Our First Kiss

It was a truth-or-dare dry brush of lips, scented with the warm beer and cigarettes that lurked in the breath behind our closed mouths. You and I stood, leaning across the rickety, scarred card table and bracing our palms there, our mouths touching in the middle while everyone else hooted and cackled and Metallica snarled into the smoke-heavy air

A toothy tale : Themes of abjection in John Marsden and Shaun Tan's picture story book, the rabbits

In this article I consider the multi-award winning, intriguing, contemporary Australian picture story book, The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan. Published in 1998, the book has been given the Aurealis Convener's Award for Excellence, the Spectrum Gold Award for Book Illustration, and the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award. While the audience for this book is notionally children and young adults (acknowledged by its inclusion in the curriculum of Australian secondary schools), the book declares itself as "a rich and haunting allegory of colonization suitable for all ages and cultures" told from the viewpoint of native animals ( The Rabbits back cover). The Rabbits depicts the dispossession of small lizard and marsupial-like animals in a recognizably Australian landscape; the indigenous inhabitants are robbed of their way of life, their cultural heritage, country, and children stolen by the invading army of rabbits who arrive with all the hallmarks of European culture and, with devastating effect, ruthlessly exploit the land, displacing the indigenes. The seemingly simple narrative contains complex references that most obviously relate to the contemporary, contested notion of colonization, and warrants a serious reading

Comparative transcriptomic analysis of plum fruit treated with 1-MCP

Microarray technology has allowed the large scale transcriptomic analysis of fruit ripening. The μPEACH1.0 microarray containing 4,806 probes corresponding to genes expressed in peach fruit tissues has been used in a heterologous fashion in two studies of plums ripening behavior. Gene expression of different cultivars of plums treated with the ethylene antagonist, 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) and stored for short periods at room temperature or for longer periods of cold storage was examined. In the first study, mature fruit of a suppressed ethylene climacteric cultivar 'Shiro' and a cultivar characterized by a typical increase of ethylene production during ripening ('Santa Rosa') were harvested and incubated for 24h in air (control) or 1-MCP and allowed to ripen at room temperature. Different levels of transcripts of genes implicated in cell wall metabolism, hormone (ethylene and auxin) regulation, stress and defense, and in the transcription/translation machinery, as well as others involved with ripening were identified. In the second study, the effects of 1-MCP on gene expression in relation to the development of chilling injury (CI) in the climacteric cultivars 'Ruby Red' (RR) and 'October Sun' (OS) and 'Zee Lady' peaches (ZP) were analyzed. The fruit were treated for 24h at room temperature with 1-MCP prior to storage at 0°C. For RR, there was no significant effect of 1-MCP on the level of CI symptoms, while 1-MCP significantly reduced CI symptoms in OS fruit and an increase of CI in treated ZP fruit. Microarray analysis showed that immediately following treatment, 186, 134 and 56 genes were differentially expressed between the control and 1-MCP-treated fruit of these cultivars, respectively: after 4 weeks cold storage, 311, 52 and 224 genes for RR, OS and ZP, respectively, were differentially expressed between control and treated fruit. Thus, for OS, the number of differentially expressed genes reduced during storage while the number increased in RR and ZP. Comparisons of the data suggest that the transcript profile is altered by 1-MCP more in plums than peaches. These studies, carried out within an international collaborative network, will increase our understanding of the regulation of pathways involved in plum fruit ripening and in metabolic processes related to storage and shelf lif