Surveying rip current survivors: Preliminary insights into the experiences of being caught in rip currents

This paper begins a process of addressing a significant gap in knowledge about people's responses to being caught in rip currents. While rip currents are the primary hazard facing recreational ocean swimmers in Australia, debate exists about the best advice to give swimmers caught in rip currents. Such surf rescue advice - on what to do and how to respond when caught in a rip - relies on empirical evidence. However, at present, knowledge about swimmers reactions and responses to rip currents is limited. This gap is a considerable barrier to providing effective advice to beach goers and to understanding how this advice is utilised (or not) when actually caught in the rip current. This paper reports the findings of a pilot study that focussed on garnering a better understanding of swimmers' experiences when caught in rip currents. A large scale questionnaire survey instrument generated data about rip current survivors' demographics, knowledge of beach safety and their reactions and responses when caught in a rip current. A mix of online and paper surveys produced a total of 671 completed surveys. Respondents were predominantly an informed group in terms of rip current knowledge, beach experience and had a high self-rated swimming ability. Preliminary insights from the survey show that most respondents recalled a "swim across the rip/parallel to the beach" message when caught in the rip and most escaped unassisted by acting on this message. However, while nearly a quarter of respondents recalled a message of "not to panic", short answer responses revealed that the onset of panic inhibited some respondents from recalling or enacting any other type of beach safety message when caught in the rip current. Results also showed that despite the research sample being younger, competent and frequent ocean swimmers, they were more likely to swim at unpatrolled beaches and outside of the red and yellow safety flags. Moreover, they were still caught in a rip current and they panicked. The findings of this study have significant implications for a range of demographic groups of differing beach safety knowledge and swimming ability who may be caught in rip currents behave, we know very little about how beach goers may respond to being caught in them. © 2012 Author(s)

They have no concept of what a farm is

This book provides a contemporary perspective on rapidly evolving population, economic and environmental changes in rural and regional Australia, itself a significant concept

Advancing Memory Methods

This introductory chapter provides an extended reflection on the scope of memory methods, charting the existing methods-based research, and how an affective turn in the humanities and social sciences has prompted scholars in memory studies to engage with more-than-human and embodied methodological approaches. The introduction also outlines the themes covered by the volume: an ethics of care, experiencing and emplaced (researcher) bodies, and places—mapped and digital. We summarise the contributions, explicating how they push traditional methodological boundaries in their engagement with multisensorial and embodied memory-work, and use memory places through mapping and digital media

Capturing Commemoration : Using Mobile Recordings Within Memory Research

his paper details the contribution of mobile devices to capturing commemoration in action. It investigates the incorporation of audio and sound recording devices, observation, and note-taking into a mobile (auto)ethnographic research methodology, to research a large-scale commemorative event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. On May 4, 2016, the sounds of a Silent March—through the streets of Amsterdam to Dam Square—were recorded and complemented by video grabs of the march’s participants and onlookers. We discuss how the mixed method enabled a multilevel analysis across visual, textual, and aural layers of the commemorative atmosphere. Our visual data aided in our evaluation of the construction of collective spectacle, while the audio data necessitated that we venture into new analytic territory. Using Sonic Visualiser, we uncovered alternative methods of “reading” landscape by identifying different sound signatures in the acoustic environment. Together, this aural and visual representation of the May 4 events enabled the identification of spatial markers and the temporal unfolding of the Silent March and the national 2 minutes’ silence in Amsterdam’s Dam Square

Assembling attachments to homes under bushfire risk

This research, conducted in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia, explores attachment to the home in the context of bushfire risk. The paper builds on existing research that has focused both on the home and on emplaced and mobile methods therein and seeks to understand the range of human and non-human attachments. We situate our examination of attachment in the context of a bushfire-prone suburban area to consider whether attachments to home may be influenced by an external risk. We use a mix of verbal, visual, and sensory methods (walking and image-led interviews) to examine both verbal and sensorial articulations in place and in the home. We report on a stepwise analysis of place attachments, home, and bushfire risk. First and while interviewing, we moved with the participants inside and outside of their homes to understand how attachment to those sites was constructed and maintained. Second, we considered those encounters as assemblages of attachments to place. Finally, we studied those assemblages of home-bound attachments in the context of the risk of bushfire in proximate suburbs

Land territorialisation, contestation and informal place-laws ofIndigenous peoples in Phuket and Phang Nga, Thailand

This innovative Handbook provides an expansive interrogation of the spaces and places of law, exploring how we engage relationally in a material world, within which we are inter-dependent and reliant, and governed by laws in a dynamic Process. It advances novel insights into the numerous intersections of space, place and law in our lives

"Dye in the Water": A Visual Approach to Communicating the Rip Current Hazard

Many beaches are characterized by rip currents—strong, narrow flows that can quickly carry bathers offshore, often against their will. However, despite long-standing efforts at community education and awareness strategies, people continue to drown in rip currents at high rates. Here we describe a simple, but powerful visual-based risk communication approach involving imagery associated with releases of colored dye into rip currents that has been used as an outreach tool with success in Australia. This approach has the potential to transcend limitations of traditional education approaches and bring the rip current hazard to life for a largely unaware public