Waratah theft in Brisbane Water National Park - an analysis of the blue paint poaching reduction program

The flowers of Waratahs, Telopea speciosissima (family Proteaceae) are regularly harvested illegally from natural bushland, particularly close to urban areas such as the New South Wales Central Coast. The removal of Waratah blooms from the wild may have implications for the long-term survival of local populations because of the interaction between wildfire events, subsequent flowering and limited seedling recruitment opportunities. To reduce the incidence of theft, blue acrylic paint was applied to blooms to reduce their commercial value. The painting of blooms in 2004 did not significantly reduce the incidence of wildflower theft when compared to unpainted blooms, but overall losses were lower (27%) than in 2003 (33%). However, painting of blooms had a deleterious affect on fruit production on plants with multiple heads with painted blooms having significantly reduced fruit set compared to unpainted blooms. Painting of blooms had no significant effect on seed quality (seed production per fruit, seed germination or seedling vigour) when compared to unpainted blooms. The painting of Waratah blooms to reduce theft was relatively ineffective and decreased fruit production. Alternative strategies should be considered to reduce wildflower theft in the area

Beyond Nelson: A Post-heroic Study of Leader-Follower Interaction in the Royal Navy

Leadership studies have traditionally considered leader characteristics to account for leadership outcomes such as leader emergence or team performance. This heroic narrative has always had its opponents but recently a post-heroic approach is becoming more prominent. Post-heroic approaches contest the assertion that leadership outcomes are mainly the product of leader traits. My research begins with a particular leader trait, the ability to interact, and bridges the two approaches by investigating the process from leader competence to leadership outcomes. The research uses a sequential exploratory design incorporating mixed methods. Three projects were conducted in Royal Navy (RN) warships. A qualitative project developed a leader-follower interaction model. The model suggests that leadership is granted by followers after a long-term series of mundane encounters. These encounters allow followers to build a group consensus of leader prestige. Prestige inuences follower behaviour such as engagement, disengagement and a covert form of resistance called levelling. A second project mapped the advice and participation networks on RN vessels and determined the prestige of team and sub-team leaders. Regression techniques allowed me to verify empirically the signicant relationship between prestige scores and team performance for ships conducting Sea Training. A nal project conducted on a warship in the South Atlantic verified a similar relationship between advice network prestige and intra-team communication. Finally I used the findings of the two empirical projects, based on sub-team or dyadic relationships, to model the effects of prestige at the group level, using computer simulation. I discovered that prestige that is dispersed throughout a group generates more effective teams, in terms of communication, than other conditions. This challenges the traditional top-down view of leadership communication. The resulting leader-follower interaction model describes a series of mundane and contested encounters through which prestige is given to dispersed leaders within a group. The theoretical impact of my research is to develop trait-process approaches to leadership and to describe leader-follower interaction as a post-heroic process. In doing so, I synthesise engagement theory with antropological approaches, including resistance to leadership. Practically, my projects validate the RN's compentency method of selecting leaders but points out that prestigious leaders alone cannot maximise team performance

RICHARD PEACE

RICHARD PEAC

Queer(y)ing Illiberal Pragmatism in Singapore

Review of Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow (eds), Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2012)

Mary Grace Bertulfo Interview

Bio: Mary Grace Bertulfo lives and writes at the intersection of nature, culture, and spirituality. She has written professionally for television and children’s education in such venues as CBS, Pearson Education Asia, and Schlessinger and for conservation magazines such as Sierra and Chicago Wilderness. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in Growing Up Filipino II, Our Own Voice, and The Oak Parker and her essays have appeared in various anthologies. She is a co-owner of Calypso Moon Studio, a working arts studio, in the Oak Park Arts District. Mary Grace is a member of the international N.V.M. and Narita Gonzalez Writers Group, the Historical Novel Society, New Moon Mondays, and the Acorn novelist workshop. She has served on the board of the Oak Park Arts District and was a local network rep for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. In 2017, she founded Banyan, an Asian American Writers Collective whose mission is to promote the visibility of Asian American Writers in Chicagoland and to uplift community spirit through the arts. (http://www.mgbertulfo.com/

Androgynous ethical intervention and living history

This paper explores how narratives of Australian belonging are formed through a quilted matrix of myth, history and memory. This is done through looking at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and the beach, tracing the mythology of the Surf Life Saver, the surfer and contemporary sexual and ethnic identities. I suggest that life is lived through layers of the past, organised in formal and informal, conscious and unconscious ways, connected in asymmetrical and symmetrical fashion. The aim here is not to add to the measurable, instrumental canon of history, but to activate what Greg Denning has referred to as “living histories”, by exploring androgynous moments of belonging

Village in the Jungle: The Eighth Annual Doireann MacDermott Lecture

This paper is a slightly edited version of a keynote lecture, delivered at the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona as The Eighth Annual Doireann MacDermott Lecture, organized by the university’s Australian Studies Centre in December 2007. Offord’s essay takes us from Leonard Woolf’s creative and ethical intervention in Britain’s colonial project, forged through a transformative vision of the ‘spirit of place’ in his novel The Village in the Jungle (1931), to the Australian specifics of colonialism and its aftermath. Highly critical of the dominant power structures in Australian society that keep sustaining the Enlightenment discourse of an unfinished colonial project, Offord delineates alternative strategies so as to deal with identity and belonging, arguing for a notion/nation of ‘cultural citizenship’, no longer based on exclusions