The multitasking myth | Jamie Oliver's kitchen on wheels | You study what?Is

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IVORY & STRINGSThe story behind Australia's first piano.

DEMENTIA:When prevention is better than cure

FUTURE FARMING: DEAD END JOB:Are farmers our greatest innovators?

It's time to rethink work

WelcomeAs ECU’s 25th anniversary celebrations come to an exciting finale, it’s time to begin thinking about what the next 25 years will look like. Students who enter university today will find themselves in a very different workforce tomorrow. The challenge for universities and employers alike is how to give them the skills to adapt and succeed.

In this edition we also explore how dementia will affect our ageing population and look at unlikely pairings between farmers and professors to grow food more sustainably and profitably.

Professor Steve Chapman Vice-Chancellor

Contact134 328 Web: www.ecu.edu.au Facebook: Edith Cowan University (ECU) Twitter: @EdithCowanUni

EdithEditor: Rhys Stacker Writers: Ruth Callaghan, Kim Cousins, Tiffany Fox, Danika Ferguson, David Gear, Ben Jones, Tori Pree, Craig Speelman.

Design: 303MullenLowe

Editorial enquiries: Tel: (08) 6304 2131 Email: pr@ecu.edu.au

Edith is published by Edith Cowan University through the Marketing and Communications Service Centre:Building 1, Joondalup Campus, ECU, 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, WA, 6027.

Views expressed in Edith are not necessarily endorsed or approved by the University. Neither the University nor the Editor accepts responsibility for the content or accuracy of information published. Articles or portions of articles may be reproduced with permission of the Editor or as otherwise provided for in the Copyright Act 1968.

Edith is distributed biannually. It is also available via www.ecu.edu.au/edith and at ECU campuses.

4 In Brief7 You Study What? Is this stool taken?8 The Big Question9 Community: Jamie’s Ministry of Food10 5 minutes with… Nardia Bordas11 Big Data20 The farm of the future28 Lightbox32 Events33 Alumni: Patricia Slapp34 The Last Word: Can we actually multitask?

12 Dead end job The workplace of the future will look radically different from what we are familiar with today.

24 Holding back the tide

16 For the love of ivory and strings

Contents

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As a Research student at ECU, you’ll have the abilityto make a real diff erence to the lives of others, whileextending your knowledge.You’ll benefi t from the support and knowledge of our highly qualifi ed research supervisors in a number of areas including:

A stimulating intellectual environment will inspire you and encourage life changing research outcomes. So when the time comes to make a lasting contribution to the world, you’ll be ready.

For more information, visit ecugetready.edu.au/research

ECU. That’s how university should be.

One day, your research could make a global impact.

Get ready.

• Engineering, especially materials engineering,nanophotonics and nanoelectronics

• Business and management

• Medical, health and sports sciences• Communications and media• Ecology and environment

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LINKing business and innovationTHE LINK is a collaboration between the City of Joondalup and ECU to encourage the brightest minds in research and business to work together, developing novel solutions and job-creating enterprises. The first step is the recent launch of THE LINK website, which enables business and investors to access information on opportunities in Joondalup and connect with ECU research expertise. For more information visit www.thelink.space

Prehistoric diet for modern weight lossThe paleo diet was found to be more effective for weight loss than the Australian Dietary Guidelines, according to a study by researcher Angela Genoni. She found that women who ate a paleo diet over a four-week period lost 2kg more than women who ate a diet based on the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. But Ms Genoni also cautions against diets that cut out entire food groups.

It actually is rocket scienceSchool of Science PhD candidate Samantha Ridgway has successfully flown the most powerful amateur rocket launched by a woman in Australia. The 5m rocket reached an altitude of over 4000m and hit speeds of over 1200kph during its 25 second flight near the Wheatbelt town of Williams.

New courses for 2017ECU will introduce several new courses next year to take advantage of growing industries. The Bachelor of Engineering (Petroleum Engineering) provides the foundations for a career in the oil and gas sector, both in Australia and internationally. For postgraduate students, the new Master of Science (Assisted Reproductive Technology) provides both theoretical and practical experience in this emerging field. For more information, see www.ecugetready.com.au

Silver Scholarships As part of ECU’s 25th anniversary celebrations in 2016, the University has established a new scholarship for current students. Speech Pathology student Shi Jing Kong and Exercise and Sports Science student David Barrett were selected as Silver Scholarship recipients and will receive free tuition for the duration of their studies.

Enactus team takes on the world A group of ECU students dedicated to volunteering in their local community has represented Australia at an international competition in Canada, after being named the Australian champions. The team of 24 students spent thousands of hours volunteering on projects that assist senior citizens with technology, as well as helping businesses reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill.

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In Brief

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High temperatures may increase skin cancer threatExposure to ultra-violet (UV) light has long been known to be the main cause of skin cancer, but a new study has found temperature may also play a part. ECU researchers exposed two samples of skin cells to UV light, keeping one at 37°C and the other at 39°C. They found the cells kept at 39°C had significantly more DNA damage, a major risk for developing skin cancer.

New performance space ECU has become the first university in the world to acquire a spiegeltent, providing a unique space for WAAPA students to hone their craft. Named The Edith, it is was designed and built by the Klessens family in Belgium, who have been constructing ornate spiegeltents since the 1920s.

“Ending up in the shit isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

These are the words Professor Tom Riley uses to describe his research career, in which he has spent a lot of time thinking about, and working with, poo.

Professor Riley was recruited to ECU’s School of Medical and Health Science earlier this year as a Professorial Research Fellow, as part of the university’s drive to develop research activity and impact.

But while today he is a recognised expert in his field, his scatological start came by accident.

“When I was working in a lab in my 20s I had a disagreement with the lab manager about how an experiment should be conducted,” Professor Riley explains.

“It got a little heated and as a bit of a punishment he assigned me to analyse stool samples for a few weeks.”

Little did that lab manager know the punishment would be the beginning of a fruitful research career.

While in the past this bacteria has predominantly infected older hospital patients, Professor Riley says new, virulent strains are now being detected in younger people in the broader community.

“These people are generally quite healthy so they don’t get a severe disease, but the big concern is that these new virulent strains will find their way into hospitals where they could infect and potentially kill more vulnerable people,” he says.

Professor Riley says the best way to avoid a case of C.diff, and the associated bad case of diarrhoea, is to maintain healthy gut bacteria.

“Avoid taking unnecessary antibiotics, because this can clear out your gut flora allowing C.diff to take hold,” he says.

“And if you are taking antibiotics, make sure you wash your hands with soap, because an alcohol‑based disinfectant won’t kill C.diff spores.”

For those who have been infected, one treatment option is a faecal transplant, which works by re-introducing bacteria from a healthy gut.

And where would be the best place to source faecal matter for a transplant? Professor Riley’s answer might test even the strongest relationships.

“Generally speaking, the best person to get the poo from is your spouse,” he says.

“Their gut flora is most likely to be similar to yours.”

“I had always been interested in anaerobic bacteria, which are bacteria that do not require oxygen to grow. But it was being assigned to work with those stool samples that sparked my interest in the ‘new’ pathogen Clostridium difficile,” Professor Riley says.

“C.diff is a very interesting bacterium. It causes infectious diarrhoea and in some cases can be fatal.

“It can’t compete with other gut bacteria, but it is resistant to certain types of antibiotics. This means that when patients in a hospital are given a course of these antibiotics that wipe out a lot of the other bacteria, it allows C.diff to propagate and cause problems.”

When C.diff was first identified as a cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea in the 1970s it was thought not to be a big problem in Australian hospitals because they did not use much clindamycin, the antibiotic most often linked with C.diff.

However, while working at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in the 1980s, Professor Riley helped improve diagnostic methods for detecting C.diff and found that cases were on the rise.

“I then looked into the reasons and showed that a simultaneous increase in the use of certain antibiotics was probably responsible and that this infection was costing the hospital about $1.25 million annually,” he says.

“As a result of this finding, antibiotic policies were changed leading to reduction of C.diff cases.”

What leads someone to study something that would cause most of us to recoil in disgust? Professor Tom Riley tells David Gear how he ended up in the poo.

Hope five years after FukushimaDespite being the largest release of nuclear material into the world’s oceans, new research has shown that five years after the Fukushima accident, radiation levels across the Pacific Ocean are rapidly returning to normal. But ongoing releases of radioactive material from the plant on Japan’s east coast continue to contaminate coastal waters around the plant, according to research co‑author Professor Pere Masqué.

You Study What?

Is this stool taken?

NAPLAN? No worriesDespite widespread concerns about the pressure students may feel when undertaking National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing, research from the School of Education found the standardised testing regime has only a minimal impact on levels of stress. They surveyed 465 students, 346 parents and 40 teachers and found only three per cent reported a severe level of stress around NAPLAN testing.

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What’s thebiggest myth in your field?

Not only does the evidence suggest that this is not true, but dairy products are the best source of dietary calcium, which is important for the development and maintenance of bone mass as well as protecting against the loss of bone mass associated with ageing.

Associate Professor Amanda Devine School of Medical and Health Sciences

Results from my research show people who frequently visit gambling venues to gamble are not necessarily problem gamblers or addicted to gambling. These people may enjoy all other non-gambling facilities and activities that casinos provide, such as celebrity chefs, luxurious resorts, concerts and other entertainment shows. People who are rated as problem gamblers don’t visit casinos frequently.

Associate Professor Catherine Prentice School of Business and Law

People sometimes think that as psychologists we know what you are thinking about; essentially that we are mind readers. Psychology is about studying how people behave, think and feel, not what they are thinking about at any particular time.

Dr Bronwyn Harman School of Arts and Humanities

People don’t feel they have digital expertise to manage children online. The expertise a parent needs is about their own child, not about media. Talking with your child about their online activities creates a new basis for shared understanding and the foundation for a great relationship as the child gets older.

Professor Lelia Green School of Arts and Humanities

The Big Question

Wholesome cookingtakes to the road

That eating dairy products leads to weight gain, heart problems and mucus build-up.

That problem gamblers frequently visit gambling venues — and people at gambling venues are problem gamblers.

That psychologists are mind readers.

That children are always at risk online.

The University has been playing host to Jamie’s Ministry of Food program, with a mobile kitchen visiting the Joondalup and South West campuses as part of a three-year partnership.

Every week, the mobile kitchen is home to 18 cooking classes, each lasting 90 minutes, teaching groups of up to 12 basic but lifelong cooking skills.

ECU’s Deputy Vice‑Chancellor (Strategic Partnerships) Cobie Rudd says ECU is the first university in Australia to have major partner status with Jamie’s Ministry of Food and the students are the first Jamie’s Ministry of Food interns in the world.

“ECU is about transforming lives through teaching and research,” she says.

“From the start we saw a close alignment with this initiative in encouraging diversity, fostering the achievement of personal excellence and sustainability, advancing health and wellness, and strengthening local communities and social connections.”

Superstar chef Jamie Oliver has built his reputation on the idea that anyone can learn to cook — and now ECU is helping spread that philosophy through Western Australia.

Students of any ability, and almost any age, attend the courses for seven weeks, mastering simple but wholesome cooking skills in the process.

The result is easy but sensational eating, says Marie Fitzpatrick, manager of the mobile kitchen and who incidentally, is an ECU graduate.

“We are really open to everyone and take a back‑to‑basics approach,” she says.

“For those who don’t have much confidence or who have not had the opportunity to cook, this is the cooking class for them.

“And as much as we use simple recipes, the food is really delicious — things you can impress your friends with.

“Jamie sets out to have a positive impact on everyone and it means the courses are very non‑threatening, so we have had children with their parents, people of different ages, even people with physical disabilities learning to cook.”

The Ministry of Food mobile kitchen is backed by not‑for‑profit organisation The Good Foundation with a number of partners nationwide.

Besides teaching community members critical skills, the program also offers industry experience and research opportunities for students and staff.

A recent evaluation of the program found participants who took the cooking courses increased their number of home-cooked meals and reduced consumption of take-away food.

They also boosted their daily intake of vegetables — with results sustained six months after completing the program.

Fitzpatrick says the feedback she receives from participants backs the notion that good food leads to happier people.

“I am surrounded by food and positivity every day,” she says.

“It’s just fantastic.”

Jamie’s Ministry of Food van is due to return to Joondalup campus in October. Classes can be booked through www.jamieoliver.com/ jamies-ministry-of-food-australia.

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2016 2070

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The average amount of weight lost by women who ate a diet based on the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. *1

The proportion of students, teachers and parents who reported a severe level of stress during National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing. *2

The portion of Australian adults aged over 60 with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. *4

Possum populations in WA’s South-West will continue to decline over coming decades as climate change and habitat loss rapidly reduce the area they can survive. *539

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3.2kgThe average amount of weight lost by women who ate the paleo diet for four weeks. *1

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Q. What was it that attracted you to chemistry?

A. I loved science growing up. I would actually hang around the science labs during lunch and recess talking to the lab technicians at high school. At university I studied biotechnology, and I enjoyed the chemistry component in that. It’s always fun doing experiments, mixing chemicals together and watching them change.

Q. What does a typical day look like for a laboratory technician?

A. It really depends on what time of the year. During semester it is a lot of setting up the labs to be ready for classes. This can involve setting up 30 experiments so that when the students and tutor arrive they can get straight into the class and get the most out of their time in the lab. Outside of semester there is plenty cleaning of equipment, organising and preparing so we are ready for semester to begin. I also

Nardia Bordas was always destined for a career in a laboratory. But as the School of Science Laboratory Technician told David Gear, the path she took to get there was a little unconventional.

help out with promotions like Open Day and going out to high schools to get kids excited about science and chemistry.

Q. What is your favourite part of the job?

A. Definitely the students. Students from many different disciplines do a unit in the labs in their first year, so I get to see a lot coming through each semester. It’s so great watching them learn and develop their skills and get excited about chemistry. Then there’s the students that do units in the lab throughout their degree and go on to post-graduate work that you get to develop really strong relationships with.

Q. What are some of the more unconventional experiments you get to help facilitate?

A. One of the more interesting ones is where we take the students out to the car park to a simulated car accident. I get to play the role of the injured driver of the car. We set up

simulated chemicals spills around the accident and the students have to assess how to safely get to the car to ‘rescue’ me. We have another one where I get to be an ‘arsonist’. This involves me burning an item of clothing and the students have to work out what kind of accelerant may have been used.

Q. What do you like to get up to outside of the lab?

A. While it’s not technically outside of a lab, I volunteer at Scitech helping to teach kids about chemistry. It was for this work that I was named the 2015 Scitech Volunteer of the Year. I also like to play, or at least attempt to play, the ukulele. There’s a group of people who meet up at Hillarys Boat Harbour every Friday night to play the ukulele and sing along. It’s great fun.

5 minutes with...

Research by the numbers

Big Data

1. Genoni. A, Lyons-Wall. P, Lo. J, Devine. A. (2016) Cardiovascular, Metabolic Effects and Dietary Composition of Ad-Libitum Paleolithic vs. Australian Guide to Healthy Eating Diets: A 4-Week Randomised Trial. Nutrients. Doi:10.3390/nu8050314

2. Rogers. S, Barblett. L, Robinson. K. (2016) Investigating the impact of NAPLAN on students, parent and teacher emotional distress in independent schools. The Australian Educational Researcher. Doi: 10,1007/s13384-016-0203-x

3. Calapre L, Gray ES, Kurdykowski S, David A, Hart P, Descargues P, Ziman M (2016) Heat-mediated reduction of apoptosis in UVB-damaged keratinocytes in vitro and in human skin ex vivo. BMC Dermatology DOI: 10.1186/s12895-016-0043-4

4. Villemagne, V. L., Burnham, S., Bourgeat, P., Brown, B., Ellis, K. A., Salvado, O., Szoeke, C., Macaulay, S. L., Martins, R., Maruff, P., Ames, D., Rowe, C. C. & Masters, C. L. 2013. Amyloid beta deposition, neurodegeneration, and cognitive decline in sporadic Alzheimer's disease: a prospective cohort study. Lancet Neurol, 12, 357-67. doi: 10.1016/S1474-4422(13)70044-9

5. Molloy SW, Davis RA, van Etten EJB (2016) Incorporating Field Studies into Species Distribution and Climate Change Modelling: A Case Study of the Koomal Trichosurus vulpecular hypoleucus (Phalangeridae). PLoS ONE 11(4): e0154161. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0154161

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Building an adaptable workforceThe youngest Millennials (also known as Gen Ys), and their younger siblings Gen Z, are expected to have up to 17 jobs each across their careers.

That means they need high levels of adaptability and a willingness to be self motivated, says futurist and author Gihan Perera.

“Most workplaces still carry over baggage from 200 years ago, when offices were invented,” he says.

“But people are becoming much more entrepreneurial. You no longer need to be in an office and can work remotely while still being part of a creative and productive team.

“Distributed work will become the norm, not the exception, with more offsite workers such as freelancers used.”

Preparing Gen Ys and Zs for this kind of work has already seen changes in the style of university teaching, from putting a greater emphasis on team work in assessments to encouraging students in greater use of industry-grade technology.

It’s designed to upskill students for the kind of fluid working environment they are likely to face on graduation.

Perera says the future of work, especially for knowledge workers, will be about seamlessly blending work and personal life, using digital technology such as cloud computing and augmented reality rather than the traditional office working structure.

That will require both the physical infrastructure necessary to allow remote working as well as a significant shift in thinking from employers.

He predicts one of the biggest challenges will be the new management styles needed to operate and supervise work in fast-changing environments.

“The best people for the job will do the work but this doesn’t always happen in the traditional workplace,” Perera says.

“The whole concept of diversity expands – and we don’t think of diversity in work patterns.

“Some people are early‑birds, others are night-owls. There are different countries and time zones, and even differences in people’s motivation.

The workplace of the future will look radically different from what we are familiar with today. Kim Cousins investigates how universities and industry are preparing for this shift.

At first glance, the next generation of workers face a pretty bleak future – digital disruption of business, the automation of work and inevitable loss of many jobs.

In fact, around 40 per cent of Australian jobs that exist today could vanish within 20 years, according to a recent research report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

But there are silver linings in the shift taking place in the way we think about and do our daily work.

And for universities, the mission of preparing a workforce able to cope with such shifts can offer interesting opportunities.

Dead End Job

Dead end job

“Digital technology changes the whole concept of workplace culture.”

Already companies are beginning to embrace the change.

Some Perth technology companies report the option of working remotely from far flung parts of the globe is now the price required to attract the best employees.

Others have disbanded the idea of a CBD central office for a network of operatives working from their own homes, coffee shops or on the go.

Director of Datacraft Technologies Chris Pudney says the beauty of the changed work scenario is the flexibility it offers.

“The work can happen anywhere and everywhere. The technology is ubiquitous,” he says.

“We can work from home, while we’re out and about or on the move. Face‑to‑face (in person) meetings will be thought of as expensive, slow and inefficient and only done as a last resort.”

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It is a lower barrier for employers and students than an internship, which can see students carry out up to six months of full-time work.

As part of these closer ties, students are exposed to workplace etiquette, the use of tools like LinkedIn and networking, and they engage with industry speakers who can share vital experience.

But just as demands for those already working have changed, so too have the expectations of employers in the five years Jackson has been overseeing WIL.

She says employers are now seeking students who can demonstrate independence and entrepreneurialism, with an eye towards their role as leaders of the future.

“Students are now expected to show leadership skills,” Jackson says.

“Employers want to see leadership through captaining school sports teams for example, and whether they have done volunteer work.”

When even work experience becomes competitive, it shows just how different the standards will be in the future workplace — where graduates will face a very different world of work.

Making the workplace part of the classroomTo prepare the next generation of workers means looking at what industry really needs — and that’s a core principle behind work-integrated learning or WIL.

Another way of bridging the gap between research and business, WIL sees students embedded into workplaces as part of their studies, so they learn alongside existing employees and develop the right skills to adapt to professional life.

It’s a process now integral to preparing students for the workplace, says Dr Denise Jackson, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of WIL programs in ECU’s School of Business and Law.

“It’s about developing self-awareness,” Jackson says.

“Some of the students are very green – they’ve never walked into an office.

“It gives them a big insight into their profession that they can’t get from a textbook.”

WIL sees students spend 100 to 150 hours in a workplace, and is open to around 60 undergraduates and 10 postgraduate students each semester.

Embedding innovation in daily lifeBeyond a change in the style of work is a shift in how quickly industries and businesses learn and adapt — and here universities have another role to play.

To navigate a landscape where technologies can be born, grow and become obsolete almost overnight, additional priority is being placed on research and development.

As an example, Deloitte predicts that one third of the Australian economy will experience imminent and substantial disruption by digital technologies and business models by 2025.

By the same date, it is anticipated that disruptive digital and internet technologies could impact Western Australia’s economy to the tune of $76 billion a year – or about 25 per cent of gross state product.

The answer lies in finding new ways to at least keep up with the pack — and ideally lead the way.

Professor Fang Zhao, the Associate Dean (Management) in ECU’s School of Business and Law, says that around $9.7 billion was due to be invested in R&D by the

“The practical aspects of the program reminded me about working in a team, which is very different to working alone or with supervisors on your thesis,” Brooker says.

“We had to negotiate and assign tasks in order to get the tasks completed on time, with people that we’d never interacted with before.

“It helps to know yourself and to be aware of how others like to work to achieve shared goals.”

Brooker says iPrepWA allowed her to look at the concept of work in a different way, thinking of herself as an entrepreneur, even as she worked for a potential employer.

It had also helped her make the shift from studying to being ready to sell her services to industry.

“We’ve all heard stories about PhD students that complete their degree and then have to take on unskilled employment to make ends meet, or who are overqualified for many jobs and yet there are no opportunities in their area of specialisation,” she says.

“Working for a company that develops and sells educational software has required me to think about the commercial value of my work and how my work contributes to the development of the product that I have been hired to support.”

Dead End Job |

“Frontier research outcomes will not provide much value to the economy if they are not transferred to industries or commercialised,” she says.

“Universities have a crucial role to play in fostering an entrepreneurial mindset and culture as well as delivering training and education to help entrepreneurs to take research outcomes and innovations to the markets.”

Connecting future workers with employers One way Western Australian universities are helping to bridge the gap between research and industry is through iPrepWA, an ECU-led initiative that supports research collaboration between the university sector and WA industries.

PhD graduate Miriam Brooker recently completed the six-week program and landed a job with the industry partner for her team — global ICT service provider CingleVue.

She says iPrepWA gave her the opportunity to get industry experience as well as build her skills in collaboration.

Australian Government alone in 2015‑16, according to the National Innovation and Science Agenda.

Around $6.5 billion of those funds were earmarked for supporting research in universities and research agencies such as CSIRO.

Zhao says this level of investment provides opportunities for university researchers to obtain funding and work towards increasing Australia’s innovation on a global scale.

“Although ranked as the 17th most innovative nation in the world, Australia still lags behind New Zealand and some of its Asian counterparts such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea,” she says.

“In the Global Innovation Index, Australia is ranked lower in knowledge and technology outputs.

“This is further evidenced by a recent OECD survey that found Australia has the lowest level of industry-research collaboration in the OECD countries, even though it boasts some of the highest quality scientific research organisations in the world.”

Zhao says that to address the problem of low innovation, universities and researchers need to focus on engaging with end users and industry and conveying the impact of their research.

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For the Love of Ivory and Strings

For the love of

Forty years on, the composer and pianist is a leading expert on historically informed performance practice, the custodian of a “small” set of historical pianos of his own, and is preparing to take possession of one of the world’s great collections of antique pianos for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

It is a particular coup for WAAPA, which is earning a name as home to some of the finest and rarest instruments in Australia.

Two years ago, it marked the arrival of a hand‑crafted, Italian‑made Fazioli, a grand piano donated thanks to the generosity of the McCusker Charitable Foundation.

This joined more than 40 high quality Yamaha pianos already in daily use by students and staff, and now more than 130 historically significant pianos have been generously gifted to WAAPA by collector Stewart Symonds.

The remarkable collection includes Australia’s first piano — a Frederick Beck square piano that arrived on the Sirius with the First Fleet.

“This is the first piano in Australia and the first piano upon which piano lessons were given, by the first piano teacher in Australia,” says Lancaster, who has written two volumes on the discovery of the First Fleet piano, tracing its provenance.

“There’s a whole cloud of cultural significance associated with this particular instrument.”

The Beck — so fragile that it needed to be flown to Perth rather than trucked across, lest its 18th century animal glue weaken during a desert crossing — has spent years waiting for its significance to be recognised.The first piano in Australia has

found a new home at WAAPA, writes Ruth Callaghan.

and

Geoffrey Lancaster remembers the exact moment his old world ended and another began.

“I was an undergraduate music student in 1973 and just in passing, I saw in a shop window in Queens Street, Woollarha in Sydney, an old piano,” he says.

“As it turned out, it was a Broadwood Grand of 1837 that had just come out from Warwick Castle.

“I went in, having only had experience with the modern piano, but the antiques dealer had a passion for historical pianos, he had about 50 of them.

“Within a very short space of time, that dealer changed my musical life. I knew in my spirit that this is what I should devote my life to.”

Professor Lancaster has been as good as his word.

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Professor Geoffrey Lancaster and Stewart Symonds.

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What is it about the piano that inspires such love? They are the size of small sofas, not easily stored. They demand care or their sinews stretch out of tune. They get covered with doilies and clutter and dust.

But anyone who has struggled with Chopsticks or mastered their Mozart knows: it is very hard to stop owning a piano.

Master piano technician Paul Tunzi, who has worked with WAAPA for more than three decades, admits he is a collector, “much to my wife’s horror”.

“I’ve got an antique grand, I’ve got a Bösendorfer Imperial, which is the world’s biggest piano, and I’ve got a couple of other dribs and drabs,” he says.

“I collect them like a dog refuge, from people who don’t want them any more.”

Tunzi, who will mark 40 years next year as a piano tuner, says pianos are ‘dangerously emotional items’.

“When we inherit pianos from our parents and grandparents, they bring cherished memories of good times and songs; the emotion of the one who has owned and played the piano,” he says.

The problem is that a piano is not designed to last as long as the emotional connection endures. Most have life spans less than 100 years — far shorter for concert pianos — and they cannot easily be coaxed back to life.

“All instruments can convey emotions but most can be put away in a cupboard, whereas the oldest piano I own was built in the 1850s. I don’t know anything about it but I’m sure if it could speak it would have a wonderful history,” he says.

“When you go to a client’s house, say she’s in her late 80s or 90s, and I come to tune the piano and the last time they heard it played was by their late husband who has passed away, the emotion I see then is when I see how cherished pianos are.

“You can’t avoid a piano in the room. You walk past it and there’s not only an empty keyboard but pictures of families on it, pictures of babies and christenings and people who went off to war and didn’t come back.

“A piano provides a central focus point to a family’s significant memories of history.”

WAAPA Professor Geoffrey Lancaster is another who has more pianos tucked away than he cares to admit.

“I have to loan out pianos to friends and say ‘I don’t have room for this one, can you look after it’ and they usually say yes,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t squeeze in just one more.

“I’m just about to take delivery of the greatest maker of modern copies of historical pianos and it is the copy of a piano I have hoped to have all my life,” Lancaster says.

“It is a copy by JA Stein and I’ve been a Stein man for years. There’s an effortless perfection.

“They are the kind of piano that Mozart loved but because he was a musician he could never afford. Really, not much has changed.”

Perth is developing a reputation as a home for pianos — both the finest and the finished. East of the city in York is a paddock where more than 35 pianos wheeze out their final days among weeds and rocks, known locally as the Piano Graveyard. Tunzi knows a Perth tuner who has his own mausoleum closer to town “with 30 upright pianos stacked up” in his yard in Byford.

With the arrival of 130 historic pianos at WAAPA and the growing number of world‑class Faziolis in private and institutional ownership, Tunzi says Perth is beginning to make its mark internationally.

“Why is it that such a small populace of Perth has more Faziolis than anywhere else in Australia?” he says.

“How is it that Perth is becoming such a focal point of keyboard instruments?

“My answer is that part of it is luck. Part of it is that the likes of Geoffrey Lancaster invite this sort of collection. But also there is the joining of like minds, people who have embraced quality and who want to move forward in keyboard and also go backwards, celebrating the past as much as the future.”

For the Love of Ivory and Strings |

Symonds was a long-time friend of antiques dealer William Bradshaw, a Sydney identity whose home Lancaster describes as a ‘musical paradise,’ with so many pianos that they spilled out onto verandas and filled up garages and sheds.

Among these was a Frederick Beck square piano, built between 1780 and 1786, which matches exactly the description of the sole piano to have arrived in Botany Bay with the first white settlers.

Bradshaw reported buying the piano from a home in Windsor, on the outskirts of Sydney, where it had sat unloved in a laundry of a family that had owned it since the 1830s.

Despite its unfortunate location, it was in surprisingly good condition. Lancaster says generations of children in the family had been warned not to damage it as it had “arrived on the First Fleet”.

Symonds purchased the piano in 1986, took it home and tucked it in a hallway beside an 1809 Joseph Kickman grand piano, another element in the incredible collection now donated to WAAPA.

In announcing the donation earlier this year, Symonds described the importance of preserving his collection and the musical history his 130 pianos represent.

"This is for future generations,” he said at the time.

“People in 100, 500, maybe even 1000 years, will be able to come and rediscover in these instruments exactly what our early composers composed.

“I want to give it back to Australia rather than have it frittered off overseas. It doesn’t help anybody in storage.

“On a modern piano you press the notes down 12mm, and at the bottom where the action is very heavy you press a weight down of 32 grams,” he says.

“On an earlier piano, say a late 18th century piano from Vienna, you have a weight of 5g and you press the key down not 12mm but two. It’s a very different physicality involved.”

Then there are the complex conventions of the time, known but often not recorded by composers and performers: rules as to what notes might be long, soft, loud or the cue to improvise.

“If you don’t know the conventions of the time you run the real risk of losing the meaning and compromising the expressivity of the music,” Lancaster says.

“It is a partnership between research into these conventions of performance and interpretation, coupled with an understanding of how to play these instruments physically.”

He believes preserving the pianos and helping students understand how to play them as the great musical masters did, can deepen their understanding of the universe.

“I believe that the works of the composers we regard as being great are worthy of preservation because they deal with the human experience,” Lancaster says.

“But high art is a language that needs to be learned if it is to be understood.

“And once the language is learned, the rewards are astonishing.”

“By giving these pianos to WAAPA, they will be there for all who come for hundreds of years.”

For Lancaster, the arrival of the pianos will not only see WAAPA become custodians of an irreplaceable collection but enable a new generation to learn the language of the historic pianos — even the skills of piano restoration.

Playing on such instruments is akin to travelling in time, he says, experiencing music as it was intended to be played by its original composers.

“When a virtuoso scholar musician gets his or her hands on one of these instruments and plays music written for the instrument, it is possible to have a very complete and transforming experience of a voice from the past,” he says.

“It acts as a mirror to our own values.”

Lancaster says the difference in playing a modern and historical piano is stark – both in the accent and inflection the older instrument gives to music and in the physical demands made on the pianist.

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The Farm of the Future

From ancient Sumer during the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago to the Wheatbelt in central Western Australia, the question on every farmer’s mind remains the same. How can you extract enough food from the land to feed those who need it?

And just as the question has remained the same across millennia, so has the answer: innovation.

Australian farmers are among the most efficient in the world.

This is despite very poor soils across much of the continent as well as low levels of government farm subsidies (by international standards). Yet, Australian farmers export more than $41 billion worth of produce each year.

They provide 93 per cent of food eaten domestically, and help feed some 40 million people outside of Australia every day.

But Australia’s position as an agricultural innovator could be under threat from falling levels of investment in research and development.

In its 2016 review of farming exports, the Australian Farm Institute found our farmers were losing market share to competitors in the developing world, where production is being rapidly expanded.

At the same time, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported that the amount of land suitable for farming is under threat from climate change, salinity, erosion and nutrient loss.

And research from the University of Minnesota has found that between 1960 and 2009, Australia fell from 9th to 16th place in proportional spending on research and development in the agricultural sector.

It’s a decline individual farmers and researchers are hoping to arrest, recognising that to grow our agricultural sector we must develop new ways to grow food more efficiently and sustainably.

The farm of the futureSince the dawn of civilisation, farmers have been innovating to get the most out of their land. David Gear examines some of the ideas that could drive the next agricultural revolution.

“Farms are businesses, so if there is a better way of doing things that can improve the bottom line, you have to embrace that change.”

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Big data makes for better farmsFor all the technology that has been brought to bear on modern farms, farmers are still faced with a dilemma as old as agriculture itself: trying to predict what will happen next season.

They have to make decisions about what varieties of crops to plant, how much fertiliser to use and what land to use, based on what they think will happen months in the future.

This is where the worlds of agriculture, big data and machine learning collide.

Tony White, a farmer in the central Wheatbelt, knows well the need for innovation.

Over his 30 years working the land, he has seen and implemented advances to farming technology and practices at a breakneck speed.

With GPS‑guided tractors, a harvester that can differentiate between grains and weed seeds, and scientific application that has led to more efficient use of herbicides, White exemplifies the reasons the modern farmer cannot afford to stand still.

“Things are always changing and there is always a better way of doing things,” he says.

“One area that you need to be good at is handling data.

“We use satellite imagery combined with aerial drones to get an overlay of how the crop is growing. If we see an area of the field that is not growing well, we can look at it and we have to decide whether to put some more fertiliser down.

“The more data you have, the more you can minimise the unknowns of farming and hopefully maximise your yields.”

Concepts like data mining, neural networks and spatial interpolation may sound like they have little application to farmers, but for Dr Leisa Armstrong, from ECU’s School of Science, they go hand in hand.

As leader of ECU’s eAgriculture Research Group, she works to take information communications technology research and apply it to the challenges farmers face each season.

“The most effective tool farmers have is information that allows them to acquire knowledge and make decisions based on that knowledge,” she says.

One of the projects the group has been developing is an automated decision support system for farmers in WA’s Wheatbelt.

The system works by collating huge amounts of data on average rainfall, yearly wheat crop yields and soil types from hundreds of locations across the region.

Using this data, an artificial neural network is used to predict crop yields for different varieties of wheat.

“The automated decision support system is designed to be simple to use and easy for farmers,” Armstrong says.

“It displays information graphically so farmers can get useful information.”

The Farm of the Future |

Weed-detecting lasersOf course, working out what to plant, where and when is just one part of the puzzle. Ensuring the crop thrives during its growing season against competitors is another.

One project under development at ECU’s Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI) is the Photonic Weed Detection System, which can identify weeds within a field of crops and apply a spray herbicide directly.

“This system has the potential to reduce the use of herbicides by farmers by as much as 75 per cent,” ESRI Director Kamal Alameh says.

“This could not only greatly cut costs for farmers but also reduce the amount of herbicides that enter the environment.”

The system works by using three lasers of different wavelengths in conjunction with a camera, which together scan the paddock surface at a speed exceeding 20 kmh.

“The most effective tool farmers have is information that allows them to acquire knowledge and make decisions based on that knowledge.”

The information from the reflected beams and camera is analysed by the system, which is then able to pinpoint weeds with herbicide, leaving the surrounding crops unsprayed.

Innovation can support marginal landReceiving just 200mm of rain annually, the arid region of south-eastern Spain near the city of Almeria was home to very little agriculture 35 years ago.

Today, thanks to 26,000 hectares of greenhouses, the area produces more than half of the fruit and vegetables eaten in Europe.

Such is the power of greenhouses to turn areas of marginal agricultural use into food-bowls.

Now, researchers from ESRI’s state of the art laboratories have developed a revolutionary greenhouse that has the potential to make the driest of deserts bloom.

The greenhouse is built out of transparent glass panels that can generate 50 watts of power per square metre of surface area, while allowing 70 per cent of visible light to pass through and blocking more than 90 per cent of the solar UV and IR radiations.

Alameh says this can provide enough power to run heating or cooling for the greenhouse, as well as desalination to provide water – vital considering how much of Australia is desert.

“One of the major challenges for food production in many parts of the world is getting enough water,” he says.

“Being able to selectively control light radiation, thus maximising the crop yield, while producing and storing electricity for water desalination, irrigation, heating and air conditioning, will enable greenhouses to operate in a closed environment.

“They can operate with minimum water and nutrient delivery in areas that currently cannot support food production due to a shortage of suitable water.”

These breakthroughs are signs of how farming has changed. Successful food production is now as much about the research conducted by men and women in laboratories as it is by those on the land.

But as White says, it is a change that is inevitable.

“Farms are businesses,” he says.

“If there is a better way of doing things that can improve the bottom line, you have to embrace that change.”

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Dementia

It is one of the biggest health crises in the world — sometimes called the modern plague — and the statistics about its reach are staggering.

More than 353,000 Australians already live with dementia, the debilitating degenerative disease that robs people of memory, independence and sometimes personality.

That includes more than 33,300 Western Australians, according to Alzheimer’s Australia. Every week, there are more than 1800 new cases diagnosed.

And by 2050, the number of people living with dementia in Australia is expected to be almost 900,000.

It is already our second leading cause of death and an estimated 1.2 million Australians are involved in the care of a person who has the disease.

But while there is no cure, the efforts being devoted to holding back the tide of dementia as the population ages are well underway.

A personal battle Susan Lynch is painfully familiar with the devastation dementia can wreak on family life.

After losing her mother, older sister and a cousin to Alzheimer’s Disease—the most common form of dementia — the Woodvale grandmother has one guiding motto in life: “I’m not going to let Alzheimer’s disease get me.”

“I could not begin to tell you what it was like to see my mother, who was this wonderful woman who did art and craft, become one who has this dreadful disease and there is nothing you can do about it,” Lynch says.

“When my poor mum did pass away 19 months after entering a nursing home, I vowed that I would have to do something and find out more for me, because I didn’t want my family to go through what I had been through with my mother.”

Lynch’s story is increasingly common as Australia’s ageing population and our sedentary lifestyle fuel what Access Economics labels a nationwide epidemic, but thanks to her efforts and those of researchers, it may be possible to limit the time someone lives with dementia, if not cure it altogether.

Delay an important first step If by 2020 we can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by just five months, the population-wide savings to Australia are estimated at $1.3 billion, according to Access Economics.

The same delay will save $6.6 billion by 2040 and if we can hold off the disease by five years, the 2040 savings are estimated at an incredible $67.5 billion.

There is no cure, but a team of scientists led by Edith Cowan University Ageing and Alzheimer’s Foundation chair Professor Ralph Martins are combining brain scans with investigations into lifestyle factors to understand the future of our minds.

Martins says that while the statistics are concerning, researchers have come a long way in understanding the role lifestyle factors play in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

At the heart of the disease is a toxic form of a protein called beta amyloid.

The protein forms a sticky deposit, known as plaque, in and around brain cells, killing off the cells and leading to dementia.

Martins says brain scans done as part of the ground-breaking Australian Imaging Biomarkers Lifestyle Study of Ageing (ABIL) study reveal almost one-third of Australians aged over 60 have enough beta amyloid in the brain to be considered to have preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.

Now in its tenth year, the AIBL study follows 1100 participants including people like Susan Lynch, who have no memory problems but may have lost family members to the disease, people experiencing mild cognitive impairment and participants in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

The goal is to develop an early diagnosis technique for Alzheimer’s disease.

“What we have also found through the AIBL study is it takes a good 20 years from someone who starts accumulating amyloid to the point where it gets so high that they express the features of the disease, such as memory loss,” Martins says.

“We keep hearing about drug trials failing, constantly failing, and they are failing because it is too little too late.

“By the time people are clinically diagnosed, the brain is very severely damaged.

“We have a very significant window of time, if we can pick them early, where we can do something about it.”

D en ia e n i i

As Australia's population ages, the prevalence of dementia is set

to increase dramatically. Tiffany Fox talks to the scientists working to hold back the tide on this disease.

Dementia: when prevention is better than cure.

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Dementia |

Diet helps preserve the mindHolding back the tide of dementia could be as simple as maintaining healthy lifestyle.

Martins says people who adhere to a Mediterranean type of diet, rich in fish, fruit and vegetables, less saturated fat and moderate alcohol intake, have been found to have a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

The AIBL study also shows that people who follow the diet have lower amyloid levels, whether they have a genetic risk factor or not.

It is this hope that fuels Lynch’s determination to spread awareness of the causes and concerns associated with Alzheimer’s and raise money for research in the field.

As an AIBL study participant, she and her husband regularly take a battery of memory, brain function, hearing and blood tests, and have volunteered to undergo complex scanning procedures such as positron emission tomography (PET), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and eye scans to track any changes in their brains.

In conjunction with the scientific tests, Lynch says she tries her best to live a healthy lifestyle in the hope it will help stave off any accumulation of toxic beta amyloid in the brain.

“I try to socialise as much as I can, I walk and do a lot of gardening, and I keep very active with my grandkids,” she says.

“I think this research is absolutely vital because we need to know and there is a lot that we could be doing to help relieve the problem.”

Healthy body means healthy mindECU School of Medical and Health Sciences research fellow Dr Belinda Brown says there is good evidence that a combination of lifestyle factors, including sleep and exercise, also play their parts in the development of dementia.

Dr Brown and colleague Dr Stephanie Rainey‑Smith found a link between the levels of beta amyloid in the brain and the time it takes patients to fall asleep.“Sleep is very important,” Brown says.“In this day and age people think they can burn the candle at both ends and do as much as they can, but people cannot function properly on small amounts of sleep.

“Given there is no treatment at the moment that intervenes with the pathology of the disease, it is so important that people do things earlier in life... to prevent or delay the onset.”Apart from health and quality-of-life reasons for better and earlier detection of the disease, there is a pressing economic imperative for improved diagnosis and treatment.

One Access Economics report concluded dementia will become the third greatest source of health and residential aged care spending within two decades.More than half of the residents in Government‑subsidised aged care facilities have dementia, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and the disease is the single biggest cause of disability in people aged 65 or older.

With dementia expected to reach

epidemic proportions, training

carers and professional health

workers in the best way to manage

people living with dementia,

especially early onset dementia, is

“vitally important”, says ECU School

of Nursing and Midwifery associate

dean Dr Elisabeth Jacob.

Jacob and colleague Dr Caroline

Vafeas have developed education

resources, including an interactive

book and training videos, to be

trialled in Bethanie Health Care

and MercyCare facilities this year.

They warn that patients presenting

with younger-onset dementia

have different needs to their older

counterparts, because they are

often more active and need more

meaningful activities and diversions

as part of their care.

“It does not matter where you work, if you are in an aged care facility, if you are in an emergency department, if you are in hospital surgical wards, everywhere, then you are going to be coming across dementia patients,” Jacob says.“If you are having this contact with dementia patients and you do not know how to cope with them and they are constantly being given sedation, that is not the correct way to care for these people,” Vafeas adds.

“It is not about medication, it is about holistic, person‑centric care."

Music finds a path for forgotten memories

“So most of these people feel really cut off and cannot communicate even simple needs, as simple as being thirsty or sore or feeling sad.”In a pilot project being launched in nursing homes this year, the pair aims to identify activities using music, language and the arts to see how these tools work with people living with dementia.“The challenge and difficulty and the fascination of this project is it is at the crossroads of many disciplines, and we want to use arts because arts works really well with health issues,” Di Rollo says.

“Research shows that every pleasurable activity increases cognitive skills, quality of life and helps people retrieve information that is lost somewhere in their memory.“Language, whatever is the level of language skills, is very important for humans and if humans cannot communicate with the people around them then that is going to be a big issue.”

WA Academy of Performing

Arts Italian language lecturer

Dr Aureliana Di Rollo and ECU

School of Arts and Humanities

French studies coordinator

Dr Celine Doucet hope to use

music and arts to improve the

quality of life of bilingual people

experiencing neurodegeneration.

Di Rollo, who uses opera and

music to teach Italian, says there

is anecdotal evidence that bilingual

dementia sufferers often lose their

second language first and revert

to their original language, which

presents a big issue especially in

migrant communities.

“The main problem is that they lose

the ability to communicate with

their family and with their carers,”

Di Rollo says.

Music has long been said to sooth the savage beast, but it may also hold the key to addressing a pressing social issue for people living with dementia and their carers.

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ECU researchers are involved in projects that span the globe – and beyond. In some cases, photography is an integral part of the research process. In others, it’s simply to capture a unique moment in science.

Thanks to the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, even school students can access multi-million dollar telescopes to glimpse far-away galaxies. The spire of gas that can be seen near the centre of the Eagle Nebula is approximately 9.5 light years long, or about 90 trillion kilometres. The image is from the Our Solar Siblings project, an ECU initiative to teach high school students about astronomy. It is on show at the Journey Out Into The Universe exhibition, running at Building 32 on the Joondalup Campus until 2017. Photo: Professor David H. McKinnon & Dr Michael Fitzgerald

The Jewel Box is one of the youngest known star clusters, estimated at just 14 million years old. These stars live fast and die young, usually as supernovae explosions. Photo: Professor David H. McKinnon & Dr Michael Fitzgerald

The Palau flycatcher is an insectivore found in the Republic of Palau that is common in forest and mangroves. This male was photographed during an ECU research trip by Dr Rob Davis, ecologist Dr Belinda Davis and PhD student Paul Radley to study the endangered Micronesian megapode. Photo: Belinda Davis

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A modified catamaran is used to hammer PVC pipes into the seabed in the Vasse Wonnerup wetlands near Busselton, to gather sediment cores. The research was conducted by Dr Oscar Serrano, Professor Paul Lavery and Gloria Salgado in their investigation of the health of local wetlands. Photo: Gloria Salgado

During a month‑long trip across the Southern Ocean aboard the CSIRO’s research vessel RV Investigator, a team of researchers from ECU’s School of Science examined the link between carbon dioxide and climate change. In this image, an aerosol sampler is being prepared on the front deck ready to filter the air, so that airborne particles can be analysed. Photo: Gloria Salgado

The upper part of a mooring replete with sensors and instruments to monitor the atmosphere and ocean is deployed in the Southern Ocean. Photo: Gloria Salgado

Dr Oscar Serrano from ECU’s School of Science examines a sediment core that tells the story of 5,000 years of natural and man-made environmental changes. Photo: Gloria Salgado

The fluttering feathers of the spirographis worm. As a filter feeder, this animal feeds by trapping suspended matter and food particles from a water column. Filter feeders play an important role in clarifying water. Photo: Oscar Serrano

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FEBRUARYECU GRADUATION CEREMONIESPerth Convention and Exhibition Centre, 4-5 FebruaryThe University farewells another batch of successful graduates, with the students joining our network of more than 130,000 alumni around the world.

BUNBURY GRADUATION CEREMONYBunbury Regional Entertainment Centre, 20 FebruaryWith a grand parade through the streets of Bunbury, ECU farewells the South West Campus graduates.

OPERA! THE OPERAWAAPA, Mount Lawley Campus, 11-17 NovemberThe world premiere of Opera! The Opera, a heart‑warming new comedy from ABC broadcaster and conductor Guy Noble, combines a new story with some of the greatest operatic music ever written.

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN ECU LECTURE SERIESMount Lawley Campus, 25 NovemberWAAPA’s Professor Geoffrey Lancaster will take his audience on a journey through 200 years of Australian musical history, culminating in a performance on one of the country’s oldest pianos.

MUSIC UNDER THE STARSJoondalup Campus, 26 November

Headlined by WAAPA alumnus Billie Court, this year’s Music Under the Stars features performances from Perth favourites Murphy’s Lore and The Milford Street Shakes.

DECEMBER2016 SRI SECURITY CONGRESSJoondalup Campus, 5-7 DecemberECU’s Security Research Institute Security Congress brings together leading thinkers across all areas of security professions, disciplines and research.

OCTOBERTHE BEAT GENERATIONWAAPA, Mount Lawley Campus, 12-16 OctoberIn this exciting new production, acting students and their jazz musician counterparts explore the cultural impact of the highly influential Beat Generation movement.

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN ECU LECTURE SERIESJoondalup Campus, 21 OctoberProfessor Mel Ziman will explain her internationally recognised research into the diagnosis of melanoma and Huntington’s disease.

ECU’S RUN FOR IT!Joondalup Campus, 29 OctoberRace through our stunning Joondalup Campus and straight into Halloween at this spooky fun run, raising money for ECU’s Melanoma Research Group.

NOVEMBERWA SCREEN ACADEMY DOCUMENTARY SCREENING – CONNECTIONS Luna Cinemas, 10 November

Six short documentaries by WA Screen Academy students will premiere at this gala screening. Themes include online dating in your 80s, being transgender, a world‑first fishing carbon offset venture and the challenge of raising — then slaughtering — your own chickens.

EventsAlumni

“I’m proud of the work I did for Les Mills — it was a very high profile position and I valued the opportunities to train and motivate other industry professionals and support their growth.”

While working for Les Mills was a career highlight, Slapp’s proudest achievement has been to launch her own business — Bordoni Sport —offering high quality, technical fitness clothing to suit active women.

Bordoni Sport combines Slapp’s insights into practical fitness fashion with her talent for sewing, something she learnt from her grandmother at a young age.

To succeed, she gained additional fashion qualifications in London and has developed a presence in the increasingly competitive ‘ath-leisure’ industry.

“Creating my own brand is something I’ve always wanted to do and it tied in closely with my work in the fitness industry,” Slapp says.

“It’s an activewear brand designed by a fitness professional. As an athlete and fitness instructor, I know what designs work best and what doesn’t and I’m also really pedantic about the fabrics I use.

“My clothing is functional and stylish and it’s made for women who train hard but still want to feel confident in what they’re wearing.

“Starting the business is one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done.”

Now home living in Perth, Slapp continues to work in the fitness industry as a trainer at F45 East Perth and sells her Bordoni Sport collections online at www.bordonicreations.com

Her advice for any students wishing to pursue a similar career path is simple – know what you want to achieve and stay focused.

“You need to have a good idea what you want to do first, especially in sports science where there are so many facets of the industry you could end up in,” she says.

“Be sensible when picking your electives and select subjects which are likely to help you reach your future goals.”

Patricia is featured in ECU’s 25 years, 25 faces project, showcasing successful graduates from across the past quarter century. See www.ecu25.com.au for more.

As a former athlete, sports aerobics champion, fitness instructor and all‑round active woman, Patricia Slapp knows a thing or two about pushing yourself to your limits.

The former competitive gymnast had always fixed her eye on a career in fitness, so when she chose to study sports science at ECU it was a natural step.

The degree gave her the confidence to set her sights high and also valuable experience within the industry, gained while working at the University’s gym – ECU Sports – while she studied.

It was experience that helped her secure a job in London after graduation as a national trainer and presenter with fitness powerhouse Les Mills UK — where for 12 years she delivered training and fitness workshops and presented at national events.

“At Les Mills I trained other fitness professionals and they could really put you on the spot with questions, so having the background knowledge from my degree was really important,” Slapp says.

Patricia Slapp has climbed through the ranks of the fitness industry since she finished her sports science degree at ECU. She tells Danika Ferguson what keeps her moving.

For more information on ECU events, visit www.ecu.edu.au

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Can we actually multitask?

The Last Word

Many of us believe we can do

two things at once. We try it every

day even though our limitations are obvious.

Yet we persist, so much so that laws need to be passed to deal with our foolishness. For instance, it is illegal in all Australian states and territories to drive a motor vehicle while using a mobile phone, without some sort of hands-free arrangement. In some states, police fine pedestrians who use phones while crossing the road.

Young people often claim they are experts at multitasking. That they can monitor several electronic devices at once makes it seem to be the case.

But research demonstrates that when they try to do two things at once, they tend to do both poorly. Either they make more errors or take longer than when they did one thing at a time.

In one study, university students' laptops were monitored by a spyware program during lectures. It found students attempted to multitask by checking course material and taking lecture notes as well as looking at emails, engaging in social media, surfing the web and playing games.

The more often students engaged with non‑course‑related material, the worse their academic performance was in the course.

Three main principles explain our limitations in performing multiple tasks at the same time.

1. Some tasks require more attention than others

Walking, chewing and chatting seem to require so little attention that we can do them without thinking. By contrast, constructing an argument, reading a book and following a movie require considerable attention – particularly if we want to do the task well.

2. We are limited in how much attention we can devote to any task or tasks

This seems to be a limitation built in to our brain. If doing two tasks together requires less than maximum attention capacity, then we are likely to succeed. But if two tasks together exceed our attention capacity, then something has to give.

Even though driving and having a conversation might seem fairly easy, if the road conditions change and the act of driving becomes more challenging, the conversation would likely stop.

Our maximum attention capacity is also affected by our arousal state. If we are tired, we just don’t have the same attention capacity as when fully awake.

3. We can get better at multitasking

Our ability to perform some tasks can improve with practice.

In a recent study of mine, participants were presented with pictures of randomly arranged dots and asked to count them.

The more dots, the slower the response. But after seeing every picture many times, participants were equally fast whether there were six dots or eleven. They knew the answer automatically.

A similar process underlies our acquisition of cognitive skills such as reading.

Yet not all tasks can be practised to the point where they require little attention to perform. Holding a serious conversation is not something we can shunt off to automatic pilot and expect a worthwhile outcome.

So, can we do two things at once? It depends on the tasks we want to perform, how aroused we are, the extent of our experience, and how much we care about the quality of performance.

Professor Craig Speelman is the Associate Dean (Research) with ECU’s School of Arts and Humanities. This article was first published on theconversation.edu.au

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Postgrad study at ECU can help you change or further your career.As a postgrad student, you can choose from a range of study options including part-time, online or evening classes to fi t study into your life. You can also choose from a range of courses that develop the skills employers are seeking. So when the time comes to take the next step, you’ll be ready.

To fi nd out more visit ecugetready.com.au/postgraduate

ECU. That’s how university should be.

Get ready.

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Placing us amongst the best in Australia.

ECU has again been awarded fi ve stars for teaching quality by the Good Universities Guide, a record now unmatched by all but a few universities in Australia. In the latest Guide, graduates also rated ECU fi ve stars for overall education experience, skills development,student support and median graduate salary levels.

ECU Vice-Chancellor Professor Steve Chapman welcomed the latest fi ve star ratings.

“When it comes to university rankings, teaching quality is paramount. Good teachers are able to really engage their students with the theoretical and practical knowledge they will need to get ready for the workplace of the future,” Professor Chapman said.

The Good Universities Guide uses the results of a major annual survey of all Australian graduating students on their university experience and current employment. So at the end of your journey with ECU, you’ll be ready to take on the world.

ecugetready.com.au

ECU. That’s how university should be.

ECU rated fi ve stars for teaching quality eight years in a row.