Bringing Indigenous Religion into Focus

A review of Max Charlesworth, Francoise Dussart and Howard Morphy (eds), Aboriginal Religions in Australia: An Anthology of Recent Writings (Ashgate, London, 2005)

Blackleg churches? The changing relationship between religion and executive government

Since the election of the Howard-led Coalition government in March 1996, the relationship between government and religious organisations has undergone some significant shifts. My address draws on research I conducted as the 1999 Australian Parliamentary Fellow to chart some of these shifts, and assess their implications for the future involvement of religious organisations, especially the Christian churches, in public policy

VLBI Observations of the Nearby Type IIb Supernova 2011dh

We report on phase-referenced VLBI radio observations of the Type IIb supernova 2011dh, at times t = 83 days and 179 days after the explosion and at frequencies, respectively, of 22.2 and 8.4 GHz. We detected SN 2011dh at both epochs. At the first epoch only an upper limit on SN 2011dh's angular size was obtained, but at the second epoch, we determine the angular radius SN 2011dh's radio emission to be 0.25 +- 0.08 mas by fitting a spherical shell model directly to the visibility measurements. At a distance of 8.4 Mpc this angular radius corresponds to a time-averaged (since t=0) expansion velocity of the forward shock of 21000 +- 7000 km/s. Our measured values of the radius of the emission region are in excellent agreement with those derived from fitting synchrotron self-absorbed models to the radio spectral energy distribution, providing strong confirmation for the latter method of estimating the radius. We find that SN 2011dh's radius evolves in a power-law fashion, with R proportional to t^(0.92 +- 0.10).Comment: 8 pages; accepted to Astrophysical Journa