Intimate Immensities: The Poetics of Space in Contemporary Australian Literature

Much of Australia’s literary landscape reflects a quest to represent its immense space. Empirical modes of investigation and Eurocentric literary models have resulted in alienation. Australian space, for non-Indigenous Australians, remains an unsettling and unsettled space. Colonial erasures, legal fictions and national mythologies have failed to turn space into place. Too much remains unresolved to write from the perspective of a place literature. A lack of intimacy with Australia’s immensities has led to much misrelation, with devastating consequences for Indigenous Australians and the non-human environment. The Aboriginal Turn of the 1980s and postcolonial literary theory have been invaluable to progress towards more ethical modes of representation. Yet, we live in the settler colonial present. My thesis makes connections between authors, modes and genres to offer a compelling case for a complementary poetics of space that embraces intimacy with immensity. Ross Gibson’s nonfiction, Tim Winton’s fiction and Nicolas Rothwell’s narrative essays position the reader in front of temporal and spatial hinges that need to be apprehended anew: the colonial archive, the age of exploration or the 1988 Bicentenary. Key to their poetics of space is a reorientation towards Country so that Indigenous thought and culture may reform settler society. As well as writing back to Empire, Gibson, Rothwell and Winton write from and to the settler colonial present, decolonising modes of perception, representation, time, space, the sacred, as well as relationships with Indigenous people and the non-human realm. Their works double as critical tools that serve to forge a poetics of Reconciliation. My methodology draws critically from concepts developed in the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism and trauma theory. Because French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century were instrumental in reforming spatial theory, I use concepts developed by Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to identify principles which inform contemporary spatial representations. From within the colonial present, Intimate Immensities evokes the possibility of a post-settler dynamic of non-belonging, with placelessness and movement as key markers of a renegotiated identity

Ethics of Representation and Self-reflexivity: Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative Essays

ROBCON - Ethics of Representation and Self-reflexivity: Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative EssaysWhile many contemporary Australian writers pitch their narratives on the coastal fringes, where most Australians reside, Nicolas Rothwell returns obsessively to the interior where one senses a sense of unfinished business. The spatial instabilities that resulted from the settler colonial project act as a catalyst for unsettling prior forms of knowledge and belief. Rothwell’s works feature real-and-imagined characters caught between fiction and non-fiction, the lies in the land and the lie of the land. His narratives create a form of generic disorientation that has a political, social and epistemological purpose. Central to Rothwell’s literary project is the reminder that spatial representations influence spatial practices. The author advocates for a break from the novelistic tradition; the country has seen enough literary and legal fictions that had catastrophic consequences for the native population and the environment.I argue that Rothwell’s spatial and literary renegotiations culminate in the formation of a new literary genre, the narrative essay. The author decolonises place, space and literary forms to articulate ethical models of non-belonging. Rothwell offers a transformative sublime aesthetics that I analyse as an expression of Bill Ashcroft’s ‘horizonal sublime’ and Christopher Hitt’s ‘ecological sublime’. I compare Rothwell’s ethics of representation, characterised by a self-reflexive prose, narrative instability and narrative regression, to that of Anglo-German author W.G. Sebald, who uses similar techniques in his evocation of a ruined Europe. Rothwell not only presents man’s propensity for a ‘Natural History of Destruction’, he is also intent on identifying the mechanisms at work in building the future

Hypernovae as possible sources of Galactic positrons

INTEGRAL/SPI has recently observed a strong and extended emission resulting from electron-positron annihilation located in the Galactic center region, consistent with the Galactic bulge geometry, without any counterpart at high gamma-ray energies, nor in the 1809 keV $^{26}$Al decay line. In order to explain the rate of positron injection in the Galactic bulge, estimated to more than 10$^{43}$ s$^{-1}$, the most commonly considered positron injection sources are type Ia supernovae. However, SN Ia rate estimations show that those sources fall short to explain the observed positron production rate, raising a challenging question about the nature of the Galactic positron source. In this context, a possible source of Galactic positrons could be supernova events of a new type, as the recently observed SN2003dh/GRB030329, an exploding Wolf-Rayet star (type Ic supernova) associated with a hypernova/gamma-ray burst; the question about the rate of this kind of events remains open, but could be problematically low. In this paper, we explore the possibility of positron production and escape by such an event in the framework of an asymmetric model, in which a huge amount of $^{56}$Ni is ejected in a cone with a very high velocity; the ejected material becomes quickly transparent to positrons, which spread out in the interstellar medium.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the 5th INTEGRAL Workshop: "The INTEGRAL Universe", February 16-20, 2004, Munich, German

Shadowing effects for continuum and discrete deposition models

We study the dynamical evolution of the deposition interface using both discrete and continuous models for which shadowing effects are important. We explain why continuous and discrete models implying both only shadowing deposition do not give the same result and propose a continuous model which allow to recover the result of the discrete one exhibiting a strong columnar morphology

FullSWOF: A free software package for the simulation of shallow water flows

Numerical simulations of flows are required for numerous applications, and are usually carried out using shallow water equations. We describe the FullSWOF software which is based on up-to-date finite volume methods and well-balanced schemes to solve this kind of equations. It consists of a set of open source C++ codes, freely available to the community, easy to use, and open for further development. Several features make FullSWOF particularly suitable for applications in hydrology: small water heights and wet-dry transitions are robustly handled, rainfall and infiltration are incorporated, and data from grid-based digital topographies can be used directly. A detailed mathematical description is given here, and the capabilities of FullSWOF are illustrated based on analytic solutions and datasets of real cases. The codes, available in 1D and 2D versions, have been validated on a large set of benchmark cases, which are available together with the download information and documentation at http://www.univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/.Comment: 38 page

Large time behavior of differential equations with drifted periodic coefficients modeling Carbon storage in soil

This paper is concerned with the linear ODE in the form $y'(t)=\lambda\rho(t)y(t)+b(t)$, $\lambda <0$ which represents a simplified storage model of the carbon in the soil. In the first part, we show that, for a periodic function $\rho(t)$, a linear drift in the coefficient $b(t)$ involves a linear drift for the solution of this ODE. In the second part, we extend the previous results to a classical heat non-homogeneous equation. The connection with an analytic semi-group associated to the ODE equation is considered in the third part. Numerical examples are given.Comment: 18 page

On the influence of the thickness of the sediment moving layer in the definition of the bedload transport formula in Exner systems

In this paper we study Exner system and introduce a modified general definition for bedload transport flux. The new formulation has the advantage of taking into account the thickness of the sediment layer which avoids mass conservation problems in certain situations. Moreover, it reduces to a classical solid transport discharge formula in the case of quasi-uniform regime. We also present several numerical tests where we compare the proposed sediment transport formula with the classical formulation and we show the behavior of the new model in different configurations

Evidence for 1809 keV Gamma-Ray Emission from 26Al Decays in the Vela Region with INTEGRAL/SPI

The Vela region is a promising target for the detection of 1.8 MeV gamma-rays emitted by the decays of radioactive 26Al isotopes produced in hydrostatic or explosive stellar nucleosynthesis processes. COMPTEL has claimed 1.8 MeV gamma-ray detection from Vela at a 3sigma level with a flux of 3.6 10^-5 ph/cm^2/s. In this paper, we present first results of our search for 1.8 MeV gamma-rays from Vela with the spectrometer SPI aboard INTEGRAL. Using the data set acquired during 1.7 Ms at the end of 2005 in the frame of our AO-3 open-time observation, we determine a flux of (6.5 \pm 1.9(stat) \pm 2.4(syst)) 10^-5 ph/cm^2/s from 26Al decays in the Vela region.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in ESA SP-622 (Proceedings of the 6th INTEGRAL Workshop, Moscow, 2006 07 03-07

Fabrication of Octahedral Tantalum Cluster Film by Electrophoretic Deposition

The octahedral Ta6Br14.8H2O cluster, one of the [M6Li12La6]n- octahedrons (M= Nb, Ta; Li= halogen, La= halogen or chalcogen), exhibits interesting oxido-reduction properties in solution1. The application of the [Ta6Bri12]2+ cores has been potentially studied in biotechnologies2, optical devices3, photovoltaic cells4 and catalysis5. Originating from the expectation to block the UV and NIR light on low-emissivity window, the Ta6Br14.8H2O cluster thin film on ITO glass has been fabricated by electrophoretic deposition (EPD) process, a fairly rapid and low cost two-step process well-known for ceramic shaping, conductive surface coating and easily scalable to industrial level. The interesting characteristic has been recognized that the green [Ta6Bri12]2+ cores (adsorbing Ultra-Visible range) easily transfers to brown [Ta6Bri12]3+/4+ cores (absorbing near-infrared range) when dissolved in different solvents. Therefore, selecting the medium and optimizing the concentration of water in solvent to obtain the green homogeneous suspension with high dissolution is the main purpose of study. Considering the green color and transmittance of solution, as well as FE-SEM surface morphology of the green film, 0.02 mL H2O per mL acetone was selected as the optimal ratio to obtain the green transparent suspension and possibility to fabricate the green film by EPD process. However, the [Ta6Bri12]2+ green film has been essentially incorporated with poly vinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) in order to improve the dispersion of Ta6Br14.8H2O clusters inside the suspension and effectively prevent the performance of new [Ta6Bri12]3+/4+ clusters (brown-color) by oxidizing reactions. Reference [1] A. Vogler et al., Inorg. Chem., 1983, 23 (10), 1360. [2] J. Knablein et al., J. Mol. Biol., 1997, 270, 1. [3] S. Cordier et al., J. Inorg. Organomet. Polym., 2015, 25, 189. [4] A. Renaud et al., Chemistry Select., 2016, 1, 2284. [5] A. Barras et al., Appl. Catal. B: Environ., 2012, 123,