Journal articles: 'Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force' – Grafiati (2024)

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The author studies the history of formation of the Australian-new Zealand army corps (ANZAC) formations after the beginning of the First world war. The mobilization activities of the governments of Australia and New Zealand, the reaction of societies in these countries to the world war and participation in it, the features of recruitment of the Australian Imperial Force (AIS) and the new Zealand expeditionary force, the characteristics of the corps command are studied. It shows the main events during the transport of the first convoy with ANZAC troops to training camps in Egypt in the autumn of 1914, the victory of the Australian cruiser Sydney over the German raider – light cruiser Emden during the AIS convoy. Special attention is paid to the connection of events of formation and transport ANZAC with Russia – the presence in the body of Russian emigrants volunteers, and participation in the protection of the convoy and against German raiders in the Pacific and Indian oceans warships of the Russian Navy, «Pearl» and «Askold». The article uses archival materials of the Australian War Memorial and English archives, diary entries and letters of participants of the first convoy from Australia to Alexandria (Egypt).

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On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominion's force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

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Abstract For a very long time, the common law has provided that an agent does not have the authority to sign a sealed document on behalf of the agent’s principal unless the principal granted authority to the agent to do so under seal. It also provides that an agent who enters into a sealed contract becomes a party personally to the contract and the principal is not a party to the so-called sealed contract rule. This article suggests that both common-law rules have been overtaken by certain legislative provisions in force in British Columbia (BC). In particular, the second rule may not have been in force in the UK since the coming-into-force in 1881 of the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act, the operative part of which has been enacted in BC, various states of Australia, New Zealand and various other Commonwealth countries. The article goes on to suggest that the one UK decision relied on by a leading textbook in support of the continuing validity of the sealed contract rule is not a valid authority on that point.

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Current provisions in the New Zealand Loadings code for dynamic amplification of moment and shear force in cantilever wall buildings are critically examined. Based on time-history analyses of six wall structures, from two- to twenty-storeys, it is found that higher mode effects are inadequately represented by either the equivalent lateral force or modal response spectrum design methods. The time-history results indicate that dynamic amplification is dependent on both initial period, and expected displacement ductility level. Two different methods for consideration of higher mode effects in cantilever walls are proposed. The first is based on a simple modification of the modal response spectrum method, while the second is appropriate for single-mode design approaches such as the equivalent lateral force method. Both are found to give excellent representation of expected response. It is shown that providing capacity protection at the design seismic intensity does not ensure against undesirable failure modes at intensities higher than the design level. This has significance for the design of critical facilities, such as hospitals.

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Recent studies of the Battle of the Ice (1242) in many respects derive from the late 1950s–early 1960s expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR to the region of Lake Peipsi that was to determine the battle location. The reliability of the results it obtained is now evaluated differently, especially by those zealously searching for evidence of state commission. Materials collected and research carried out and published as early as 1962 is now used in disputes; however the authors contend that that they are not sufficient for making balanced and objective conclusions. Handwritten diaries of the expedition leader G. N. Karaev should shed a new light on the history of the project: its preparation, field work progress, and applied methods. The diaries covering the period of 1956-1960 are stored in the fonds of the Archive of the Pskov State United Historical, Architectural, and Fine Arts Museum-Reserve. The text refers directly to the time of the described events (to a day). The diaries expound the research process (including submarine studies) and the general mood of the expedition. They show that the initiative came from the local historians, some of those amateurs. However, support of the leading scholars (particularly, academician M.N. Tikhomirov) and of the USSR Academy of Sciences gave the project its scientific force. The documents attached to the diaries confirm that G. N. Karayev founded his conclusions on the changes in level and depths of the lake, its bottom relief, and reasons for the absence of finds that definitely dated from the 13thcentury on the data obtained by experts in the natural and exact sciences. The authors conclude that the expedition journals of G. N. Karaev confirm the reliability of its results.

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Early in 1920, French-born architect Sholto Smith (1881-1936) decided to abandon his Moose Jaw practice, and his Canadian wife and family, and emigrate to New Zealand. His decision seems to have been precipitated by a memorable encounter with a woman who would later become a celebrated pianist for the Auckland radio station 1YA, Phyllis Mary Hams (1895-1974). Sholto Smith had met Hams during World War I while he was on leave from the Canadian Expeditionary Force and visiting Colwyn Bay, North Wales. Sholto Smith's major contribution to Arts and Crafts Auckland, the house he designed as a gift for Phyllis Hams on the occasion of their marriage on 3 March 1925, was named Colwyn to memorialise their Welsh meeting place. Despite only living in New Zealand for his last 16 years, Sholto Smith left a legacy of over 100 buildings. Colwyn was a well-placed advertisem*nt for his domestic architecture, and his Arts and Crafts and Tudor house designs were soon in great demand throughout the building boom of the 1920s. Smith had arrived in Auckland on 17 March 1920 and immediately joined the practice of Thomas Coulthard Mullions (1878-1957) and C Fleming McDonald. The latter had been the architect of the original Masonic Hotel in Napier (1897), and the firm originally specialised in hotels and commercial architecture using modern materials including reinforced concrete, but dressing the modernist structure with historicist references. Several of their inner-city Auckland buildings such as the Waitemata and Manukau Council building on the corner of Shortland and Princes Street, Chancery Chambers in O'Connell Street and the Lister building on the corner of Victoria and Lorne Streets, still survive. After McDonald's death, Sholto Smith became a partner in the firm and encouraged Thomas Mullions to move into residential property development in central Auckland: Shortland Flats (1922) was a commercial venture where the architects formed a company owning shares in the building which comprised 24 flats designed to generate rental income. But detached suburban domestic architecture was Sholto Smith's real passion. Before leaving Canada for fresh beginnings in New Zealand, he drew an architectural perspective for his ideal home. He titled this drawing Dreamwold, and his vision for this ideal house was to be realised in Auckland at 187 St Heliers Bay Road. For this house design, Sholto Smith drew inspiration from Canadian colleagues such as British Columbian architect Samuel Maclure (1860-1929) and from the British masters of the Arts and Crafts Movement including CFA Voysey (1857-1951) and MH Baillie Scott (1865-1945). Colwyn is reminiscent of the latter's Corrie Wood (1908) in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire in its adventurous open planning. A little bit of Olde Englande recreated in the South Pacific for his homesick new wife, Colwyn was Sholto Smith's perfect Dreamwold, right down to the text on the wooden mantelpiece over the fireplace. The quote inscribed there is taken from the beginning of Shakespeare's sonnet 57, and seems addressed by Smith to his 30-year-old bride: "Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?" Epitomising the romantic archetype, Colwyn remains a fine example of the type of Arts and Crafts dwelling that well-to-do Aucklanders aspired to inhabit in the 1920s.

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Sixty-six male and 51 female second year medical students anonymously completed the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) and the Attraction to Sexual Aggression (ASA) Scale, both modified so that women could report behaviours in which they were aggressors, and men, behaviours in which they were victims. Men's aggression scores on the two scales were significantly correlated. As expected, more men than women reported both the likelihood and the experience of being sexual aggressors, although 6% of women reported being so aroused they couldn't stop when their partner didn't want intercourse and 13% of men reported having intercourse against their will. In men sexually coercive behaviours correlated positively with the masculinity scale of the Bern Sex Role Inventory. Fewer female medical students reported experiencing sexually aggressive behaviours compared to US or New Zealand university students; however, the percentage of male students who reported using or threatening to use physical force was in the same range as that of US students. Significant attention to the issue of sexual coercion would appear necessary in the education of medical students.

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This paper presents the results of nonlinear dynamic analyses carried out on ductile coupled shear walls (CSWs) to investigate the seismic shear demand on wall segments. The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the dynamic amplification and establish a code-format force reduction factor for shear, applicable in Canada. The study considered three Canadian seismic zones (4, 5, and 6), five numbers of storeys (6, 10, 15, 20, and 30), three degrees of coupling (low, medium, and high), and 10 historical earthquake records encompassing a broad range of frequency contents. Overall, 450 analyses were performed. Results indicate that the New Zealand amplification factor βv presently used in Canada overestimates the dynamic amplification. Additionally, the use of the overstrength factor for shear γp for tension walls may underestimate their shear resistance and result in a shear failure. Conversely, the use of γp for compression walls provided a reasonable factor of safety. Finally, for the shear design of CSWs, two alternative approaches are suggested. The first involves the use of a force reduction factor for shear, Rv, including the dynamic amplification factor γd and the overstrength factor γp as follows: Rv = 2.0 for Za > Zv, Rv = 1.0 for Za < Zv, and Rv = 1.3 for Za = Zv, where Za and Zv are acceleration- and velocity-related zonal identifiers. The second approach implies the use of the overstrength factor γp of the compression wall for both walls of CSWs and βv = 1.0.Key words: coupled shear walls, reinforced concrete, degree of coupling, seismic, frequency content, shear demand, dynamic amplification factor, force reduction factor for shear.

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This study aimed to determine the time-dependent effects of diaphragmatic inactivity on its maximum shortening velocity ( Vmax) and the muscle atrophy F-box (MAF-box, atrogin-1) gene expression during controlled mechanical ventilation (CMV). Twenty-four New Zealand White rabbits were grouped into 1 day, 2 days, and 3 days of CMV and controls in equal numbers. The in vitro isotonic contractile properties of the diaphragm were determined. In addition, myosin heavy chain protein and mRNA, myosin light chain, MAF-box mRNA, and volume density of abnormal myofibrils were measured. Tetanic force decreased, and Vmax increased from control of 6.4 to 6.6, 7.7, and 8.1 muscle lengths per second after 1, 2, and 3 days of CMV, respectively ( P < 0.02). The increased Vmax compensated for the decreased tetanic force; consequently, compared with the controls, maximum power output was unchanged after 3 days of CMV. Vmax correlated with the volume density of abnormal myofibrils [ y = 0.1 x + 5.7 ( r = 0.87, P < 0.01)]. In the diaphragm, MAF-box was overexpressed (355% of control) after 1 day of CMV, before the evidence of structural myofibril disarray. In conclusion, CMV produced a time-dependent increase in Vmax that was associated with the degree of myofibrillar disarray and independent of changes in myosin isoform expression. Furthermore, CMV produced an increase in MAF-box mRNA levels that may be partially or completely responsible for the degree of myofibrillar disarray resulting from CMV.

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Abstract. Glacier behaviour during the mid-Holocene (MH, 6000 year BP) in the Southern Hemisphere provides observational data to constrain our understanding of the origin and propagation of palaeo-climatic signals. We examine the climatic forcing of glacier expansion in the MH by evaluating modelled glacier equilibrium line altitude (ELA) and climate conditions during the MH compared with pre-industrial time (PI, year 1750) in the mid latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, specifically in Patagonia and the South Island of New Zealand. Climate conditions for the MH are obtained from PMIP2 models simulations, which in turn force a simple glacier mass balance model to simulate changes in equilibrium-line altitude during this period. Climate conditions during the MH show significantly (p ≤ 0.05) colder temperatures in summer, autumn and winter, and significantly (p ≤ 0.05) warmer temperatures in spring. These changes are a consequence of insolation differences between the two periods. Precipitation does not show significant changes, but exhibits a temporal pattern with less precipitation from August to September and more precipitation from October to April during the MH. In response to these climatic changes, glaciers in both analysed regions have an ELA that is 15–33 m lower than PI during the MH. The main causes of this difference are the colder temperature during the MH, reinforcing previous results that mid-latitude glaciers are more sensitive to temperature change compared to precipitation changes. Differences in temperature have a dual effect on mass balance. First, during summer and early autumn less energy is available for melting. Second in late autumn and winter, lower temperatures cause more precipitation to fall as snow rather than rain, resulting in more accumulation and higher surface albedo. For these reasons, we postulate that the modelled ELA changes, although small, may help to explain larger glacier extents observed in the mid Holocene in both South America and New Zealand.

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Osteotomies are common surgical procedures used for instance in rhinoplasty and usually performed using an osteotome impacted by a mallet. Visual control being difficult, osteotomies are often based on the surgeon proprioception to determine the number and energy of each impact. The aim of this study is to determine whether a hammer instrumented with a piezoelectric force sensor can be used to (i) follow the displacement of the osteotome and (ii) determine when the tip of the osteotome arrives in frontal bone, which corresponds to the end of the osteotomy pathway. Seven New Zealand White rabbit heads were collected, and two osteotomies were performed on their left and right nasal bones using the instrumented hammer to record the variation of the force as a function of time during each impact. The second peak time τ was derived from each signal while the displacement of the osteotome tip D was determined using video motion tracking. The results showed a significant correlation between τ and D ( ρ2 = 0.74), allowing to estimate the displacement of the osteotome through the measurement of τ. The values of τ measured in the frontal bone were significantly lower than in the nasal bone ( p<10−10), which allows to determine the transition between the nasal and frontal bones when τ becomes lower than 0.78 its initial averaged value. Although results should be validated clinically, this technology could be used by surgeons in the future as a decision support system to help assessing the osteotome environment.

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Much recent attention has been focused on the tachycardia-induced heart failure model. We hypothesized that sustained tachycardia would lead to myocardial depression in rabbits, as it does in dogs and swine. We evaluated the passive and active length-tension relations and postrest contraction behavior in right ventricular papillary muscles from 22 New Zealand White rabbits, 11 controls, and 11 subjected to ventricular pacing at a rate of 400 beats/min for 29.4 +/- 10.6 days. Studies were performed in oxygenated buffer at 22 degrees C. Active tension was significantly reduced at muscle lengths of 0.95.Lmax and above; at Lmax it was 4.7 +/- 0.2 g/mm2 for the control group and 3.3 +/- 0.2 g/mm2 for the paced group (P less than 0.005). Both groups showed increased force development when the concentration of calcium in the buffer was increased. There were no differences between the groups in the passive length-tension relations. Of note, postrest contraction data showed that the second postrest beat was smaller for the paced animals for rest intervals up to 2 min, suggesting that beat-to-beat trans-sarcolemmal calcium handling may differ from normal in this model. We conclude that sustained tachycardia will lead to myocardial depression in rabbits; the extension of this model to a small animal species may offer new ways to explore its causative mechanisms.

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Biomechanical evaluation of the subsynovial connective tissue (SSCT) provides insight into the causes of carpal tunnel syndrome. Studies of carpal tunnel mechanics have been performed using fresh-frozen cadaver tissue. Freezing can affect mechanical properties of some tissues, but its effect on SSCT is unknown. A total of 16 rabbit paws were harvested from eight New Zealand rabbits and subjected to mechanical testing consisting of three repeated tendon excursions in sets of three different excursion magnitudes. One paw from each animal was unfrozen. The contralateral paw was frozen and thawed before testing. Force, energy and stiffness of the first cycle of each set were evaluated, as were ratios of the second to first cycle for each parameter. Two-factor ANOVA with repeated measures over both factors was performed. No significant interactions between factors were found. There were no significant differences between fresh and frozen paws for any parameters, though there were significant differences between excursion amplitudes. The damage threshold was not different between fresh and frozen paws. This study demonstrated that freezing rabbit subsynovial connective tissue does not significantly change its mechanical properties. The same may be true for human cadaver tissues. Results of cadaver mechanical testing may not be influenced by this preservation technique.

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Ted Ringwood was born in Kew, an inner Melbourne suburb, on 19 April 1930, an only child in a family that identified strongly with Australia and with Melbourne in particular. Both his parents were Australian, but his mother's parents had come to Australia as Presbyterian emigrants from Ulster. His paternal grandfather was born in New Zealand, his paternal greatgrandfather in Australia and his grandmother in India. His father, also Alfred Edward Ringwood, enlisted as an 18–year–old in the First World War and fought in France, suffering gas attack, trench feet and other distressing experiences which impacted heavily on his later life. During the 1920s he held a variety of unskilled jobs and was essentially unemployed from the beginning of the Depression onwards. Ted's mother and extended family on both sides provided stability when his father joined Australia's large, itinerant ‘odd–jobbing’ labour force during the 1930s. (Later, his father received a war service pension.) Ted's mother, with clerical skills, supported the family through much of the Depression. However, the family's precarious financial position meant that Ted was boarded out with grandparents and relatives for extended periods. His maternal grandfather owned a small foundry in Fitzroy and successfully managed a small business through the Depression and the Second World War years.

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With the accelerating trend toward transnational families in many parts of the world associated with globalization, coping with the demand for family reunification has become a major challenge for both migrant families and migrant-sending and -receiving societies. In July 2012, a significant policy change regarding the Family Sponsorship Stream (Parent Category) took place in New Zealand, which raised the bar for migrants’ elderly parents on entering New Zealand as permanent residents. This policy change has a significant impact on many Chinese migrant families from the People’s Republic of China (prc), where filial piety is an important part of traditional values and the state provides very limited ageing support to the elderly. In the meantime, legislation came into force in China in July 2013 that requires children to visit their* elderly parents “often” or risk being sued. This paper takes these policy and legislative changes as a starting point for an exploration of the changing dynamics of Chinese migrant families in New Zealand in a multi-generational and transnational context. It first examines the impact of the New Zealand policy and then discusses the wider implications of this policy change on migrant family dynamics as well as on New Zealand society. The second focus is on younger generations in the Chinese migrant families. Linking three generations of the Chinese migrant families together, the final part of this paper addresses a highly pertinent research area — the intergenerational dimensions of transnational migration. 全球化进程催速了跨国移民家庭现象的形成。这些身居异地的移民家庭成员对家庭团聚有着非常强烈的诉求, 但却面临来自移民源发国和接收国制度和体系造成的对家庭团聚的种种阻碍。 新西兰在 2012 年开始执行新的家庭团聚担保政策。紧缩的新政策使成年移民子女担保父母移民变得更加困难，对新西兰新华人移民家庭造成了负面影响。原因主要是子女孝顺与父母同住的华人传统理念与新西兰不欢迎移民年老父母的政策倾向形成的冲突。华人移民家庭面临的压力还来自于移民源发国—— 中国的新立法改革。2013 年 7 月中国正式立法规定成年子女必须勤力探望照顾年迈父母，否则将会面临法律指控。本文以这项新立法为着眼点，深入探究新西兰多代大陆华人新移民家庭现在面临的来自家庭内部成员间的压力和来自外部跨国移民趋势的影响。本文首先研究新西兰 2012 年家庭父母类别团聚新政策对移民社区的冲击和影响， 再深入分析该新移民政策调整对移民家庭内部关系，种族关系的引申社会含义。 本文最后一部分着重比对出一个至今还被忽略的研究领域空白—那就是跨国移民的代际维度。 This article is in English.

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A new device and method to measure rabbit knee joint angles are described. The method was used to measure rabbit knee joint angles in normal specimens and in knee joints with obvious contractures. The custom-designed and manufactured gripping device has two clamps. The femoral clamp sits on a pinion gear that is driven by a rack attached to a materials testing system. A 100 N load cell in series with the rack gives force feedback. The tibial clamp is attached to a rotatory potentiometer. The system allows the knee joint multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOF). There are two independent DOF (compression-distraction and internal-external rotation) and two coupled motions (medial-lateral translation coupled with varus-valgus rotation; anterior-posterior translation coupled with flexion-extension rotation). Knee joint extension-flexion motion is measured, which is a combination of the materials testing system displacement (converted to degrees of motion) and the potentiometer values (calibrated to degrees). Internal frictional forces were determined to be at maximum 2% of measured loading. Two separate experiments were performed to evaluate rabbit knees. First, normal right and left pairs of knees from four New Zealand White (NZW) rabbits were subjected to cyclic loading. An extension torque of 0.2 Nm was applied to each knee. The average change in knee joint extension from the first to the fifth cycle was 1.9deg±1.5degmean±sd with a total of 49 tests of these eight knees. The maximum extension of the four left knees (tested 23 times) was 14.6deg±7.1deg, and of the four right knees (tested 26 times) was 12.0deg±10.9deg. There was no significant difference in the maximum extension between normal left and right knees. In the second experiment, nine skeletally mature NZW rabbits had stable fractures of the femoral condyles of the right knee that were immobilized for five, six or 10 weeks. The left knee served as an unoperated control. Loss of knee joint extension (flexion contracture) was demonstrated for the experimental knees using the new methodology where the maximum extension was 35deg±9deg, compared to the unoperated knee maximum extension of 11deg±7deg, 10 or 12 weeks after the immobilization was discontinued. The custom gripping device coupled to a materials testing machine will serve as a measurement test for future studies characterizing a rabbit knee model of post-traumatic joint contractures.

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This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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INTRODUCTION: Rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are high among Pacific people in New Zealand. Physical activity is recommended in the prevention and management of these conditions. Community-based, ‘small-sided game’ group activities may be an effective and culturally appropriate way to promote physical activity within Pacific communities. AIM: To assess the effectiveness of small-sided games-based exercise on fitness and health parameters among Pacific adults over four weeks. METHODS: Twenty untrained (13 female) Pacific adults were randomised to intervention or control. Intervention participants were offered 45 minutes of small-sided games three times per week for four weeks. Control participants were offered one-month gym membership after the trial. Primary outcomes included cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 peak) and leg strength (maximal concentric force of quadriceps at 60°/second) measured at baseline and four weeks. Secondary outcomes included glycaemia, lipid profile, blood pressure (BP), and inflammatory markers. Multivariable regression models were used to assess differences between groups, adjusting for baseline values, age and gender. RESULTS: At baseline, mean age was 34.8 years (SD 12.6), BMI 36.3 (6.7), systolic BP 127.7 mmHg (12.1), HbA1c 6.1% (1.9), VO2 peak 2.5 L/min (0.6) and leg strength 170.0 N.m (57.4). Sixteen participants completed the trial. Change in outcomes were greater in intervention than control participants in absolute VO2 peak (0.9 L/min (p=0.003)), leg strength (17.8 N.m (p=0.04)) and HDL (0.12 mmol/L (p=0.02)). There were no other significant differences. DISCUSSION: Small-sided games appear to be a promising means for improving the health and cardiorespiratory fitness and reducing the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in Pacific adults. KEYWORDS: Exercise; diabetes mellitus, Type 2; Pacific Islands; randomized controlled trial; health promotion

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Before the build-up to the centenary of the 1915 invasion of Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula begins in earnest, I thought it might be timely to interrogate the notion that those of us who live in Australasia are confronted with every Anzac Day: that it was on April 25, 1915, the day the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) landed at Gallipoli as part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, that the consciousness of nationhood was born in Australia and New Zealand, This foundational idea, with specific application to Australia, was first published nine years after the event by Charles Bean, the Australian Government’s official World War I historian who is also regarded as having created the Anzac legend. On a broader view, World War I was, for Bean, about freedom, and more broadly still, about the survival of civilisation.

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Ligaments are regularly subjected to repetitive loading in vivo. Typically, mechanical studies focus on repetitive loading protocols of short duration, while those characterizing damage accumulation over a longer duration (i.e., fatigue studies) are lacking. The aims of this study were as follows: (a) to demonstrate that damage does accumulate in ligament tissue subjected to repetitive loading and (b) to evaluate existing and new methods for characterizing fatigue damage accumulation. It was hypothesized that ligaments would accumulate damage with repetitive loading as evidenced by failure at stresses well below ultimate tensile strength, creep curve discontinuities, and by reductions in stiffness during loading. Eight normal medial collateral ligaments from female New Zealand white rabbits were cycled in tension, between 0 MPa and 28 MPa, to failure or until 259,200 cycles, whichever came first. Medial collateral ligaments that did not fail were subsequently loaded to failure. Displacement rates (dlmax/dt) as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary creeps were monitored as indices of damage accumulation and impending mechanical failure. Additionally, the relative utilities of tangent, secant, and chord stiffness parameters were critically evaluated. Finally, new uses for the second derivative of force-displacement data were explored. Three out of eight ligaments failed during testing, demonstrating that ligaments can fail in fatigue under moderate tensile stress in vitro. The evaluation of displacement rates (dlmax/dt), as well as primary through tertiary creep patterns, were not well suited to predicting failure in normal ligaments until rupture was all but imminent. Tangent stiffness, which was calculated from a mathematically defined start of the “linear region,” was surprisingly constant throughout testing. Secant stiffness dropped in a predictable fashion, providing a global indicator of tissue stiffness, but did not provide any insight into fiber mechanics. Chord stiffness, on the other hand, appeared to be sensitive to fiber recruitment patterns. The second derivative of force-displacement data proved to be a useful means of (a) objectively defining the start of the linear region and (b) inferring changes in fiber recruitment patterns within ligament tissue. Tangent, secant, and chord stiffnesses highlight different attributes of ligament responses to loading; hence these parameters cannot be used interchangeably. Additionally, the second derivative of the force-displacement curve was introduced as a useful descriptive and analytical tool.

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The education reforms that began in New Zealand in 1987 have generated a huge literature. One of the features of that literature has been the attempt to relate the education reforms to the large collection of economic and political reforms set in place by the fourth Labour Government after its election in 1984. The first, and most radical, phase of these reforms occurred during the 1984-87 Parliament. They centred on a programme of widespread economic deregulation and the curtailment and/or commercialization of state activities. They were informed and driven by a neo-liberal economic theory, known locally as “Rogernomics” after its chief begetter, the Minister of Finance in the 1984-87 Labour Government, Roger Douglas (see Holland and Boston, 1991). In this phase there were no radical changes to the education systems. With the return of the Labour government in 1987 the reform impetus was extended to education. There were two strands to this impetus. One was the explicit application to education of the Rogernomics neo-liberal approach, this is set out in the second volume of the Treasury’s brief to the incoming government (NZ Treasury, 1987). The other was the setting up of the Picot task force on the administration of education whose report Administering for Excellence was published in April 1988. These two strands were distinct from each other. The Treasury brief distinguished between education as a public good and as a commodity (see Grace, 1989). The Picot Task force’s terms of reference were confined to the administration of education. Where the strands come together was in the presence of a Treasury representative on the Picot task force, whose activities on the task force were revealed by another of its members, Peter Ramsay, to have amounted to putting pressure on the Picot members to follow “the Treasury line”. These two interventions in education gave rise to what has been perhaps the most influential interpretation of the New Zealand education reforms, that they were led by a new right, neo-liberal ideology, that in essence they represented the extension of Rogernomics to education. This interpretation sees the education reforms as aimed at eventually privatizing education in line with the privatization of other areas of government activity. It points to the continuing interest of the Treasury in education, which it sees as being fuelled and supported by the Business Roundtable (BRT) and in particular, informed by the report the BRT commissioned from the neo-liberal writer on education, Stuart Sexton, (1990).

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05–466Cheng Pui-Wah, Doris (Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China; doris@ied.edu.hk) & Philip Stimpson, Articulating contrasts in kindergarten teachers' implicit knowledge on play-based learning. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.4–5 (2005), 339–352.05–467Collins, Fiona M. (Roehampton U, London, UK; f.collins@roehampton.ac.uk), ‘She's sort of dragging me into the story!’ Student teachers' experiences of reading aloud in Key Stage 2 classes. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.1 (2005), 10–17.05–468Fischl, Dita (Kaye College for Teacher Education, Israel) & Shifra Sagy, Beliefs about teaching, teachers and schools among pre-service teachers: the case of Israeli-Bedouin students. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK) 18.1 (2005), 59–71.05–469Gamliel, Eyal & Liema Davidovitz (Ruppin Academic Center, Israel; eyalg@ruppin.ac.il), Online versus traditional teaching evaluation: mode can matter. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (Abingdon, UK) 30.6 (2005), 581–592.05–470Gebhard, Jerry G. (Indiana U of Pennsylvania, USA), Awareness of teaching through action research: examples, benefits, limitations. JALT Journal (Tokyo, Japan) 27.1 (2005), 53–69.05–471Gillies, Robyn M. (U of Queensland, Australia; r.gillies@uq.edu.au), The effects of communication training on teachers' and students' verbal behaviours during cooperative learning. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.3 (2005), 257–279.05–472Grugeon, Elizabeth (De Montfort U, Bedford, UK; egrugeon@dmu.ac.uk), Listening to learning outside the classroom: student teachers study playground literacies. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.1 (2005), 3–9.05–473Harfitt, Gary & Nicole Tavares (U of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; gharfitt@hkucc.hku.hk), Obstacles as opportunities in the promotion of teachers' learning. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.4–5 (2005), 353–366.05–474Hosie, Peter (Curtin U of Technology, Australia; Peter.Hosie@cbs.curtin.edu.au), Renato Schibeci & Ann Backhaus, A framework and checklists for evaluating online learning in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (Abingdon, UK) 30.5 (2005), 539–553.05–475Katyal, Kokila & Colin Evers (U of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; kkatyal@hkusua.hku.hk), Teacher leadership and autonomous student learning: adjusting to the new realities. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.4–5 (2005), 367–382.05–476Kwo, Ora W. Y. (U of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; wykwo@hku.hk), Understanding the awakening spirit of a professional teaching force. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.4–5 (2005), 292–306.05–477Lewis, Ramon (La Trobe U, Melbourne, Australia), Shlomo Romi, Xing Qui & Yaacov J. Katz, Teachers' classroom discipline and student misbehavior in Australia, China and Israel. Teaching and Teacher Education21.6 (2005), 729–741.05–478Ogier, John (U of Canterbury, New Zealand; john.ogier@canterbury.ac.nz), Evaluating the effect of a lecturer's language background on a student rating of teaching form. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (Abingdon, UK) 30.5 (2005), 477–488.05–479Orland-Barak, Lily (The U of Haifa, Israel) & Hayuta Yinon, Different but similar: student teachers' perspectives on the use of L1 in Arab and Jewish EFL classroom settings. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK) 18.1 (2005), 91–113.05–480Pearson, Sue (Leeds U, UK; S.E.Pearson@education.leeds.ac.uk) & Gary Chambers, A successful recipe? Aspects of the initial training of secondary teachers of foreign languages. Support for Learning (Oxford, UK) 20.3 (2005), 115–122.05–481Perry, Bill & Timothy Stewart (Kumamoto U, Japan; perry@kumamoto-u.ac.jp), Insights into effective partnership in interdisciplinary team teaching. System (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 33.4 (2005), 563–573.05–482Ricketts, Chris (Plymouth U, UK; C.Ricketts@plymouth.ac.uk) & Stan Zakrzewski, A risk-analysis approach to implementing web-based assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (Abingdon, UK) 30.6 (2005), 603–620.05–483Tajino, Akira (Kyoto U, Japan) & Craig Smith, Exploratory practice and Soft Systems Methodology. Language Teaching Research (London, UK) 9.4 (2005), 448–469.05–484Wu, Zongjie (Zhejiang U, China; zongjiewu@zju.edu.cn), Being, understanding and naming: teachers' life and work in harmony. International Journal of Educational Research (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 41.4–5 (2005), 307–323.05–485Zeegers, Margaret (U of Ballarat, Australia), English community school teacher education and English as a second language in Papua New Guinea: a study of a practicum. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (London, UK) 33.2 (2005), 135–146.

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On 31 October 2000, the United Nations (UN) Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. This resolution was followed by others (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122 and 2422), which stress the disproportionate impact of wars and conflicts on women and children, and highlight the fact that, historically speaking, women have always been on the margins of peace processes and stabilisation efforts. They underline the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, in peace negotiations, peace building and humanitarian and post-conflict activities. Resolution 1325 calls upon member states to integrate gender perspective into UN plans and programmes, but mainly to protect women and girls in armed conflicts. The Resolution was also adopted by the Republic of Slovenia and the Slovenian Armed Forces has included it into pre-deployment training of Slovenian contingents as required reading. After 1991, when Slovenia became independent, two journals on women in the military have been published. The first one was published in 1995, five years prior to the UN Resolution. It was edited by Zorica Bukinac and published by the Ministry of Defence under the title of Ženske v oboroženih silah (Women in the military). The second journal was produced in 2002. It was edited by Ljubica Jelušič and Mojca Pešec and published by a joint effort of the Defence Research Centre of the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana, the Ministry of Defence and the SAF General Staff. The former journal provides the first account of the experiences of female SAF members, and the views of Slovenian and foreign authors on the role of women in the military. The latter uses traditions, culture and gender-role patterns to present the limiting factors of the integration of women in the military, and provides an analysis of the share of women and the duties they perform in the SAF. Greater integration of women in the military still raises much attention and a number of questions. The experiences vary importantly across countries. A number of them are positive, but there are also the negative ones. 2015 marked 15 years since the adoption of Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, 20 years since the publishing of the first journal, and 13 years since the publishing of the other. With this thematic issue, the Editorial Board wished to learn about the novelties regarding the Resolution in Slovenia and abroad, and publish them. We invited Lieutenant Colonel Suzana Tkavc, PhD, Gender Advisor at SAF General Staff, appointed coordinator of the MoD for Gender Equality and national representative in the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives to participate. The issue in front of us is the result of our joint efforts. Pablo Castillo Díaz, who works in the United Nations Organisation, wrote the article Military women in peacekeeping missions and the politics of UN Security Council Resolution 1325. He shares with us his expert view and experiences regarding the Resolution on Women, Peace and Security. By focusing on international operations and missions, he draws attention to the advantages and disadvantages of the Resolution. Garry McKeon wrote an article titled Better citizens – humanitarian and gender training, EUTM Somalia. The author has been member of the Irish Defence Forces for over 30 years and has also been deployed in a mission in Somalia. His experiences regarding training in the implementation of Resolution 1325 are very interesting, since they concern a cultural setting, which is substantially different from ours. In her article Some of the best practices in gender perspective and the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the 25 years of Slovenian armed forces, Suzana Tkavc provides an insight into gender perspective in the 25 years of Slovenia’s independence with a special emphasis on the armed forces and their activities in international operations and missions. How well did Slovenia do compared to female and male representatives of other armed forces? Jovanka Šaranović, Brankica Potkonjak-Lukić and Tatjana Višacki are the authors of the article Achievements and perspectives of the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces. Serbia invested important effort into the implementation of Resolution 1325, since this subject matter is included in the national action plan, which includes a number of different state authorities and other non-governmental institutions. In their article, the authors determine how successful they were in this mission. In the article titled An analysis and critique of the UNSCR 1325 – what are recommendations for future opportunities? Jane Derbyshire acquaints us with the perspective and experiences of the New Zealand Defence Force regarding the resolution. Are they very different from the experiences of other countries? The author believes that time has come for changes. Unlike the majority of the authors, who are members of armed forces or are directly related to them, Nadja Furlan Štante wrote her article Women in military system: between violence and vulnerability from a different perspective. She specialises in religion and women’s studies and as such bases her writing on biological, historical, religious and other aspects, also taking into consideration the findings, practice and works of the authors who write about defence and the military. We believe that with this themed issue we have passed on new experiences and added some views to the mosaic of gender perspective, encouraged you to read or maybe even write.

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The contemporary supermarket is a work of classification and cataloguing as marvellous as any museum. Barcodes are hallmarks by which its computer systems could know, in their own electronic language, every possible product of a certain kind afoot in the nation. It is a rather special institution in this respect -- a huge fund of contemporary synchronic cultural memory, a database and storehouse of collected human tastes to which individuals turn to seek out their own. However, this means that just as Wittgenstein demonstrated the impossibility of a purely private language, there can be no such thing as a purely private taste. Taste is demonstrated by choosing from a range of public items, that is, products. Therefore let's bracket the liberal concept of sovereign personal taste for now and beat a different track: the supermarket is the site of aggregation of multiple discourses by which the individual is sewn into and sews the fabric of collective life. Techniques used to sell food today, such as freebies (like plastic toys), free offers, forms of gambling, and images of healthiness, convenience, celebrity and enhanced relationships, appeal to -- must appeal to for commercial reasons -- shared values. It is inviting to view the supermarket as an emblem of a postmodern condition. The gaggle of images and words that line its aisles defy unity, play fast and loose with reality, create a simulacral space of copied quotes and sight bites that is coterminous with radically decentred selves. It conforms to the Jamesonian topography of a culture that has lost it -- that sense of real placed history that identity used to be tied up with. But my aim in this essay is to critique such a rhetoric of loss. Discourse remains the province of the self-imaginings of social groups in spite of the diversity of images in circulation. And although the media through which group solidarity is transmitted change with technological developments, the fact of such transmission does not. Hence, by looking at the imagery used on food packets, I will analyse the way that one rhetorical strategy used to sell the food we find on supermarket shelves -- nationalism -- is part of a longstanding cultural trajectory by which citizens of a nation imagine their relationship with their land. This, however, involves the equation of 'the nation' with the ethnic imagery of the group that dominates its political apparatus and territory, a process of circ*mscription that I shall ultimately suggest has political ramifications, especially in the context of nations like Australia which were formed by largely European settler colonisation of the land. Nationalism, then, is a strand of marketing rhetoric used most often, but not exclusively, for the promotion of products in the country of their origin. As such it grafts a tradition of art commemorating place and ethnic identity into the seemingly unlikely genre of the product label. Indeed, for Benedict Anderson the sociopolitical sentiment of nationalism requires forums and images through which to articulate itself, or more accurately, to imaginatively create its auratic object of adoration -- as nationalism is itself innovative (Anderson 15). It also depends upon technologies that can produce a sense of simultaneity between dispersed people who will never meet each other. The distribution of the packaged 'gifts' of a land to 'its people' provides one such opportunity for the transmission of sacralised images of land and the solidarity of its inhabitants. So the genre of the label that comes with a specific distribution and selling system provides the technical medium, and the land, its produce, its people and their relationships in ecosocial community, form the imagery. A limit case example of pride in the gifts of the land can be found on the label of New Zealand's Steinlager: "New Zealand's Finest ... World's Best Lager ... Brewed with the finest New Zealand Hops, Yeast, Barley and Pure Water ... Since 1854". It embodies a series of associations found in other examples: the products of the land are associated with firstly, high quality, and secondly, natural purity. New Zealand seems to be repeated with two slightly different senses. In its juxtaposition with "the world", the two places centre on the finished product of lager, which is presented as a literally world-beating national product. The last line of the label reads "Brewed and Bottled by New Zealand Breweries Limited", the company name both emphasising the agency of New Zealand people in processing ingredients taken from their land's soil, and the legally New Zealandian status of their enterprise. The second sense implies the physical basis for all this: the giftedness of the land which subtends an economy and a culture. "Since 1854" brings these components together on the axis of continuity, making the origination of national production temporal as well as spatial. In other words this benign relationship of production becomes part of national heritage. A certain double sense is in play. Land is both a nation comprising citizens and physical resource; the word that perfectly fuses the sense of the former's political proprietary relationship with the latter into a working unity. Accordingly many packets transfigure the legal requirement to mention the place of production into an attention-grabbing declaration of country of origin whilst also referring to the physical land. The latter may be parsed into two general categories: imagery of animals, plants, landscapes, the elements, etc, and rustic images of human management of the land. So Bulla ice cream advertises its Australianness to a pastoral backdrop; Saxa salt, which has been "Australia's own ... Since 1911", is being hauled by a hat-wearing Aussie man and loyal horse; Bundaberg caster sugar is both "pure Australian" and "Australian made" thanks to the blessing of the (Australian) sun. And other products, such as Australian Natural Foods Non Dairy Soy Mango Smoothie and Pureland Organic Tofu make links between nation and nature through 'land-based' company names similarly buttressed by images of Australian agricultural landscape and the Australian made hallmark respectively. The three conceptual categories often found in correlation with the concrete particulars of 'the land' -- healthiness, purity and naturalness -- are well represented in the packets analysed here. A series of metonymic implications is set up between the terms. They are all potential qualities of the land that are realised in the products it yields. Pureland and Australian Natural Foods juxtapose nation and healthiness closely and the pastoral visions of Bürgen and Dairy Vale have the approval of the National Heart Foundation. Bundaberg and Pureland make the most direct appeals to purity, but concepts such as Bulla's "Australian made real dairy" and Devondale's "choice grade" and "premium Australian" also convey a certain sense of uncorrupted pedigree in their products' provenance. Most products seem to evoke naturalness pictorially, with green rolling landscapes and cows feeding on the verdure featuring particularly highly. Thus at this point a critique of capitalist industrial culture is possible. The missing links are the contemporary factory and office: the places of the processing and assembly of the product physically and discursively; the places where the fruits of the land meet their packaging and are primed for the marketplace. The gifts of nature become commodities but are inscribed as the gifts of nature still, such that the point of sale obfuscates the point of production: profit. The whole enterprise seems to be based on a principle of distantiation. Because of urbanisation, the vast majority of people live away from farm land, and because most food is not consumed by the local communities that produce it, but is produced for larger markets, it is packed and written upon for transport to strangers who will buy it and perhaps also an idealisation of the land. Yet they aren't strangers. This mediation of group solidarity by food-as-commodity does not tear social bonds apart, it forms them. It forms ecosocial community just as it provides a projection of one. And the very invocation of group loyalty as the reason for buying means we should question, as John Frow has done, whether the commodity is always simply a token of abstraction in conceptual opposition to 'the gift' (Frow, "Gift and Commodity"). It is not simply the case that capitalists dupe consumers into thinking of commodities in gift-like terms. Indeed, the discourses of the land we find on supermarket shelves go back a long way in Western culture. As Raymond Williams says: "in English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known" (1). The majority of the packets analysed extend the pastoral tradition of European art, a tradition which determines the "innate bounty" (33) of the land as the province of benign, 'total' social relations as reflected in the "timeless rhythm" of the authentic agrarian life (10). But the pastoral tradition is itself a media technical one. Williams points out that "a working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation" (120). The same is true of pastoral in its nationalistic guise. It is transmitted by books, paintings and packets, is predicated on such a 'separation and observation'. The idealisation of the common land that subtends 'us' may be an attempt to bridge that distance, yet it is, ironically, transmitted through inscribed objects that create bonds between spatially and temporally dispersed people. It achieves what Anderson calls "unisonance", "a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests -- above all in the form of poetry and songs" (132). So, if the supermarket turns inner desire outward to the realm of public items that provides its possibilities, nationalistic desire moves in the same way, both inside and outside the supermarket context. There is no purely internal or purely external nation, just as there is no private language. Rather cultural memory, whether transmitted by a food packet or a poem is a thread transmitted through selves, language, technological milieux, and groups of people. Thus as Thongchai Winichakul succinctly states, "a nation is not a given reality. Rather it is the effect of imagining about it" (14). "We can know about it as long as we employ certain technologies to inscribe the possible sphere. In turn, such technologies create the knowledge of it, create a fact of it, and the entity comes into existence." (15). The contemporary food packet is one such media technology as certainly as a book or a song, and all media inscriptions of the possible sphere of 'the land' are lived ecosocial experience of the land. They make the land a unity by fusing its first physical sense with its second sociopolitical one. Invocation of the land as a prior given that subtends and provides the continuity of a sociopolitical group that has power over its resources, nests the historical contingency of that power relationship into a secure vision of the provenance of nation with the self-origination of 'its' land. That natural element, free, pure and healthy, is the one in which the group's ownership rights are rooted and legitimated. However, in fact, any nation is itself an historical innovation, an inherently unstable ideological product of strategy, technique, rhetorical and material. Nation-states are not naturally correlative with the land, nor are the ethnic groups that politically dominate the nation. They arise where other socio-economic political organisations existed before; they emerge. In The City and the Country Williams's main concern was to point out an alternative class-based history of the real and largely exploitative management of the land, a history that is actively occluded by idealised renderings of the countryside. Here in a parallel way but without room for explication, I want to suggest an alternative history of the management of the land that is indissociable from the emergence of the modern Australian nation -- a race-based history. Thus, here's the rub: the totems of pastoral that are equated with Australianness in the packets I have referred to, are European. The 'food packet' pastoral idealises group totems such as to transform historically contingent relationships of certain ethnic groups with the land into naturalised ones. The cows of Bulla and Devondale, the pastures of Dairy Vale, Bürgen's wheat, the agricultural infrastructure, the men imaged and their modes of management of the land, are European in lineage, and so is most of the food they sacralise as 'Australian'. These things are not natural to the land but were introduced, as was a related political and economic infrastructure that created 'Australia'. And there is a whole history to this appropriation of the land that is not active in the rhetorical force field of the European Australian pastoral, just as the living cultural memories of Aboriginal peoples disposed by the creation of the Australian nation-state are not. ... In "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy", Felicia Fletcher and John Leonard mention how representatives of Aboriginal countries in Australia assembled at Parliament House eat food to sustain themselves in their bid to right this dispossession: "vegetables are cooked in the coals, bread is toasted over the fire, endless cups of tea are poured, pots of three dozen eggs are boiled again and again to keep up the strengths and spirits of the people" (16). However, they add, quoting the group rather than a specific individual: "'It's nice, but at home we'd have a nice bit of kangaroo tail in the fire -- you've got to know how to do it properly -- and damper'": a different memory of and relationship with 'the land' (in both its senses). To conclude, the memories of the land create it at the time of commemoration. How we commemorate it is a present-day matter of great communal and political significance. Plates 1 Ducks Nuts 7 Bürgen High-Bake Heritage White bread 2 Steinlager Beer 8 Devondale Extra Soft margarine 3 Bulla Real Dairy Ice Cream 9 Bundaberg Caster Sugar 4 Saxa Table Salt 10 Dairy Vale Skim Milk 5 Pureland Organic Tofu 11 Devondale Cheese 6 So Natural Mango Smoothie 12 Edgell References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Fletcher, Felicia, and John Leonard. "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy." Meanjin 58.1 (1999): 10-17. Frow, John. "Gift and Commodity." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ---. "Toute la Mémoire du Monde: Repetition and Forgetting." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Guy Redden. "Packaging the Gifts of Nation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php>. Chicago style: Guy Redden, "Packaging the Gifts of Nation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Guy Redden. (1999) Packaging the gifts of nation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]).

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As the Next Big Thing in consumer electronics is introduced, Australia is once again feeling the tyranny of distance from the world's major markets DVD (Digital Video Disc, recently rechristened 'Digital Versatile Disc') has long been hyped as the next step in the digital revolution of home entertainment. A good decade after the audio CD began to replace LPs as the premier sound carrier medium, it is now video's turn to become digital. DVD, which in many aspects constitutes the next generation of CD technology, has inherited many of its ancestor's features -- the handy and robust physical format of the individual CD-like discs, superior picture and sound quality (especially when compared with VHS tapes) which doesn't degrade with multiple viewings, and the convenience of direct access to particular tracks and sections of the disc, without rewinding. As a second-generation medium, DVD also adds the enhanced gadgetry that was still beyond the CD's technological horizon -- DVDs offer multiple versions of a movie on one disc (e.g., standard and director's cuts, pan-and-scan, letterbox, and 16:9 editions, PG- to R-rated versions, alternative endings), up to eight alternative soundtracks (Dolby Stereo, Dolby Surround, various foreign-language overdubbed versions), a total of 32 sets of optional subtitles, and further interactive control options for the viewer. Such enhancements are partly due to the much-increased storage capacity of the DVD when compared to CDs: in addition to a sevenfold increase in capacity per surface area, DVDs can also double and quadruple that increase by carrying data on both sides of a disc, and by offering two surface layers of information per side. In keeping with the general trend towards an integration of various entertainment and computing technologies, then, DVDs will also gradually replace standard audio CDs (most DVD players can also play audio CDs, making the transition even easier) and CD-ROMs (DVD-ROMs, which are able to read older CD-ROMs, are already on the market). It is the consumer video market, however, where DVD has been expected to make its biggest impact -- and more than a year after its market introduction in the U.S., the signs there are positive. Around 350,000 DVD players have been sold, over 600 DVD titles are now available, video stores are setting up DVD rental sections, and even the major LaserDisc and video Internet mail-order stores like Ken Crane's or Movienow! are offering DVDs. Comparisons with the triumph of CDs over vinyl break down quickly, however, since those two technologies were fundamentally similar read-only media -- by contrast, the technology DVD has set out to supersede, VHS, is also a recording medium (recordable DVDs are still some way into the future; even recordable CDs are only now appearing at affordable prices). DVD, therefore, is targetted more at the growing 'home cinema' market, that is, at consumers who value quality vision and sound over recordability (they are likely to own a hi-fi VCR anyway). The satisfactory, but ultimately limited market LaserDiscs have been able to carve out for themselves in competition with VHS serves as a caution against overestimating the inevitability of success for the DVD campaign. In the course of that campaign, it is now Australia's turn, and the technology's move beyond the borders of such unified, self-contained national markets as North America points out a number of mostly self-inflicted problems which may very well reduce DVD to a digital video dud, for the time being. The availability of DVD hardware is unlikely to present much of an obstacle, but it is software choice which will ultimately determine the acceptance of any new entertainment medium. With Village Roadshow having jumped the gun for the official Australian DVD roll-out that was slated for Easter '98, there were originally only a total of nine titles available in Australia -- mixing the Australian flavour of Shine, Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and an ABC production of the opera La Bohème with an odd assortment of international movies: Dumb & Dumber, The Crow, Wild Rhapsody, Evita, The Mask, and Seven. That merely such a handful of titles are available (the entry of other distributors into the Australian market has not significantly increased the volume) is due to a particular arrangement of the future world market for DVDs into various zones -- these are: 1. North America 2. Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Japan 3. South East Asia 4. Middle and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea 5. Russia, the remainders of Asia and Africa 6. China On the surface, such a division makes sense for various reasons: movie tastes will differ markedly from region to region, and differences in video standards (the use of PAL or NTSC systems) also mean that DVDs from one region may not play on another region's players. (With the growing market share of dual-system TVs, such technical distinctions are beginning to lose importance, though.) Mainly, however, the regions soon emerge clearly as instruments to counteract the increasing globalisation of trade in entertainment content -- they were demanded by Hollywood's studios, designed specifically so that DVDs of recent movies would not enter a particular region before the movie had run its course in the region's cinemas, and they exist to protect the status quo of video distribution rights which has come under threat from globally operating mail-order video stores. Europeans wanting to buy a copy of Armageddon on DVD, for example, would have to wait until the disc was available in their region, and couldn't simply get the U.S. release that came out after the movie had finished its theatrical run there, months ago. To ensure that they indeed would not order DVDs from another region, technical barriers have been implemented in players and discs: in essence, Australian-made players will only play Australian-made discs, for example -- a DVD that was made for the American 'region one' will simply refuse to play. Only die-hard movie fans, the DVD producers hope, will make the effort to also buy their DVD player in the U.S. (this would force them to buy all their discs there, too -- Australian-made discs wouldn't play). This strange form of inverted protectionism (a protection of the local market from imports, put into place by a transnational consortium), then, is the reason that despite the relative abundance of DVD titles in region one only such few are available in Australia -- none of the overseas ones would play on the local region four machines. The prospects for Australian DVD consumers appear bleak, then: having been included in the wildly heterogeneous 'rest of the Western world' group of region four, Australia seems unlikely to enjoy a great influx of major titles anytime soon -- while the Middle and South American markets within the region are too large to ignore for DVD manufacturers, they are likely to encourage a selection of DVDs that is significantly at variance with Australian movie interests. At the same time, the English-speaking component of the region is simply too small to make any great effort addressing: in the immediate future, the combined markets of Australia and New Zealand are likely to produce a few hundred DVD-equipped households at best. Australia, then, is once again about to feel the tyranny of its distance from the areas with which it feels the greatest cultural affinity, is once again about to be overlooked as a small player amongst the larger markets of North America and Europe, and is this time even technologically restrained from attaching itself to these markets. At least in Australia, then, the industry's decision to counteract the growing trend of market globalisation that has led to consumers' increased use of international mail-order services, particularly with the help of computerised shopping on the Internet's World Wide Web, may come back to haunt it. Should DVD in Australia turn out to be a digital video dud in the next few years, in fact, distributors may want to seriously rethink their positioning of the country in region four, moving it instead to the better-suited, larger-market regions one or two. In any event, the continuing convergence of home entertainment and computer technology also offers some hope for Australian movie fans: the regional division makes much less sense in DVD-ROM drives for computers (which will also play movie DVDs), since the software market is a global one, and so those drives are more likely to offer ways of overriding regional coding -- as the computer becomes the central element in the home entertainment system, then, it may remove the regional barriers which the movie industry has imposed on us. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Digital Video Dud?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Digital Video Dud?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) Digital video dud? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php> ([your date of access]).

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The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of communication. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? Michael Serres, 1982. Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. Claude Shannon, 1948. Reading Information At their most simplistic, there are two means for shifting information around – analogue and digital. Analogue movement depends on analogy to perform computations; it is continuous and the relationships between numbers are keyed as a continuous ordinal set. The digital set is discrete; moving one finger at a time results in a one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, analogue and digital are like the two companions in Serres’ tale. Each suffers the relationship of noise to information as internal rupture and external interference. In their examination of historical constructions of information, Hobart and Schiffman locate the noise of the analogue within its physical materials; they write, “All analogue machines harbour a certain amount of vagueness, known technically as ‘noise’. Which describes the disturbing influences of the machine’s physical materials on its calculations” (208). These “certain amounts of vagueness” are essential to Claude Shannon’s articulation of a theory for information transfer that forms the basis for this paper. In transforming the structures and materials through which it travels, information has left its traces in digital art installation. These traces are located in installation’s systems, structures and materials. The usefulness of information theory as a tool to understand these relationships has until recently been overlooked by a tradition of media art history that has grouped artworks according to the properties of the artwork and/or tied them into the histories of representation and perception in art theory. Throughout this essay I use the productive dual positioning of noise and information to address the errors and impurity inherent within the viewing experiences of digital installation. Information and Noise It is not hard to see why the fractured spaces of digital installation are haunted by histories of information science. In his 1948 essay “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” Claude Shannon developed a new model for communications technologies that articulated informational feedback processes. Discussions of information transmission through phone lines were occurring alongside the development of technology capable of computing multiple discrete and variable packets of information: that is, the digital computer. And, like art, information science remains concerned with the material spaces of transmission – whether conceptual, social or critical. In the context of art something is made to be seen, understood, viewed, or presented as a series of relationships that might be established between individuals, groups, environments, and sensations. Understood this way art is an aesthetic relationship between differing material bodies, images, representations, and spaces. It is an event. Shannon was adamant that information must not be confused with meaning. To increase efficiency he insisted that the message be separated from its components; in particular, those aspects that were predictable were not to be considered information (Hansen 79). The problem that Shannon had to contend with was noise. Unwanted and disruptive, noise became symbolic of the struggle to control the growth of systems. The more complex the system, the more noise needed to be addressed. Noise is both the material from which information is constructed, as well as being the matter which information resists. Weaver (Shannon’s first commentator) writes: In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise. (4). To enable more efficient message transmission, Shannon designed systems that repressed as much noise as possible, while also acknowledging that without some noise information could not be transmitted. Shannon’s conception of information meant that information would not change if the context changed. This was crucial if a general theory of information transmission was to be plausible and meant that a methodology for noise management could be foregrounded (Pask 123). Without meaning, information became a quantity, a yes or no decision, that Shannon called a “bit” (1). Shannon’s emphasis on separating signal or message from both predicability and external noise appeared to give information an identity where it could float free of a material substance and be treated independently of context. However, for this to occur information would have to become fixed and understood as an entity. Shannon went to pains to demonstrate that the separation of meaning and information was actually to enable the reverse. A fluidity of information and the possibilities for encoding it would mean that information, although measurable, did not have a finite form. Tied into the paradox of this equation is the crucial role of noise or error. In Shannon’s communication model information is not only complicit with noise; it is totally dependant upon it for understanding. Without noise, either encoded within the original message or present from sources outside the channel, information cannot get through. The model of sender-encoder-channel-signal (message)-decoder-receiver that Shannon constructed has an arrow inserting noise. Visually and schematically this noise is a disruption pointing up and inserting itself in the nice clean lines of the message. This does not mean that noise was a last minute consideration; rather noise was the very thing Shannon was working with (and against). It is present in every image we have of information. A source, message, transmitter, receiver and their attendant noises are all material infrastructures that serve to contextualise the information they transmit, receive, and disrupt. Figure 1. Claude Shannon “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” 1948. In his analytical discussion of the diagram, Shannon actually locates noise in two crucial places. The first position accorded noise is external, marked by the arrow that demonstrates how noise is introduced to the message channel whilst in transit. External noise confuses the purity of the message whilst equivocally adding new information. External noise has a particular materiality and enters the equation as unexplained variation and random error. This is disruptive presence rather than entropic coded pattern. Shannon offers this equivocal definition of noise to be everything that is outside the linear model of sender-channel-receiver; hence, anything can be noise if it enters a channel where it is unwelcome. Secondly, noise was defined as unpredictability or entropy found and encoded within the message itself. This for Shannon was an essential and, in some ways, positive role. Entropic forces invited continual reorganisation and (when engaging the laws of redundancy) assisted with the removal of repetition enabling faster message transmission (Shannon 48). Weaver calls this shifting relationship between entropy and message “equivocation” (11). Weaver identified equivocation as central to the manner in which noise and information operated. A process of equivocation identified the receiver’s knowledge. For Shannon, a process of equivocation mediated between useful information and noise, as both were “measured in the same units” (Hayles, Chaos 55). To eliminate noise completely is to sacrifice information. Information understood in this way is also about relationships between differing material bodies, representations, and spaces, connected together for the purposes of transmission. It, like the artwork, is an event. This would appear to suggest a correlation between information transmission and viewing in galleries. Far from it. Although, the contemporary information channel is essentially a tube with fixed walls, (it is still constrained by physical properties, bandwidth and so on) and despite the implicit spatialisation of information models, I am not proposing a direct correlation between information channels and installation spaces. This is because I am not interested in ‘reading’ the information of either environment. What I am suggesting is that both environments share this material of noise. Noise is present in four places. Firstly noise is within the media errors of transmission, and secondly, it is within the media of the installation, (neither of which are one way flows). Thirdly, the viewer or listener introduces noise as interference, and lastly, it is present in the very materials thorough which it travels. Noise layered on noise. Redundancy and Modulation So far in this paper I have discussed the relationship of information to noise. For the remainder, I want to address some particular processes or manifestations of noise in New Zealand artists’ collective, et al.’s maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 (2006, exhibited as part of the SCAPE Biennal of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery). The installation occupies a small alcove that is partially blocked by a military-style portable table stacked with newspapers. Inside the space are three grey wooden chairs, some headphones, and a modified data projection of Google Earth. It is not immediately clear if the viewer is allowed within the spaces of the alcove to listen to the headphones as monotonous voices fill the whole space intoning political, social, and religious platitudes. The headphones might be a tool to block out the noise. In the installation it is as if multiple messages have been sent but their source, channel, and transmitter are unintelligible to the receiver. All that is left is information divorced from meaning. As other works by et al. have demonstrated, social solidarity is not a fundamentalism with directed positions and singular leaders. For example, in rapture (2004) noise disrupts all presence as a portable shed quivers in response to underground nuclear explosions 40,000km away. In the fundamental practice (2005) the viewer is left attempting to decode the un-encoded, as again sound and large steel barriers control and determine only certain movements (see http://www.etal.name/ for some documentation of these projects) . maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 is a development of the fundamental practice. To enter its spaces viewers slip around the table and find themselves extremely close to the projection screen. Despite the provision of copious media the viewer cannot control any aspect of the environment. On screen, and apparently integral to the Google Earth imagery, are five animated and imposing dark grey monolith forms. Because of their connection to the monotonous voices in the headphones, the monoliths seem to map the imposition of narrative, power, and force in various disputed territories. Like their sudden arrival in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) it is the contradiction of the visibility and improbability of the monoliths that renders them believable. On the video landscape the five monoliths apparently house the dispassionate voices of many different media and political authorities. Their presence is both redundant and essential as they modulate the layering of media forces – and in between, error slips in. In a broad discussion of information Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari highlight the necessary role of redundancy commenting that: redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the significance of information, the second (I=I) concerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that information and communication, and even significance and subjectification, are subordinate to redundancy (79). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 patterns of frequency highlight the necessary role of entropy where it is coded into gaps in the vocal transmission. Frequency is a structuring of information tied to meaningful communication. Resonance, like the stack of un-decodable newspapers on the portable table, is the carrier of redundancy. It is in the gaps between the recorded voices that connections between the monoliths and the texts are made, and these two forms of redundancy emerge. As Shannon says, redundancy is a problem of language. This is because redundancy and modulation do not equate with relationship of signal to noise. Signal to noise is a representational relationship; frequency and resonance are not representational but relational. This means that an image that might be “real-time” interrupts our understanding that the real comes first with representation always trailing second (Virilio 65). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the monoliths occupy a fixed spatial ground, imposed over the shifting navigation of Google Earth (this is not to mistake Google Earth with the ‘real’ earth). Together they form a visual counterpoint to the texts reciting in the viewer’s ears, which themselves might present as real but again, they aren’t. As Shannon contended, information cannot be tied to meaning. Instead, in the race for authority and thus authenticity we find interlopers, noisy digital images that suggest the presence of real-time perception. The spaces of maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 meld representation and information together through the materiality of noise. And across all the different modalities employed, the appearance of noise is not through formation, but through error, accident, or surprise. This is the last step in a movement away from the mimetic obedience of information and its adherence to meaning-making or representational systems. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 we are forced to align real time with virtual spaces and suspend our disbelief in the temporal truths that we see on the screen before us. This brief introduction to the work has returned us to the relationship between analogue and digital materials. Signal to noise is an analogue relationship of presence and absence. No signal equals a break in transmission. On the other hand, a digital system, due to its basis in discrete bits, transmits through probability (that is, the transmission occurs through pattern and randomness, rather than presence and absence (Hayles, How We Became 25). In his use of Shannon’s theory for the study of information transmission, Schwartz comments that the shift in information theory from analogue to digital is a shift from an analogue relationship of signal to noise to one of the probability of error (318). As I have argued in this paper, if it is measured as a quantity, noise is productive; it adds information. In both digital and analogue systems it is predictability and repetition that do not contribute information. Von Neumann makes the distinction clear saying that to some extent the “precision” of the digital machine “is absolute.” Even though, error as a matter of normal operation and not solely … as an accident attributable to some definite breakdown, nevertheless creeps in (294). Error creeps in. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5, et al. disrupts signal transmission by layering ambiguities into the installation. Gaps are left for viewers to introduce misreadings of scale, space, and apprehension. Rather than selecting meaning out of information within nontechnical contexts, a viewer finds herself in the same sphere as information. Noise imbricates both information and viewer within a larger open system. When asked about the relationship with the viewer in her work, et al. collaborator p.mule writes: To answer the 1st question, communication is important, clarity of concept. To answer the 2nd question, we are all receivers of information, how we process is individual. To answer the 3rd question, the work is accessible if you receive the information. But the question remains: how do we receive the information? In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the system dominates. Despite the use of sound engineering and sophisticated Google Earth mapping technologies, the work appears to be constructed from discarded technologies both analogue and digital. The ominous hovering monoliths suggest answers: that somewhere within this work are methodologies to confront the materialising forces of digital error. To don the headphones is to invite a position that operates as a filtering of power. The parameters for this power are in a constant state of flux. This means that whilst mapping these forces the work does not locate them. Sound is encountered and constructed. Furthermore, the work does not oppose digital and analogue, for as von Neumann comments “the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure” (295). maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 shows how digital and analogue come together through the productive errors of modulation and redundancy. et al.’s research constantly turns to representational and meaning making systems. As one instance, maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 demonstrates how the digital has challenged the logics of the binary in the traditions of information theory. Digital logics are modulated by redundancies and accidents. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 it is not possible to have information without noise. If, as I have argued here, digital installation operates between noise and information, then, in a constant disruption of the legacies of representation, immersion, and interaction, it is possible to open up material languages for the digital. Furthermore, an engagement with noise and error results in a blurring of the structures of information, generating a position from which we can discuss the viewer as immersed within the system – not as receiver or meaning making actant, but as an essential material within the open system of the artwork. References Barr, Jim, and Mary Barr. “L. Budd et al.” Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand. Ed. Rene Block. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. 123. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2005. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. Venice Document. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2006. Daly-Peoples, John. Urban Myths and the et al. Legend. 21 Aug. 2004. The Big Idea (reprint) http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/print.php?sid=2234>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1996. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1990. Hobart, Michael, and Zachary Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. p.mule, et al. 2007. 2 Jul. 2007 http://www.etal.name/index.htm>. Pask, Gordon. An Approach to Cybernetics. London: Hutchinson, 1961. Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1988. Schwartz, Mischa. Information Transmission, Modulation, and Noise: A Unified Approach to Communication Systems. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1982. Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. July, October 1948. Online PDF. 27: 379-423, 623-656 (reprinted with corrections). 13 Jul. 2004 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html>. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, British Film Institute, 1994. Von Neumann, John. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” Collected Works. Ed. A. H. Taub. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963. Weaver, Warren. “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Mathematical Theory of Commnunication. Eds. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. paperback, 1963 ed. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1949. 1-16. Work Discussed et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 2006. Installation, Google Earth feed, newspapers, sound. Exhibited in SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, September 30-November 12. Images reproduced with the permission of et al. Photographs by Lee Cunliffe. Acknowledgments Research for this paper was conducted with the support of an Otago Polytechnic Resaerch Grant. Photographs of et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 by Lee Cunliffe. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ballard, Su. "Information, Noise and et al." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>. APA Style Ballard, S. (Oct. 2007) "Information, Noise and et al.," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>.

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Abstract:

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circ*mstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circ*mstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

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It is January 1930 and the restless Southern Ocean is heaving itself up against the frozen coast of Eastern Antarctica. For hundreds of kilometres, this coastline consists entirely of ice: although Antarctica is a continent, only 2% of its surface consists of exposed rock; the rest is buried under a vast frozen mantle. But there is rock in this coastal scene: silhouetted against the glaring white of the glacial shelf, a barren island humps up out of the water. Slowly and cautiously, the Discovery approaches the island through uncharted waters; the crew’s eyes strain in the frigid air as they scour the ocean’s surface for ship-puncturing bergs. The approach to the island is difficult, but Captain Davis maintains the Discovery on its course as the wind howls in the rigging. Finally, the ship can go no further; the men lower a boat into the tossing sea. They pull hard at the oars until the boat is abreast of the island, and then they ram the bow against its icy littoral. Now one of the key moments of this exploratory expedition—officially titled the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE)—is about to occur: the expedition is about to succeed in its primary spatial mission. Douglas Mawson, the Australian leader of the expedition, puts his feet onto the island and ascends to its bleak summit. There, he and his crew assemble a mound of loose stones and insert into it the flagpole they’ve carried with them across the ocean. Mawson reads an official proclamation of territorial annexation (see Bush 118-19), the photographer Frank Hurley shoots the moment on film, and one of the men hauls the Union Jack up the pole. Until the Australian Flags Act of 1953, the Union Jack retained seniority over the Australian flag. BANZARE took place before the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which gave full political and foreign policy independence to Commonwealth countries, thus Mawson claimed Antarctic space on behalf of Britain. He did so with the understanding that Britain would subsequently grant Australia title to its own Antarctican space. Britain did so in 1933. In the freezing wind, the men take off their hats, give three cheers for the King, and sing “God Save the King.” They deposit a copy of the proclamation into a metal canister and affix this to the flagpole; for a moment they admire the view. But there is little time to savour the moment, or the feeling of solid ground under their cold feet: the ship is waiting and the wind is growing in force. The men row back to the Discovery; Mawson returns to his cabin and writes up the event. A crucial moment in Antarctica’s spatial history has occurred: on what Mawson has aptly named Proclamation Island, Antarctica has been produced as Australian space. But how, exactly, does this production of Antarctica as a spatial possession work? How does this moment initiate the transformation of six million square kilometres of Antarctica—42% of the continent—into Australian space? The answer to this question lies in three separate, but articulated cultural technologies: representation, the body of the explorer, and international territorial law. When it comes to thinking about ‘turf’, Antarctica may at first seem an odd subject of analysis. Physically, Antarctica is a turfless space, an entire continent devoid of grass, plants, land-based animals, or trees. Geopolitically, Antarctica remains the only continent on which no turf wars have been fought: British and Argentinian soldiers clashed over the occupation of a Peninsular base in the Hope Bay incident of 1952 (Dodds 56), but beyond this somewhat bathetic skirmish, Antarctican space has never been the object of physical conflict. Further, as Antarctica has no indigenous human population, its space remains free of the colonial turfs of dispossession, invasion, and loss. The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 formalised Antarctica’s geopolitically turfless status, stipulating that the continent was to be used for peaceful purposes only, and stating that Antarctica was an internationally shared space of harmony and scientific goodwill. So why address Antarctican spatiality here? Two motivations underpin this article’s anatomising of Australia’s Antarctican space. First, too often Antarctica is imagined as an entirely hom*ogeneous space: a vast white plain dotted here and there along its shifting coast by identical scientific research stations inhabited by identical bearded men. Similarly, the complexities of Antarctica’s geopolitical and legal spaces are often overlooked in favour of a vision of the continent as a site of harmonious uniformity. While it is true that the bulk of Antarctican space is ice, the assumption that its cultural spatialities are identical is far from the case: this article is part of a larger endeavour to provide a ‘thick’ description of Antarctican spatialities, one which points to the heterogeneity of cultural geographies of the polar south. The Australian polar spatiality installed by Mawson differs radically from that of, for example, Chile; in a continent governed by international consensus, it is crucial that the specific cultural geographies and spatial histories of Treaty participants be clearly understood. Second, attending to complexities of Antarctican spatiality points up the intersecting cultural technologies involved in spatial production, cultural technologies so powerful that, in the case of Antarctica, they transformed nearly half of a distant continent into Australian sovereign space. This article focuses its critical attention on three core spatialising technologies, a trinary that echoes Henri Lefebvre’s influential tripartite model of spatiality: this article attends to Australian Antarctic representation, practise, and the law. At the turn of the twentieth century, Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen trooped over the polar plateau, and Antarctic space became a setting for symbolic Edwardian performances of heroic imperial masculinity and ‘frontier’ hardiness. At the same time, a second, less symbolic, type of Antarctican spatiality began to evolve: for the first time, Antarctica became a potential territorial possession; it became the object of expansionist geopolitics. Based in part on Scott’s expeditions, Britain declared sovereignty over an undefined area of the continent in 1908, and France declared Antarctic space its own in 1924; by the late 1920s, what John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge refer to as the nation-state ontology—that is, the belief that land should and must be divided into state-owned units—had arrived in Antarctica. What the Adelaide Advertiser’s 8 April 1929 headline referred to as “A Scramble for Antarctica” had begun. The British Imperial Conference of 1926 concluded that the entire continent should become a possession of Britain and its dominions, New Zealand and Australia (Imperial). Thus, in 1929, BANZARE set sail into the brutal Southern Ocean. Although the expedition included various scientists, its primary mission was not to observe Antarctican space, but to take possession of it: as the expedition’s instructions from Australian Prime Minister Bruce stated, BANZARE’s mission was to produce Antarctica as Empire’s—and by extension, Australia’s—sovereign space (Jacka and Jacka 251). With the moment described in the first paragraph of this article, along with four other such moments, BANZARE succeeded; just how it did so is the focus of this work. It is by now axiomatic in spatial studies that the job of imperial explorers is not to locate landforms, but to produce a discursive space. “The early travellers,” as Paul Carter notes of Australian explorers, “invented places rather than found them” (51). Numerous analytical investigations attend to the discursive power of exploration: in Australia, Carter’s Road to Botany Bay, Simon Ryan’s Cartographic Eye, Ross Gibson’s Diminishing Paradise, and Brigid Hains’s The Ice and the Inland, to name a few, lay bare the textual strategies through which the imperial annexation of “new” spaces was legitimated and enabled. Discursive territoriality was certainly a core product of BANZARE: as this article’s opening paragraph demonstrates, one of the key missions of BANZARE was not simply to perform rituals of spatial possession, but to textualise them for popular and governmental consumption. Within ten months of the expedition’s return, Hurley’s film Southward Ho! With Mawson was touring Australia. BANZARE consisted of two separate trips to Antarctica; Southward Ho! documents the first of these, while Siege of the South documents the both the first and the second, 1930-1, mission. While there is not space here to provide a detailed textual analysis of the entire film, a focus on the “Proclamation Island moment” usefully points up some of the film’s central spatialising work. Hurley situated the Proclamation Island scene at the heart of the film; the scene was so important that Hurley wished he had been able to shoot two hours of footage of Mawson’s island performance (Ayres 194). This scene in the film opens with a long shot of the land and sea around the island; a soundtrack of howling wind not only documents the brutal conditions in which the expedition worked, but also emphasises the emptiness of Antarctican space prior to its “discovery” by Mawson: in this shot, the film visually confirms Antarctica’s status as an available terra nullius awaiting cooption into Australian understanding, and into Australian national space. The film then cuts to a close-up of Mawson raising the flag; the sound of the wind disappears as Mawson begins to read the proclamation of possession. It is as if Mawson’s proclamation of possession stills the protean chaos of unclaimed Antarctic space by inviting it into the spatial order of national territory: at this moment, Antarctica’s agency is symbolically subsumed by Mawson’s acquisitive words. As the scene ends, the camera once again pans over the surrounding sea and ice scape, visually confirming the impact of Mawson’s—and the film’s—performance: all this, the shot implies, is now made meaningful; all this is now understood, recorded, and, most importantly, all this is now ours. A textual analysis of this filmic moment might identify numerous other spatialising strategies at work: its conflation of Mawson’s and the viewer’s proprietary gazes (Ryan), its invocation of the sublime, or its legitimising conflation of the ‘purity’ of the whiteness of the landscape with the whiteness of its claimants (Dyer 21). However, the spatial productivity of this moment far exceeds the discursive. What is at times frustrating about discourse analyses of spatiality is that they too often fail to articulate representation to other, equally potent, cultural technologies of spatial production. John Wylie notes that “on the whole, accounts of early twentieth-century Antarctic exploration exhibit a particular tendency to position and interpret exploratory experience in terms of self-contained discursive ensembles” (170). Despite the undisputed power of textuality, discourse alone does not, and cannot, produce a spatial possession. “Discursive and representational practices,” as Jane Jacobs observes, “are in a mutually constitutive relationship with political and economic forces” (9); spatiality, in other words, is not simply a matter of texts. In order to understand fully the process of Antarctican spatial acquisition, it is necessary to depart from tales of exploration and ships and flags, and to focus on the less visceral spatiality of international territorial law. Or, more accurately, it is necessary to address the mutual imbrication of these two articulated spatialising “domains of practice” (Dixon). The emerging field of critical legal geography is founded on the premise that legal analyses of territoriality neglect the spatial dimension of their investigations; rather than seeing the law as a means of spatial production, they position space as a neutral, universally-legible entity which is neatly governed by the “external variable” of territorial law (Blomley 28). “In the hegemonic conception of the law,” Wesley Pue argues, “the entire world is transmuted into one vast isotropic surface” (568) upon which law acts. Nicholas Blomley asserts, however, that law is not a neutral organiser of space, but rather a cultural technology of spatial production. Territorial laws, in other words, make spaces, and don’t simply govern them. When Mawson planted the flag and read the proclamation, he was producing Antarctica as a legal space as well as a discursive one. Today’s international territorial laws derive directly from European imperialism: as European empires expanded, they required a spatial system that would protect their newly-annexed lands, and thus they developed a set of laws of territorial acquisition and possession. Undergirding these laws is the ontological premise that space is divisible into state-owned sovereign units. At international law, space can be acquired by its imperial claimants in one of three main ways: through conquest, cession (treaty), or through “the discovery of terra nullius” (see Triggs 2). Antarctica and Australia remain the globe’s only significant spaces to be transformed into possessions through the last of these methods. In the spatiality of the international law of discovery, explorers are not just government employees or symbolic representatives, but vessels of enormous legal force. According to international territorial law, sovereign title to “new” territory—land defined (by Europeans) as terra nullius, or land belonging to no one—can be established through the eyes, feet, codified ritual performances, and documents of explorers. That is, once an authorised explorer—Mawson carried documents from both the Australian Prime Minister and the British King that invested his body and his texts with the power to transform land into a possession—saw land, put his foot on it, planted a flag, read a proclamation, then documented these acts in words and maps, that land became a possession. These performative rituals and their documentation activate the legal spatiality of territorial acquisition; law here is revealed as a “bundle of practices” that produce space as a possession (Ford 202). What we witness when we attend to Mawson’s island performance, then, is not merely a discursive performance, but also the transformation of Antarctica into a legal space of possession. Similarly, the films and documents generated by the expedition are more than just a “sign system of human ambition” (Tang 190), they are evidence, valid at law, of territorial possession. They are key components of Australia’s legal currency of Antarctican spatial purchase. What is of central importance here is that Mawson’s BANZARE performance on Proclamation Island is a moment in which the dryly legal, the bluntly physical, and the densely textual clearly intersect in the creation of space as a possession. Australia did not take possession of forty-two percent of Antarctica after BANZARE by law, by exploration, or by representation alone. The Australian government built its Antarctic space with letters patent and legal documents. BANZARE produced Australia’s Antarctic possession through the physical and legal rituals of flag-planting, proclamation-reading, and exploration. BANZARE further contributed to Australia’s polar empire with maps, journals, photos and films, and cadastral lists of the region’s animals, minerals, magnetic fields, and winds. The law of “discovery of terra nullius” coalesced these spaces into a territory officially designated as Australian. It is crucial to recognise that the production of nearly half of Antarctica as Australian space was, and is not a matter of discourse, of physical performance, or of law alone. Rather, these three cultural technologies of spatial production are mutually imbricated; none can function without the others, nor is one reducible to an epiphenomenon of another. To focus on the discursive products of BANZARE without attending to the expedition’s legal work not only downplays the significance of Mawson’s spatialising achievement, but also blinds us to the role that law plays in the production of space. Attending to Mawson’s Proclamation Island moment points to the unique nature of Australia’s Antarctic spatiality: unlike the US, which constructs Antarctic spatiality as entirely non-sovereign; and unlike Chile, which bases its Antarctic sovereignty claim on Papal Bulls and acts of domestic colonisation, Australian Antarctic space is a spatiality of possession, founded on a bedrock of imperial exploration, representation, and law. Seventy-four years ago, the camera whirred as a man stuck a flagpole into the bleak summit rocks of a small Antarctic island: six million square kilometres of Antarctica became, and remain, Australian space. Works Cited Agnew, John, and Stuart Corbridge. Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge, 1995. Ayres, Philip. Mawson: A Life. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1999. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford, 1994. Bush, W. M. Antarctica and International Law: A Collection of Inter-State and National Documents. Vol. 2. London: Oceana, 1982. Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London: Faber, 1987. Dixon, Rob. Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance. Brisbane: UQP, 2001. Dodds, Klaus. Geopolitics in Antarctica: Views from the Southern Oceanic Rim. Chichester: Wiley, 1997. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Ford, Richard. “Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction).” The Legal Geographies Reader. Ed. Nicholas Blomley and Richard Ford. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 200-17. Gibson, Ross. The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia. Sydney: Sirius, 1984. Hains, Brigid. The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn, and the Myth of the Frontier. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2002. Imperial Conference, 1926. Summary of Proceedings. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1926. Jacka, Fred, and Eleanor Jacka, eds. Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Jacobs, Jane. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1996. Pue, Wesley. “Wrestling with Law: (Geographical) Specificity versus (Legal) Abstraction.” Urban Geography 11.6 (1990): 566-85. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How the Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Tang, David. “Writing on Antarctica.” Room 5 1 (2000): 185-95. Triggs, Gillian. International Law and Australian Sovereignty in Antarctica. Sydney: Legal, 1986. Wylie, John. “Earthly Poles: The Antarctic Voyages of Scott and Amundsen.” Postcolonial Geographies. Ed Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan. London: Continuum, 2002. 169-83. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collis, Christy. "Australia’s Antarctic Turf" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/02-feature-australia.php>. APA Style Collis, C. (2004, Mar17). Australia’s Antarctic Turf. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture,7,<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/02-feature australia.php>

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IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history research and what Scates calls the “cult of remembrance” (“Finding” 218). They provide a way for individuals, often two or three generations removed, to discover, understand and document the wartime experiences of individuals in their family. By allowing descendants to situate their family story within the larger, historically significant narrative of the First World War, online memorials encourage people to feel that the suffering and untimely death of their forbear wasn’t in vain – that it contributed to something worthwhile and worth remembering. At a collective level, this contributes to the ANZAC myth and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s attempt to use it as a foundational myth for Australia’s nationhood.Kylie Veale (9) argues that cyberspace has encouraged improvements on traditional memorial practices because online memorials can be created in a more timely fashion, they are more affordable and they are accessible and enable the sharing of grief and bereavement on a global scale. As evidence of this, an enterprising group in the USA has developed an android app which provides a template for creating an online memorial. They compete with Memorialsonline.com. Veale’s arguments remind us that the Internet is a hyper-democratic space where interactions and sites that are collaborative or contemplative exist alongside trolling and prejudice. Veale also contends that memorial websites facilitate digital immortality, which helps keep the memory of the deceased alive. However, given the impermanence of much of the content on the Internet, this final attribute is a bold claim.It is interesting to compare the way individual soldiers are remembered prior to and after the arrival of the Internet. Now that it is possible to create a tribute website, or Facebook page in memory of someone who served, do families do this instead of creating large physical scrapbooks or photo albums? Or do they do both? Garry Roberts created a ‘mourning diary’ as a record of his journey of agonising grief for his eldest son who died in 1918. His diary consists of 27 scrapbooks, weighing 10 kilograms in total. Pat Jalland (318) suggests this helped Roberts to create some sort of order out of his emotional turmoil. Similarly, building websites or digital tribute pages can help friends and relatives through the grieving process. They can also contribute the service person’s story to official websites such as those managed by the Australian Defence Forces. Do grieving family members look up a website or tribute page they’ve created in the same way that they might open up a scrapbook and remind themselves of their loved one? Kylie Veale’s research into online memorials created for anyone who has died, not necessarily those killed by war, suggests online memorials are used in this way (5).Do grieving relatives take comfort from the number of likes, tags or comments on a memorial or tribute website, in the same way that they might feel supported by the number of people who attend a memorial service or send a condolence card? Do they archive the comments? Garry Roberts kept copies of the letters of sympathy and condolence that he received from friends and relatives after his son’s tragic death and added them to his 27 scrapbooks.Both onsite and online memorials can suffer from lack of maintenance and relevance. Memorial websites can become moribund like untended headstones in a graveyard. Once they have passed their use as a focal point of grief, a place to post tributes; they can languish, un-updated and un-commented on.Memorials and PilgrimageOne thing that online memorials will never be, however, are sites of pilgrimage or ritual. One does not need to set out on a journey to visit an online memorial. It is as far away as your portable electronic device. Online memorials cannot provide the closure or sense of identity and community that comes from visiting a memorial or gravesite.This was evident in December 2014 when people felt the need to visit the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place after the terrorist siege and lay flowers and tributes. While there were also Facebook tribute pages set up for these victims of violence, mourners still felt the need to visit the sites. A permanent memorial to the victims of the siege has now opened in Martin Place.Do people gather around a memorial website for the annual rituals which take place on Anzac or Remembrance Day, or the anniversaries of significant battles? In 2013, the Australian War Memorial (AWM) saw a spike in people logging onto the Memorial’s Remembrance Day web page just prior to 11am. They left the site immediately after the minute’s silence. The AWM web team think they were looking for a live broadcast of the Remembrance Day service in Canberra. When that wasn’t available online, they chose to stay on the site until after the minute’s silence. Perhaps this helped them to focus on the reason for Remembrance Day. Perhaps, as Internet speeds get faster, it will be possible to conduct your own virtual ceremony in real time with friends and family in cyberspace.However, I cannot imagine a time when visiting dignitaries from other countries will post virtual wreaths to virtual war memorials. Ken Inglis argues that the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the AWM has become the ritual centre of the Australian nation, “receiving obligatory wreaths from every visiting head of state” (459).Physical and Online Memorials to the War in AfghanistanThere are only eight physical war memorials to the Afghanistan conflict in Australia, even though this is the longest war Australia has been involved in to date (2001-2015). Does the lack of physical memorials to the war in Afghanistan mean that our communities no longer need them, and that people are memorialising online instead?One grieving father in far north Queensland certainly felt that an online memorial would never suffice. Gordon Chuck’s son, Private Benjamin Chuck, was killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was only 27 years old. Spurred by his son’s premature death, Gordon Chuck rallied family, community and government support, in the tiny hinterland town of Yungaburra, west of Cairns in Queensland, to establish an Avenue of Honour. He knocked on the doors of local businesses, the Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL), the Australian Defence Forces and every level of government to raise $300,000. His intention was to create a timeless memorial of world standard and national significance. On 21 June 2013, the third anniversary of his son’s death, the Chief of the Defence Force and the Prime Minister formally opened the Avenue of Honour in front of “thousands” of people (Nancarrow).Diggers from Afghanistan who have visited the Yungaburra Avenue of Honour speak of the closure and sense of healing it gave them (Nancarrow). The Avenue, built on the shores of Lake Tinaroo, features parallel rows of Illawarra flame trees, whose red blossoms are in full bloom around Remembrance Day and symbolise the blood and fire of war and the cycle of life. It commemorates all the Australian soldiers who have died in the Afghanistan war.The Avenue of Honour, and the memorial in Martin Place clearly demonstrate that physical war memorials are not redundant. They are needed and cherished as sites of grief, hope and commemoration. The rituals conducted there gather gravitas from the solemnity that falls when a sea of people is silent and they provide healing through the comfort of reverent strangers.ConclusionEven though we live in an era when most of us are online every day of our lives, it is unlikely that virtual war memorials will ever supplant their physical forebears. When it comes to commemorating the First World War or contemporary conflicts and those who fought or died in them, physical and virtual war memorials can be complementary but they fulfil fundamentally different roles. Because of their medium as virtual memorials, they will never fulfil the human need for a place of remembrance in the real world.ReferencesBinyon, Laurence. “For the Fallen.” The Times. 21 Sep. 1914. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.army.gov.au/our-history/traditions/for-the-fallen>.Brown, James. Anzac’s Long Shadow. Sydney: Black Inc., 2014.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss. Great Britain: Cambridge UP, 1999.Hunter, Kathryn. “States of Mind: Remembering the Australian-New Zealand Relationship.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 36 (2002). 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/journal/j36/nzmemorial>.Inglis, Ken. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.Inglis, Ken, and Jock Phillips. “War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey.” Australian Historical Studies 24.96 (1991): 179-191.Jalland, Pat. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. London: Oxford University Press, 2002.Knapton, Sarah. “Print Out Digital Photos or Risk Losing Them, Google Boss Warns.” Telegraph 13 Feb. 2015. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410506/Print-out-digital-photos-or-risk-losing-them-Google-boss-warns.html>.Lakin, Shaune. “Laurence Aberhart ANZAC.” Artlink 35.1 (2015): 48-51.Legge, James. “Vandals Deface Two London War Memorials with ‘Islam’ Graffiti”. Independent 27 May 2013. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/vandals-deface-two-london-war-memorials-with-islam-graffiti-8633386.html>.Luckins, Tanya. The Gates of Memory. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2004.McLuhan, Marshall. Understating Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Mentor, 1964.McPhedran, Ian. “Families of Dead Soldiers Angered after Defence Chief David Hurley Donates Memorial Plinth to Avenue of Honour.” Cairns Post 7 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/families-of-dead-soldiers-angered-after-defence-chief-david-hurley-donates-memorial-plinth-to-avenue-of-honour/story-fnjpusyw-1226946540125>.McPhedran, Ian. “Backflip over Donation of Memorial Stone from Afghanistan to Avenue of Honour at Yungaburra.” Cairns Post 11 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/backflip-over-donation-of-memorial-stone-from-afghanistan-to-avenue-of-honour-at-yungaburra/story-fnkxmm0j-1226950508126>.Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Interpreting First World War Memorials.” Updated 4 Sep. 2014. <http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/interpreting-first-world-war-memorials>.Nancarrow, Kirsty. “Thousands Attend Opening of Avenue of Honour, a Memorial to Diggers Killed in Afghanistan”. ABC News 7 Nov. 2014. 2 Oct. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-22/avenue-of-honour-remembers-fallen-diggers/4773592>.Scates, Bruce. “Finding the Missing of Fromelles: When Soldiers Return.” Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War. Eds. Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. 212-231.Scates, Bruce. “Soldiers’ Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of the Great War.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 40 (2007): n.p.Scott, Ernest. Australia during the War: The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Vol. XI. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941.Stanley, Peter. “Ten Kilos of First World War Grief at the Melbourne Museum.” The Conversation 27 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/ten-kilos-of-first-world-war-grief-at-the-melbourne-museum-30362>.Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the Dead.” Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004). 7 Oct. 2019 <http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/>.Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambrigde: Cambridge UP, 1995.———. The Experience of World War I. London: Macmillan, 1988.

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Abstract:

About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circ*mscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. References Beck, Brenda E. “Comments on the Distancing of Emotion in Ritual by Thomas J. Scheff.” Current Anthropology 18.3 (1977): 490. Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics and Research Programmes.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon. London: Sage, 2005. 211–28. Boston, Jonathan., Philip Nel, and Marjolein Righarts. “Introduction.” Climate Change and Security: Planning for the Future. Wellington: Victoria U of Wellington Institute of Policy Studies, 2009. Boykoff, Maxwell T. “We Speak for the Trees: Media Reporting on the Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34 (2009): 431–57. Corbett, Julia B. Communicating Nature: How we Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Washington, DC: Island P, 2006. Cox, Robert. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. London: Sage, 2010. Deflem, Mathieu. “Ritual, Anti-Structure and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processural Symbolic Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30.1 (1991): 1–25. Gifford, Robert. “Psychology’s Essential Role in Alleviating the Impacts of Climate Change.” Canadian Psychology 49.4 (2008): 273–80. Hamilton, Maxwell John. “Introduction.” Media and the Environment. Eds. Craig L. LaMay, Everette E. Dennis. Washington: Island P, 1991. 3–16. Horvath, Agnes., Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra. “Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change.” International Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): 3–4. Howard-Williams, Rowan. “Consumers, Crazies and Killer Whales: The Environment on New Zealand Television.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 27–43. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change Synthesis Report. (2007). 23 March 2012 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf› Killingsworth, M. J., and Jacqueliene S. Palmer. “Silent Spring and Science Fiction: An Essay in the History and Rhetoric of Narrative.” And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Ed. Craig Waddell. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 174–204. Littleton, C. Scott. Gods, Goddesses and Mythology. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2005. Lorenzoni, Irene, Mavis Jones, and John R. Turnpenny. “Climate Change, Human Genetics, and Post-normality in the UK.” Futures 39.1 (2007): 65–82. Lopez, Antonio. “Defusing the Cannon/Canon: An Organic Media Approach to Environmental Communication.” Environmental Communication 4.1 (2010): 99–108. Maier, Daniela Carmen. “Communicating Business Greening and Greenwashing in Global Media: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of CNN's Greenwashing Video.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 165–77. Milfront, Taciano L. “Global Warming, Climate Change and Human Psychology.” Psychological Approaches to Sustainability: Current Trends in Theory, Research and Practice. Eds. Victor Corral-Verdugo, Cirilo H. Garcia-Cadena and Martha Frias-Armenta. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 20–42. O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. “Fear Won’t Do It: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations.” Science Communication 30.3 (2009): 355–79. Pawlik, Kurt. “The Psychology of Global Environmental Change: Some Basic Data and an Agenda for Cooperative International Research.” International Journal of Psychology 26.5 (1991): 547–63. Reynolds, Jock., ed. Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Rosenzweig, Cynthia, David Karoly, Marta Vicarelli, Peter Neofotis, Qigang Wu, Gino Casassa, Annette Menzel, Terry L. Root, Nicole Estrella, Bernard Seguin, Piotr Tryjanowski, Chunzhen Liu, Samuel Rawlins, and Anton Imeson. “Attributing Physical and Biological Impacts to Anthropogenic Climate Change.” Nature 453.7193 (2008): 353–58. Roser-Renouf, Connie, and Edward W. Maibach. “Communicating Climate Change.” Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology Communication. Ed. Susanna Hornig Priest. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 2010. 141–47. Stamm, Keith R., Fiona Clark, and Paula R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and the Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219–37. Turner, Victor. “Dramatic Ritual – Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 1.3 (1979): 80–93. —-. “Symbols in African Ritual.” Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Herbert A. Applebaum. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987. 488–501. —-. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

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IntroductionWhen she divorced, Cheryl Strayed chose for herself an entirely new surname. In Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, the memoir she wrote and published in 2012 about hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border, she recalls looking up the definition of the word “strayed”, and how its meaning resonated for her. “I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild”, Strayed writes. “Even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before” (97).From the outset of her memoir, Strayed links the notion of wildness with movement, suggesting that “becom[ing] wild” only came about for her when she moved away from—and I would suggest here deliberately rejected—a sedentary role in her life. That is, when she became a peripatetic walker: someone “travelling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short periods” (Oxford English Dictionary online). In this article, I discuss Strayed’s memoir Wild as an example of radical wandering. I argue that Strayed subverts the figure of the adventuring explorer in nature—who we usually think of as male—by using the idea of “dark peripatetic walking” whereby the dark peripatetic walker transgresses by going against, or existing outside of, society’s norms, walking “perhaps out of life itself” (Adams 196). Strayed walks the PCT out of desperation and grief after her mother dies and her marriage ends. While Paul Adams interprets dark peripatetic walking as a dire act, in this article I offer a reading of this impulse to wander away from as empowering: a radical “return to the self” only made possible by solitude (Barbour 201-202). My reading of Strayed’s walking as dark peripatetic offers a framework for understanding women’s walking in the wild; how, in wandering away from society’s norms, and in seeking solitude and being self-sufficient, the female walker rejects what society expects of women in the wild and finds empowerment in the transgressive act of existing in a male-dominated terrain: in this case, the literal one of the PCT, and the generic one that comprises memoirs about journeys in nature.Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering A rich history of walking exists throughout the last few centuries, from Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur strolling the streets of Paris, to psychogeography and Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, to pilgrimages throughout the ages. However, much of this walking was conducted in primarily urban spaces—and flânerie, in particular, excluded women both culturally and linguistically. Dark peripatetic walking is also associated with the urban rather than nature, but I want to take it out into wild landscapes. Adams describes two kinds of walking that Western society practises: “light peripatetic” and “dark peripatetic”. Light peripatetic is associated with solitude, simplicity, and idyll; in short, it connotes a Romantic strolling (193-194). Adams cites the celebrated nature writer Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” as an example of light peripatetic, in which, for Thoreau, walking is an essential, routine part of each day. Dark peripatetic is a more ominous form of walking. Adams writes that “the dark peripatetic motif signals that the bonds of society have been torn, or a character’s identity is beginning to dissolve, or both” (196). The dark peripatetic walker is seen to walk “out of doors, out of society, out of community, out of normal reality, and perhaps even out of life itself” (196). Adams associates dark peripatetic with walking in urban spaces, driven by a sense of leaving, or being forced to leave, society.Extending Adams’s concept of the dark peripatetic, we might follow the dark peripatetic walker away from an urban setting and into the wilderness. Here we find Strayed. By the time she sets out to embark on the PCT, she has transgressed a number of social norms that have taken her to the edge of society and her existence: she has been unfaithful in her marriage, which has now fallen apart; she regularly takes drugs (though does not consider herself an addict); she is struggling with depression after the death of her mother; she is emotionally isolated as significant relationships with her family and wider networks have collapsed, and she has almost no money and no plans for the immediate future. We can see in Strayed a figure poised at the edge of what could be conceived as the limit of what is bearable. Strayed’s solution is to walk away from her broken life and into solitude and nature. The impulse of dark peripatetic is away from; the dark peripatetic walker transgresses by going against, or existing outside of society’s norms, walking “perhaps out of life itself” (Adams 196). However, while Strayed’s sense of identity, and her connections with society, have come to feel tenuous, I do not insinuate that she sees hiking the PCT as an act that leads her away from life and into death. While her reasoning for embarking on the hike comes from a place of desperation, it is not a desperate act; while Strayed is unprepared for the rigours of the hike, her inexperience does not equal failure. While Adams interprets dark peripatetic walking as dire, it is possible also to interpret this impulse to walk away from as radical and empowering—particularly for women walking away from societal norms and gendered constrictions that say women should not be, nor want to be, in the wild. Woman in the WildWhen we think about “wildness”, notions of the unfamiliar are evoked; the uncomfortable, the frightening, and the physically arduous. But wildness can also evoke the empowering. For Thoreau, the word “wild” was “the past participle of to will, self-willed” (cited in Turner 111). Carol Black elaborates on this idea, describing Thoreau’s wild as “that which lives out of its own intrinsic nature rather than bowing to some extrinsic force” (Black). Understood like this, to be wild is ultimately to embody your intrinsic essence. Of course, the discussion of an “intrinsic essence”, or, implicitly, one of a woman’s, is complicated territory: as the feminist scholar Donna Haraway writes, “there is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (155). There is a long association between women and nature as the ecofeminist scholar Carolyn Merchant discusses in her important book The Death of Nature, with both being dominated by science and men, and both being conflated as the “nurturing mother” (xx). The association between men and nature, however, is interestingly fluid, as the ecocritic Astrid Bracke points out: “‘male’ can be seen as both culture, and nature: culture, when ‘wild’, ‘natural’ women have to be civilized, nature when it comes to drawing a contrast to the domestic sphere of the home, the place of women and children” (“Macho Nature”). The discussion of the essence of a human being is complex and potentially fraught, and would require another article to do it justice, so what I want to focus on here is the idea of wildness as being, or returning to, a sense of selfhood that may have been forgotten. I focus here on how Strayed experiences self and wildness through the act of walking in solitude, and what this means for narratives of being in the wild. The ability to inhabit, explore freely, and stake claims on wild places has often been the business of men in history and male characters in literature. For instance, Tanya Kam argues that women who hike alone are more likely to be asked what compelled them to do so, whereas this legitimisation is not required when a man does the same thing (365). She suggests that adventures in the wild are often perceived in Western society as a “rite of masculinity” (365) where the male explorer sets out to conquer “rugged, natural terrain” (353). For Kam, this stems from the concept of “frontier masculinity”, which, she writes, “depends on romanticised conceptions of the wilderness, rugged self-sufficiency, courage, masculine physical strength, autonomous individualism, and the active subordination of nature” (353). This masculine explorer trope impedes the fact that women have always been present in nature and wilderness. Sarah McFarland calls for “the reconstruction of the concept of nature itself” (45), which she argues women’s nature writing can bring about, in a way that will “integrat[e] the interests of actual women into an actual wilderness” (45). Memoirs such as Tracks (1980) by Robyn Davidson, Woman in the Wilderness (2018) by Miriam Lancewood, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube (2016) by Blair Braverman, and even The Word for Woman Is Wilderness by Abi Andrews (2018), which is not a memoir but a novel that reads like one, are a suite of texts that I think would interest McFarland, who proposes that by disrupting the notion of the solitary male “questing hero” (37), women-authored texts about being in nature refute “the myth of a womanless wilderness” (38). Strayed, with Wild, joins the lineage of women writers who do this.One strategy that Strayed uses to refute this myth, and provide an alternative to the male explorer, is to embody some of the tropes of this figure in her narration of hiking the PCT. The criteria by which Kam defines this masculine explorer are evident, in most instances, in Strayed’s narrator in Wild. During the three months that she spends hiking the PCT, she is forced to become self-sufficient; she finds courage in the face of extreme hardship; her physical strength develops, and she becomes comfortable in her autonomy. Strayed consistently highlights the gender of her body in this narration: her overweight pack “Monster” is a constant struggle for her smaller physique; she pushes herself physically so male hikers don’t overtake her; she lists the condoms and natural sea sponge she packs, anticipating occasions of physical intimacy and attending to the practicality of menstruating while on the trail. She notes, as the weeks pass, the way her hair grows straw-like from exposure to the weather, and how the developing muscles in her legs “rippl[e] beneath [her] thinning flesh in ways they never had” (190). Patches of skin on her hips and tailbone bleed and scab over from her pack chafing (190). Strayed’s walking, and how she foregrounds the femininity of her body, disrupts the idea that the wilderness is not a place for a woman’s body.However, it is important that the narrator does not seek to subordinate nature—a key aspect of Kam’s “frontier masculinity”. Embodying some, but not all, of the masculine explorer’s traits, as a female narrator-protagonist, Strayed engages with, but ultimately resists, conforming to this tradition, subverting the dominant picture of the masculine explorer in wild places. This is not to say that Strayed refrains from engaging in adversarial encounters with nature; she feels triumphant after successfully navigating snow-covered parts of the trail, and loudly blows her whistle to scare away wildlife. Strayed’s gender is key here: with this strategy, Strayed claims her place as a woman in masculine territory, but in doing so she is more concerned with reflecting on her inner life than in asserting herself over the land that she traverses. In a statement against patriarchal and colonial conceptions of “the wilderness” as empty space to be claimed (via literally claiming land, or by inscribing a romantic narrative upon it), Strayed finds her place in the landscape without owning it. She writes about being in nature, but is ultimately more occupied with being in herself.Witnessing the SelfIf the need to assert himself over nature drives the male adventurer, as Kam suggests, we might read in Wild’s female adventurer an antithesis to this impulse: the act of witness. In a moment of revelation, the narrator realises what it is that drove her, and others before her, to hike the PCT:It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. (207)Strayed’s language choices are significant here. In walking through the landscape features that she names in the above passage, she is witnessing place. Witnessing connotes viewing, but not acting upon. We might also surmise, however, that she is witnessing herself located in these places. Strayed uses the phrase “how it felt to be” to describe the essence of her experience in the wild—again, “felt” could refer to tactile experience in the landscape, or a sense of wildness in her identity that manifested through being in that landscape.On the trail, Strayed also discovers that she is comfortable alone. In a passage that is deceptively short, Strayed makes a remarkable comment on solitude as a transgressive and transformative state for a woman to seek out and ultimately feel at home in: Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. (119, emphasis mine)There are two important points in this passage: the first is that Strayed feels most herself when she is alone, and the second that her understanding of aloneness has shifted. Reading Strayed’s walking as dark peripatetic allows us to see the act of walking as a radical “return to the self”. John Barbour, from whom I have borrowed this phrase, explains that “solitude … is not oriented toward escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it, as made possible by the disengagement from ordinary social interactions. Solitude is a return to the self” (201-202). Kam discusses how Barbour’s “return to the self” (201-202) occurs when the subject is freed from the various social and domestic responsibilities by which they would normally be bound. She speculates that isolation, or solitude, is generally discouraged in the individual as it endangers the functionality of society. This criticism seems particularly relevant in relation to women, as it highlights their roles as home-makers in a patriarchal society. Hiking alone, Strayed finds that her participation in the world has changed—and it is through her solitary experience that this occurs. There is a safety, a self-containment, in Strayed’s solitude—which counters the narrative that for women, in particular, the wilderness contains danger and threat. As Kam points out, it is not wild animals that present the greatest threat to Strayed; it is a pair of male hunters who encounter her campsite on one occasion (Kam 363).Claiming autonomy and seeking out solitude, as Strayed does in Wild, suggests an experience of wildness that resonates with Thoreau’s understanding of it as “self-willedness” (Turner 111). After reading Wild, the phrase “radical self-containment” seems to me to describe the phenomenon of the particular kind of wildness enabled by walking; the autonomy found in solitude; and in existing beyond the reach of extrinsic forces that would normally affect one’s life. In this experience of wildness, walking, the natural world, and solitude are entwined and essential to the other: wildness is both an embodied and internal experience. ConclusionWild asks us to think about what we make of women venturing into the wild, and the role that walking plays in this. Reading Strayed’s walking in Wild as dark peripatetic suggests a framework for understanding women’s walking in the wild; how, in seeking and discovering that she is at home in solitude, the female walker rejects what society expects of women. Women are not, culturally speaking, encouraged to seek out either solitude or wild places. As nature writing has historically suggested, wild terrain is male terrain. Strayed subverts the figure of the adventuring explorer in nature with her walking by foregrounding the lived experiences of her female body, rejecting society’s role for her, and finding that she is at home in solitude. But most importantly, she does so by shifting the gaze of the walker that we encounter in much male-authored nature literature: rather than looking outward with the intention of conquering, dominating, or claiming landscape, she looks inwards, witnessing the changes in self that walking in remote, wild landscapes enables, and in doing so, gives us another narrative for contemporary journeys in the wild.ReferencesAdams, Paul C. “Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place.” Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Eds. Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2001.Andrews, Abi. The Word for Woman Is Wilderness. London: Profile Books, 2018.Barbour, John D. The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.Black, Carol. “On the Wildness of Children: The Revolution Will Not Take Place in the Classroom.” Carolblack.org, Apr. 2016. 27 May 2019 <https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/on-the-wildness-of-children/>.Bracke, Astrid. “Macho Nature? Or, Gender in New Nature Writing Part I.” Astridbracke.com, 19 Feb. 2013. Braverman, Blair. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. 1980. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.Kam, Tanya Y. “Forests of the Self: Life Writing and ‘Wild’ Wanderings.” Life Writing 13.3 (2016): 351-371. 22 Apr. 2019 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14484528.2016.1086290>.Lancewood, Miriam. Woman in the Wilderness: A Story of Survival, Love and Self-Discovery in New Zealand. New Zealand: Allen & Unwin. 2017.McFarland, Sarah E. “Wild Women: Literary Explorations of American Landscapes.” Ed. Barbara J. Cook. Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008.Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1983.“Peripatetic.” Oxford English Dictionary. Lexico, 2019. <https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/peripatetic>.Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found. Rev. ed. London: Atlantic Books, 2013.Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1996.

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The first two months of 2021 saw Google and Facebook ‘go dark’ in terms of news content on the Australia versions of their platforms. In January, Google ran a so-called “experiment” which removed or demoted current news in the search results available to a segment of Australian users. While Google was only darkened for some, in February news on Facebook went completely dark, with the company banning all news content and news sharing for users within Australian. Both of these instances of going dark occurred because of the imminent threat these platforms faced from the News Media Bargaining Code legislation that was due to be finalised by the Australian parliament. This article examines how both Google and Facebook responded to the draft Code, focussing on their threats to go dark, and the extent to which those threats were carried out. After exploring the context which produced the threats of going dark, this article looks at their impact, and how the Code was reshaped in light of those threats before it was finally legislated in early March 2021. Most importantly, this article outlines why Google and Facebook were prepared to go dark in Australia, and whether they succeeded in trying to prevent Australia setting the precedent of national governments dictating the terms by which digital platforms should pay for news content. From the Digital Platforms Inquiry to the Draft Code In July 2019, the Australian Treasurer released the Digital Platforms Inquiry Final Report which had been prepared by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). It outlined a range of areas where Australian law, policies and practices were not keeping pace with the realities of a digital world of search giants, social networks, and streaming media. Analysis of the submissions made as part of the Digital Platforms Inquiry found that the final report was “primarily framed around the concerns of media companies, particularly News Corp Australia, about the impact of platform companies’ market dominance of content distribution and advertising share, leading to unequal economic bargaining relationships and the gradual disappearance of journalism jobs and news media publishers” (Flew et al. 13). As such, one of the most provocative recommendations made was the establishment of a new code that would “address the imbalance in the bargaining relationship between leading digital platforms and news media businesses” (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Digital Platforms Inquiry 16). The ACCC suggested such a code would assist Australian news organisations of any size in negotiating with Facebook, Google and others for some form of payment for news content. The report was released at a time when there was a greatly increased global appetite for regulating digital platforms. Thus the battle over the Code was watched across the world as legislation that had the potential to open the door for similar laws in other countries (Flew and Wilding). Initially the report suggested that the digital giants should be asked to develop their own codes of conduct for negotiating with news organisations. These codes would have then been enforced within Australia if suitably robust. However, after months of the big digital platforms failing to produce meaningful codes of their own, the Australian government decided to commission their own rules in this arena. The ACCC thus prepared the draft legislation that was tabled in July 2020 as the Australian News Media Bargaining Code. According to the ACCC the Code, in essence, tried to create a level playing field where Australian news companies could force Google and Facebook to negotiate a ‘fair’ payment for linking to, or showing previews of, their news content. Of course, many commentators, and the platforms themselves, retorted that they already bring significant value to news companies by referring readers to news websites. While there were earlier examples of Google and Facebook paying for news, these were largely framed as philanthropy: benevolent digital giants supporting journalism for the good of democracy. News companies and the ACCC argued this approach completely ignored the fact that Google and Facebook commanded more than 80% of the online advertising market in Australia at that time (Meade, “Google, Facebook and YouTube”). Nor did the digital giants acknowledge their disruptive power given the bulk of that advertising revenue used to flow to news companies. Some of the key features of this draft of the Code included (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “News Media Bargaining Code”): Facebook and Google would be the (only) companies initially ‘designated’ by the Code (i.e. specific companies that must abide by the Code), with Instagram included as part of Facebook. The Code applied to all Australian news organisations, and specifically mentioned how small, regional, and rural news media would now be able to meaningfully bargain with digital platforms. Platforms would have 11 weeks after first being contacted by a news organisation to reach a mutually negotiated agreement. Failure to reach agreements would result in arbitration (using a style of arbitration called final party arbitration which has both parties present a final offer or position, with an Australian arbiter simply choosing between the two offers in most cases). Platforms were required to give 28 days notice of any change to their algorithms that would impact on the ways Australian news was ranked and appeared on their platform. Penalties for not following the Code could be ten million dollars, or 10% of the platform’s annual turnover in Australia (whichever was greater). Unsurprisingly, Facebook, Google and a number of other platforms and companies reacted very negatively to the draft Code, with their formal submissions arguing: that the algorithm change notifications would give certain news companies an unfair advantage while disrupting the platforms’ core business; that charging for linking would break the underlying free nature of the internet; that the Code overstated the importance and reach of news on each platform; and many other objections were presented, including strong rejections of the proposed model of arbitration which, they argued, completely favoured news companies without providing any real or reasonable limit on how much news organisations could ask to be paid (Google; Facebook). Google extended their argument by making a second submission in the form of a report with the title ‘The Financial Woes of News Publishers in Australia’ (Shapiro et al.) that argued Australian journalism and news was financially unsustainable long before digital platforms came along. However, in stark contrast the Digital News Report: Australia 2020 found that Google and Facebook were where many Australians found their news; in 2020, 52% of Australians accessed news on social media (up from 46% the year before), with 39% of Australians getting news from Facebook, and that number jumping to 49% when specifically focusing on news seeking during the first COVID-19 pandemic peak in April 2021 (Park et al.). The same report highlighted that 43% of people distrust news found on social media (with a further 29% neutral, and only 28% of people explicitly trusting news found via social media). Moreover, 64% of Australians were concerned about misinformation online, and of all the platforms mentioned in the survey, respondents were most concerned about Facebook as a source of misinformation, with 36% explicitly indicating this was the place they were most concerned about encountering ‘fake news’. In this context Facebook and Google battled the Code by launching a public relations campaigns, appealing directly to Australian consumers. Google Drives a Bus Across Australia Google’s initial response to the draft Code was a substantial public relations campaign which saw the technology company advocating against the Code but not necessarily the ideas behind it. Google instead posited their own alternative way of paying for journalism in Australia. On the main Google search landing page, the usually very white surrounds of the search bar included the text “Supporting Australian journalism: a constructive path forward” which linked to a Google page outlining their version of a ‘Fair Code’. Popup windows appeared across many of Google’s services and apps, noting Google “are willing to pay to support journalism”, with a button labelled ‘Hear our proposal’. Figure 1: Popup notification on Google Australia directing users to Google’s ‘A Fair Code’ proposal rebutting the draft Code. (Screen capture by author, 29 January 2021) Google’s popups and landing page links were visible for more than six months as the Code was debated. In September 2020, a Google blog post about the Code was accompanied by a YouTube video campaign featuring Australia comedian Greta Lee Jackson (Google Australia, Google Explains Arbitration). Jackson used the analogy of Google as a bus driver, who is forced to pay restaurants for delivering customers to them, and then pay part of the running costs of restaurants, too. The video reinforced Google’s argument that the draft Code was asking digital platforms to pay potentially enormous costs for news content without acknowledging the value of Google bringing readers to the news sites. However, the video opened with the line that “proposed laws can be confusing, so I'll use an analogy to break it down”, setting a tone that would seem patronising to many people. Moreover, the video, and Google’s main argument, completely ignored the personal data Google receives every time a user searches for, or clicks on, a news story via Google Search or any other Google service. If Google’s analogy was accurate, then the bus driver would be going through every passenger’s bag while they were on the bus, taking copies of all their documents from drivers licenses to loyalty cards, keeping a record of every time they use the bus, and then using this information to get advertisers to pay for a tailored advertisem*nt on the back of the seat in front of every passenger, every time they rode the bus. Notably, by the end of March 2021, the video had only received 10,399 views, which suggests relatively few people actually clicked on it to watch. In early January 2021, at the height of the debate about the Code, Google ran what they called “an experiment” which saw around 1% of Australian users suddenly only receive “older or less relevant content” when searching for news (Barnet, “Google’s ‘Experiment’”). While ostensibly about testing options for when the Code became law, the unannounced experiment also served as a warning shot. Google very effectively reminded users and politicians about their important role in determining which news Australian users find, and what might happen if Google darkened what they returned as news results. On 21 January 2021, Mel Silva, the Managing Director and public face of Google in Australia and New Zealand gave public testimony about the company’s position before a Senate inquiry. Silva confirmed that Google were indeed considering removing Google Search in Australia altogether if the draft Code was not amended to address their key concerns (Silva, “Supporting Australian Journalism: A Constructive Path Forward An Update on the News Media Bargaining Code”). Google’s seemingly sudden escalation in their threat to go dark led to articles such as a New York Times piece entitled ‘An Australia with No Google? The Bitter Fight behind a Drastic Threat’ (Cave). Google also greatly amplified their appeal to the Australian public, with a video featuring Mel Silva appearing frequently on all Google sites in Australia to argue their position (Google Australia, An Update). By the end of March 2021, Silva’s video had been watched more than 2.2 million times on YouTube. Silva’s testimony, video and related posts from Google all characterised the Code as: breaking “how Google search works in Australia”; creating a world where links online are paid for and thus both breaking Google and “undermin[ing] how the web works”; and saw Google offer their News Showcase as a viable alternative that, in Google’s view, was “a fair one” (Silva, “Supporting Australian Journalism”). Google emphasised submissions about the Code which backed their position, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee who agreed that the idea of charging for links could have a more wide-reaching impact, challenging the idea of a free web (Leaver). Google also continued to release their News Showcase product in other parts of the world. They emphasised that there were existing arrangements for Showcase in Australia, but the current regulatory uncertainty meant it was paused in Australia until the debates about the Code were resolved. In the interim, news media across Australia, and the globe, were filled with stories speculating what an Australia would look like if Google went completely dark (e.g. Cave; Smyth). Even Microsoft weighed in to supporting the Code and offer their search engine Bing as a viable alternative to fill the void if Google really did go dark (Meade, “Microsoft’s Bing”). In mid-February, the draft Code was tabled in Australian parliament. Many politicians jumped at the chance to sing the Code’s praises and lament the power that Google and Facebook have across various spheres of Australian life. Yet as these speeches were happening, the Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was holding weekend meetings with executives from Google and Facebook, trying to smooth the path toward the Code (Massola). In these meetings, a number of amendments were agreed to, including the Code more clearly taking in to account any existing deals already on the table before it became law. In these meetings the Treasurer made in clear to Google that if the deals done prior to the Code were big enough, he would consider not designating Google under the Code, which in effect would mean Google is not immediately subject to it (Samios and Visentin). With that concession in hand Google swiftly signed deals with over 50 Australian news publishers, including Seven West Media, Nine, News Corp, The Guardian, the ABC, and some smaller publishers such as Junkee Media (Taylor; Meade, “ABC Journalism”). While the specific details of these deals were not made public, the deals with Seven West Media and Nine were both reported to be worth around $30 million Australian dollars (Dudley-Nicholson). In reacting to Google's deals Frydenberg described them as “generous deals, these are fair deals, these are good deals for the Australian media businesses, deals that they are making off their own bat with the digital giants” (Snape, “‘These Are Good Deals’”). During the debates about the Code, Google had ultimately ensured that every Australian user was well aware that Google was, in their words, asking for a “fair” Code, and before the Code became law even the Treasurer was conceding that Google’s was offering a “fair deal” to Australian news companies. Facebook Goes Dark on News While Google never followed through on their threat to go completely dark, Facebook took a very different path, with a lot less warning. Facebook’s threat to remove all news from the platform for users in Australia was not made explicit in their formal submissions the draft of the Code. However, to be fair, Facebook’s Managing Director in Australia and New Zealand Will Easton did make a blog post at the end of August 2020 in which he clearly stated: “assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram” (Easton). During the negotiations in late 2020 Instagram was removed as an initial target of the Code (just as YouTube was not included as part of Google) along with a number of other concessions, but Facebook were not sated. Yet Easton’s post about removing news received very little attention after it was made, and certainly Facebook made no obvious attempt to inform their millions of Australian users that news might be completely blocked. Hence most Australians were shocked when that was exactly what Facebook did. Facebook’s power has, in many ways, always been exercised by what the platform’s algorithms display to users, what content is most visible and equally what content is made invisible (Bucher). The morning of Wednesday, 17 February 2021, Australian Facebook users awoke to find that all traditional news and journalism had been removed from the platform. Almost all pages associated with news organisations were similarly either disabled or wiped clean, and that any attempt to share links to news stories was met with a notification: “this post can’t be shared”. The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reacted angrily, publicly lamenting Facebook’s choice to “unfriend Australia”, adding their actions were “as arrogant as they were disappointing”, vowing that Australia would “not be intimidated by big tech” (Snape, “Facebook Unrepentant”). Figure 2: Facebook notification appearing when Australians attempted to share news articles on the platform. (Screen capture by author, 20 February 2021) Facebook’s news ban in Australia was not limited to official news pages and news content. Instead, their ban initially included a range of pages and services such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, emergency services pages, health care pages, hospital pages, services providing vital information about the COVID-19 pandemic, and so forth. The breadth of the ban may have been purposeful, as one of Facebook’s biggest complaints was that the Code defined news too broadly (Facebook). Yet in the Australian context, where the country was wrestling with periodic lockdowns and the Coronavirus pandemic on one hand, and bushfires and floods on the other, the removal of these vital sources of information showed a complete lack of care or interest in Australian Facebook users. Beyond the immediate inconvenience of not being able to read or share news on Facebook, there were a range of other, immediate, consequences. As Barnet, amongst others, warned, a Facebook with all credible journalism banned would almost certainly open the floodgates to a tide of misinformation, with nothing left to fill the void; it made Facebook’s “public commitment to fighting misinformation look farcical” (Barnet, “Blocking Australian News”). Moreover, Bossio noted, “reputational damage from blocking important sites that serve Australia’s public interest overnight – and yet taking years to get on top of user privacy breaches and misinformation – undermines the legitimacy of the platform and its claimed civic intentions” (Bossio). If going dark and turning off news in Australia was supposed to win the sympathy of Australian Facebook users, then the plan largely backfired. Yet as with Google, the Australian Treasurer was meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook executives behind closed doors, which did eventually lead to changes before the Code was finally legislated (Massola). Facebook gained a number of concessions, including: a longer warning period before a Facebook could be designated by the Code; a longer period before news organisations would be able to expect negotiations to be concluded; an acknowledgement that existing deals would be taken in to account during negotiations; and, most importantly, a clarification that if Facebook was to once again block news this would both prevent them being subject to the Code and was not be something the platform could be punished for. Like Google, though, Facebook’s biggest gain was again the Treasurer making it clear that by making deals in advance on the Code becoming law, it was likely that Facebook would not be designated, and thus not subject to the Code at all (Samios and Visentin). After these concessions the news standoff ended and on 23 February the Australian Treasurer declared that after tense negotiations Facebook had “refriended Australia”; the company had “committed to entering into good-faith negotiations with Australian news media businesses and seeking to reach agreements to pay for content” (Visentin). Over the next month there were some concerns voiced about slow progress, but then major deals were announced between Facebook and News Corp Australia, and with Nine, with other deals following closely (Meade, “Rupert Murdoch”). Just over a week after the ban began, Facebook returned news to their platform in Australia. Facebook obviously felt they had won the battle, but Australia Facebook users were clearly cannon fodder, with their interests and wellbeing ignored. Who Won? The Immediate Aftermath of the Code After the showdowns with Google and Facebook, the final amendments to the Code were made and it was legislated as the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (Australian Treasury), going into effect on 2 March 2021. However, when it became legally binding, not one single company was ‘designated’, meaning that the Code did not immediately apply to anyone. Yet deals had been struck, money would flow to Australian news companies, and Facebook had returned news to its platform in Australia. At the outset, Google, Facebook, news companies in Australia and the Australian government all claimed to have won the battle over the Code. Having talked up their tough stance on big tech platforms when the Digital Platforms Inquiry landed in 2019, the Australian Government was under public pressure to deliver on that rhetoric. The debates and media coverage surrounding the Code involved a great deal of political posturing and gained much public attention. The Treasurer was delighted to see deals being struck that meant Facebook and Google would pay Australian news companies. He actively portrayed this as the government protecting Australia’s interest and democracy. The fact that the Code was leveraged as a threat does mean that the nuances of the Code are unlikely to be tested in a courtroom in the near future. Yet as a threat it was an effective one, and it does remain in the Treasurer’s toolkit, with the potential to be deployed in the future. While mostly outside the scope of this article, it should definitely be noted that the biggest winner in the Code debate was Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp. They were the strongest advocates of regulation forcing the digital giants to pay for news in the first place, and had the most to gain and least to lose in the process. Most large news organisations in Australia have fared well, too, with new revenue flowing in from Google and Facebook. However, one of the most important facets of the Code was the inclusion of mechanisms to ensure that regional and small news publishers in Australia would be able to negotiate with Facebook and Google. While some might be able to band together and strike terms (and some already have) it is likely that many smaller news companies in Australia will miss out, since the deals being struck with the bigger news companies appear to be big enough to ensure they are not designated, and thus not subject to the Code (Purtill). A few weeks after the Code became law ACCC Chair Rod Sims stated that the “problem we’re addressing with the news media code is simply that we wanted to arrest the decline in money going to journalism” (Kohler). On that front the Code succeeded. However, there is no guarantee the deals will mean money will support actual journalists, rather than disappearing as extra corporate profits. Nor is there any onus on Facebook or Google to inform news organisations about changes to their algorithms that might impact on news rankings. Also, as many Australia news companies are now receiving payments from Google and Facebook, there is a danger the news media will become dependent on that revenue, which may make it harder for journalists to report on the big tech giants without some perceptions of a conflict of interest. In a diplomatic post about the Code, Google thanked everyone who had voiced concerns with the initial drafts of the legislation, thanked Australian users, and celebrated that their newly launched Google News Showcase had “two million views of content” with more than 70 news partners signed up within Australia (Silva, “An Update”). Given that News Showcase had already begun rolling out elsewhere in the world, it is likely Google were already aware they were going to have to contribute to the production of journalism across the globe. The cost of paying for news in Australia may well have fallen within the parameters Google had already decided were acceptable and inevitable before the debate about the Code even began (Purtill). In the aftermath of the Code becoming legislation, Google also posted a cutting critique of Microsoft, arguing they were “making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival” (Walker). In doing so, Google implicitly claimed that the concessions and changes to the Code they had managed to negotiate effectively positioned them as having championed the free and open web. At the end of February 2021, in a much more self-congratulatory post-mortem of the Code entitled “The Real Story of What Happened with News on Facebook in Australia”, Facebook reiterated their assertion that they bring significant value to news publishers and that the platform receives no real value in return, stating that in 2020 Facebook provided “approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated AU$407 million to the news industry” (Clegg). Deploying one last confused metaphor, Facebook argued the original draft of the Code was “like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car — and letting the stations set the price.” Of course, there was no mention that following that metaphor, Facebook would have bugged the car and used that information to plaster the internal surfaces with personalised advertising. Facebook also touted the success of their Facebook News product in the UK, albeit without setting a date for the rollout of the product in Australia. While Facebook did concede that “the decision to stop the sharing of news in Australia appeared to come out of nowhere”, what the company failed to do was apologise to Australian Facebook users for the confusion and inconvenience they experienced. Nevertheless, on Facebook’s own terms, they certainly positioned themselves as having come out winners. Future research will need to determine whether Facebook’s actions damaged their reputation or encouraged significant numbers of Australians to leave the platform permanently, but in the wake of a number of high-profile scandals, including Cambridge Analytica (Vaidhyanathan), it is hard to see how Facebook’s actions would not have further undermined consumer trust in the company and their main platform (Park et al.). In fighting the Code, Google and Facebook were not just battling the Australian government, but also the implication that if they paid for news in Australia, they likely would also have to do so in other countries. The Code was thus seen as a dangerous precedent far more than just a mechanism to compel payment in Australia. Since both companies ensured they made deals prior to the Code becoming law, neither was initially ‘designated’, and thus neither were actually subject to the Code at the time of writing. The value of the Code has been as a threat and a means to force action from the digital giants. How effective it is as a piece of legislation remains to be seen in the future if, indeed, any company is ever designated. For other countries, the exact wording of the Code might not be as useful as a template, but its utility to force action has surely been noted. Like the inquiry which initiated it, the Code set “the largest digital platforms, Google and Facebook, up against the giants of traditional media, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation” (Flew and Wilding 50). Yet in a relatively unusual turn of events, both sides of that battle claim to have won. At the same time, EU legislators watched the battle closely as they considered an “Australian-style code” of their own (Dillon). Moreover, in the month immediately following the Code being legislated, both the US and Canada were actively pursuing similar regulation (Baier) with Facebook already threatening to remove news and go dark for Canadian Facebook users (van Boom). For Facebook, and Google, the battle continues, but fighting the Code has meant the genie of paying for news content is well and truly out of the bottle. References Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. 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Abstract:

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in hom*osocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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We live in an era in which the ‘active learner’ has become accepted as the fundamental goal of good teaching from early childcare to university education (Silberman; University of Melbourne University). In this paper we reflect upon the arts of stillness in contemporary classrooms based on research in schools across Sydney (Watkins and Noble).Part of the context for this paper is the way ‘activity’ has been uncritically elevated to a pedagogic principle in contemporary education. Over several decades a critique of traditional or more formal approaches to education has produced an increasing emphasis on learning that is said to be more engaged often under labels such as ‘discovery’ or ‘experiential’ learning, enquiry methods or ‘learning by doing’. This desire to give students a greater role in the educational process is admirable. It is also seen to be more democratic and ‘relevant’ to young people (Cope & Kalantzis). Positioned against a straw man of ‘passive learning’, characterised by the dominance of teacher direction, rote learning and individuated desk work, this active learning or progressivist perspective on education privileges student ‘ownership’ of curriculum, group-based activity and the ‘doing’ of things. Stillness is characterised as a ‘problem of passivity’, a ‘disease’ of ‘chalk and talk’ (Lucas 84-85). In its most extreme form, this emphasis on activity has been translated into ‘educational kinesiology’ and ‘brain gym’, in which physical movement is seen to have a direct, beneficial effect on learning, often in place of content-based curriculum (Lucas 50). In this paper we don’t engage in a critique of ‘active learning’ per se; rather, taking seriously Foucault’s insistence on the productivity of discipline, we argue stillness is crucial to scholarly labour.Part of the context for this research is public anxiety about ‘Asian success’ within Australian education systems. Students from ‘Asian’ backgrounds are often perceived as having a cultural proneness towards educational achievement (Duffy 28). These perceptions rest on assumptions about ‘Asian values’ of family, sacrifice, hard work and success (Robinson). These assumptions, however, are problematic (Wu and Singh), and carry a concern that such students are ‘passive’ in the classroom, deferential to traditional forms of education and obsessed with exams. Certainly, despite their success, these students don’t conform to what many teachers favour as the ideal learner within the dominant paradigm of progressivism (Cope & Kalantzis 4). These anxieties have also emerged in response to the proliferation of coaching colleges which are seen to transgress western notions of childhood.The research – based on a parent survey in 10 primary schools, interviews with Year 3 teachers, parents and students and classroom observations in six of these schools – explored the extent to which a ‘disposition’ to academic achievement can be explained by ethnicity or relates to a complex set of socio-cultural factors. The report from this study engages with the broad question of the relationship between ethnicity and, what we call, following Bourdieu, the ‘scholarly habitus’ (Watkins & Noble). Against a pathologising of cultural background, it examines the ways achievement is embodied as orientations to learning through different home and school practices. Here we use examples drawn from the observations to focus on the capacities for self-discipline and stillness that can foster achievement. Against the tendency to equate stillness with inaction, we argue that a 'productive stillness' underlines capacities for sustained attention and self-direction. This bodily discipline entails a state of composure, a 'staying' of movement which entails a readiness for action necessary for academic tasks. While not all stillness is ‘productive’, we argue there are forms of stillness which are conducive to the formation of the 'scholarly habitus' (Bourdieu, Logic). The Bodily Capacity for Scholarly LabourBourdieu (State) refers to dispositions that are valued in education: self-discipline, the ability to work intensively, confidence, independence, contemplation, abstraction and the value of excellence. Yet he is less interested in exploring these capacities in relation to teaching practice than in discussing them as forms of social distinction. Educational applications of Bourdieu also focus on the social reproduction of inequality, separate to the technical competencies of schooling, although Bourdieu does not differentiate between them (Lareau and Weininger). To understand the uneven distribution of educational competencies, however, they first need to be examined as bodily capacities that are enabling.To do this, let us contrast two classrooms in Broughton PS, a large school in a low-to-mid SES area in Sydney’s inner south-west with large numbers of Arabic-speaking and Asian students, and smaller groups of Anglo, Pasifika and African students. One class is an enrichment class, in which high ability students are placed and where there is a strong focus on academic work. The other class has many of the least able students. The enrichment class comprises students of mostly Chinese background, with a smaller number of Vietnamese, Indian and Anglo background. There is one Arabic-speaking student but no Pasifika students. The second class is more diverse, and has many Pasifika students, with fewer Chinese, Arabic and Anglo students.The first time we saw the enrichment class was after recess. Students shuffled into their classroom and sat down at their desks with minimum fuss. Many of them pulled out books and read them while waiting for their teacher, Heather, to enter. If they talked, it was quietly, and often about what they were reading. They sat still: the posture of most students was upright, even when they were working. Some students occasionally rocked back, stretching arms and legs. Overall, however, these students had mastered the arts of stillness. Sonia, of Chinese background, is a case in point – she was always work-focused, sitting still and getting on with it. Even during unstructured discussion she remained task-orientated displaying a substantial investment in her work.In the second class the students bustled in, taking a while to settle. Kids stood around chatting, playing, shoving each other until the teacher, Betty, shouted at them, which she did a lot. The noise of the students never abated, even as the teacher was giving instructions, and it frequently reached high levels. There was constant movement as students came in late, and teachers and students wandered in and out. Kids visited other kids; one student rolled on the floor. When they were directed to sit at the front, several squatted, some sat away from the area, several simply stood. When they were at their desks, many slouched forward or leant back; a large number of the students rocked on their chairs during the sessions, some constantly. The directions of the teacher to put ‘feet on floor’ and ‘hands on heads’, or putting her fingers to her lips to gesture for them to be quiet, shouting or by counting back from 5 had little effect. This class was a very active group, but little work got done. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness appropriate for academic activities. In the enrichment class, the teacher didn’t have to check noise or movement very often – the students had internalised these behaviours as capacities that directed their work. Occasionally, they policed each other if they were disrupted. There was occasional talk, but it tended to be in whispers. If the task required it, there was plenty of discussion; and some of the students didn’t hesitate in challenging the teacher when she made a mistake. These students’ stillness and quiet was by-and-large productive and appropriate. We call this a state of composure, a readiness for activity. When required, this class was capable of concentration and application; or, alternatively, discussion. We call it composure because it links to Foucault’s (162-3) insight that modern forms of discipline rest on a ‘composition of forces’ which not only produce an efficient organisation but individuals with a disposition towards acting skilfully.Betty’s class, in contrast, was in a state of decomposure, with unproductive movement and noise. They were rarely still, posture was poor, and many students spent little time attending to work or the teacher. They were rarely ready for work when the teacher called them to it. Rather they saw a change in activity as a chance for movement and chatter. This was not the caged resentment that Willis described in his analysis of resistance to school amongst working class boys. It was not a form of conscious insubordination, though a similar form of ‘self-damnation’ was evident.Sonny, a Samoan boy in this class, in contrast to Sonia, struggled to stay on-task for more than a few minutes, and clearly had little investment in his work. He generally didn’t care where he was at with the task, and expected the teacher to constantly direct him. Sonny was a very large child – the teacher commented that his physical presence in the class was an ongoing problem as he was unaware of other children, constantly bowling them over. The teacher struggled to manage Sonny’s body. He talked frequently and loudly, and leant back on his chair despite being placed in a way that pinned him against a cupboard. His location in the class was telling. He was sitting at a table with students who followed tasks, separated from the usual troublemakers. This is significant for another reason of which Sonny was not fully conscious. At one stage in the lesson he sat bolt upright and pointing at each of his tablemates, yelled, ‘Miss, why am I sitting with all Chinese?’ Betty apparently hoped that being with the quieter Chinese students Sonny would not only be out of harm’s way, he might absorb the skills of application they possessed!This uneven distribution of capacities was also seen in the way different classes undertook a maths assessment task on fractions. While other classes treated it as a general lesson, in the enrichment class it was completed in test conditions, which the teacher later commented the kids loved. The teacher explained the task and the conditions – that there should be no copying, to work in silence, concentrate on the questions, the amount of time they’d get and what to do when they finished (further maths work). She initiated an enthusiastic class discussion of the topic (fractions), reminded them of work they had completed in this area and got them to go through basic aspects of fractions. The task was distributed and students immediately filled in their name and the date. When they commenced their work she moved around the room monitoring their progress. Occasionally she directed a student to reread the instructions and towards the end she reminded them to check their work and then gave them a five-minute warning. There was little movement, fiddling or talk, unless it was a question of clarification directed to the teacher. Most finished and moved quickly onto their maths workbooks. There was a lively discussion afterwards as the class went through the questions and discussed the answers and procedure. Overall, there was a clear sense of a strong investment in the process and the product: with many showing real annoyance when they got things wrong, and deep pleasure when they were correct. While the contrast between these classes is clear, and show an uneven distribution of particular capacities, we should be careful not to make a simple assumption that stillness, quiet and obedience are good, and their opposites bad. Apart from the fact that the enrichment class showed itself capable of vociferous and physical behaviour (as when they were completing a craft activity), the point is really about the appropriateness and productivity of these embodied competencies for particular tasks, and the ability to move between these capacities when necessary.Stillness, and its attendant capacities described above, is not a good in and of itself. There is another kind of stillness that we found in a class in another school we observed. Chestervale PS was in a middle class area in a northern suburb of Sydney that was favoured by parents of Chinese background. This class was by no means as unruly as Sonny’s – classroom behaviour was generally well managed by the teacher, and the students were fairly adept at following tasks. Two students we observed – Walter (of Chinese background) and Eric (of Anglo background) – seemed at first glance to be well-behaved students who did their work. Watching these boys for several hours, however, we became aware of the fact that for large chunks of the classroom time they did nothing, but were not recognised as doing so. Walter spent 45 minutes without adding anything to his writing – a straightforward comprehension task. This was also run in near-test-like conditions of quiet concentration, and Walter, apart from a few minor distractions, seemed to be focused on the pages in front of him but actually wrote nothing in the lesson. The teacher strolled around checking students’ work and giving advice or praise as needed – she managed the class quite well – but seemed not to notice when she checked Walter’s work that he hadn’t written anything. Eric, rather more obviously distracted, but who nevertheless seemed to complete 1-2 questions, got by with little work by being, like Walter, generally quiet. His distractions amounted to little more than staring at the contents of the shelf next to him and fidgeting. Walter and Eric were acquiring specific types of capacities – skills in getting out of work that are also fundamentally unproductive. Walter’s general abilities allowed him to float through the class, but Eric’s failure to develop productive capacities was demonstrated in his poor reading and writing levels. We don’t wish to participate in the academic romanticisation of such tactics as ‘resistance’, however, because while this ‘ordinary art’ is diversionary it does not ultimately work to ‘the advantage’ of the student (de Certeau 29-31). Rather, it is simply disabling.This example highlights two important points. First, as mentioned, stillness and quiet are not in themselves signs of educational ‘productivity’ – such capacities always have to be seen in context, related to specific tasks and aims. Many teachers may encourage stillness and quiet – even reward it – simply because it produces an orderly classroom. Second, we should be wary of looking to ethnicity as an explanation of the uneven distribution of capacities: Eric, as an Anglo student, isn’t subject to the kind of cultural pathologising usually reserved for students of particular ethnic backgrounds and Walter, clearly, did not match the stereotype of an academically engaged Chinese student. These issues are taken up in the larger report. Disciplining the Scholarly HabitusOur point is not just to outline some differences in abilities, but to begin to analyse how these contribute to the dispositions, or lack thereof, of the scholarly habitus, to think about how these capacities relate to particular kinds of practices at home and school which instil specific kinds of discipline, and thus eventually to elaborate links between schooling and cultural background. Neither popular pathologies of cultural difference nor sociologies of education which reduce these complexities to either class or gender adequately account for the capacities and practices at stake here (Watkins and Noble).The comparative account of these vignettes of classroom practice provide examples of different disciplinary forms demonstrating the ways in which school structures and pedagogic practices affect students’ engagement in learning and overall performance at school. As indicated, the notion of discipline used here does not simply pertain to control, operating as a negative force inhibiting learning – though a disabling discipline of control was apparent in the pedagogy some teachers employed and also framed some whole school practices. Discipline, here, has a broader meaning. As Foucault intended, it also refers to the knowledge and skills which need to be mastered in order to achieve success in particular fields. Foucault famously analyses the roles of discipline in the functioning of modern institutions. He describes the emergence of the school in modern times as ‘a machine for learning’. Despite his much-repeated insistence on the productive and enabling nature of discipline (and his insight that discipline ‘is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, … but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine’), it is the machine-like and oppressive quality of discipline that is often the focus. In relation to the nineteenth century school, for example, he describes it as a ‘morality of obedience’ based on a prescriptive discipline of absolute silence and a Pavlovian process of ‘signalisation’ and response (164-7).Sonia’s class (the enrichment class), however, is not one where passivity or docility is the rule – and illustrates better the form of disciplined, productive stillness crucial to educational activity. As this first group of students demonstrates, this discipline takes a material form, whereby students’ bodies are capacitated through the control and focus they embody. This recalls Foucault’s other focus captured in his view that ‘a disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture’ (152). This discipline predisposes students towards particular types of endeavour; a discipline that takes the form of dispositions as in the scholarly habitus. Differing degrees of discipline resulting from the repeated performance of certain practices is what distinguishes the three groups of students in this paper.Writing, listening and talking in class are all forms of labour that require bodily control as well as forms of knowledge. Sonia, for example, evinced capacities of stillness, quiet, attention, self-direction and self-discipline which disposed her to engaged learning. This is a state of composure which evinces a readiness for activity. When required, she was capable of sustained application. This is not to be mistaken for docility – her stillness and quiet were productive for academic engagement. In contrast, many in Sonny’s class were far from composed. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness and quiet or the capacity for self-control in an educational environment. They manifested different types of bodily capacities which incline them, like Sonny, towards disengagement. Eric and Walter are different cases yet again. They displayed a degree of quiet and stillness that was unproductive, that didn’t ready them for engaged activity.This sense of bodily control also operates at basic levels of mastery as well as readiness for intellectual activity. Indeed, low-order capacities are stepping stones for higher order skills. It is difficult to develop literacy, for example, without mastering the physical skills of writing. Such skills require a certain posture and control for perfecting letter and word formation. Such mastery, for example, is needed for writing to become ‘transparent’: the student stops ‘thinking’ about forming the letter or word with the pen, and concentrates on the content of their writing. The physical nature of the labour of writing stops being a conscious task and becomes a largely unconscious capacity, which lends itself to the development of capacities in composition, analysis and abstraction. Neither Walter nor Eric had developed a mastery of the pen or their own body. In the case of Eric, Deirdre, his teacher, commented that he had ‘immature fine motor skills’, which affected his writing. She pointed out that ‘when your writing doesn’t come easy it is going to take longer’, which meant Eric ‘rarely completes things’. ConclusionAs Vitalis argued thousands of years ago, with writing, the whole body labours (cited in Ong 95). But this form of labour entails stillness, self-control and the bodily capacity for sustained intellectual engagement. Educational practice needs to not only return to an appreciation of the arts of stillness but to rethink the ways in which activity in learning is understood; the ways in which an active mind is reliant upon a composed yet capacitated body and the particular pedagogies that, from the early years of school, can promote this form of corporeal governance. ReferencesBourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.———. The State Nobility. Trans. Lauretta Clough. 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