individualistic civil society.
The Army remains a closed, insular system, committed first and foremost to producing first-class soldiers. The belief is the Army should operate in a separate domain so it can remain effective and apolitical. But as the inner workings of our liberal democracy become more convoluted, the disconnect is proving obstructive. For both sectors.
The public sees an institution inclined to living in its own myth, and more concerned with integrating with the wider Australian defence force and other allied armies than interacting with Australian society.
The Army sees a society that does not understand what it does, or what it needs. It believes there is general support for its role in counter-terrorism actions, border protection, peacekeeping and restoring order after natural disasters, but limited appreciation of its operational realities, resourcing and equipment challenges, or other activities that are absent from the public discourse.
The public upholds the Army for its integrity and bravery, but doesn’t fully understand its role in modern society.CPL Nunu Campos/PR handout
Solutions for re-engaging with society
So, how might this disconnect between the Army and society be ameliorated?
In an effort to keep pace with societal expectations, modern recruitment campaigns highlight a military that reflects the community it seeks to protect and the importance of a diverse and multicultural workforce with a broad skill base.
A Navy recruitment add emphasising the service’s multicultural make-up.
Likewise, the military leadership’s strong condemnation of misconduct among some personnel suggests that the institution is committed to improving its image and being more in line with the nation’s norms and standards.
An approach embraced by other liberal democracies, including the UK, US and Canada is to work within the myth-making paradigm to construct a strategic narrative that emphasises the Army’s value to society. Although such a narrative is only likely to resonate with those who already have a vested interest in the Army, it may well produce greater general awareness of its roles and missions.
These methods ignore the key strength of the Army, however. The service is in the business of direct engagement. Even as scandal, exclusivity and a sense of disconnection have undermined its reputation in recent years, the public continues to admire the institution’s readiness to put boots on the ground.
Perhaps the answer, then, lies in an intensification of direct associations with society. A more visible presence in communities, an expansion of the reserves and more engagement in activities that foster shared experience could ease the degree of separation between the sectors, and rekindle mutual trust.
That trust needs to be present. The Army is reliant on society for its very existence. Indeed, if the Army becomes segregated from its future ranks, and from the society it is entrusted to protect, it has lost its raison d’être.
The bond between the Army and society should be carefully nurtured and protected as a vital element of national security.
Holidays are often a time of overindulgence and food-based regret. That’s partly because when people eat together, they tend to eat more.
But if you’re aware of the things that encourage you to eat more than you need – and perhaps more than you plan to – you might be able to nudge yourself towards eating less than you would otherwise.
Here are eight evidence-based actions you can take to actively control your food intake in the face of the abundant food on offer during the holiday season.
If you’re hosting, setting out more food than you and your guests could reasonably eat is a surefire way to lead people to overeat.
Pre-plan your meals and food offerings. Make sure you stick to your shopping list and don’t shop for food when you’re hungry, or you’re likely to make impulse buys.
If Santa brings chocolate, lollies and candy canes, of course people are going to eat them!
Start by limiting both the type and amount of food you bring into the house. And if you do slip up, keep the junk food out of view because if you can’t see it, you’re less likely to want to eat it.
3) Reduce portion sizes
Serve more and you’ll eat more, with no increase in satisfaction. One study found doubling the serving size resulted in people eating 35% more.
Conversely, if you reduce portion sizes, you’ll eat less. Just make sure the portion size doesn’t get too small, otherwise you’ll start compensating and end up eating more.
4) Use smaller plates
In situations where you’ll be self-serving, choose a smaller plate size. With a smaller area, you’re likely to end up with less food on your plate.
In conditions where others are eating a lot, this can lead to overeating, so consider drafting a “designated eater” who sets the example for all.
7) Beware the multiple effects of alcohol
What is a holiday feast without alcohol? A lot less fattening! Alcohol contains 29 kilojoules per gram, or about 954 kilojoules for a 250 ml glass of wine.
Alcohol also numbs the stomach and delays the signals to your brain to tell you you’ve eaten enough, resulting in overeating.
8) Cut down on processed foods
Reducing the energy density of foods can be an easy way to reduce the number of kilojoules you consume without giving up on the satisfaction of a filling meal.
Research shows people who replace processed foods with a more natural alternative find it easier to limit their intake and therefore maintain their weight or lose weight.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laurien Beane, Course Coordinator, Queensland Undergraduate Early Childhood, Australian Catholic University
As the new year dawns, parents likely turn their thoughts to their child and new beginnings they may experience as they enter an early childhood education and care centre or preschool. Naturally, it’s a time of reflection on the previous year, and excitement about the possibilities for the new year to come.
Parents might reflect on friendships their child makes in the coming year. Making friends is not always instinctive for a young child. Learning to make friends is part of the social development curriculum in early childhood.
Social development skills are just as important as cognitive skills when learning. In recent studies, positive social skills are highlighted as key predictors for better outcomes in adulthood. It’s important for parents to be aware of ways to ensure positive social development skills in their young child.
Parents can begin by looking for interpersonal people skills, such as empathy, listening and communication skills. This will help your child transition into the next stage of their educational journey.
Is your child’s social development on track, at risk or vulnerable?
Each domain is essential for learning how to build friendships, though social development is the central one. The following table outlines what is considered developmentally on track, at risk or vulnerable in the social competence domain.
After reading this table, if you feel your child is developmentally at risk or vulnerable, there may be several reasons for this. Be guided by the educator at your preschool or early childhood education and care centre centre when deciding which service might best support your child to develop healthy social skills.
To help you, there are a broad range of services available. These include art and music therapists, dietitians, occupational therapists, speech therapists, physiotherapists, audiologists, and child counsellors.
Making friends through the stages of play
There is a range of research about stages of play a young child engages in when they’re learning to make friends. According to brain development research, a young child begins to develop pathways in their brain for social skills from birth.
According to research, there are six stages of play with associated social skills. These are assessed in the early childhood curriculum. The following stages and social skills are approximate and to be used as a guide only:
Understanding some of these key indicators of social skills required to for play will help you consider their ability. Take time to observe your young child’s social interactions in a range of settings. Watch them at home, with family and friends, as well as in their preschool or early childhood education and care centre. This may help you determine if your child is engaging socially during play to make friends.
What’s next?
When a child moves from one educational setting to another, we call this movement a transition. Positive social development skills are an asset for your child during this time. Educators at both educational settings will work in partnership with you, and each other, to make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.
Essentially there are some key indicators which will help children during transitions: self-care, separating from parents, growing independence, and readiness to learn. As parents you can:
familiarise your child with the new environment
engage in active listening as your child expresses their thoughts and feelings about starting in a new learning environment
ensure children start the new year with all required equipment recommended by the centre or school
arrange to meet other people starting in the new year and practice turn taking, listening, asking questions and asking for help before the new year begins.
This will support development of social skills for your young child and help them make new friends more readily.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sujeet Kumar, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University
India’s urban population is growing. More than 50% of the country’s population is forecast to be living in cities by 2030. This is a major challenge for government because the country’s cities lack the infrastructure (affordable housing, roads) and basic services (sanitation, water, health care) for existing inhabitants, let alone the influx of people over the next decade.
Many Indian children are growing up in very disadvantaged circumstances. These two live in Mahmudi Chak slum next to Rajendra Nagar Railway Junction in Patna.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
However, estimates of slum populations differ widely in many Indian cities due to differences in the counting criteria. For example, in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, it’s estimated more than 50% of the population live in slums, but the 2011 Indian Census put the figures at 41.3% and 14.6% respectively.
Launching the national Smart Cities Mission in 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “… if anything has the potential to mitigate poverty it is our cities”. He said the mission, which has a target of 100 smart cities, aims to ensure access to basic services for the people. This includes houses for the urban poor.
The program aims to fulfil the aspirations and needs of the citizens through comprehensive development of institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure. This comprehensive development would also ensure increased public participation, Modi said.
Villagers migrated to the Danapur Block slum after the Ganga river flooded.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
Smart city plan has a dark side
In one of the 100 cities selected for the Smart City Mission, Patna (Bihar), I witnessed the flip side of the smart city. Patna, the state capital of Bihar, has a rich history, but 63% of its population lives in slums. And 93% of them are from the historically oppressed “scheduled castes” and “other backward castes” (based on data collected in 42 slums).
Demolished homes at Meena Bazar.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
The city administration often demolishes slums without following due process of law in order to seize the land in the name of beautification and development of Patna.
In slums like Meena Bazar (near the famous Nalanda Medical College Hospital) and Amu Kuda Basti (near Patna Airport) people have been living there for generations in houses often partially funded by government housing projects. These have been bulldozed.
Riot police are on hand when slum dwellers’ homes are demolished at Amu Kuda Basti.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
The city administration usually makes ad-hoc loudspeaker announcements before bulldozing these settlements. A massive police presence and riot vehicles are on hand in case residents protest the demolitions. They use derogatory language and forcefully enter houses and thrash male members, say women in Amu Kuda Basti.
The government could have given them more time or relocated them elsewhere in the city, rather than just bulldozing their houses, which they had built with hard-earned money, the slum dwellers said.
Residents of slums like Amu Kuda Basti say houses they built with their own hard-earned money are being demolished with little notice.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
There is apparently reason to smash these homes. There always is. The usual arguments for demolition include: beautification of the city, construction of a government building or enterprise, extension of the airport, crime locations, governance, illegality, encroachment etc. The state says demolitions of such slums are necessary for the development of the city.
In 2011, the state proposed a slum policy to relocate slum dwellers who had lived in the city for generations to the outskirts in a plan to develop Patna and make it a smart city, says Kishori Das, an advocate for the rights of slum dwellers for years. Faced with widespread protests, the state deferred the policy, but it is silently applying it on the ground, he said.
Who speaks for the marginalised poor?
These two leaders from Meena Bazar are among 84 community representatives, elected and non-elected, interviewed by the author.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
Local and mainstream media are not reporting these demolitions and forced evictions, especially when it happens in non-metro cities like Patna. Civil society and advocacy NGOs also take little notice of these frequent demolitions, probably due to threats to life and, if not, then to co-option by the state. The roles of the ruling party and opposition are also dubious.
Bihar has been ruled by leaders who attracted votes by campaigning on issues of poverty, caste and social justice for the past three decades. In the early 1990s, the prominent leader Lalu Prasad Yadav mobilised the poor and the oppressed caste groups under the umbrella of “Vikas nahin, samman chahiye” (we want dignity, not development). The present chief minister, Nitish Kumar, also known as Sushaasan Babu (good governance man), adopted the slogan “Nyay ke saath vikas” (development with justice).
However, the frequent injustices suffered by the urban poor negate the political commitment. These actions are also in conflict with the motto of the Indian Constitution, which frames justice as a balancing wheel between the haves and have-nots.
Promises of social justice ring hollow for residents of bulldozed communities like Amu Kuda Basti.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
These reports of struggle and forced evictions contradict the statements by Modi when he said smart cities development would strictly follow large-scale public participation in preparing these plans.
Such demolitions reveal a dark side to making Indian cities smart and cast serious doubt on claimed government commitment to the urban poor. These actions hardly live up to the idea of the rights of the poor. It became more challenging when the head of the biggest democracy in the world denounces those who speak up for the poor, oppressed and voiceless as “urban Naxals”.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. For India, this means the urban poor need help both from political parties and civil society so that their voice finds expression and their demands and concerns are heard and considered in public policy.
Children sleep out in the open in a slum area in Harding Park, Patna.Sujeet Kumar, Author provided
A strange thing happened on the way to the leisure society.
It was once widely anticipated that the process which saw the standard working week fall from 60 to 40 hours in wealthy nations over the first half of the 20th century would continue.
As we now know, this did not happen. The official working week has not fallen significantly in several decades. Average working hours per household have increased. The effect is that many feel that life is now less leisured than in the past.
But why should it be?
Working fewer hours was once seen as an essential indicator of economic and social progress. I explore this history in my book Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society?
It’s time to put reduced working hours back on the political and industrial agenda.
There are strong arguments for working fewer hours. Some are economic. Others are about environmental sustainability. Yet others have to do with equity and equality.
Economists on board
In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that technological change and productivity improvements would make a 15-hour work week an economic possibility within a couple of generations.
A biographer of Keynes, the economic historian Robert Skidelsky, revisited those predictions in his 2012 book How Much Is Enough? He proposed legislating maximum hours of work in most occupations, without any reduction in output or wages, as a way to to achieve a more sustainable economy.
He is not alone. According to a report by the New Economics Foundation, a London-based think-tank, making the normal working week 21 hours could help to address a range of interlinked problems: “These include overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.”
More recently, Belgian historian Rutger Bregman has argued in his best-selling 2017 book Utopia for Realists that a 15-hour work week is achievable by 2030, the centenary of Keynes’ prediction.
Broader motivations
Second and third-wave feminism tended to concentrate on women’s access to the labour market, equal pay for equal work, child care services, parental leave and flexibility, and men doing a greater share of unpaid domestic work.
Monowara Begum gathers torn and unusable plastic bags to recycle in a small factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She works about 12 hours a day to earn less than US$25 a week.Abir Abdullah/EPA
More recently, writers such as Nichole Marie Shippen, Cynthia Negrey and Kathi Weeks have argued that the quality of life would be generally improved if working hours were reduced for all.
British ecologist Jonathon Porritt described the leisure society as a “mega-fantasy” in his 1984 book Seeing Green. Many environmentalists agreed. As Andrew Dobson noted in his 1990 book Green Political Thought, they looked at the consumer-orientated, environmentally damaging, industrialised nature of the leisure industry and saw a future anathema to the green ideal of self-reliant and sustainable production.
But views have changed within environmental circles. Canadian Anders Hayden argued in his 1999 book Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet that working less would mean lower resource consumption and therefore less pressure on the environment.
Some critical and neo-Marxist writers have viewed reduced working in the formal capitalist economy as a means of fundamentally changing it, even hastening its demise. The late French/Austrian sociologist André Gorz, first advanced the idea in the 1980s.
In The Brave New World of Work (2000), German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls on progressive movements to campaign for a “counter-model to the work society” in which work in the formal economy is reduced. In the Mythology of Work (2015), British sociologist Peter Fleming (now based in Australia) proposes a “post-labour strategy”, including a three-day work-week.
The Take Back Your Time organisation based in Seattle, argues the “epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine” threatens “our health, our relationships, our communities, and our environment”. It advocates for fewer annual working hours by promoting the importance of holiday times and other leave entitlements, including the right to refuse having to work overtime.
Workers marching for an eight-hour day in Victoria outside Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne, circa 1900.Wikimedia, CC BY
No time like the present
Despite these arguments, current prospects of working fewer hours without any reduction in wages seem unlikely. Wages are static. The pressure from employers is, if anything, to expect more hours.
In Australia the last great success in reducing working hours was 35 years ago, in 1983, when the Australia Conciliation and Arbitration Commission endorsed a 38-hour working week. Now reducing hours is not on the agenda of a union movement weakened by decades of declining membership.
But the 20th century did not begin with a strong union movement either. There were plenty of excuses not to reduce working hours, including the Great Depression and the economic deprivations of two world wars.
Few employers supported reduced working hours. For the most part they bitterly resisted union campaigns first for a ten-hour and then an eight-hour day (and five-day week).
Among the few exceptions were William Hesketh Lever (co-founder of Lever Brothers, later to become Unilever) and Henry Ford, who saw the potential for increasing productivity from a less fatigued workforce. Now countries such as Germany and Denmark demonstrate that working fewer hours is quite compatible with economic prosperity.
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 24 of the declaration states: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” All members of the United Nations that have formally endorsed the declaration have, inter alia, endorsed leisure as a human right.
Not so long ago the age-old desire for more leisure and less work was a key part of the industrial and social agenda. Are we now content just to complain about lack of time? Or should we be seeking to do something about it?
Every holiday season, you have new worlds at your fingertips. Reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching films and TV shows can help you break away from the frenzy of everyday life, and journey into other possible worlds.
As with any kind of travel, the journey affects you. The degree to which you become engaged with a story is known as narrative transportation. This effect causes feelings and thoughts consistent with the narrative world. The more a story transports you, the more likely you are persuaded to adopt the beliefs espoused within it.
Deeper changes occur too. Previous research shows that changes of attitudes and intentions are part of the narrative transportation effect. My colleagues Stephanie Feiereisen, Luca Visconti and I were interested in what factors predict a greater narrative transportation effect, so we used meta-analysis to measure the power of stories to both engage and change people.
Meta-analyses aggregate the results of a large number of published empirical studies, which can greatly increase confidence in a phenomenon. No meta-analysis had been performed on narrative transportation for five years, so we investigated all the published research since.
We averaged the results of 64 different papers, reporting 138 separate effects, based on results from more than 20,000 participants.
We discovered that three factors reliably influence the narrative transportation effect: whether a story is commercial or noncommercial, whether it is user-generated or created by professionals, and whether there are other people present while you are engaging with the story.
Profit motive
A transporting story is 16% more likely to affect you if it has commercial profit, rather than an artistic or other value, as its primary aim.
Many films and TV series are primarily made for commercial purposes with the intention of making a profit. If you are not aware of this profit motive, the effect of narrative transportation is strengthened. As a result, you will be inclined to buy products – and even animals – featured in films and TV series.
A transporting story is 11% more likely to change you if it is made publicly available, reflects a certain amount of creative effort, and is created outside of professional routines and practices.
Many books and podcasts are user-generated, meaning they are self-published at their authors’ own expense. A creator’s emotional participation in the story strengthens the narrative transportation effect.
Take Andy Weir’s book The Martian. In 2011, after a long search for a professional agent, he gave up on big publishing. Instead, he posted the book to Amazon. It was soon climbing the charts and he attracted a dedicated, worldwide following. It was later made into a feature film starring Matt Damon, that was hailed for its attention to scientific detail.
Other examples of this kind of creator influence include teenagers like Charlotte D’Alessio, who became an overnight Instagram fashion sensation. Stand-up comedians at open mic nights are further examples of nonprofessional creators who are telling impactful stories.
Whether you’re alone
A transporting story is 10% less likely to influence you if you are with others, rather than alone, when you are consuming it.
Social groups weaken the narrative transportation effect. As a result, you are less likely to be persuaded if you share the experience with family or groups of friends.
Live-action role playing games are a case in point. These increasingly popular fan happenings encourage you to experience beloved films and TV series together with others. This collective form of narrative consumption protects you somewhat against the influence of a story.
The more you are transported by a narrative, the more likely that your beliefs, attitudes and intentions will converge with those of the story. This is neither good nor bad. Yet being aware of this effect – and the factors that increase it – could help you think critically about your desire to get a new pet after watching a movie.
When vacations return there is only one place many people want to be: ensconced in a story. Books, podcasts, films and TV series are prepackaged journeys. Just make sure that you steel yourself for what lies within.
This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. You can send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
Why does the world store nuclear waste and just not shoot it into the Sun or deep space? – Jason, age 16, Mackay, Queensland.
Hi Jason. Thanks for the question. I research space junk, so I have also spent some time thinking about what we blast into space and where it ends up.
It would be nice to send dangerous nuclear waste far away from Earth where it won’t cause any harm. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Nuclear waste is what’s left over after nuclear fuel has been used in a reactor. Many countries across the world use nuclear reactors to make electricity for homes and industries.
The energy is made by fission, which is when an atom breaks apart. The problem is that some of the waste – called high-level waste – is very radioactive. It releases particles that can make people, animals and plants sick. It also lasts for thousands of years.
High-level waste is only 3% of all the nuclear waste produced. A lot of it is recycled, which reduces its radioactivity. This leaves the problem of what to do with the rest.
At the moment, high-level waste is stored on Earth. Usually it is isolated in water, glass or concrete to prevent the particles escaping. The containers are buried, but they have to be somewhere where earthquakes don’t happen, and terrorists can’t dig them up.
We wouldn’t have to worry about this if we could send the waste to the Sun, where it will disintegrate. But there are a few reasons we don’t do this.
It’s not as easy as you might think
One is that this is very, very expensive. When the Parker Solar Probe was sent to take measurements of the Sun this year, it cost US$1.5 billion just for a spacecraft the size of a small car to get that far.
It seems simple to shoot an object towards something as big as the Sun – which is 1.3 million times the size of Earth. But it’s actually very hard. The Parker Solar Probe (a NASA robotic spacecraft en route to investigate the outer corona of the Sun) has to swing past the planet Venus seven times to slow itself down enough to get close to the Sun.
The other reason is that rockets sometimes blow up on the launch pad, or in the atmosphere. This would release the waste into the environment and make the problem even worse.
What about deep space?
You also asked about deep space, and it’s a good question. Why don’t we just send nuclear waste away from the Sun, into the outer solar system?
Well, there is a risk the waste storage spacecraft could go off course and crash into a planet, moon or asteroid. Some places may have life we haven’t discovered yet, like Mars and Europa (which is one of Jupiter’s moons).
Even if the waste is safely sealed in a container, there is a risk it could end up polluting other planets. It may pose a danger to us or other life forms. The life forms might be just microbes, but we still have an ethical responsibility not to harm them.
Of course, there are already nuclear-powered spacecraft out there. They use an RTG (a type of generator called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). In the film The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) digs up an RTG to keep him warm in the freezing temperatures.
In reality, the RTG container is very safe and would not be dangerous.
At the end of the day, the problem is that no one on Earth wants nuclear waste stored near them, and it’s not safe or cost-effective to blast it into space.
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity
Dear tiny Jesus, with your golden fleece diapers, with your tiny little fat balled-up fists … Dear 8 pound 6 ounce newborn infant Jesus, don’t even know a word yet, just a little infant so cuddly …
So goes the now infamous grace prayed by aspiring racing legend Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights. When his family interrupt to remind him that Jesus grew up, Ricky Bobby says:
Look, I like the baby version the best. I like Christmas Jesus best.
My lowbrow movie tastes aside, this comedic scene makes a powerful point. Christmas Jesus is easier. Christmas Jesus is safe. After all, how challenging can the story of a newborn baby really be? Well, it depends on which story you read.
This year, millions of Christians around the world will read the opening of Luke’s Gospel in their Christmas services. Luke chapter 2 contains the fairly well-known classic version of Jesus’s birth: Mary wraps her infant son in swaddling clothes and lays him in a manger because there was “no room for them in the guest room”.
Only two of the four gospels in the New Testament include the story of Jesus’s birth. And it is Luke’s version of events that has arguably had the most influence over Western art and music when it comes to depicting the birth of Jesus. Without Luke, we would not know the story of the angelic announcement to the unwed Mary that she would have a son. Without Luke, we wouldn’t have the story of shepherds visiting the manger or the heavenly host of angels singing.
Angels, shepherds and a family huddled around an infant seem charming and make excellent fodder for nativity plays and Christmas carols. The problem is that in the ancient world the birth of Jesus was not a safe story nor a domestic one. It was highly political, a product of a time when religion and politics were inseparable.
“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus…”, Luke begins, reminding the reader that Jesus’s birth takes place under Roman Imperial rule in the occupied territory of Judea. Mary, Joseph and their firstborn are displaced from home precisely because of an imperial edict requiring them to travel for a census. As Jews living under Roman rule, they are part of a minority religious group – ordinary people, at the whim of a powerful authoritarian state, with fewer rights than a Roman citizen.
Why might Luke emphasise the political setting? What is his agenda?
Of relevance here is the Priene Calendar inscription celebrating the birth day of Emperor Augustus. Yes, that’s the same Augustus Luke mentions just prior to Jesus’s birth. This inscription, found in an ancient marketplace in Asia Minor, dates to around 9 BCE and lauds Augustus as a “saviour”, “benefactor”, “god”, and a bringer of “good news”.
Since providence … has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a saviour, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance excelled even our anticipations, surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birth day of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the world…
Written decades later, Luke’s Gospel echoes much of this imperial language. In the opening chapters, Jesus is called “saviour” and “mighty saviour”. The shepherds are told Jesus’s birth is “good news of great joy for all the people”, much like Augustus’s birth was good news “for the world”.
The Greek term for “good news”, euangelion, is precisely the word used in the New Testament to announce Jesus’s birth. It is often translated as “gospel”, hence the title of these biblical books. Finally, like Augustus, Jesus is proclaimed as God (or, more precisely, son of God) and is said to bring peace to the world.
According to Luke, this baby boy will upset the social order and create political upheaval. Poetic uses of language – of light dawning upon a people in darkness and the rich being sent away while the poor are lifted up – are further ways Luke portrays this new era ushered in by Jesus’s birth.
Contemporary Christians are divided between those who see their faith as inseparable from their politics and those who’d prefer to keep the two discrete. Keeping politics out of the pulpit is the preference of this latter group. Yet Luke’s Gospel does not offer that option. Religion is political and always has been. What one believes, who one worships and even the stories one tells shape political views and values.
Whether one believes Luke’s version of events, or not, is a matter of faith. It remains, however, that Luke’s Gospel, as a first-century literary work, has carefully crafted Jesus’s birth as nothing less than the arrival of a new political power whose rule will challenge the prevailing world order, redistribute wealth, end oppression and bring peace.
It makes sense then, that at the end of the gospel, this Jesus would be put to death by the Roman state. “Tiny baby Jesus” is not as safe and cuddly as he might appear.
As most workers wind down to enjoy the holidays, staff in hospital trauma units are preparing to ramp up. This is because between November and January, there is a 25% increase in trauma presentations. Around 30% of road fatalities for the year occur during this period.
A hospital’s trauma unit witnesses the extreme of physical injury and pain that occurs over the holiday season. Here’s a snapshot of what we see.
Inside the trauma unit
The first trauma patient of the day is handcuffed uncomfortably to a hospital trolley. He is under arrest after an early morning brawl at a nightclub. A deep stab wound to his leg has damaged the artery. He is being examined by the on-call surgeons as two uniformed police look on.
The decision to take the patient for surgery is made quickly. Studies in trauma reception show doctors are required to make a critical decision every 72 seconds in the first 30 minutes of a trauma patient arriving in the emergency department.
Violence and assaults, including family violence, often peak around Christmas and New Year. This is due to a combination of triggers, including stretched household budgets and separated families coming together.
More people are drinking in the holidays, and this provides more opportunities for dangerous situations. On Christmas day, for instance, there is a 50% increase in ambulance attendances for alcohol intoxication.
In the next bay is an agitated young man in his late teens. He was weaving his motorbike in and out of traffic when he lost control at high speed. He was rushed to the CT scanner and, despite wearing a helmet, has blood inside his skull that needs to be drained by a neurosurgeon.
Although the patient may survive, it is still too early to know what the long-term effects will be. Motorbike crashes have twice the rate of fatal or serious injuries compared with cars, and similar to cars, comprise 30% of road fatalities over summer.
In a neighbouring trauma bay, an elderly lady has been brought in after a fall. She is awake but looks uncomfortable lying flat on her back with a hard neck collar immobilising her spine. She slipped and hit her head while playing with her grandchildren.
Older people are often in unfamiliar environments on Christmas day, visiting friends and family, where there are more opportunities for injury.
Trauma doctors have to make critical decisions in very little time.from shutterstock.com
We hear the sound of a helicopter. A 4WD has rolled when the driver swerved at high speed to avoid another car, smashing head-on into a tree. He was killed instantly, but his female passenger survived and is seriously injured.
Not every hospital has a trauma unit. In Victoria, where we work, two adult and one paediatric hospital have been designated as the state trauma centres: The Alfred, the Royal Melbourne and the Royal Children’s Hospital. Patients with major trauma are usually transported to one of these hospitals.
The awaiting trauma bay is a hive of focused preparation as the patient is wheeled in by the helicopter crew.
The trauma team springs into action checking the airway, breathing and circulation. An ultrasound is performed to identify any internal bleeding. Chest and pelvis X-rays are taken from overhead and reveal a collapsed lung and a crushed pelvis.
In anticipation of ongoing bleeding, the blood bank has been notified and a blood transfusion is started to boost the blood pressure.
As you end your shift, today reminds you to stay safe over the festive period. Because Christmas should be the most wonderful time of the year.
Are you an organic shopper? Into fairtrade? A greenhouse gas warrior? All about free-range and animal welfare?
Even if you said yes to all the above, the chances are that, when you shop, only a few products that meet these ethical concerns actually make it into your basket.
Generally, we all have the blinkers on when shopping with our ethics. We select specific ethical causes and concerns to integrate into our shopping choices while ignoring others.
In their book The Myth of the Ethical Consumer, management professor Timothy Devinney his co-authors cite the evidence that while consumers might profess a social consciousness in surveys (where there is no cost), they usually fail to live up to this when their behaviour is examined.
Rather than a myth, perhaps a more accurate description would be “one-eyed”.
So why do we exercise ethical favouritism at the cash register, turning a blind eye to all but a select few ethical concerns?
Creatures of habit
Shopping is highly habitual. Think about how you do your own grocery shopping. It is usually at the same stores, buying the same stuff. Chances are you take the same route around the store every time.
Mobilising our ethical concerns into our shopping baskets generally requires breaking old habits and making new ones. This takes conscious effort.
Research is required. You have to the read the fine print on labels. Then you have to assess if the claims made are accurate, and weigh them against other choices. It takes time. To integrate a new ethical concern into our shopping basket may even require a whole new store visit and travel routine.
A Fairtrade coffee stall in Gloucester, Britain. Fairtrade certification is one of the few labels guaranteeing fair conditions for producers, but it applies only to a small range of products, such as coffee, chocolate, tea, vanilla, cotton and gold.Jacek Wojnarowsk/Shutterstock
Priority principles
All the effort to make new habits and break old habits is generally reserved for the ethical concerns we give the greatest priority.
Prioritisation is an important coping mechanism to maintain our sanity while juggling complexity – and there are few better examples of the increasing complexity of modern life than your average supermarket. Here we are confronted with literally thousands of choices.
Price, weight and kilojoules are generally the only standardised information provided. A label may carry a logo certifying the product is organic, or fairtrade, or sourced sustainably from a forest or ocean, but very few products meet all those ethical standards simultaneously. If you are concerned about carbon emissions or modern slavery in supply chains, for example, there are no explicit certification schemes.
It is not surprising, then, that with limited time and resources to source and verify the ethical credentials of products, we prioritise our ethical concerns into primary and secondary importance.
Primary ethical concerns resonate with our sense of values strongly enough to mobilise us into action. Primary ethical concerns often make it to the checkout. Secondary concerns rarely do, being traded off against other priorities such as price.
When it comes to any issue effectively downgraded to secondary importance, we are notoriously commitment-phobic.
Part of the reason is because we associate commitment with sacrifice. Whether accurate or not, we have an idea that shopping ethically will usually mean paying more, as well as sacrificing on quality, choice, trendiness and so forth.
Even if there is no or minimal obvious sacrifice, we still harbour suspicions of some cost lurking beneath the surface, and avoid the potential risk. Only for those highest priority concerns to which we feel a strong moral obligation are we willing to commit, take the risk and make a sacrifice.
Guilt avoidance
As we become more aware of questionable ethics in production — such as the epidemic of modern slavery tainting so many of the products and services we consume – the guilt we feel could fast become unbearable.
Research has highlighted the common justification techniques people use to avoid feeling guilty about enjoying the goods produced using modern slavery. These include blaming the slave for their own enslavement (denial of victim), trivialising the experience and impact on the enslaved individual (denial of injury) and regarding the slave as different to ourselves, and therefore worthy of different treatment (dehumanising the slave).
These are perhaps the most extreme forms of guilt avoidance. But we are all adept at deploying some degree of psychological justification to neutralise any sense of personal responsibility for contributing to the problem through our consumption choices.
Turning myth into reality
Can the myth of the ethical consumer become a more lived reality?
Yes, I’m positive it can.
To do so, we need more help from all those interests that shape the choices available to consumers. Laws, regulations and decisions by owners and managers all along supply chains play a part in curating and constraining the choices we have as consumers.
Making it easier for us to assess the ethical credentials of products – through in-store information, accredited labelling systems or apps – would help.
And perhaps simply being more aware of the unconscious justifications going on in our heads daily may help to remove the blinkers, nudging us to shop with both eyes open.
Once again, the year in popular film has been a little underwhelming – with a few exceptions. 2018 has brought to our screens the usual plethora of biopics and films based on true stories, big-budget entries in seemingly endlessly proliferating franchise series, sophomoric indie comedy-dramas and some solid, if minor, genre films. And the year isn’t even over yet.
Probably the most notable thing about 2018 was the box-office success of big-budget franchise films and sequels, including films I have no intention of seeing (Deadpool 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; Mama Mia! Here We Go Again, and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, to name a few) and some still to be seen that look a little more promising (Creed II, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and The Predator, for example).
Here, then, are my top five of the year, some of the more notable disappointments, and a few I am eagerly anticipating.
Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino directed one of the best films of 2017, the elegant, beautifully realised, coming of age film Call Me By Your Name. His remake of Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece of 1977 is similarly exceptional. As with Argento’s film, the setting is an elite German dance academy run by a coven of witches, but whereas Argento’s Germany is a phantasmagoric, expressionistic nightmare-scape, Guadagnino sets his film in a historically acute Berlin, against the backdrop of the actions of the Baader-Meinhof group. The narrative follows the descent of American dance ingenue Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) as she realises things are not what they seem at the academy. The film is punctuated with genuinely terrifying moments – the witches are of the scary, rather than Charmed, variety – but it mostly burns along slowly, inviting the viewer to let its hypnotic images and sounds wash over her. The tension then explodes in the final section, and we are confronted with one of the most gruelling, and vibrant, horror sequences outside of Argento.
Halloween
Like Suspiria, this is a genre film done really well. Co-written by comedian Danny McBride (Pineapple Express, TV’s Eastbound and Down, etc.), and directed by David Gordon Green, whose filmography offers a striking balance between outrageous comedy and sombre melodrama, this is, arguably, the best film in the popular slasher series that features masked killer Michael Myers. (The best film in the series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, is a bizarre and incisive critique of American consumer spectacle, but doesn’t feature Myers.) The plot for a slasher film, of course, is not the point – a guy walks around killing people – but the tone of Halloween, with its remarkable seriousness and intensity, effectively engages the viewer. Its sincerity is all the more striking in the context of a 21st century in which popular culture tends to be evaluated through its capacity for irony and cleverness. Kudos to Halloween for reinvigorating the slasher film as a serious genre after it was put to death by the Scream films in the 1990s.
Andi Matichak in Halloween (2018).idmb
Upgrade
I have written about Leigh Whanell’s Upgrade elsewhere but I just can’t praise this Australian science-fiction/revenge/action film enough. It borrows styles and themes from key earlier works – Robocop, Cyborg, The Terminator – intensifying and extending these. Genre is never really about originality, so to critique a genre film on the basis that it is formulaic is senseless – the pleasure of a genre film comes through its repetition of earlier affects, sensations, and narratives. What makes Upgrade so successful is its ability to reimagine the old generic tropes so the film feels both pleasurably familiar and dynamic at the same time. There is nothing original about Upgrade’s premise – a technological implant malfunctions and the protagonist Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) battles an evil A.I. – but it is handled so skilfully, with compelling and charismatic actors, well-staged action scenes, spare yet visually splendid production design, and an immersive electronic score, that it doesn’t matter.
BlacKkKlansman
BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s best film in decades. It is funny, irreverent, and, at times, rather sweet. The true story on which it it based – an African-American policeman imitates a white redneck in order to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan via telephone – is infectiously outlandish, and Lee develops it in a typically stylish fashion. The film could certainly be criticised on the basis of its confused political and ideological configuration. Can a narrative really make a meaningful statement about structural racial oppression when it features a policeman as the sympathetic protagonist, given the role of the police is to preserve and protect structures as they are? But as a feel-good comedy, it is hard to beat.
John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman (2018).40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks,Blumhouse Productions,Legendary Entertainment
Skyscraper
Many people, I’m sure, will roll their eyes when they see Skyscraper, a highly formulaic disaster film starring The Rock, in a top-five list, but this is one of the best films of its kind. It follows Will Sawyer, a one-legged security expert, as he tries to save the tallest building in the world and its inhabitants – including his family – from a gang of crooks. Every aspect of the film is extreme – it is extremely loud, mayhemic, silly, exciting and funny. It combines the heightened melodrama of The Towering Inferno with the hard-hitting action of Die Hard to create a viscerally charged cinematic experience. Each disaster film-cliché is amplified to the edge of parody, but the filmmakers manage to pull back enough for us to go along for the ride in good faith. Indeed, Skyscraper seems remarkably sincere. This is cinema as immersive spectacle at its finest.
Solid performers: from American Animals to Venom
Solid (if less interesting) films released in 2018 include the wry mockumentary I, Tonya, which, whilst a little heavy-handed in places, offers the viewer a comically wrought true-crime story anchored around charismatic actors and American Animals, another true crime docu-drama. The latter features the real-life criminals onscreen next to their fictionalised avatars and is similarly hilarious in its exploration of a bungled attempt to steal some rare books.
Disobedience, following a budding lesbian relationship in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York City, was one of the most controlled, economically realised films of the year. Its simplicity (and beauty) are quite astonishing. The Kindergarten Teacher is similarly well-made. An agonising, relentless (and hilarious) study of mediocrity, it stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as the eponymous teacher who becomes inappropriately obsessed with one of her talented students.
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Parker Sevak in The Kindergarten Teacher (2018).Pie Films, Farcaster Films, Imagination Park Entertainment
Other highlights were the thought-provoking, European-American documentary Genesis 2.0; the doleful German-French refugee thriller, Transit; Venom, an enjoyably hard-boiled and unsentimental film that feels more like a minor 1950s science-fiction thriller than a Marvel product, and Hereditary, an uneven but satisfying horror epic. The beautifully rendered Leave No Trace, which follows a father and daughter as they attempt to live off the grid, also deserves a mention.
Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie in Leave No Trace (2018).BRON Studios, Harrison Productions, Topic Studios
The disappointments: yes, including Black Panther
As a scholar specialising in action cinema, I was very excited about exploitation cinephile Eli Roth’s remake of Michael Winner’s seminal 1970s film Death Wish – one of the great nasty films of the period. Starring Bruce Willis in the role originally played by Charles Bronson, this film promised to be spectacular. But Roth’s vision is much straighter and less challenging than the original and comes across as another mediocre revenge film.
The Commuter saw Liam Neeson reunited with director Jaume Collet-Serra for the third time. I had hoped for another tightly wrought thriller, with Neeson reprising his now signature role as regular guy turned action hero. This one, however, was confusing, tedious, and unconvincing.
Equally disappointing was Lynne Ramsay’s, You Were Never Really Here. While atmospheric (and starring Joaquin Phoenix at his bearded best), the narrative fails to cohere in fundamental ways.
The major disappointment of the year was Black Panther. Touted as offering a fresh approach to the superhero genre, it is yet another American consumer-liberal fantasy pretending to be something more radical. The film offers a technocratic vision of the black rights movement, celebrating a racial equality and harmony expunged of all of the violence and messiness necessarily embedded in every struggle for equality.
It stages the decades-old conflict between liberal and radical versions of black activism as the clash between good hero (the liberal) and bad villain (the radical), and, given Hollywood’s history of offering liberal fantasy in place of actual social and political critique, this should hardly be surprising. Black Panther is, after all, a Marvel film, so what was I expecting?
Angela Bassett and Letitia Wright in Black Panther: yet another American consumer-liberal fantasy pretending to be something more radical. (2018):Marvel Studios, Moonlighting Films, Korean Film Council
The hopefuls
There are also several non-franchise films of 2018 that I am keen to see. Bodied, a battle rap comedy produced by Eminem looks ecstatically outrageous, and the biopic First Man, starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, may be eminently watchable. Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, by all accounts is engagingly nutty, and I am also eager to see Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, the Lizzie Borden biopic (!) Lizzie, How to Talk to Girls at Parties and Action Point, a true story starring Johnny Knoxville about the world’s strangest amusement park.
Two melancholic films of 2018 closed out the careers of two great American 1970s movie stars. The Old Man and the Gun stars Robert Redford in his final role before retirement and The Last Movie Star looks like an elegiac swan song for brilliant, epoch-defining Burt Reynolds.
Still to be released are the blockbusters Mary Poppins Returns, Bumblebee and Aquaman, and the new Sherlock Holmes comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Holmes & Watson – this gets my vote for trailer of the year. I know what I’ll be doing on Boxing Day.
Open justice is a fundamental principle of our system of goverment and central to maintaining confidence in the justice system. But in many of the most high profile trials, when public interest is high, open justice comes into conflict with the potential of negative publicity about an accused to prejudice a fair trial. In recent weeks, the question of how to balance a free press and a fair trial has been hotly debated. But it has been a topic of controversy for many decades.
What happens if jurors read about an accused’s previous convictions, or access material that is not part of the trial? Will jurors listen when the judge tells them to ignore it? In the digital age, can suppression orders even work when they are routinely ignored overseas?
Numerous judges and lawyers working in the criminal justice system have disagreed about whether we should retain juries to ensure accused people are judged by their peers. In his review of the Victorian Open Courts Act last year, former Supreme Court Justice Frank Vincent noted that the Walsh Street murder trial jury in 1990 delivered acquittals, despite intense publicity and community discussion.
Opponents of juries will cite the secrecy of their deliberations, and examples of jurors befriending accused criminals on social media, or telling their followers they planned to convict. Then there is the argument that juries cannot be adequately protected from publicity that will make a fair trial impossible. Before Adrian Bayley was convicted of murdering Jill Meagher, the police and Meagher’s husband were forced to plead with the public to remove Facebook hate pages directed at Bayley.
Had Bayley not pleaded guilty, how might jurors have ignored the readily available information about his criminal past? Then Victorian Chief Justice Marilyn Warren said in 2015 that suppression orders were made in Bayley’s case to protect a fair trial.
The capacity of members of the public to derail a trial through online publishing is a relatively recent development. Reporting at the Supreme Court in 1989 was a long way from today’s global digital village. The main news agencies were the daily newspapers, the ABC and the wire service AAP. Journalists took notes in court to record sentencing remarks, although some judges would allow reporters to use tape recorders for accuracy’s sake.
In those days, suppression orders were relatively rare. Justice Bernard Teague wrote in 1999 that he had granted non-publication applications, but had also warned journalists about the prospect of being in contempt of court through publication. He attributed the appointment of a courts information officer (former Age court and law reporter Prue Innes) as a major reason for the lack of contempt cases in Victoria in the 1990s.
It might also be news organisations remembered the $80,000 fine given to The Age publishers and editor in 1981 for a feature article that referred to two brothers who were facing trial on drugs charges. Writing for The Age, Innes reported the penalty was the highest for contempt in any Australian court.
Another brake on suppression orders at the Victorian Supreme Court was the presence of reporters in the building. Media lawyers could be called quickly to court, and be given a detailed summary of the suppression arguments while on the way. It meant they could make specific submissions instead of general points about open justice and potentially improve their prospects. Judges knew the regular court reporters by sight, and could anticipate their interest.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, the law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth published the glossy magazine called Medialine, which featured numerous articles about media law issues. In one edition, Sydney barrister Angela Browne quoted High Court decisions supporting jurors’ ability to put aside outside information about a case and reach decision based on the evidence. She wrote:
Jurors are not expected to have extraordinary qualities of impartiality or fairness. What is expected of them is that, having given a solemn undertaking to do so and being properly directed by a judge, they will return a true verdict according to the evidence.
London law firm partner Alaisdair Pepper wrote in 1995 about UK contempt of court rules restricting international pre-trial reporting of the Rosemary West multiple murders case. He acknowledged schools and businesses received news bulletins from other European countries. He said:
In years to come attempts to keep the public in Great Britain in ignorance of what the rest of the world knows about a trial of considerable public interest in this country may render the law looking more and more out of touch.
We might expect these sentiments in a publication that regularly featured media lawyers and journalists. In 1997, Justice Bill Gillard delivered much-repeated remarks about writers commenting during legal proceedings when fining The Australian and a reporter over a column published during the Supreme Court fraud trial of Coles Myer chief Brian Quinn.
Even the most unpopular defendant is entitled to a fair hearing,“ Justice Gillard said. “I would expect that a first-year journalist would know and understand the sub judice rule.” He continued:
All members of the media would be well advised on the basis that, other than reporting the actual proceedings of the court, nothing should be stated in the media concerning the trial, the court, the accused or witnesses. If it is thought that a fact or a comment concerning the trial should be published, then legal advice from those experienced in media law should be consulted.
By 2009, the world, and Victorian court reporting, had changed. Commercial lawyer Isolde Lueckenhausen wrote in Precedent magazine that suppression orders applying to all community members had replaced sub judice contempt as the main method of attacking prejudicial publication. A report commissioned by major media organisations showed Victoria had the largest number of orders made in 2008, although South Australia had proportionally more when population was considered.
Facebook publications were an issue when a man was charged with arson over the 2009 Victorian bushfires, a fictionalised television series was suppressed in part while underworld court proceedings were continuing, and terror trials attracted suppression orders. Lueckenhausen said:
Suppression orders do not stop discussion or prevent determined people from getting information from internet sites. However, they do stop the gradual discussion and analysis of issues that occur with contemporaneous reporting.
She quoted then New South Wales Chief Justice Jim Spigelman, who suggested temporary removal of references to an accused and sequestering jurors might be necessary to support fair trials. She said Justice Spigelman saw the heart of the issue was the conflict between two principles mentioned at the start of this article – open justice and a fair trial.
Recently, the Victorian government asked the Department of Justice to inquire into the prospect of judge-alone trials as an option for those charged with criminal offences. It would provide accused people and their lawyers with an alternative if they were concerned about the possible effect of social and mainstream media publications. But such a move could also open judges to more scrutiny, attack and commentary.
It was on December 21, 1968, that Apollo 8 launched from Cape Kennedy, in Florida, sending US astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr and William Anders on the world’s first human mission to the Moon.
Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman leads the way as he, James Lovell and William Anders head out to the launch pad for the historical Apollo mission to the Moon.NASA
A few days later – on Christmas Eve Houston time, Christmas Day in Canberra – the three astronauts had just passed over the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon and were approaching a lunar sunrise when they sent back a historic Christmas message to the people of Earth.
A few hours later, an Australian tracking station took over as prime data and relay receiving site for the mission.
Located among the gum trees and kangaroos just outside Canberra, Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station listened for the crucial acquisition of signal as the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon on its final orbit, having fired its engine to return to Earth.
Australia’s Honeysuckle Creek tracking station acquired the Apollo 8 signal in December 1968.Hamish Lindsay, Author provided
Honeysuckle Creek received and retransmitted astronaut Jim Lovell’s first words to Mission Control on their way back home:
Houston, Apollo 8, over. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.
Apollo 8: the mission that ‘saved 1968’
The Apollo 8 mission was just the second crewed outing for the type of spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the first lunar landing the following year.
Initially the mission was to test the lunar module in the safety of Earth orbit. But with that spacecraft still not ready, NASA took the bold decision to launch a command and service module around the Moon by itself as a precursor to a crewed landing.
Astronauts (left to right) William Anders, James Lovell Jr and Frank Borman in training for the Apollo mission.NASA
Also spurring the decision was the belief that the Russians were close to launching their own Moon shot.
Apollo 8 was the first manned launch of a massive Saturn V rocket, the first rendezvous with the Moon, and the first time human eyes saw the far side of the Moon.
The six-day mission was a spectacular success. The three astronauts completed ten orbits of the Moon and the spacecraft and ground support were thoroughly tested.
NASA was now one step closer to that “giant leap for mankind”.
Earthrise, taken by astronaut William Anders, December 24, 1968, from on board Apollo 8.NASA
The astronauts also took the now iconic “Earthrise” photograph of the Earth behind a lunar landscape. This was a profound image, containing all of humanity, bar the three astronauts.
Although the religious nature of Apollo 8’s Christmas Bible reading caused some controversy after the mission, it was heard by hundreds of millions of people.
That the message was transmitted from further than humans had ever been – the distance led to a delay of one second into all communications – made it all the more remarkable.
One member of the public famously wrote to NASA to credit the mission with having “saved 1968”, a year otherwise plagued by war and protests over Vietnam, civil rights and other issues.
Supporting Apollo down under
The Apollo program that enabled the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit was overwhelmingly an American endeavour, but not exclusively so.
At a time before dedicated spacecraft communication satellites, NASA relied on a chain of tracking and data relay stations around the world to communicate with Earth-orbiting satellites and astronauts. To ensure adequate coverage, these included stations in far off places such as Madagascar, Nigeria and Woomera in South Australia.
For missions further into the solar system, NASA used three principal stations: one near Canberra in Australia which included Honeysuckle Creek, another at Madrid in Spain, and the third at Goldstone in California.
At least one of these three stations would have a dish that would face the spacecraft at any given time, receiving their communications and passing them to Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
This was a global network of instantaneous data and voice communications, at a time when even a single international telephone call had to be booked weeks in advance and was extremely expensive.
For Apollo 8, Honeysuckle Creek received telemetry and voice communications when the spacecraft first went into orbit behind the Moon, when it first emerged back into communication with Earth, and when it began its fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on December 27.
Australian technicians were responsible for the vital task of aligning the dishes with the spacecraft and troubleshooting any problems that might arise with the equipment, a not unlikely occurrence with 1960s technology.
While only Lovell would fly again, on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, all the equipment and procedures tested on Apollo 8 – the spacecraft, the NASA technicians and the global network of tracking stations – would support the remaining Apollo flights.
Even on Christmas Day, Tidbinbilla will be receiving messages from spacecraft around the Solar System.
So when you send a Christmas message this year, spare a thought for those messages from the Moon 50 years ago, and the role Australian scientists played in receiving them.
A series of memoirs are appearing for Christmas – by Mike Carlton, Kerry O’Brien and the like – as the baby boomer generation of journalists gets some quality time to reflect, laugh, and reveal some new secrets.
As the receiver of a cheapo massive cardboard screed in 1972 for “investigative journalism” from my colleagues in the ABC’s This Day Tonight, my recollection was that “investigative journalism” was a cool, new genre any young journo wanted to be associated with.
Amid denials that illegal casinos existed, we found one well-known establishment across the road from the ABC’s radio headquarters in Forbes Street, near Kings Cross, and arrived with cameras at the front door one night to see if we could film inside. The answer was no, but we phoned our TDT presenter, the great Bill Peach, and asked him to ring the police because we had helpfully found one of these establishments for them. At the end of the show we reported the constabulary had not arrived and wished to remain in ignorance.
It was a laugh, but had a point. Not long later, I repeated this method with a mate of mine from Sydney University, conscientious objector Michael Matteson. When federal Liberal Minister Phillip Lynch said he couldn’t find any “draft dodgers” refusing to go to Vietnam, we found the very articulate pacifist in the university canteen where he sat every day. He gave a great interview.
Back then, no-one in our gang of young troublemakers had formulated a methodology for what we were doing on a daily basis. But we instinctively knew it was a different form of the trade from what we had learned from crusty old news heads as cadets. It was:
evidence-based
“transparent” in inviting the public to see our reasoning
balanced in giving the “other side” a time and place to respond
not pursuing a government or opposition agenda.
A decade later, both ABC’s Four Corners and Brian Toohey’s National Times would make an art of developing “the document trail” or “the money trail” and letting the public see for itself where these trails led. Many of the stories were about “secrets” that security agencies such as ASIO or the CIA didn’t want revealed (for example, Pine Gap and how it operated).
Hundreds of books have since been published on what constitutes “investigative journalism”. I taught at UTS from some of them (and my own experience) a decade ago.
Now comes what I detect to be a new form of journalism. It is often badged as “exclusive investigation”, but in fact has little in common with traditional methodologies. Very often it appears to be a leak from security agencies, not about them. The stories become a convenient form of government propaganda.
The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently called this new form “access journalism”. In this form, journalists report the access, usually an allegation, and do not either prove or disprove the allegation. This form has the following features:
the evidence is based on sources who cannot be named
there is no evidence base (such as a document or money trail)
it lacks transparency, in that the evidence cannot be independently verified
it serves one side’s agenda (usually the government’s)
it uses words in the text that have little definition (especially “is linked to”
it can be written and published very quickly.
The form is undoubtedly a response to the need for media to move faster for stories with big impact. But while allegations might suit US law, in Australia, where depth of research can be a useful legal defence, it is also particularly dangerous under our defamation laws.
Compare the traditional form of “investigative journalism”, which bears these traits:
it is based on identifiable sources whose standing and credibility enhance the claims
it is evidence-based (including documents, finances, and so on) proving a specific thesis or proposition formally stated in the text
its evidence is available for checking
it serves no-one’s agenda, in that several sides of the argument are heard, allowing readers/viewers to make up their own minds as to the truth
it does not use words that unnecessarily pre-judge the final conclusion
it takes a painstaking amount of time to build the evidence base, allow balance, and get legal advice if needed.
No media are immune to taking shortcuts in this transition to a digital future. Even the best, including Fairfax (now part of Nine) and the ABC can be seen to be sipping at the “access journalism” spring.
But an allegation is not necessarily a story, nor is a “link to something” automatically evidence. There needs to be larger conversation about what constitutes proper public evidence, proper reliable sources and transparency in both.
During the end-of-year holidays families often come together to exchange gifts and, sometimes, to confront long-held grudges. What better gift than a peace offering?
Conflict is rarely pleasant and arguments in families can be particularly upsetting. We all know that knot in the pit of the stomach, the flushed face and sweaty hands we experience when we feel we have been dealt with unjustly.
This is a primal stress response to when we feel personally or socially threatened. Our natural reaction is to fight or avoid the person. Revenge might feel instinctive, but that can lead to a cycle of unpleasantness that rolls on and on.
Trying to forget or rationalise a hurtful incident, usually to avoid further confrontation, seldom works. Even if the unpleasant feelings might start to fade, they generally linger in our subconscious and any reminder can reignite them. A constructive way of getting rid of them is to forgive.
But how do we do this and what helps us in the process? We’ve been asking these questions since we started doing research with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (set up by the South African government to help deal with the trauma of apartheid) witnesses more than 20 years ago.
Victims who had indicated they had forgiven perpetrators were less angry and distressed than those who did not. We also found victims were more notably forgiving if they received an apology.
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or minimising the pain we feel; nor is it about excusing others. Forgiveness means making a conscious and deliberate decision to let go of our feelings of resentment or revenge, regardless of whether the person who has upset us deserves it.
Forgiveness is, in the first place, not about others. It is about stopping us from allowing resentment towards others to make life miserable for us.
People want to return to how they felt before the offending incident occurred. And they want to think of the event without bitterness and anger, a tightness in the chest, and endless rumination.
Forgiveness takes time. It sometimes helps to think of occasions when we have offended people in the past or to try to look genuinely at the situation through the offender’s eyes.
We must start by forgiving ourselves for any contribution we think we might have made to the incident. People often blame themselves partly for what may have happened.
Survivors of sexual abuse or harassment say the most difficult part of the forgiveness process is accepting they were not to blame and to stop being angry with themselves.
A good apology ideally has three parts: an admission of responsibility, a demonstration of sorrow, and doing something to remedy the offence, or prevent a repetition of it. This could even just involve promising not to do it again.
When we asked people who had been offended by an intimate partner what convinced them their partner was truly sorry, they said actions spoke louder than words. One said it would help if their partner went out of their way to do something that would be an inconvenience for them.
An apology is not telling others we feel sorry they are angry; it is telling them we understand why they are angry with us, regret making them feel that way, and want to take their anger away. An effective apology is showing the person we understand why they are hurting.
A study that explored medical errors and the responses of those affected showed an apology was most effective where it focused on the needs of the patient. We might not always know how we can take away the anger, so it is usually good to ask the person we are apologising to what their needs are.
If the apology wasn’t good enough the first time, you can try again, but first listen carefully to what the person you are apologising to is saying, and address those concerns.
Misdirected apologies can make a situation worse, they can make people more angry and make it more difficult for them to forgive. So, don’t apologise unless it’s sincere.
Prioritise your safety
Forgiving ourselves is always good. But forgiving others is only beneficial if the advantages exceed the potential costs. We should therefore not forgive others if that might expose us to further abuse or exploitation.
The stress response we experience to being hurt is protective because it motivates us to stop people from abusing or taking advantage of us. Anger is sometimes functional.
We should not feel guilty if we do not forgive because some behaviour is simply unforgivable.www.shutterstock.com, CC BY
We should also not feel guilty if we do not forgive because some behaviour is simply unforgiveable and carrying our anger might be less harmful than the potential harm of forgiving.
There are also times when everyone may feel they are the victim or some people may not realise they have hurt others even if they can sense someone is unhappy with them.
A good way forward is to ask people what the issue is and then listen to understand, rather than listening to be able to respond. When we listen without instinctively thinking of a way to defend ourselves, we may realise there has been a misunderstanding or we’ve behaved inappropriately.
And if you feel offended by something that’s said or done, you could avoid unpleasant feelings by telling the other person how you feel.
December 24 is the 50th anniversary of Earthrise, arguably one of the most profound images in the history of human culture. When astronaut William Anders photographed a fragile blue sphere set in dark space peeking over the Moon, it changed our perception of our place in space and fuelled environmental awareness around the world.
The photo let us see our planet from a great distance for the first time. The living Earth, surrounded by the darkness of space, appears fragile and vulnerable, with finite resources.
Viewing a small blue Earth against the black backdrop of space, with the barren moonscape in the foreground, evokes feelings of vastness: we are a small planet, orbiting an ordinary star, in an unremarkable galaxy among the billions we can observe. The image prompts emotions of insignificance – Earth is only special because it’s the planet we live on.
As astronaut Jim Lovell said during the live broadcast from Apollo 8, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realise just what you have back there on Earth.”
The Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast.
Earthrise is a testament to the extraordinary capacity of human perception. Although, in 1968, the photograph seemed revelatory and unexpected, it belongs to an extraordinary history of representing the Earth from above. Anders may have produced an image that radically shifted our view of ourselves, but we were ready to see it.
A history of flight
People have always dreamed of flying. As we grew from hot-air balloons to space shuttles, the camera has been there for much of the ride.
After WWII, the US military used captured V-2 rockets to launch motion-picture cameras out of the atmosphere, producing the first images of Earth from space.
Russia’s Sputnik spurred the United States to launch a series of satellites — watching the enemy and the weather — and then NASA turned its attention to the Moon, launching a series of exploratory probes. One (Lunar Orbiter I, 1966) turned its camera across a sliver of the Moon’s surface and found the Earth, rising above it.
The non-human version of Earthrise from Lunar Orbiter in 1966.NASA
Despite not being the “first” image of the Earth from our Moon, Earthrise is special. It was directly witnessed by the astronauts as well as being captured by the camera. It elegantly illustrates how human perception is something that is constantly evolving, often hand in hand with technology.
Earthrise showed us that Earth is a connected system, and any changes made to this system potentially affect the whole of the planet. Although the Apollo missions sought to reveal the Moon, they also powerfully revealed the limits of our own planet. The idea of a Spaceship Earth, with its interdependent ecologies and finite resources, became an icon of a growing environmental movement concerned with the ecological impacts of industrialisation and population growth.
‘Spaceship Earth’ became a powerful rallying cry for environmental groups.Flickr, CC BY-SA
From space, we observe the thin shield provided by our atmosphere, allowing life to flourish on the surface of our planet. Lifeforms created Earth’s atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide and generating free oxygen. They created an unusual mix of gases compared to other planets – an atmosphere with a protective ozone layer and a mix of gases that trap heat and moderate extremes of temperature. Over millions of years, this special mix has allowed a huge diversity of life forms to evolve, including (relatively recently on this time scale) Homo sapiens.
The field of meteorology has benefited enormously from the technology foreshadowed by the Earthrise photo. Our knowledge is no longer limited to Earth-based weather-observing stations.
Satellites can now bring us an Earthrise-type image every ten minutes, allowing us to observe extremes such as tropical cyclones as they form over the ocean, potentially affecting life and land. Importantly, we now possess a long enough record of satellite information so that in many instances we can begin to examine long-term changes of such events.
Tropical Cyclone Owen seen from space.Bureau of Meteorology/AAP
The human population has doubled in the 50 years since the Earthrise image, resulting in habitat destruction, the spread of pest species and wildfires spurred by climate warming. Every year, our actions endanger more species.
Earth’s climate has undergone enormous changes in the five decades since the Earthrise photo was taken. Much of the increase in Australian and global temperatures has happened in the past 50 years. This warming is affecting us now, with an increase in the frequency of extreme events such as heatwaves, and vast changes across the oceans and polar caps.
With further warming projected, it is important that we take this chance to look back at the Earthrise photo of our little planet, so starkly presented against the vastness of space. The perspective that it offers us can help us choose the path for our planet for the next 50 years.
It reminds us of the wonders of the Earth system, its beauty and its fragility. It encourages us to continue to seek understanding of its weather systems, blue ocean and ice caps through scientific endeavour and sustained monitoring.
The beauty of our planet as seen from afar – and up close – can inspire us to make changes to secure the amazing and diverse animals that share our Earth.
Zoos become conservation organisations, holding, breeding and releasing critically endangered animals. Scientists teach us about the capacities of animals and the threats to their survival.
Communities rise to the challenge and people in their thousands take actions to help wildlife, from buying toilet paper made from recycled paper to not releasing balloons outdoors. If we stand together we can secure a future for all nature on this remarkable planet.
But is a 50-year-old photo enough to reignite the environmental awareness and action required to tackle today’s threats to nature? What will be this generation’s Earthrise moment?
The authors would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Alicia Sometimes to this article.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Hinz, Director of Research and Development, Pivot Professional Learning; and Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne
This is a longer read at just over 1,500 words. Enjoy!
The year 2018 was a mixed bag for schooling policy in Australia.
We had new ministers, a new organisation and some auspicious anniversaries. As Christmas approaches, it’s worth reflecting on the year that’s been.
Let’s begin in the states and territories
New South Wales
One of the biggest ticket items this year is the overhaul of the NSW school curriculum for the first time in decades. The curriculum is currently under review – and when it’s reformed, the effect will likely be felt far beyond NSW’s borders.
There have been multiple indications the reformed curriculum may have a greater focus on capabilities. These are also known as “soft skills” or “21st century skills”, and include creative and critical thinking. (The new Victorian Curriculum, and to a lesser extent the national Australian Curriculum, have also focused more closely on general capabilities.)
NSW premier Gladys Berijiklian announced in May 2018 they would review and overhaul the state curriculum.Peter Rae/AAP
This shift is a response to growing evidence of the vital importance of capabilities to school performance, life outcomes and the economy. There is also evidence they can and should be developed in education settings from toddler-hood through to the tertiary years and beyond. Debate now turns to the best way to do so.
South Australia
NSW is not the only state marching forward with its own bold program. The new South Australian government is embarking on an ambitious school improvement agenda to “speed up” the learning growth of every student in every classroom. This system-wide reform combines tailored approaches with a heavier emphasis on planning, data, literacy and numeracy, building on their successful trial of the phonics check.
Queensland is steadily closing gaps in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.
It has also launched a new strategic plan. Notably, this includes early childhood education and post-school education, and additional measures for students in regional and rural areas, and students with disabilities. This is part of a cohesive approach to lifting and sustaining learning outcomes for all students.
Victoria
The re-election of the Andrews government in November sees the continuation of its Education State reform agenda. This includes funding more specialists in schools (teachers, doctors, speech pathologists, psychologists and social workers), building and renovating more schools, and providing more preschool.
Victorian state education minister James Merlino (left) and Victoria’s Premier, Daniel Andrews (right).Ellen Smith/AAP
Yes, in a landmark policy announcement, Victoria’s youngest residents will receive two years of funded preschool. Given the benefits of quality preschool to all students, especially reducing developmental vulnerability on school entry, it’s a solid investment. It is one of the only strategies proven by research to lift outcomes for all children.
Western Australia is turning its attention to better recruitment, development and support for school leaders, as part of its broader system improvement strategy.
Tasmania
In Tasmania, the ongoing implementation of the 2017 Education Act kept schools and department officials busy – in large part due to giant shift to 13 years of compulsory schooling (prep to year 12) by 2020.
Until recently, many schools finished at year ten and students wanting to continue their education move to a new school, often in a new town. This is a major factor in Tassie’s low year 12 completion rate of only 72% – a full 10% lower than the national average.
The Northern Territory
And the NT launched it’s latest strategic plan with a focus on school leadership, quality, equity, differentiated learning, community engagement and better data.
The NT is focusing on a strong public education system that ensures equity for all children.Lucy Hughes Jones/AAP
They also put out a new school funding model, with a greater emphasis on action and targeting to student needs and interventions.
ACT
The ACT became the first jurisdiction in Australia to provide every secondary student in a government school with a laptop. The ACT 2018-19 budget also provided A$9.2 million for research and trials of new teaching techniques in response to damning research that found once socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account, ACT students are up to a year behind their counterparts in other states and territories.
Turning to the federal level
Gonski 2.0
The March release of the Gonski 2.0 report was an early highlight. This review was tasked with identifying the school and classroom factors that can make the biggest, sustained difference to educational achievement. This includes what funding should be spent on, rather than structural issues like funding allocations.
The Gonski 2.0 report, authored by David Gonski (far left) was released in March 2018.Mick Tsikas
Gonski 2.0 advocated for a student-centred schooling system based on learning growth over time. Key recommendations focused on enhancing student voice, and better valuing of and support for teachers and school leaders, including providing them with the time and tools (including finer grain data, and data beyond NAPLAN) to focus on teaching and educational leadership, so they’re not swamped by administrative compliance.
(Astute readers will have noticed the key elements of Gonski 2.0 are already key elements of existing state and territory policy platforms and strategies.)
Happy anniversary?
2018 was the tenth anniversary of three major pillars of Australian schooling policy: NAPLAN, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and the Melbourne Declaration of Educational Goals for Young Australians. Each celebrated this milestone amidst growing debate on whether they had served their intended purpose.
In the case of NAPLAN, this was accompanied by a growing call for its abolition or overhaul. NAPLAN was intended as a nationally-comparable, point-in-time dataset on a few vital areas to support schools and system leaders to make program and resourcing decisions. It was also meant to inform parental choice of schools.
But misunderstanding and misuse of NAPLAN has led to perverse effects. These include an overemphasis on preparation by some schools and families, resulting in anxiety and curriculum narrowing.
2018 also saw the launch of a new national institution – the Gonski Institute focused on addressing education inequality across Australia. Despite – or perhaps because of – near continuous reforms at state and federal levels this past decade, inequality continues to grow.
Dan Tehan, right, was appointed Federal Education Minister by Scott Morrison, left, in August 2018.Mick Tsikas/AAP
We also got a new federal education minister – Dan Tehan. He received the poisoned chalice of continuing the long and testy negotiations with the states on a five-year school funding agreement derived from the 2017 Education Act (the previous round of funding refoms) and the Gonski 2.0 findings.
It wasn’t until this week all jurisdictions were finally signed-up. But the last signatory – Victoria – only made a one-month deal. The Victorian government has expressed their concerns about a “dud deal” that provides more funding for students at non-government schools than those at government schools.
This short-term deal raises a bunch of questions as we head into the near year and the 2019 federal election – will there be by more short-term deals? Will other states seek to renegotiate better terms? Is Victoria banking on a change of government – and negotiating partner?
What do we know about federal Labor’s plans for education?
The key elements of Labor’s schooling policy pillars are restoring funding to schools cut by the Coalition. This includes, contentiously, restoring funding to some of the most over-funded non-government schools.
They have also pledged an additional year of preschool for all kids across Australia, and have announced they will establish a national evidence institute for education policy.
Federal Labor plans to establish a national evidence institute for education policy if they win the election in 2019.Wayne Taylor/AAP
A new year and new goals
The updating of the national goals for Australian schooling by Australia’s state, territory and Commonwealth education ministers next year provides an opportunity to reflect on the purposes of schooling in the 21st century.
It’s hard to find fault with Minister Tehan’s statement that “Australia needs a shared agenda across the country to ensure alignment between policy, practice and delivery” and that young people need “a quality school education, tailored to individual needs”.
But it’s also true the 2008 goals were never achieved because it was never properly implemented.
Grand goals are well and good, but we need to also provision for implementation and work hard to make it happen. This means time, resources, clarity on each stakeholder’s role in creating an excellent and equitable schooling system (which enables all young Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals), and active and informed citizens.
It’s time to commit to action and cooperation, regardless of who wins the 2019 elections.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Troy Innocent, City of Melbourne Knowledge Fellow 2017-18, Senior Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University of Technology
Playable cities connect people and place in creative ways. They appropriate urban environments and infrastructure and provide ways for citizens to participate in smart cities. While people may be aware of smart cities, these are perceived to be more about technology and corporate interests, rather than about people.
Play invites participation. And the playable city invites you to become part of the experience, part of the artwork. It shifts the boundary of where an artwork begins and ends in relation to our urban environment.
The 2018 Melbourne Art Trams program connects people with art, with trams first being painted in creative ways in 1978. But, for the first time, one tram makes art “playable”.
Using a smartphone camera and an augmented reality app, the music changes with the tram’s speed.James H.H. Morgan, Author provided
My 32.5-metre tram artwork plays a musical score via augmented reality. It takes something that is functional and everyday and turns it into a playable public artwork.
Public art is often decorative, but should also be provocative – challenging our perception and understanding of public space. Central to the playable city concept is the role of art and play in transformation and defamiliarisation – so that we our world in a new light.
The playable city happens in conversation with people and places that make the city – it is a social framework. Conversation is what playable cities bring to smart cities, broadening our perspective and imagining of what our city could be.
The 2018 festival team embraced the concept of a playable art tram by providing a C2-class tram on Route 96. At 32.5 metres, it’s Melbourne’s longest tram.
Viewed through a smartphone camera, the tram is roughly five times as wide as the screen. This allows it to be scanned as it moves – somewhat like a musical score being read by a pianola. The speed of the tram generates different musical compositions when it’s stationary, accelerating, at full speed, slowing to a stop and so on.
The particular ways in which trams move through urban spaces is the main inspiration for the work. Making it playable is a way to visualise and sonify that movement.
Troy Innocent talks about the playable city and his playable tram.
The Playable City
If a tram can be playable, then what other parts of the city could we play? While play in cities is not a new idea, in the past two decades we have seen a rise of creative technologies that present new opportunities for artists and designers working in public space.
In 2012, the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio recognised this trend and founded the Playable City project – reacting against the technological bias of smart cities at the time. Originating in Bristol, the international network now includes eight cities around the world.
Through a series of commissions – including talking lamp posts and street lights that mirror your shadows – a methodology has been developed that talks across urban planners, artists, technologists, designers, academics, local government, architects, creative producers and beyond. Since the project started, smart cities have become more diverse and have started to learn from the conversations that the Playable City started – particularly around citizen participation and co-creation.
Playable cities bring people back into the civic conversation through playful strategies like public art, participatory design and urban play. A new conversation around Melbourne as a playable city is beginning to take shape. As Melbourne grows, this is a conversation that needs many voices and strategies.
As the Art Tram program demonstrates, Melbourne has always been a playable city. Quentin Stevens’s 2007 book, The Ludic City, features the urban landscape of Melbourne as a public playground – before the smartphone arrived and transformed public space.
The city has a long history of independent and experimental game development. Having recently completed a Melbourne Knowledge Fellowship researching playable cities overseas, it is clear what the city has to offer to this conversation and we hope to establish an urban play community in Melbourne.
Play that can reshape cities
Games and play have become increasingly embedded in daily life over the past two decades – they have become pervasive. I’m interested in games and play that are situated in unfamiliar contexts and locations, that cross over disciplines, that get us thinking and seeing the world in new ways.
As games and play become something that is not only about entertainment but also challenge and re-imagine our ways of being in the world, we will experience a wider range of creative expression and possibilities. Play can literally create alternative realities for us that are not separate from the world but reshape the world we already live in. Playable cities connect people and create opportunities for people to participate in the processes that shape the cities they live in.
Try it for yourself: download the Accelerando app (here or here) and go play a tram!
‘Tis the season for seafood. While those in colder parts of the world tuck into turkey and hot dinners, in the southern hemisphere we get festive with prawn cocktails at Christmas and smoked salmon for New Year’s. Maybe crayfish and crab. Perhaps oysters and octopus. Or barramundi and more prawns on the barbie.
Yes, most of us love to eat fish. Some fish, anyway – and just some parts of those fish. When, for example, did you last eat a piece of fish that wasn’t a fillet?
That’s a problem when you consider how wild fish get caught. When fishing trawlers cast nets or reel out long lines, they don’t just catch the fish they know we want to eat. The industry calls the unwanted fish caught “bycatch”. These fish are generally discarded by being thrown back into the sea, alive or dead.
Our research shows that huge economic and environmental benefits could come from fully using fish now discarded. If all of the edible fish caught was kept and sold, both the sustainability and profitability of fishing would significantly improve.
Here’s the bycatch
Discarded fish accounts for 8% of the total global catch by volume. In Australia our reluctance to eat many types of fish makes the bycatch problem even worse.
As part of a CSIRO research team, we spent 12 months examining causes (and possible solutions) to the bycatch problem. This involved an economic analysis of fish caught and discarded by fishing trawlers operating in the Great Australian Bight Trawl Sector.
The Great Australian Bight Trawl Sector.Australian Fisheries Management Authority
This region of the Southern Ocean is fished mostly for deepwater flathead and bight redfish. There are, in fact, 120 different species that can be caught, but only 60 of these are eaten. The means up to 56% of any catch is discarded.
We calculated the cost and potential of the bycatch that fishing trawlers were already catching using the information about fish both caught and discarded that commercial fishing vessels are required to record in log books.
By our calculation, had the discarded fish been able to be sold, total annual fishing returns would have been increased by 18%, from A$1.97 million to A$2.32 million per vessel.
By always eating the same fish in the same ways, consumers are wasting other fish species. In the short term this means rising prices as the cost of finding and catching fish increases; in the longer term it means those fish will become luxury items and large swathes of the fishing industry will become unsustainable.
A typical trawler catch. The big fish are hapuka, the red fish are bight redfish; these will be kept. The yellow fish, ocean jacket, will be discarded.Matt Koopman
The obvious solution is to rethink how we use the fish we already catch. Cultural preferences and consumer demand are not external and fixed issues. We can make conscious choices.
Consumer problem
Why do we eat such a limited range of seafood? It is a combination of palate – what we are used to – and awareness. Culture plays a part, as does fashion. What our ancestors once commonly ate might strike us as unpalatable or as exotic as a foreign cuisine.
In Australia, most people tend to dislike “fishy” flavours like sardines and cook fish in a way – flinging it on the bbq – that may not work for more delicate, unusual species like clams. We prefer boneless fish that flakes but isn’t too soft or too oily (for example we love flathead, not eel). We have also gotten used to consuming the same foods at any time of year, with little thought to seasonality.
That means molluscs may be too irregular, leatherjacket might have too many bones, and dogfish might just have the wrong name.
But these consumption preferences are not immutable. They can change. As one fisher we spoke to said, there was much to be hopeful about reducing the level of discards, due not only to the potential of Asian markets but the increasing consumer interest in sustainable consumption.
Changing how we think about eating fish
Inspiration could come from the “nose to tail” movements that promote using all of the animal. The movement to use local produce could also help. There are restaurants in Scandinavia that specialise in cooking little-known previously discarded local species, cooking “whatever comes in that afternoon” off local fishing boats.
Programs to market lesser-known fish, provide recipes and identification charts are also becoming common overseas. Celebrity chefs or cooking programs could help make eating currently rejected fish fashionable.
Increased demand for a wider range of locally caught species would also reduce imported fish (Australia imports more seafood than it exports). This would help take the pressure off overseas fisheries that may be less sustainably managed than our own (which are subject to strict environmental regulations).
So next time you buy or eat fish, explore your options. Talk to your local fish supplier and restaurateur and try something new. Don’t throw another shrimp on the barbie; make it ocean jacket or whatever has just come in fresh instead.
This research was funded by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (project 2015/204) on behalf of the Australian government. Alistair Hobday, Matt Koopman, Ian Knuckey and Shijie Zhou contributed to the project
enable academics – particularly younger, untenured, or otherwise vulnerable academics – to have the option of publishing under a pseudonym when they might otherwise be deterred from publishing by fear of death threats… threats to their families, or threats to their careers.
This is a justification that should trouble us all, not just those of us who happen to work in and for universities. Scientific advance, as well as the health of our society and the political and cultural freedoms that underpin it, depends on our capacity to accept that ideas, when properly and rigorously argued, are capable of being judged with a reasonable degree of objectivity, regardless of who is positing them.
We should expect academics in particular to be willing to assess an idea on the basis of what is being argued, not who is arguing it. Failing to do this is traditionally understood as committing an ad hominem fallacy.
True, we know that all human knowledge is subject to a myriad of visible and hidden prejudices that shape how we think. But reasoned argument gives us various tools that we can use to expose these prejudices, and thus also the possibility of rising above them.
Thus academics are trained to judge an idea primarily on the basis of the cogency, originality and rigour of the arguments that support it. We can assess the underlying validity of those arguments by scrutinising their inherent reasoning and by comparing them against bodies of pre-existing knowledge.
The peer review process is one particular tool we use to uphold these standards. It involves the “blind” assessment of submissions to academic publications. The recent “grievance studies” hoax, however, has drawn public attention to some of the weaknesses of the peer review system. It also helps us understand the wider context that has motivated the creation of a Journal of Controversial Ideas.
In this hoax, three academics concocted articles that parodied a certain style of academic argument. Several of the fake articles were accepted for publication despite their dubious content. Their titles included Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon and An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.
One hoax article purported to be a study of Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.Shutterstock
The hoaxers argue that the fact such articles were accepted for publication points to the corrupting influence of “identity politics” on academia. The righteousness of one’s personal experiences of, or feelings about, an issue (and, more broadly, the identity groups with which one identifies) are, they suggest, increasingly valued as a source of authority over abstract reasoning or generalised observation.
When our identity becomes the principal filter through which we understand the world, however, we can no longer presume that notions like truth and objective facts actually exist. We must instead accept that we live in a world of multiple competing truths, with no agreed consensus about how we might choose between them.
Rejection of expert advice
Both the election of Trump and the result of the Brexit referendum in the UK have been in part attributed to the success of political campaigns so conceived. Both involved an explicit rejection of reasoned advice from academic experts such as political scientists, climate scientists, and economists. Instead, appeals for support targeted particular sections of the electorate based on voters’ race and ethnicity – identity politics at its purest.
This is not a phenomenon restricted to the political right. As the New York Times observed last year, the right has itself been responding to a form of political thinking already common to so-called “progressive” political movements.
For instance, if you happen to be white, male, cis-gendered, working class, and so on, you are likely to look for a tribal allegiance of your own. Or, as Mark Lilla put it in his 2017 book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, “as soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same”.
Lilla argues that we must instead reassert the importance of appeals to a “universal democratic ‘we’” (as opposed to “I”) “on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled and action inspired”.
One of the reasons this is so difficult to do is that our identity does matter when we confront many genuine political grievances. Racism, poverty, misogyny, homophobia are, alas, very real problems. They affect us individually very differently depending on how others perceive us – or we perceive ourselves – in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality and the like.
To effectively solve the injustices that arise out of these social phenomena, it is necessary to recognise that the significant forms of disadvantage and discrimination they cause are not natural, but socially constructed. They need to be contested and addressed as such.
Lilla is right to argue, nevertheless, that we risk taking our focus on identity too far. The emergence of a Journal of Controversial Ideas is only one particular sign that our once generally accepted belief in the possibility of disinterested political, theoretical, or even scientific, knowledge may be threatened by an over-focus on identity.
Other signs include the rise of an “alternative facts” discourse and the now widespread lack of trust in public broadcasting and other forms of so-called “mainstream” media.
New forms of social media, on the other hand, are perfectly made for identity politics because they allow us easily to inhabit identity-based silos. Safe in these communities of shared background and interest, we risk never having to meet, let alone debate with, people who might think or act differently to us.
Cultural value
The influence of identity politics is felt in my own academic field of music. Here, questions of musical value are increasingly being understood as little more than a reflection of an individual’s contingent cultural appetites. Experience-centred methodologies such as autoethnography and action research, which license a researcher to make themselves the principal subject of research, lend this shift in perspective scholarly respectability.
But by focusing on the centrality of personal experience over shared knowledge, we can avoid having to consider a more inclusive or idealistic understanding of what our musical culture is. Or, indeed, ought to be.
We also risk becoming less concerned to learn about, or seek out, cultural experiences or perspectives that would seek to push us beyond the immediate limits of our own experiences and imagination.
Anna Funder (speaking here in 2012) declined to judge the Horne Prize under restrictive new guidelines which, she said, would disqualify a lot of her own work.Honner Media
Indeed, we start actively to avoid or suppress such perspectives altogether. The organisers of the Horne Prize in effect did this when they sought to disqualify “writing that purports to represent the experiences of those in any minority community of which the writer is not a member”. Judges David Marr and Anna Funder both resigned in protest and in the end the organisers backtracked.
The protests that erupted earlier this year concerning Opera Australia’s casting of the role of Maria for its forthcoming production of West Side Story is another example. Here it was argued Australian-born Julie Lea Goodwin, who has been cast as Maria, should instead have been of the same ethnic origin as Maria herself. This is despite the fact that West Side Story is itself a reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c.1595) by two Jewish-American men (Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim). Maria’s identity will always be more complex than the politics of identity would seem to allow.
Such a focus on identity may also distract us from considering the underlying economic forces that might be shaping particular forms of cultural or social behaviour, including identity politics itself. It is surely no coincidence that it is flourishing at the very same time we are being encouraged by online businesses to bracket ourselves by ethnicity, political affiliation, cultural tastes, sexuality, class, and so on. Just whose interests are ultimately being served?
To be sure, our identity unquestionably shapes (and can limit) how we interact with the world but it should not become the only foundation upon which we build our understanding of it. Claims to scholarly or political authority made on the basis of identity should also be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny and critique as any other form of public knowledge.
It is our rational systems of enquiry, and our underlying belief in the possibility of objective truth, that ultimately requires bolstering and defending by our universities, not narrow forms of knowing that would instead give primacy to our lived experience.
Without a continuing trust in such shared values we run the risk of being unable to convince people different from ourselves why they might wish to think or feel, let alone vote or act, like we do.
Looking back on the federal politics of 2018, voters can conclude they’ve been given a rough trot.
What’s been dubbed “the permanent election campaign” to which we are subjected these days is a curse. Too often it encourages expedient rather than sound decisions and ugly behaviour dominated by noise and stunts.
Added to that, we’ve had from the Coalition this year an extraordinary series of leadership, policy and individual meltdowns. A government that started 2018 with a one-seat majority ends it in a minority, after the loss of a byelection and a defection to the crossbench.
This has indeed been the year of governing badly.
As the Coalition struggles towards Christmas it has been buffeted this week by a sex scandal involving an obscure Nationals MP and an attack from its own side over its energy policy.
The cavorting of Andrew Broad in “sugar baby” land has left the Nationals looking for a candidate for the Victorian seat of Mallee, safe in normal circumstances, but not to be taken for granted in these days of community independents and when the incumbent has been disgraced. (Broad will be around until the election – there is no byelection.)
Senior Nationals want a woman to run. The party’s deputy leader senator Bridget McKenzie is not ruling out seeking preselection but has no connection with the area. One government source says “it would be pretty late for her to be carpetbagging” into the seat. A strong local would seem better.
Whether the Liberals will make it a three-cornered contest is an open question (though they probably wouldn’t field a candidate if McKenzie ran).
In 2016 the Nationals contested Murray after a Liberal retired, and won the seat; the Liberals might think they could benefit in this contest from any backlash against the Nationals over Broad’s conduct. On the other hand, would they want to spend money on this seat in an election when dollars will be tight?
The Nationals have often been a steady and stabilising force within the Coalition. Coming out of this year they look like a chaotic rump, unable to manage their personal and political lives.
Barnaby Joyce destroyed his leadership with an affair and has been undermining his party as he tries to get it back. McCormack is a trier facing a job that often looks beyond him. He’ll last to the election (well, presumably) but probably not after that.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the ultimate trier, believing the only possible salvation for the government is constant activity. For a very short time, he looked reasonably effective. But then all the freneticism stated to appear contrived and fake.
One big challenge Morrison has not been able to handle is the Coalition’s “woman problem”. Minimal female representation in both Coalition parties, claims of bullying in the Liberals, and the defection to the crossbench of Liberal MP Julia Banks will inevitably put off female voters. The Broad scandal feeds into the negative narrative.
Morrison himself has a “blokey” image that might turn away some female voters although Liberal sources dispute this.
It’s ironic that neither Coalition party will embrace quotas but Morrison wanted a female candidate in Wentworth (only to be rebuffed by the preselectors) and now McCormack urges a woman for Mallee.
Women are thought to be useful in desperate circumstances, it seems.
Amid all the year’s bedlam in conservative politics, one major policy issue remains unresolved – or more precisely it is the intersection of two issues, energy and climate.
The bitter battle within the Liberals over energy didn’t just bring down Malcolm Turnbull – it stopped the formulation of the sort of viable policy business pleads for, to give certainty to investors.
This week the Berejiklian government called out its federal counterpart; state energy minister Don Harwin declared it “out of touch” on energy and climate policy, saying “it’s time for them to change course”. But at a testy meeting of the COAG energy council federal minister Angus Taylor was defiantly unmoved.
Also this week came criticism from the Energy Security Board, which says in its 2018 Health of the Electricity Market report that when investment is needed “it is not helpful for the Commonwealth government to be threatening powers of divestment, price setting and discretionary asset write-downs.”
Energy policy both symbolises the deep ideological divide in the Liberal party and is at the core of it. The party won’t be credible on policy until it can formulate a broad position that is acceptable to stakeholders and the community. If it goes into opposition next year, doing so should be a top policy priority.
Its plan for a National Energy Guarantee was scuttled by the government itself during those crazy coup days in August. But this was not before devising the scheme had given then energy minister Josh Frydenberg a chance to show his credentials, as a policy formulator and a negotiator.
Frydenberg lost the NEG but won his colleagues’ respect. He received an overwhelming vote for Liberal deputy; as things stand, he’s well placed to lead his party at some future point.
Frydenberg, now treasurer, is one of the few senior Liberal who’s looked half way impressive this year. His next test will be the April 2 budget, although naturally ownership of that will lie as much or more with Morrison.
The timetable for a May election is now set. The government wants to maximise the period it has to try to regroup.
When parliament rose there was speculation the government might not want it to return in February because the Coalition faced a House defeat on a amendment to facilitate medical transfers from Manus and Nauru. This might make a March election more attractive, so the argument went.
But the government doesn’t seem so concerned about that vote now, believing some of the crossbenchers will drop off the amendment or want to weaken it.
Looking to 2019: the betting is firmly on an ALP victory, in the absence of a surprising turn of events. A win by either side would at least bring an end to the revolving prime ministerships, thanks to rule changes.
Assuming Labor won a solid majority, hopefully the voters might also get a little respite before the continuous campaigning started up again.
