2 research outputs found
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