1,239 research outputs found

    Digital disruption and co-creating Australian Studies

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    In the early 1990s, designing curricula was a fundamentally different exercise to what it is today: teaching was face-to-face, resources were print-based, overhead projectors were state of the art in lectures, while VHS had only recently taken over from over Betamax videos. Computers were little more than text editors, as floppy disks gradually reduced in size from eight inches to three and a half. Compact disks vied for supremacy with vinyl in music stores, not as storage devices, while DVDs had not yet been invented. I had arrived in London in August 1989 to work at the Menzies Centre in the midst of immense transformations in the world. Less than twelve months into the job, I received a call from the Australian Ambassador in Budapest with a request to scope the prospects of mounting Australian Studies programs at Hungarian universities. The present article gives an overview of the development of Australian Studies and compares what it was like to teach an Australian Studies course in Hungary then and what it is like today

    The Anzac Legend didn't mention mud: Australian novels of the Western Front

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    Mud was not the least of ironies of war on the Western Front. Nor was it the least of ironies that trenches had been dug ‘where the water-table was the highest and the annual rainfall most copious’ (47), Paul Fussell observed in his classic study of British literary responses, The Great War and Modern Memory. Beyond irony, mud was a ‘gruesome fact no one had planned for.’ It claimed the lives of countless thousands ‘drowned’ nowhere ‘near the sea,’ Adam Hochschild observed in his 2014 history To End All Wars (211). Mud defined the main theatres of operation and was code for the Western Front even when the conditions were dry. Passchendaele was known as the ‘Battle of Mud’ while Ypres was called ‘Wipers’ at least partly because of the atrocious conditions. Australian photographer Frank Hurley’s iconic images at Chateau Wood reveal something of the extent of the quagmire (in a compositional method that brought him into dispute with the creator of the Anzac myth, C. E. W. Bean) while bombs and rain poured down on the Somme and turned the earth into a ‘dark glutinous sea,’ as Leonard Mann called it in his 1932 novel Flesh in Armour. Vance Palmer’s ‘mud and misty figures’ of battle fatigued diggers emerge from the ‘foul morass’ and persist into nightmares ‘endlessly coming,’ even when the war is over in the 1920 poem ‘The Farmer Remembers the Somme’ (Holloway 110). Soldier-novelist Edward Lynch wrote simply of ubiquity in Somme Mud: ‘We live in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it, and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we cannot escape it, not even by dying’ (108)

    Post memory violence: the Great War and children of trauma

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    Hundreds of thousands of Australian children had been born in the shadow of the Great War to men who enlisted between 1914 and 1918. The lives of these children could be and often were hard and unhappy, as Anzac historian Alistair Thomson observed of his own father’s experiences as the son of a returned serviceman who had been in and out of repatriation hospitals during the 1920s and 1930s (257-259) and who became erased from family stories (299-267). These children of trauma fit within a pattern suggested by Marianne Hirsch in her influential essay “The Generation of Postmemory.” According to Hirsch “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (np). This paper attempts to situate George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) within the context of postmemory narratives of violence that were complicated in Australia by the Anzac Legend which occluded any too open discussion about the extent of war trauma present within community, including the children of war

    The Anzac Legend didn't Mention Mud

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    John Schumann's song 'I was only Nineteen' contains the line 'The Anzac Legend didn't mention Mud,' which might be reasonably read as the dirt music of Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. This article argues that Leonard Mann's 1932 novel Flesh in Armour is both an exception and indicative novel of Australian wartime experiences on the Western Front. Contaminated mud features as a persistent metaphor of abjection. Yet the sacralised beach and rocky outcrops of Gallipoli and the desert sands of the Middle East had the effect of obscuring the filth and tragedy of war in the trenches and across no-man's land. The article compares E P F Lynch's Somme Mud and Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune with Flesh in Armour and speculates on influences emanating from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front

    The Australian Legend and Its Discontents

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    The Australian Legend and Its Discontents explores the narrative construction of Australia, and those storylines preferred by Australians when describing themselves and their nation. How do Australians figure in literature, film and television, the visual arts, and daily conversation? As an introductory reader, The Australian Legend and Its Discontents is an indispensable tool for students and all those with a general interest in the nation and its people. The book is complemented by electronic study and other notes for those who wish to explore further the issues of what it is to be Australian

    Australian Aborigines

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    Describes the ancient culture of the Australian Aborigines and discusses the continuing struggle of these native people to preserve their way of life and regain the rights to their traditional lands

    For the health of the nation: comparing healthy lifestyle promotion strategies in Russia

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    The negative demographic trends that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and continue to create uncertainty about Russia’s future have pushed the Russian state towards more direct involvement in the promotion of healthy lifestyle practices with the aim of increasing the population’s longevity and well-being. These efforts have intensified over the past decade as the state has begun to more actively intervene into the bodily habits of Russian citizens on many other fronts, including reproductive behavior and sexual orientation, in order to craft the “ideal” Russian subject and establish the boundaries of “normal” Russian behavior. Meanwhile, other actors throughout society, motivated by their own ideas about what constitutes proper conduct, have been developing alternative strategies to encourage Russians to pursue healthy lifestyles. This thesis examines the content of the official healthy lifestyle promotion strategy, deconstructing how it envisions the ideal Russian body and frames the necessity of leading a healthy lifestyle. It also analyzes some of the strategies that contest the official one, with the aim of finding out which aspects are contested and how, as well as discerning the common discursive threads that run through all of the strategies. The study draws on a broad base of materials, from official policy documents to social media communities, and seeks to understand how various actors throughout Russian society attempt to transform the bodily conduct of their fellow citizens. In doing so, it relies heavily on the insights of Michel Foucault and others about power, biopolitics, discipline, and resistance, which allow for a nuanced understanding of how official discourses about the body and the nation in Russia are contested and how they are reproduced. The analysis revealed the prevalence of several themes across all of the strategies, including the ruinous impact of non-Russian values, the corrupting effects of capitalism and consumerism, the hostility of the outside world towards Russia, the glory of Russia’s past, and the importance of maintaining traditional gender roles.http://www.ester.ee/record=b5147575*es

    PRICE AND NON-PRICE INFLUENCES ON WATER CONSERVATION: AN ECONOMETRIC MODEL OF AGGREGATE DEMAND UNDER NONLINEAR BUDGET CONSTRAINT

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    We study the influence of prices and non-price conservation programs on water consumption and conservation behavior during a drought in the San Francisco Bay Area. The empirical results show that pricing can be effective in reducing water consumption. Use restrictions and landscaping audits are also effective in inducing conservation from consumers.Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy,

    From: Nile E. Yearwood

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