Sex, Money, Art and Death: A Biography of my Grandparents, Edith Birks and Basil Burdett with a Family History of the Birks - Napier - McDougall Dynasty

The thesis is in the form of a creative non-fiction book with exegesis. The main work is a combined biography and social and intellectual history. I trace the lives and family backgrounds of my grandparents Edith Birks and Basil Burdett who were both avantgarde writers, artists and cultural activists for Modernism in Australia in the 1920s and 30s. Using hybrid methodologies of Social History, the History of Emotions and Genealogy, I trace their family backgrounds in order to understand the provenance of the Modernist, liberal, feminist ideology they both championed. I describe Basil Burdett’s relationship with the Modernists and intellectuals gathered around the journal Art in Australia and I examine in detail Edith Birks’ family, a network of intensely engaged religious and political activists including Northern English landed gentry, Manchester industrialists, London Methodist intellectuals, Women’s suffragists and Utopian Christian Communists. The work contributes to knowledge of the intimate cultures of the politically and culturally activist groups and classes in the British imperial dominions in the period immediately preceding and after the First world war, and to an understanding of how the processes of economic transformation, class formation, migration, and imperial expansion operated at the local level of emotions, intimacy and filial relations. The Exegesis describes the motivation, sources, methodologies and scholarly literature used in the research programme and a summary of its contribution to scholarship.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History, 202

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference