Seeking Poetic Justice: A Reading of Dylan Voller’s Prison Graffiti

When Four Corners aired the program ‘Australia’s Shame’ we entered into the prison cells of Darwin’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and witnessed through CCTV footage the torture of mostly Aboriginal inmates, enduring a colonial system of controlling and ‘settling’ them down. Images of Dylan Voller under a spit-hood and strapped to a restraint chair are horridly similar to the prison machine in Franz Kafka’s 1914 story: In the Penal Colony. In his story, Kafka’s prison machine is a ‘bed’ where the ‘condemned man is laid face-down naked’  and a marker carves script into the prisoner’s back that is “not easy to decipher with one’s eyes”, but the prisoner can “decipher the words “with his wounds” . One purpose of literary studies is to decipher the cultural markers responsible for humanity’s ‘wounds’ through the study of words or scripts known as texts. Kafka encourages us to read only the texts that wound us; books that allow us to reflect deeply, and with feeling, in order to inspire positive changes to the material world (Winston, 2016). Balla’s poem brings attention again to the treatment of Aboriginal children in Darwin’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. Her poem suggests there may be a poetic response to such atrocities if one reflects deeply. Recent texts that further expose Australia’s racist penal system and invite critical and creative reflection include, Kim Scott’s Taboo, Paul Collis’ Dancing Home and selected stories from Tony Birch’s Common People. These texts are published not long after the Four Corners exposé, and too inform writing about the treatment of Aboriginal people by white police and prison guards

Michael R. Griffiths, The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture

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Graduate-entry pre-service teachers : The relationship between their experience using technology in their previous occupations and their technological pedagogical beliefs

An important aspect of teachers’ work is integrating technology to support student learning. Teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, and skills related to technology develop well before their pre-service teacher education begins. For those graduate-entry pre-service teachers, prior experiences may play a valuable role in shaping their self-efficacy for, and use of technology in their pedagogical practice. This paper presents findings from the first phase of a mixed method study of students enrolled in a one-year graduate teaching course (N = 146). Graduate-entry pre-service teachers at an Australian university were invited at the commencement of their course to complete a survey about their self-efficacy beliefs using technology in their previous occupations, and their self-efficacy beliefs for integrating technology into classroom teaching. The connections between previous occupational experiences using technology and technology self-efficacy beliefs were examined. Analysis revealed a significant relationship between the four variables: application of technology, types of technological tools used, general technology self-efficacy and technology pedagogy self-efficacy. The greater the experience in applying a wide variety of technological tools in their previous workplace, the higher the participant’s self-efficacy beliefs for both general technology and technology pedagogy. The results are particularly interesting of those participants (n = 58), who used specialised professional technology applications while working in these roles. For this subsample, there was a significantly higher positive linear relationship between the types of technological tools used in previous occupations, and their self-efficacy beliefs regarding both general technology and technology pedagogy. The implications of this study are to provide a greater understanding of the technological skills, expertise and beliefs graduate-entry teachers bring with them from previous roles. It aims to highlight how graduate-entry teachers’ experience of using specialised technology pertinent to their previous professions, could facilitate the achievement of mandated technology pedagogy reforms

Troughton Island Groundwater Investigation for BHP Petroleum Ltd.

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).Date:1990-0