Roger Osborne, The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic: Sydney Studies in Australian Literature, Sydney University Press, 2022. 206 pages AU$34.35 ISBN 9781743327692

Revie

Reading the Three as One: Such is Life in 1897

This paper is an attempt to read the original 1897 Such is Life from what remains in accessible printed form. It is argued that the 1897 version differs markedly from the 1903 version in three ways: location, argument, and the character of Tom Collins. The conclusion is that it was neither a ‘bush epic’ nor a ‘proto-modernist text’, but closer to a nineteenth-century urban comedy of manners

The Eton Boy and Such is Life

TB

Down (but not Out) in the City

Taking a cue from T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' this article considers the different attitudes to the Australian city, particularly Sydney, in the poetry of the 1920s. It argues that in the 1920s there was a shift from the gloomy view of the city of the late nineteenth century--evident in the work of Henry Lawson and Christopher Brennan--to an embrace of the modern aspects of Sydney, and expressed in light verse by Kenneth Slessor, Colin Wills and Ronald McCuaig

Beyond the Frame: A Study in Observational Documentary Ethics

Ethical questions are central to documentary studies. It has long been acknowledged that documentary practices have an ethical dimension for filmmakers, audiences and documentary participants. An ever-expanding body of literature academic, professional and popular speaks of a wide concern to understand and address the ethical issues raised by documentary filmmaking. Documentary ethics is a complex discourse, crossed by multiple and incommensurable obligations, rights and principles. The participant's right to privacy, audiences' right to know and the documentary filmmaker's need to tell a compelling story collide as filmmakers are called to 'weigh up' competing interests. Questions continue to be raised about the possibility of informed consent in documentary practice, appropriate levels of disclosure and the power relationship between filmmaker and participant. Despite the complexity of documentary ethics, this thesis argues that some questions fall beyond current boundaries. Specifically, the experience and meaning of documentary participation have not yet been considered. This research seeks to bring a fresh perspective to questions of ethics in documentary practice through empirical study of the practices and meanings of documentary production. In taking as its object of study documentary practice itself, this study seeks out the voice of the documentary participant, a voice that has too often been a central absence in debate in the ethics of documentary

Creative nonfiction: alchemy at work

Creative nonfiction: alchemy at work seeks to integrate and explore research and writing options available through the genre of creative nonfiction. It contains an exegesis, 'The transformative possibilities of creative nonfiction and immersion research', and a creative project, 'Iron Men: alchemy at work'. As a whole, the thesis aims to answer the question of how the techniques and approaches of creative nonfiction can be used to investigate a grassroots youth intervention strategy in a way that uses observation and description to reveal the core factors of its success and also integrates autobiographical content in order to highlight possibilities of social and personal transformation

A subset of HLA-I peptides are not genomically templated: evidence for cis- and trans-spliced peptide ligands

The diversity of peptides displayed by class I human leukocyte antigen (HLA) plays an essential role in T cell immunity. The peptide repertoire is extended by various posttranslational modifications, including proteasomal splicing of peptide fragments from distinct regions of an antigen to form nongenomically templated cis-spliced sequences. Previously, it has been suggested that a fraction of the immunopeptidome constitutes such cis-spliced peptides; however, because of computational limitations, it has not been possible to assess whether trans-spliced peptides (i.e., the fusion of peptide segments from distinct antigens) are also bound and presented by HLA molecules, and if so, in what proportion. Here, we have developed and applied a bioinformatic workflow and demonstrated that trans-spliced peptides are presented by HLA-I, and their abundance challenges current models of proteasomal splicing that predict cis-splicing as the most probable outcome. These trans-spliced peptides display canonical HLA-binding sequence features and are as frequently identified as cis-spliced peptides found bound to a number of different HLA-A and HLA-B allotypes. Structural analysis reveals that the junction between spliced peptides is highly solvent exposed and likely to participate in T cell receptor interactions. These results highlight the unanticipated diversity of the immunopeptidome and have important implications for autoimmunity, vaccine design, and immunotherapy

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

Inflation and Dark Energy from spectroscopy at z > 2

The expansion of the Universe is understood to have accelerated during two epochs: in its very first moments during a period of Inflation and much more recently, at z < 1, when Dark Energy is hypothesized to drive cosmic acceleration. The undiscovered mechanisms behind these two epochs represent some of the most important open problems in fundamental physics. The large cosmological volume at 2 < z < 5, together with the ability to efficiently target high-$z$ galaxies with known techniques, enables large gains in the study of Inflation and Dark Energy. A future spectroscopic survey can test the Gaussianity of the initial conditions up to a factor of ~50 better than our current bounds, crossing the crucial theoretical threshold of $\sigma(f_{NL}^{\rm local})$ of order unity that separates single field and multi-field models. Simultaneously, it can measure the fraction of Dark Energy at the percent level up to $z = 5$, thus serving as an unprecedented test of the standard model and opening up a tremendous discovery space