Journal articles on the topic 'Country Club (Brookline, Mass.)'

Two weeks prior to the 2017 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, a hate-inspired mass murder occurred at the city’s Pulse night club. As a response to this horrific event, many meetings, discussions, and programs in Orlando refocused to the discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of ALA. The shock and horror of this tragedy gave more immediacy to initiatives already underway in ALA, and it inspired ACRL’s Publications Coordinating Committee (PCC) to make efforts to better integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into the committee’s 2016 to 2017 work plan. This was but one small way for the ACRL publications to contribute to a positive environment, and to denounce the kind of hateful thoughts and heinous actions taken by many individuals in our country who continue to marginalize and oppress people and their communities.

This paper aims to identify the relationship between public spending on education and GDP in two groups of countries: members and non-members of the OECD, based on statistical and econometric methods, including the methodology for international comparative analysis. The two selected groups of countries differ in their level of economic development: the OECD, the so-called ‘rich countries club’, and the second group, relatively low-income developing countries. The first part of the article deals with theoretical and information and methodological issues related to research on the relationship between educational development and economic growth, in particular the general theory of human capital investment, human capital in endogenous growth models, principles for empirical estimates of the relationship between education spending and economic growth. In the second part of the article, were tested the hypotheses concerning key factors of economic growth. The authors based them on studied theoretical sources, empirical works, and the proposed statistical base of empirical calculations. The paper substantiated the degree of impact of various factors using different groups of countries as an example. Based on panel data for 1995–2018, we estimate econometric models of the relationship between GDP and education expenditures, using time lags. The results confirm the positive impact of total education spending on GDP in the long term. However, the results differ for the two groups of countries. While in rich countries, investment in all levels of education has a positive impact on GDP, in poor countries, only primary education has a positive return, while spending on secondary and vocational education reduces GDP. This may be due to the lack of demand for high-level education in economies with poorly developed technologies and labor markets. As conclusions, the authors formulate proposals of a managerial and methodological nature regarding the need to consider the country’s development level in its educational policy and choose investment directions that are adequate to the current needs of the economy. In countries with a low level of development and a low level of education for the majority of the population, diverting public resources to finance professional education may slow economic growth in the short term. Conversely, increased coverage of mass primary education may contribute to rapid growth in the near future.

Greater lower extremity joint stiffness may be related to the development of tibial stress fractures in runners. Musculotendinous stiffness is the largest contributor to joint stiffness, but it is unclear what factors contribute to musculotendinous stiffness. The purpose of this study was to compare plantar flexor musculotendinous stiffness, architecture, geometry, and Achilles tendon stiffness between male runners with and without a history of tibial stress fracture. Nineteen healthy runners (age = 21 ± 2.7 years; mass = 68.2 ± 9.3 kg; height = 177.3 ± 6.0 cm) and 19 runners with a history of tibial stress fracture (age = 21 ± 2.9 years; mass = 65.3 ± 6.0 kg; height = 177.2 ± 5.2 cm) were recruited from community running groups and the university’s varsity and club cross-country teams. Plantar flexor musculotendinous stiffness was estimated from the damped frequency of oscillatory motion about the ankle follow perturbation. Ultrasound imaging was used to measure architecture and geometry of the medial gastrocnemius. Dependent variables were compared between groups via one-way ANOVAs. Previously injured runners had greater plantar flexor musculotendinous stiffness (P< .001), greater Achilles tendon stiffness (P= .004), and lesser Achilles tendon elongation (P= .003) during maximal isometric contraction compared with healthy runners. No differences were found in muscle thickness, pennation angle, or fascicle length.

As the BBC's “Hut Man”, Gilbert Dempster Fisher was a pioneer of radio broadcasting for children in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. Also a successful author of children's books on natural history, he based both his writings and his broadcasts on his observations of the wildlife that surrounded his isolated hut near Lochwinnoch, Renfrewshire. Devoted to pedagogy, he established “The Hut-Man's Club” for children in the late 1930s and was foremost in the encouragement of natural history in Scottish schools. He also wrote poetry for young children and, from 1947 to 1950, he produced The children's magazine. During the last decade of his “Hut life” he was engaged by Scottish local education authorities to speak in schools and residential camps about nature study, captivating children with his “Hut Man” tales. He also engaged with teachers to help them deliver natural history lessons, writing a comprehensive guide book on the subject. The teacher-training authorities, however, failed to capitalize on his vision of nature study within the school curriculum. Disillusioned by their intransigence and faced with local environmental degradation of the Hut Country and inappropriate housing development locally, he moved east. In 1956 he was appointed Director-Secretary of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland administering Edinburgh Zoo. This paper concentrates on his “Hut Man” career as an author and radio presenter; the communication of natural history being its central theme, at a time when radio was becoming a popular medium of mass communication.

Violence against women is a common and menacing phenomenon in Bangladesh-and domestic violence is the most common form which includes pushing, shaking or throwing of any objects, slapping, punching with fist or something harmful, kicking or dragging, trying of choke or burn, threatening with knife/gun or other weapon, twisting arm or pulling hair. In the study mean age of the respondents were 30.66 (±8.904) and 62.5% respondents lived in Rural areas where higher prevalence of abuse has been observed. The reasons mentioned through out the country for abuse were inconsequential and included failure to perform household work and care of children, economic problems, food crisis, refusal to bring dowry, disobeying husband/elder, unemployment status of husband, suspected case of infidelity etc. Factors influencing domestic violence were lack of education both in respondents or their spouse, lack of exposure to magazine or source of information, current married, large number of children ever born etc. The majority of abused women remained silent about their experience because of the high acceptance of violence within society, only a few shared the matter with neighbor, father/mother or other relatives. A very small proportion of women approached institutional sources for help. Interestingly, violence increased with membership of women in any non government organization or mother club or relating to any income generating process. It is furthermore disgraceful to find that the women with lower body mass index are the higher group of population who are the high-flying victims of violence. In rural or urban Bangladesh, women's physical, mental, social and economic circumstances may influence their risk of domestic violence in multifaceted and paradoxical ways. Therefore findings suggest discussing policy propositions to overcome current realities.

The historical role of elite (elites) in formation of the public ecological consciousness and in solving of environmental problems from the beginning of industrial revolution of 16-17 centuries in England which resulted in drastic impacts on the environment until our days are considered in the article. It was discovered the evolution of the environmental concerns from the worry of the elites about nature to the modern global mass movement. The first concern of elites over the human impacts on nature and over the loss of harmony between man and nature is related to the time of Romanticism. It was articulated in the most expressive form in the English Romanticism (Percy Bashi Shelley, William Blake, George Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Clare) and in the German Romanticism (Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Novalis). The concern of the public elites (writers, scientists-naturalists, public figures, artists) of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries over the state of the environment, natural resources depletion, species extinction and over the decline of the natural and cultural heritage in total due to rapid industrialization and urbanization created the preconditions for the modern ecologim. During that period nature is still considered as a source of harmony and stability which is able to resist to destructive power of industrial civilization, which rapidly transforms the environment. Particular features of development of the European movement for nature protection were shaped by the national, cultural, economic and political peculiarities of the countries of the Western Europe, as well as by dominating social moral and aesthetic values of particular country. The joint result of the activities of the broad spectrum of environmental organizations and groups was the adoption of legislative acts aimed at natural-cultural heritage protection of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in a number of European countries. This created favorable conditions for networking the European environmental movement and for internationalization of its activities and for forming the first phase of the environmental mobilization of the society, initiated by the public elites of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the Second World War the broad strata of population in the Western Europe and the North America were involved in the environmental movement. At the same time this movement was split in two principal branches, namely: the nature conservation movement and the movement which considers the quality and safety of human environment as a part of human rights in a democratic society. From 1960s there are two relatively autonomous main branches of the public movement, which, however, closely interact with each other. The formation of the second phase of environmentalism is related to the penetration of the ideas of environmental protection in all spheres of social and political life during 1960s-1970s («Silent Spring», the Club of Rome) and celebration of the Earths Day in April of the year 1970. Thus, the elitist movement for nature protection was transformed into the mass movement for human rights to live in the save environment. In spite of the environmental movement has gone the way from concerns of the elites over the growth of industrialization, urbanization and negative environmental impacts of economic growth and, consequently, overconsumption to the mass movement of thousands and millions of people, the elites still continue to play a significant role in it.

RELAÇÕES MASSA-VOLUME DO SOLO, VARIABILIDADE ESPACIAL DA RESISTÊNCIA À PENETRAÇÃO E PRODUTIVIDADE DO MILHO EM SISTEMAS DE MANEJO KAMILA BORGES CASTILHO1, JORGE WILSON CORTEZ1, NELCI OLSZEVSKI2, ALESSANDRA MONTEIRO SALVIANO3, SÁLVIO NAPOLEÃO SOARES ARCOVERDE1 1Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias, Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados - UFGD, Rodovia Dourados-Itahum, km 12, Cidade Universitária, CEP: 79.804-970, Caixa-Postal: 533, Dourados, MS, Brasil. kamila_castilho45@hotmail.com; jorge.cortez@yahoo.com.br; salvionapoleao@gmail.com. 2Engenharia Agrícola e Ambiental, Universidade Federal do Vale do São Francisco - UNIVASF, Av. Antônio C. Magalhães, 510, Country Club, CEP:48902-300, Juazeiro, BA, Brasil. nelci.olszevski@univasf.edu.br. 3Embrapa Semiárido, Rodovia BR-428, Km 152, s/n - Zona Rural, CEP: 56302-970, Petrolina, PE, Brasil. alessandra.salviano@embrapa.br. RESUMO: Estudos envolvendo as características do solo permitem melhor utilização e aplicação de tecnologias agrícolas, visando a adequada capacidade produtiva. Assim, o trabalho teve por objetivo a avaliação da influência de sistemas de manejo nas relações de massa-volume, na variabilidade espacial da resistência do solo à penetração e na produtividade da cultura do milho. Foram utilizados seis sistemas de manejo em latossolo vermelho distroférrico: sem preparo (T0); uma operação de escarificação (T1); duas escarificações e uma gradagem niveladora (T2); uma aração e quatro gradagens destorroadoras-niveladoras (T3); uma gradagem destorroadora-niveladora (T4); uma escarificação e uma gradagem destorroadora-niveladora (T5). Os valores de densidade e porosidade total observados foram considerados dentro da faixa adequada para solos argilosos. A macroporosidade apresentou valores críticos de aeração nas três camadas avaliadas dos sistemas T0 e T2, na camada de 0,00-0,05 m no sistema T3 e em todos os sistemas na camada de 0,20-0,25 m. Na espacialização da RP houve variações dos dados nos perfis do solo, sendo possível observar valores altos e muito altos (>4 MPa), que podem causar restrição ao desenvolvimento radicular das plantas. Não houve diferenças entre os sistemas de manejo na avaliação da produtividade. Palavras-chaves: agricultura de precisão, compactação do solo, geoestatística. MASS-VOLUME RELANTIONSHIPS, SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF THE SOIL MECHANICAL RESISTANCE TO PENETRATION AND CORN YIELDS IN MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ABSTRACT: The application of technology is necessary, especially in agricultural research that studies the soil and its productive capacity. The aim of this study was to evaluate the physical characteristics of the soil and spatial variability of penetration resistance in the soil profile in cropping systems and their influence on yields in a Dystroferric Red Latosol (oxisol) in area consisting of six management systems. The density and total porosity was considered adequate; the macroporosity critical limits aeration and microporosity was considered adequate. In the maps RP there were variations of the soil data profiles, which can be observed very high peak values and RP (> 4 MPa), which may cause restriction of root growth. There were no significant differences between management systems in productivity assessment. Keywords: precision agricultural, compression, geostatistics.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. 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Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite.” Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15–21.

Culture: Its Many Meanings One of the problems we encounter in dealing with culture is that there are so many different meanings and definitions attached to the term. We think of culture two ways: first, in terms of aesthetic matters (relative to thearts) and second, as a concept used by anthropologists to describe the way people live. There are, so I understand, something like a hundred different definitions of culture used by anthropologists. The Origins of the Term "Culture" The word 'culture' comes from the Latin cultus, which means 'care', and from the French colere which means 'to till' as in 'till the ground'. There are many terms that stem from the word culture. For example, there is the term 'cult' which suggests some kind of a religious organisation. We are continually amazed at the power cults have to shape our behavior, to brainwash us -- to turn intelligent and educated people into fanatics. Here we are dealing with the power of charismatic personalities and of groups over individuals. If cults can exercise enormous power over individuals and groups of people, can't we say that cultures also can do the same thing, though usually not to the same extreme degree? There is also the term 'cultivated', which means something that has been grown or, in the realm of aesthetics and the arts, sophisticated taste. Just as plants only exist because they are cared for by some cultivator, over a period of time, so people's taste and cultivation only are developed by education and training. It takes time to develop a refined sensibility, to become discriminating, to appreciate texts that are difficult and complex and not immediately satisfying. Bacteriologists also speak about cultures, but they use the term to describe the bacteria that are grown in Petri dishes if they are given suitable media (sources of nourishment). This matter of bacteria growing in media may be an important metaphor for us: just as bacteria need media to grow into culture, so do human beings need cultures to survive and develop themselves. We don't do it all on our own. In the chart below I show the interesting parallels: Bacteriology Bacteria Grow in media Form cultures Sociology/Anthropology Humans Affected by media Form cultures Of course we are much more complex than bacteria; in truth, each of us form a kind of medium for countless kinds of bacteria that inhabit our mouths and various other parts of our bodies. Bacteriology involves the cultivation and study of micro-organisms (bacteria) in prepared nutrients and the study of media (and what is often called cultural criticism nowadays) involves the study of individuals and groups in a predominantly, but not completely, mass-mediated culture. Not all culture is mass mediated. An Anthropological Definition of Culture Let me offer a typical anthropological definition of culture. It is by Henry Pratt Fairchild and appeared in his Dictionary of Sociology and Related Sciences: A collective name for all behavior patterns socially acquired and transmitted by means of symbols; hence a name for all the distinctive achievements of human groups, including not only such items as language, tool-making, industry, art, science, law, government, morals and religion, but also the material instruments or artifacts in which cultural achievements are embodied and by which intellectual cultural features are given practical effect, such as buildings, tools, machines, communication devices, art objects, etc. (80) Let's consider some of the topics Fairchild mentions. Behavior Patterns. We are talking about codes and patterns of behavior here that are found in groups of people. Socially Acquired. We are taught these behavior patterns as we grow up in a family in some geographical location and are profoundly affected by the family we are born into, its religion, and all kinds of other matters. Socially Acquired. We are taught these behavior patterns as we grow up in a family in some geographical location and are profoundly affected by the family we are born into, its religion, and all kinds of other matters. The Distinctive Achievements of Human Groups. It is in groups that we become human and become enculturated or acculturated (two words for the same thing, for all practical purposes). We have our own distinctive natures but we are also part of society. Artifacts in which cultural achievements are embodied. The artifacts we are talking about here are the popular culture texts carried in the various media and other non-mediated aspects of popular culture (or not directly mediated) such as fashions in clothes, food preferences, artifacts (what anthropologists call 'material culture'), language use, sexual practices and related matters. We know that a great deal of our popular culture, while not carried by the media, is nevertheless profoundly affected by it. We can see, then, that culture is a very complicated phenomenon that plays some kind of a role in shaping our consciousness and our behavior. You may think you are immune from the impact of the media and popular culture, but that is a delusion that is generated, I would suggest, by the media. We think we are not affected in significant ways by the media and popular culture (sometimes called mass mediated culture) and culture in general but we are wrong. Culture affects us but it doesn't necessarily determine every act we do; though some scholars, who believe the media are very powerful, might argue with this point. Falling Off the Map: What Travel Literature Reveals For a graphic example of how cultures differ, let me offer two quotations from the travel writer Pico Iyer from his book Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World, a collection of travel articles about seldom-visited places (by American travelers, at least). Saigon: the only word for Saigon is 'wild'. One evening I counted more than a hundred two-wheel vehicles racing past me in the space of sixty seconds, speeding around the jam-packed streets as if on some crazy merry-go-round, a mad carnival without a ringmaster; I walked into a dance club and found myself in the midst of a crowded floor of hip gay boys in sleeveless T-shirts doing the latest moves to David Byrne; outside again, I was back inside the generic Asian swirl, walking through tunnels of whispers and hisses. "You want boom-boom?" "Souvenir for you dah-ling?" "Why you not take special massage?" Shortly before midnight, the taxi girls stream out of their nightclubs in their party dresses and park their scooters outside the hotels along 'Simultaneous Uprising' Street. (134-5) Compare his description of Saigon with his portrait of Reykjavik, Iceland, equally as fascinating and fantastic but considerably different from Saigon. Even 'civilization' seems to offer no purchase for the mind here: nothing quite makes sense. Iceland boasts the largest number of poets, presses, and readers per capita in the world: Reykjavik, a town smaller than Rancho Cucamonga, California, has five daily newspapers, and to match the literary production of Iceland, the U.S. would have to publish twelve hundred new books a day. Iceland has the oldest living language in Europe; its people read the medieval sagas as if they were tomorrow's newspaper and all new concepts, such as 'radio' and 'telephone', are given poetical medieval equivalents. Roughly three eldest children in every four are illegitimate here, and because every son of Kristjan is called Kristjansson, and every daughter Kristjansdottir, mothers always have different surnames from their children (and in any case are rarely living with the fathers). The first day I ever spent in 'Surprise City' (as Reykjavik is called), I found golden-haired princesses and sword-wielding knights enacting fairy-tale sagas on the main bridge in the capital. (67-8) We can see that there are considerable differences between Saigon and Reykjavik, though just as (to be fair) Iyer points out the incredible differences between cities in Vietnam, such as the differences between Saigon and Hue. Iyer's description of the landscape of Iceland may help explain the national character of the Icelanders. As he writes: I knew, before I visited, a little about the epidemic oddness of the place: there was no beer in Iceland in 1987, and no television on Thursdays; there were almost no trees, and no vegetables. Iceland is an ungodly wasteland of volcanoes and tundra and Geysir, the mother of geysirs, a country so lunar that NASA astronauts did their training there. (67) There has to be some influence of this remarkable landscape and climate, of the Iceland geographical location, the amount of light and darkness in which people live, upon the people who live there and there has to be some influence of the jungle and the climate of Vietnam on its people. What we become is, it seems to me, due to some curious combination of factors involving our natures (that is, the hard-wired elements of our personalities) and our cultures, with the matter of chance playing a big role as well. What we become is, it seems to me, due to some curious combination of factors involving our natures (that is, the hard-wired elements of our personalities) and our cultures, with the matter of chance playing a big role as well. References Fairchild, Henry Pratt. Dictionary of Sociology and Related Sciences. Totawa, NY: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1967. Iyer, Pico. Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Arthur Asa Berger. "The Meanings of Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/meaning.php>. Chicago style: Arthur Asa Berger, "The Meanings of Culture," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/meanings.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Arthur Asa Berger. (2000) The meanings of culture. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/meaning.php> ([your date of access]).

By the 12th century, coffee was extensively cultivated in Yemen, and qawha and cahveh, hot beverages made from roast and ground coffee beans, became popular in the Islamic world over the next 300 years. Commercial production of coffee outside Yemen started in Sri Lanka in the 1660s, Java in the 1700s, and Latin America in 1715, and this production has associations with histories of colonial expansion and slavery. Introduced to Europe in the 17th century, coffee was described by Robert Burton in the section of his 1628 Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to medicines as “an intoxicant, a euphoric, a social and physical stimulant, and a digestive aid” (quoted in Weinberg and Bealer xii). Today, more than 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed each year. Coffee is also an ingredient in a series of iconic dishes such as tiramisu and, with chocolate, makes up the classic mocha mix. Coffee production is widespread in tropical and sub-tropical countries and it is the second largest traded world commodity; second only to oil and petroleum. The World Bank estimates that more than 500 million people throughout the world depend on coffee for their livelihoods, and 25 million of these are coffee farmers. Unfortunately, these farmers typically live and work in substandard conditions and receive only a small percentage of the final price that their coffee is sold for. The majority of coffee farmers are women and they face additional challenges, frequently suffering from abuse, neglect, and poverty, and unable to gain economic, social, or political power in either their family’s coffee businesses or their communities. Some farm coffee under enslaved or indentured conditions, although Fair Trade regimes are offering some lessening of inequalities. At the opposite end of the scale, a small, but growing, number of high-end producers market gourmet sustainable coffee from small-scale, environmentally-aware farming operations. For many in the West today, however, coffee is not about the facts of its production; coffee is all about consumption, and is now interwoven into our contemporary cultural and social habits. Caffeine, found in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of the coffee tree, is an addictive psychoactive substance, but has overcome resistance and disapproval around the world and is now unregulated and freely available, without licence. Our gastronomic sophistication is reflected in which coffee, brewing method, and location of consumption is chosen; our fast-paced lifestyles in the range of coffee-to-go options we have; and our capitalist orientation in the business opportunities this popularity has offered to small entrepreneurs and multinational franchise chains alike. Cafés and the meeting, mingling, discussions, and relaxing that occur there while drinking coffee, are a contemporary topic of reflection and scholarship, as are the similarities and differences between the contemporary café and its earlier incarnations, including, of course, the Enlightenment coffee house. As may be expected from a commodity which has such a place in our lives, coffee is represented in many ways in the media—including in advertising, movies, novels, poetry, songs and, of course, in culinary writing, including cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers. There are specialist journals and popular serials dedicated to expounding and exploring the fine grain detail of its production and consumption, and food historians have written multiple biographies of coffee’s place in our world. So ubiquitous, indeed, is coffee, that as a named colour, it popularly features in fashion, interior design, home wares, and other products. This issue of M/C Journal invited contributors to consider coffee from any relevant angle that makes a contribution to our understanding of coffee and its place in culture and/or the media, and the result is a valuable array of illuminating articles from a diverse range of perspectives. It is for this reason that we chose an image of coffee cherries for the front cover of this issue. Co-editor Jill Adams has worked in the coffee industry for over ten years and has a superb collection of coffee images that ranges from farmers in Papua New Guinea to artfully shot compositions of antique coffee brewing equipment. In making our choice, however, we felt that Spencer Franks’s image of ripe coffee cherries at the Skybury Coffee Plantation in Far North Queensland, Australia, encapsulates the “fruitful” nature of the response to our call for articles for this issue. While most are familiar, moreover, with the dark, glossy appearance and other sensual qualities of roasted coffee beans, fewer have any occasion to contemplate just how lovely the coffee tree is as a plant. Each author has utilised the idea of “coffee” as a powerful springboard into a fascinating range of areas, showing just how inseparable coffee is from so many parts of our daily lives—even scholarly enquiry. In our first feature article, Susie Khamis profiles and interrogates the Nespresso brand, and how it points to the growing individualisation of coffee consumption, whereby the social aspect of cafés gives way to a more self-centred consumer experience. This feature valuably contrasts the way Starbucks has marketed itself as a social hub with the Nespresso boutique experience—which as Khamis explains—is not a café, but rather a club, a trademarked, branded space, predicated on highly knowledgeable and, therefore, privileged patrons. Coffee drinking is also associated with both sobriety and hangover cures, with cigarettes, late nights, and music. Our second feature, by Jon Stewart, looks at how coffee has become interwoven into our lives and imaginations through the music that we listen to—from jazz to blues to musical theatre numbers. It examines the influence of coffee as subject for performers and songwriters in three areas: coffee and courtship rituals, the stimulating effects of caffeine, and the politics of coffee consumption, claiming that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of other drugs and ubiquitous consumer goods that are often more readily associated with popular music. Diana Noyce looks at the short-lived temperance movement in Australia, the opulent architecture of the coffee palaces built in that era, what was actually drunk in them, and their fates as the temperance movement passed into history. Emma Felton lyrically investigates how “going for a coffee” is less about coffee and more about how we connect with others in a mobile world, when flexible work hours are increasingly the norm and more people are living alone than any other period in history. Felton also introducess a theme that other writers also engage with: that the café also plays a role in the development of civil discourse and civility, and plays an important role in the development of cosmopolitan civil societies. Ireland-based Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire surveys Dublin—that tea drinking city—and both the history of coffee houses and the enduring coffee culture it possesses; a coffee culture that seems well assured through a remarkable win for Ireland in the 2008 World Barista Championships. China has also always been strongly associated with tea drinking but Adel Wang introduces readers to the emerging, and unique, café and coffee culture of that country, as well as some of the proprietors who are bringing about this cultural change. Australia, also once a significant consumer of tea, shifted to a preference for coffee over a twenty year period that began with the arrival of American Servicemen in Australia during World War II. Jill Adams looks at the rise of coffee during that time, and the efforts made by the tea industry to halt its market growth. These strong links between tea and coffee are reflected in Duncan Barnes, Danielle Fusco, and Lelia Green’s thought-provoking study of how coffee is marketed in Bangladesh, another tea drinking country. Ray Oldenberg’s influential concept of the “third place” is referred to by many authors in this collection, but Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken focus on this idea. By using a study of how Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, worked in his local café from 9 in the morning to noon each day, this article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. Donna Lee Brien brings us back to the domestic space with her article on how the popular media of cookery books and magazines portray how coffee was used in Australian cooking at mid-century, in the process, tracing how tiramisu triumphed over the trifle. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers Sophie Sunderland offers a fresh perspective on coffee production by powerfully arguing that feeling (“affect”) is central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. Sunderland thus brings the issue full circle and back to Khamis’s discussion, for there is much feeling mobilised in the marketing of Nespresso. We would like to thank all the contributors and our generous and erudite peer reviewers for their work in the process of putting together this issue. We would also like to specially thank Spencer Franks for permission to use his image of coffee cherries as our cover image. We would lastly like to thank you the general editors of M/C Journal for selecting this theme for the journal this year.References Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001.Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K Bealer. The World of Caffeine. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London & New York. Griffin, Graham. (2002). Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...> Henkel, C. (2002). Development of Audiovisual Industries in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Master thesis. Queensland University of Technology. . (2000). Imagining the Future: Strategies for the Development of 'Creative Industries' in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Northern Rivers Regional Development Board in association with the Northern Rivers Area Consultative Committee, Lismore, NSW. Jacka, M. (2001). Broadband Media in Australia Tales from the Frontier, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Kijas, J. (2002). A place at the coast: Internal migration and the shift to the coastal-countryside. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. MacGregor, Craig. (1995). The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (1998). Content as a New Growth Industry: Working Party for the Information Economy. OECD, Paris. Ostrow, R. (2002). Joyous Days, Childish Ways. The Australian, 9 February. Peatling, S. (2001). Keep Off Our Grass: Byron stirs the pot over sniffer dogs. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 April. <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/natio...> Peters, I. (1998). Ian Peter's History of the Internet. Lecture at Southern Cross University, Lismore. CD-ROM. Produced by Christina Spurgeon. Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Productivity Commission. (2000). Broadcasting Inquiry: Final Report, Melbourne, Productivity Commission. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Contents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New Press, New York. Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Blackwell, Oxford. . (1996). Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. 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Lincolnshire, England. The crowd cheer when the ball breaks loose. From one end of the field to the other, the players chase, their snouts hovering just above the grass. It’s not a case of four legs being better, rather a novel way to attract customers to the Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park. During the matches, volunteers are drawn from the crowd to hold goal posts at either end of the run the pigs usually race on. With five pigs playing, two teams of two and a referee, and a ball designed to leak feed as it rolls (Stevenson) the ten-minute competition is fraught with tension. While the pig’s contributions to “the beautiful game” (Fish and Pele 7) have not always been so obvious, it could be argued that specific parts of the animal have had a significant impact on a sport which, despite calls to fall into line with much of the rest of the world, people in Australia (and the US) are more likely to call soccer. The Football Precursors to the modern football were constructed around an inflated pig’s bladder (Price, Jones and Harland). Animal hide, usually from a cow, was stitched around the bladder to offer some degree of stability, but the bladder’s irregular and uneven form made for unpredictable movement in flight. This added some excitement and affected how ball games such as the often violent, calico matches in Florence, were played. In the early 1970s, the world’s oldest ball was discovered during a renovation in Stirling Castle, Scotland. The ball has a pig’s bladder inside its hand-stitched, deer-hide outer. It was found in the ceiling above the bed in, what was then Mary Queens of Scots’ bedroom. It has since been dated to the 1540s (McGinnes). Neglected and left in storage until the late 1990s, the ball found pride of place in an exhibition in the Smiths Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, and only gained worldwide recognition (as we will see later) in 2006. Despite confirmed interest in a number of sports, there is no evidence to support Mary’s involvement with football (Springer). The deer-hide ball may have been placed to gather and trap untoward spirits attempting to enter the monarch’s sleep, or simply left by accident and forgotten (McGinnes in Springer). Mary, though, was not so fortunate. She was confined and forgotten, but only until she was put to death in 1587. The Executioner having gripped her hair to hold his prize aloft, realised too late it was a wig and Mary’s head bounced and rolled across the floor. Football Development The pig’s bladder was the central component in the construction of the football for the next three hundred years. However, the issue of the ball’s movement (the bounce and roll), the bladder’s propensity to burst when kicked, and an unfortunate wife’s end, conspired to push the pig from the ball before the close of the nineteenth-century. The game of football began to take its shape in 1848, when JC Thring and a few colleagues devised the Cambridge Rules. This compromised set of guidelines was developed from those used across the different ‘ball’ games played at England’s elite schools. The game involved far more kicking, and the pig’s bladders, prone to bursting under such conditions, soon became impractical. Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanisation in 1836 and the death of prestigious rugby and football maker Richard Lindon’s wife in 1870 facilitated the replacement of the animal bladder with a rubber-based alternative. Tragically, Mr Lindon’s chief inflator died as a result of blowing up too many infected pig’s bladders (Hawkesley). Before it closed earlier this year (Rhoads), the US Soccer Hall of Fame displayed a rubber football made in 1863 under the misleading claim that it was the oldest known football. By the late 1800s, professional, predominantly Scottish play-makers had transformed the game from its ‘kick-and-run’ origins into what is now called ‘the passing game’ (Sanders). Football, thanks in no small part to Scottish factory workers (Kay), quickly spread through Europe and consequently the rest of the world. National competitions emerged through the growing need for organisation, and the pig-free mass production of balls began in earnest. Mitre and Thomlinson’s of Glasgow were two of the first to make and sell their much rounder balls. With heavy leather panels sewn together and wrapped around a thick rubber inner, these balls were more likely to retain shape—a claim the pig’s bladder equivalent could not legitimately make. The rubber-bladdered balls bounced more too. Their weight and external stitching made them more painful to header, but also more than useful for kicking and particularly for passing from one player to another. The ball’s relatively quick advancement can thereafter be linked to the growth and success of the World Cup Finals tournament. Before the pig re-enters the fray, it is important to glance, however briefly, at the ball’s development through the international game. World Cup Footballs Pre-tournament favourites, Spain, won the 2010 FIFA World Cup, playing with “an undistorted, perfectly spherical ball” (Ghosh par. 7), the “roundest” ever designed (FIFA par.1). Their victory may speak to notions of predictability in the ball, the tournament and the most lucrative levels of professional endeavour, but this notion is not a new one to football. The ball’s construction has had an influence on the way the game has been played since the days of Mary Queen of Scots. The first World Cup Final, in 1930, featured two heavy, leather, twelve-panelled footballs—not dissimilar to those being produced in Glasgow decades earlier. The players and officials of Uruguay and Argentina could not agree, so they played the first half with an Argentine ball. At half-time, Argentina led by two goals to one. In the second half, Uruguay scored three unanswered goals with their own ball (FIFA). The next Final was won by Italy, the home nation in 1934. Orsi, Italy’s adopted star, poked a wildly swerving shot beyond the outstretched Czech keeper. The next day Orsi, obligated to prove his goal was not luck or miracle, attempted to repeat the feat before an audience of gathered photographers. He failed. More than twenty times. The spin on his shot may have been due to the, not uncommon occurrence, of the ball being knocked out of shape during the match (FIFA). By 1954, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) had sought to regulate ball size and structure and, in 1958, rigorously tested balls equal to the demands of world-class competition. The 1950s also marked the innovation of the swerving free kick. The technique, developed in the warm, dry conditions of the South American game, would not become popular elsewhere until ball technology improved. The heavy hand-stitched orb, like its early counterparts, was prone to water absorption, which increased the weight and made it less responsive, particularly for those playing during European winters (Bray). The 1970 World Cup in Mexico saw football progress even further. Pele, arguably the game’s greatest player, found his feet, and his national side, Brazil, cemented their international football prominence when they won the Jules Rimet trophy for the third time. Their innovative and stylish use of the football in curling passes and bending free kicks quickly spread to other teams. The same World Cup saw Adidas, the German sports goods manufacturer, enter into a long-standing partnership with FIFA. Following the competition, they sold an estimated six hundred thousand match and replica tournament footballs (FIFA). The ball, the ‘Telstar’, with its black and white hexagonal panels, became an icon of the modern era as the game itself gained something close to global popularity for the first time in its history. Over the next forty years, the ball became incrementally technologically superior. It became synthetic, water-resistant, and consistent in terms of rebound and flight characteristics. It was constructed to be stronger and more resistant to shape distortion. Internal layers of polyutherane and Syntactic Foam made it lighter, capable of greater velocity and more responsive to touch (FIFA). Adidas spent three years researching and developing the 2006 World Cup ball, the ‘Teamgeist’. Fourteen panels made it rounder and more precise, offering a lower bounce, and making it more difficult to curl due to its accuracy in flight. At the same time, audiences began to see less of players like Roberto Carlos (Brazil and Real Madrid CF) and David Beckham (Manchester United, LA Galaxy and England), who regularly scored goals that challenged the laws of physics (Gill). While Adidas announced the 2006 release of the world’s best performing ball in Berlin, the world’s oldest was on its way to the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg for the duration of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The Mary Queen of Scot’s ball took centre spot in an exhibit which also featured a pie stand—though not pork pies—from Hibernian Football Club (Strang). In terms of publicity and raising awareness of the Scots’ role in the game’s historical development, the installation was an unrivalled success for the Scottish Football Museum (McBrearty). It did, however, very little for the pig. Heads, not Tails In 2002, the pig or rather the head of a pig, bounced and rolled back into football’s limelight. For five years Luis Figo, Portugal’s most capped international player, led FC Barcelona to domestic and European success. In 2000, he had been lured to bitter rivals Real Madrid CF for a then-world record fee of around £37 million (Nash). On his return to the Catalan Camp Nou, wearing the shimmering white of Real Madrid CF, he was showered with beer cans, lighters, bottles and golf balls. Among the objects thrown, a suckling pig’s head chimed a psychological nod to the spear with two sharp ends in William Golding’s story. Play was suspended for sixteen minutes while police tried to quell the commotion (Lowe). In 2009, another pig’s head made its way into football for different reasons. Tightly held in the greasy fingers of an Orlando Pirates fan, it was described as a symbol of the ‘roasting’ his team would give the Kaiser Chiefs. After the game, he and his friend planned to eat their mascot and celebrate victory over their team’s most reviled competitors (Edwards). The game ended in a nil-all draw. Prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was not uncommon for a range of objects that European fans might find bizarre, to be allowed into South African league matches. They signified luck and good feeling, and in some cases even witchcraft. Cabbages, known locally for their medicinal qualities, were very common—common enough for both sets of fans to take them (Edwards). FIFA, an organisation which has more members than the United Nations (McGregor), impressed their values on the South African Government. The VuVuZela was fine to take to games; indeed, it became a cultural artefact. Very little else would be accepted. Armed with their economy-altering engine, the world’s most watched tournament has a tendency to get what it wants. And the crowd respond accordingly. Incidentally, the ‘Jabulani’—the ball developed for the 2010 tournament—is the most consistent football ever designed. In an exhaustive series of tests, engineers at Loughborough University, England, learned, among other things, the added golf ball-like grooves on its surface made the ball’s flight more symmetrical and more controlled. The Jabulani is more reliable or, if you will, more predictable than any predecessor (Ghosh). Spanish Ham Through support from their Governing body, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol, Spain have built a national side with experience, and an unparalleled number of talented individuals, around the core of the current FC Barcelona club side. Their strength as a team is founded on the bond between those playing on a weekly basis at the Catalan club. Their style has allowed them to create and maintain momentum on the international stage. Victorious in the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship and undefeated in their run through the qualifying stages into the World Cup Finals in South Africa, they were tournament favourites before a Jabulani was rolled into touch. As Tim Parks noted in his New York Review of Books article, “The Shame of the World Cup”, “the Spanish were superior to an extent one rarely sees in the final stages of a major competition” (2010 par. 15). They have a “remarkable ability to control, hold and hide the ball under intense pressure,” and play “a passing game of great subtlety [ ... to] patiently wear down an opposing team” (Parks par. 16). Spain won the tournament having scored fewer goals per game than any previous winner. Perhaps, as Parks suggests, they scored as often as they needed to. They found the net eight times in their seven matches (Fletcher). This was the first time that Spain had won the prestigious trophy, and the first time a European country has won the tournament on a different continent. In this, they have broken the stranglehold of superpowers like Germany, Italy and Brazil. The Spanish brand of passing football is the new benchmark. Beautiful to watch, it has grace, flow and high entertainment value, but seems to lack something of an organic nature: that is, it lacks the chance for things to go wrong. An element of robotic aptitude has crept in. This occurred on a lesser scale across the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, but it is possible to argue that teams and players, regardless of nation, have become interchangeable, that the world’s best players and the way they play have become identikits, formulas to be followed and manipulated by master tacticians. There was a great deal of concern in early rounds about boring matches. The world’s media focused on an octopus that successfully chose the winner of each of Germany’s matches and the winner of the final. Perhaps, in shaping the ‘most’ perfect ball and the ‘most’ perfect football, the World Cup has become the most predictable of tournaments. In Conclusion The origins of the ball, Orsi’s unrepeatable winner and the swerving free kick, popular for the best part of fifty years, are worth remembering. These issues ask the powers of football to turn back before the game is smothered by the hunt for faultlessness. The unpredictability of the ball goes hand in hand with the game. Its flaws underline its beauty. Football has so much more transformative power than lucrative evolutionary accretion. While the pig’s head was an ugly statement in European football, it is a symbol of hope in its South African counterpart. Either way its removal is a reminder of Golding’s message and the threat of homogeneity; a nod to the absence of the irregular in the modern era. Removing the curve from the free kick echoes the removal of the pig’s bladder from the ball. The fun is in the imperfection. Where will the game go when it becomes indefectible? Where does it go from here? Can there really be any validity in claiming yet another ‘roundest ball ever’? Chip technology will be introduced. The ball’s future replacements will be tracked by satellite and digitally-fed, reassured referees will determine the outcome of difficult decisions. Victory for the passing game underlines the notion that despite technological advancement, the game has changed very little since those pioneering Scotsmen took to the field. Shouldn’t we leave things the way they were? Like the pigs at Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park, the level of improvement seems determined by the level of incentive. The pigs, at least, are playing to feed themselves. Acknowledgments The author thanks editors, Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell, and the two blind peer reviewers, for their constructive feedback and reflective insights. The remaining mistakes are his own. References “Adidas unveils Golden Ball for 2006 FIFA World Cup Final” Adidas. 18 Apr. 2006. 23 Aug. 2010 . Bray, Ken. “The science behind the swerve.” BBC News 5 Jun. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5048238.stm>. Edwards, Piers. “Cabbage and Roasted Pig.” BBC Fast Track Soweto, BBC News 3 Nov. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 . FIFA. “The Footballs during the FIFA World Cup™” FIFA.com. 18 Aug. 2010 .20 Fish, Robert L., and Pele. My Life and the Beautiful Game. New York: Bantam Dell, 1977. Fletcher, Paul. “Match report on 2010 FIFA World Cup Final between Spain and Netherlands”. BBC News—Sports 12 Jul. 2010 . Ghosh, Pallab. “Engineers defend World Cup football amid criticism.” BBC News—Science and Environment 4 Jun. 2010. 19 Aug. 2010 . Gill, Victoria. “Roberto Carlos wonder goal ‘no fluke’, say physicists.” BBC News—Science and Environment 2 Sep. 2010 . Hawkesley, Simon. Richard Lindon 22 Aug. 2010 . “History of Football” FIFA.com. Classic Football. 20 Aug. 2010 . Kay, Billy. The Scottish World: A Journey into the Scottish Diaspora. London: Mainstream, 2008. Lowe, Sid. “Peace for Figo? And pigs might fly ...” The Guardian (London). 25 Nov. 2002. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Mary, Queen of Scots (r.1542-1567)”. The Official Website of the British Monarchy. 20 Jul. 2010 . McBrearty, Richard. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. McGinnes, Michael. Smiths Art Gallery and Museum. Visited 14 Jul. 2010 . McGregor, Karen. “FIFA—Building a transnational football community. University World News 13 Jun. 2010. 19 Jul. 2010 . Nash, Elizabeth. “Figo defects to Real Madrid for record £36.2m." The Independent (London) 25 Jul. 2000. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Oldest football to take cup trip” 25 Apr. 2006. 20 Jul. 2010 . Parks, Tim. “The Shame of the World Cup”. New York Review of Books 19 Aug. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 < http://nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/shame-world-cup/>. “Pig football scores a hit at centre.” BBC News 4 Aug. 2009. August 20 2010 . Price, D. S., Jones, R. Harland, A. R. “Computational modelling of manually stitched footballs.” Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part L. Journal of Materials: Design & Applications 220 (2006): 259-268. Rhoads, Christopher. “Forget That Trip You Had Planned to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.” Wall Street Journal 26 Jun. 2010. 22 Sep. 2010 . “Roberto Carlos Impossible Goal”. News coverage posted on You Tube, 27 May 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 . Sanders, Richard. Beastly Fury. London: Bantam, 2009. “Soccer to become football in Australia”. Sydney Morning Herald 17 Dec. 2004. 21 Aug. 2010 . Springer, Will. “World’s oldest football – fit for a Queen.” The Scotsman. 13 Mar. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 < http://heritage.scotsman.com/willspringer/Worlds-oldest-football-fit.2758469.jp >. Stevenson, R. “Pigs Play Football at Wildlife Centre”. Lincolnshire Echo 3 Aug. 2009. 20 Aug. 2010 . Strang, Kenny. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots February 8, 1857”. Tudor History 21 Jul. 2010 http://tudorhistory.org/primary/exmary.html>. “The History of the FA.” The FA. 20 Jul. 2010 “World’s Oldest Ball”. World Cup South Africa 2010 Blog. 22 Jul. 2010 . “World’s Oldest Soccer Ball by Charles Goodyear”. 18 Mar. 2010. 20 Jul. 2010 .

Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. 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Langton, Marcia. “It’s Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable Lives.” Opinion. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Nov. 2007: 2. McAllan, Fiona. “Customary Appropriations.” borderlands ejournal 6.3 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/mcallan_appropriations.htm>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004). 1 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 75-89. Norberry, J., and J. Gardiner-Garden. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006. Australian Parliamentary Library Bills Digest 158 (19 June 2006). Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 75-97.Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Rio Tinto. "Rio Tinto Aboriginal Policy and Programme Briefing Note." June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.aboriginalfund.riotinto.com/common/pdf/Aboriginal%20Policy%20and%20Programs%20-%20June%202007.pdf>. Roberts, David J., and Mielle Mahtami. “Neoliberalising Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing 'Race' in Neoliberal Discourses.” Antipode 42.2 (2010): 248-257. Stringer, Rebecca. “A Nightmare of the Neocolonial Kind: Politics of Suffering in Howard's Northern Territory Intervention.” borderlands ejournal 6.2 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention.htm>.Stokes, Dianne. "Muckaty." n.d. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.timbonham.com/slideshows/Muckaty/>. Terrill, Leon. “Indigenous Land Reform: What Is the Real Aim of Land Reform?” Edited version of a presentation provided at the 2010 National Native Title Conference, 2010. Watson, Irene. “Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009): 27-51. Watson, Nicole. “Howard’s End: The Real Agenda behind the Proposed Review of Indigenous Land Titles.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 9.4 (2005). ‹http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2005/64.html>.Wild, R., and P. Anderson. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarie: The Little Children Are Sacred. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Northern Territory: Northern Territory Government, 2007.

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circumstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circumstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. 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For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. 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Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.