staying power - australian national university...in brief 6 news from australia’s national...

Staying PowerPaths to healthy ageing

Malouf on the classics | Tales of a youth ambassador

SUMMER 2009

In brief 6News from Australia’s national university, including new information on ANU books and podcasts.

Staying power 9Paths to healthy ageing.

A mirror for our times 12David Malouf on the contemporary relevance of the classics.

Being the change 14One student’s journey to the United Nations.

Behind the numbers 16Understanding the importance of forensic accounting.

Folio: Robot world 18March of the Machines.

Reversing a tree regeneration crisis 20Charting the demise of Australia’s paddock trees.

Family tie inspires winning story 21Details on one of the nation’s most lucrative short story competitions.

Monsters of the deep 22Studying light could reveal the secrets of rogue waves.

After the fall 24Researchers look at the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Moving on, moving kids 26Turning the spotlight on relocation disputes.

Speaking of tongues 28Linguist makes the case for saving our dying languages.

Troubled in paradise 30Language students gain insight into the darker side of New Caledonia

Daily bread, ancient bones 32How archaeology is keeping a Bedouin community employed. Last word 34 Engineering a sustainable solution.

18

6

34

ANU Reporter is published quarterly by the

Communications and External Liaison Office

at The Australian National University.

Editor: Simon Couper

T: 02 6125 4171

F: 02 6125 5568

E: [email protected]

W: www.anu.edu.au/reporter

Mail: ANU Reporter

Communications and External Liaison Office

Office of the Vice-Chancellor

The Chancelry

The Australian National University

Canberra ACT 0200

Design: Jacci Pond

Production: Fairfax Media

Views expressed in ANU Reporter are not necessarily the views of The Australian National University. This publication may contain third-party advertisements. ANU does not endorse or recommend any of the third- party goods or services advertised and does not accept any responsibility or liability for the content of those advertisements or the goods or services they advertise.

Volume 40 No. 3

Cover: Kaarin Anstey on positive paths to ageing … Staying power p9.

Clarification: In ANU Reporter Spring 2009, p16, the article Supersized Solar stated that the Solar Thermal Group were “creators of the original big dish”. The original big dish was pioneered by Professor Stephen Kaneff and colleagues at ANU prior to the formation of the current Solar Thermal Group, which continues that line of research.

ISSN 0727-386X CRICOS Provider No. 00120C

www.anu.edu.au/reporterANU Reporter Summer 2009 � 3

SUMMER 2009

4 ANU Reporter Summer 2009

Something old, something new

VICE-CHANCELLOR

We are regularly reminded, in tones ranging from mild concern to outright alarm, that the Australian population is ageing. The forecasters say this trend will burden our economy, our health system, our society. They say we should plan now, to invest in the education and skills of younger generations, to build our skilled migration programs, or else. The outlook might not be bleak, but it’s certainly grey.

In this edition of ANU Reporter there are stories of how we are facing issues of ageing and change with determination and a sense of opportunity, not just foreboding. This is most apparent in the feature article on the work of Professor Kaarin Anstey and her team in the Ageing Research Unit at the Centre for Mental Health Research. She and her colleagues are exploring ways that ageing can be a positive experience, where achievable levels of exercise, mental challenge and social connection can help to keep us healthier in mind and body for longer.

As our bodies age, so too do our societies, and sometimes for the better. Few would argue that the changes that came about after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago have been wholly negative for the people of Germany. Three scholars of European history and politics reflect on how the wall’s destruction impacted on their own lives, and how it figures in the ongoing story of Europe and the world.

The passing of 20 years seems just a blink of the eye compared to the passage of time since the days of Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic empire. We know, or think we know, the broad sweep of ancient history, but ongoing work by ANU archaeologists in modern Syria is revealing new information about the mingling of Ancient Greek and local cultures — and bringing employment to contemporary Bedouin women into the bargain.

Next year it will be 20 years twice over since ANU Reporter first brought stories of discovery and achievement from ANU to you. The story of this magazine, like the institution it represents, is also one of maturation and growth. Thank you for your feedback from the reader survey included in the last edition. The editorial team is currently sifting through it with a view to bringing in some new — and cherished older — ideas in 2010. Your ideas and suggestions will help us to ensure that, as ANU Reporter ages, it remains a lively and relevant window into Australia’s national university.

Professor Ian Chubb AC Vice-Chancellor and President

ANU Reporter Summer 2009��

Omar Musa performs in the ANU Union as part of the launch day for the ANU Reconciliation Action Plan on 30 July 2009. Photo:�Stuart�Hay

FOCUS


IN BRIEF

Reconciliation Action Plan launched

Wes Whitten (front, centre) joins family and former colleagues at the opening of the new building named in his honour. Photo: Stuart Hay

Wes Whitten building opening

The new animal facility on campus has opened, the first in a series of projects to upgrade research and teaching facilities in the ANU College of Science.

The Wes Whitten Building is named for the University’s first veterinary officer, who served from 1949 to 1961.

Wes — who is 90 years old — attended the opening ceremony.

During his time at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Dr Whitten was involved in some groundbreaking research, including being the first to prove that in-vitro fertilisation of mammals could occur and produce viable embryos.

SHRIMP bound for Spain

Australian Scientific Instruments (ASI), a commercial enterprise of ANU, has sold its SHRIMP technology to the University of Granada in Spain for $6 million.

The SHRIMP is an ion microprobe developed at the Research School of Earth Sciences that measures the ages of rocks.

The University of Granada will now become the central point for European researchers as they use the SHRIMP to look back billions of years to examine the earliest crustal materials on the Earth’s surface.

ASI CEO Ed Roberts said the sale was proof that Australian research and development projects can compete with the best in the world.

Recently, the instrument has been enhanced for use in the environmental and nuclear sciences, with a particular application to the study of climate change.

Privileges for ANU graduates

Are you an ANU graduate? Update your contact details at www.anu.edu.au/alumni to receive invitations to special events, regular news and alumni privileges, including:

• ongoing email accounts

• library access

• privileged membership of University House with its reciprocal club memberships worldwide

• discounts with the Centre for Continuing Education

• alumni exchanges with universities such as Yale and Cambridge

• membership of a growing number of special interest groups and social networks

ANU staff and students launched the ANU Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) on 30 July 2009.

The ANU RAP formalises the University’s commitment to increase understanding of Indigenous culture and history, increase participation of Indigenous students and staff and foster partnerships in Indigenous research and development.

The plan was developed in consultation with Reconciliation Australia by the ANU RAP Committee, chaired by Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Professor Mick Dodson.

It focuses on four key areas of activity: undergraduate education, employment, graduate education and community engagement.

Speaking at the launch, Professor Dodson said that it was a proud day for the University.

“Today, the leading University in the nation sets an ambitious benchmark for other higher education institutions to follow,” Professor Dodson said.

“A document like this is not created overnight. It has taken almost two years of hard work and ongoing consultation by a team of people comprising ANU staff, students, and colleagues from Reconciliation Australia and Indigenous community members.”

The day’s events included a leadership breakfast, a concert featuring Indigenous performers, a reconciliation roundtable and an official presentation ceremony.

Professor Ian Chubb said that the action plan was significant for both the University and the nation.

“It is the obligation of the University to help those parts of the community that have been historically disadvantaged. If we who are privileged don’t work to overcome that disadvantage, who in this country will?” Professor Mick Dodson presents the ANU RAP to Professor Ian Chubb. Photo: Stuart Hay

ANU Reporter Summer 2009��

When larrikin appeared in Australian English at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a very negative word, strongly associated with street gangs, and synonymous with present-day hooligan. Larrikin, however, underwent a process of amelioration, and now means ‘a person who acts with disregard for social or political conventions; a maverick’. Ever since this transformation of larrikin, Australian English has been in search of a replacement for the old hooliganish sense.

Various regional terms have been tried. The first of these was westie, used to describe someone from the western suburbs of Sydney, and then to describe someone from a western suburb of Melbourne such as Footscray. Queensland chose the unusual bevan, which must have its origin in the proper name Bevan, although the precise circumstance of this origin is unknown. Was the eponymous Bevan perhaps a character in a television program? Tasmania produced a localised version of westie in chigga – a person from the working-class suburb of Chigwell in Hobart. Canberra chose booner, sometimes abbreviated to boon.

The earliest evidence for the Canberran booner is in The�Canberra�Times in March 1990. The males of the species ‘mainly have long hair and wear Metallica

shirts’, while the females ‘wear tight, black jeans, flannelette shirts and ug boots’. Booners are uncultured and thuggish: ‘The most noticeable characteristic of boons are narrow musical taste and a tendency to pick fights.’ The term booner is probably a shortening of the American boondocks ‘rough or isolated country’ (in turn a borrowing, by American soldiers, from bundok ‘mountain’ in the Tagalog language of the Philippines), and applied (perhaps unkindly?) to youths of such far-flung areas of Canberra as Woden and Tuggeranong.

And then came the bogan. The earliest evidence the Dictionary Centre has been able to find for bogan is in the surfing magazine Tracks in September 1985: ‘So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)? ’ At this stage, bogan was widely used in teenage slang for someone who was regarded as a bit of a dag, a sense popularised by the fictitious schoolgirl Kylie Mole. At about the same time, a second meaning for bogan emerged, close to the old sense of larrikin, and to the sense of the various regional replacements: westie, bevan, chigga, and booner. This second bogan is uncultured, boorish, and associated with a lower socio-economic class. The bogan is usually male, although a boganness occasionally makes a boganish appearance.

The origin of bogan is unknown. Some have argued that the term may derive from the Bogan River and district in western New South Wales (‘a person who is further west than a westie’?), but this is far from certain, and it seems more likely to be an unrelated coinage. Whatever the case, bogan has triumphed in Australian English, and it is now the standard term Australia-wide for the old larrikin. With its triumph, however, the regional terms are under threat. In Canberra, for example, the word booner, after its relatively short life, has almost entirely disappeared.

The Australian National Dictionary Centre is a joint venture between Oxford University Press and ANU. Director Bruce Moore takes a lexicographical look at our lingua franca.

definition: Bogan (n) Someone uncultured, boorish, and associated with a lower socio-economic class.

IN BRIEF

word watch

Indiana partnership leads to Asia centre

ANU has formed a new partnership with Indiana University (IU) in the United States to create a Pan-Asian Studies Institute.

IU will offer distance language courses in Uzbek and Pashto to ANU students via interactive video links, while ANU will initially offer Indonesian language studies to IU students via the same technology. ANU will also offer IU students Sanskrit through web-based learning.

The Pan-Asian Studies Institute will foster exchanges between the two institutions for senior researchers, early career researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students.

The alliance will also explore implementing jointly offered degrees so that students at ANU and IU can take full advantage of the partnership.

Federal funding supports green projects

ANU has won $1 million to increase sustainability measures on its Canberra campus.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett said the funding from the Federal Government’s Green Precincts Fund would help ANU implement its Education Precincts for the Future project.

“The funding will allow the ANU to install photovoltaic solar panels and trial a solar split air conditioning system – a technological innovation developed by ANU researchers,” Mr Garrett said.

“The University will also increase the use of carbon neutral transport on campus and upgrade facilities to assist long-distance bicycle commuters.”

The funding will also help ANU introduce water saving initiatives to reduce the University’s use of potable water, saving more than 44 megalitres of drinking water a year.

PM reveals plans for new centres

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced plans for two new centres at ANU as part of a renewed strategic relationship between the University and the Federal Government.

Delivering the annual Burgmann College address in August, Mr Rudd signalled plans to create a National Security Centre at ANU. “National security is now a very complex policy environment and senior officials need new sets of knowledge and skills to operate effectively and strategically within this new environment,” he said.

The following week, the Prime Minister announced plans for a new National Centre of Public Policy and Public Sector Management under a reinvigorated relationship between the University, the public service and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG).

Indiana University President Michael McRobbie signs the agreement with ANU.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaks at Burgmann College at ANU. Photo: Chapman Images


Millions of people owe an enormous debt to Howard Florey, who developed penicillin and whose achievements have been likened to those of Jenner, Pasteur and Lister. He was also a founder and chancellor of ANU, yet there are no roads or buildings named after him, nor a statue on campus. His only memorials are a tapestry at University House and a lecture theatre named after him.

Howard Walter Florey was born in Adelaide in 1898. The only son of a bootmaker, he was educated at St Peter’s College (dux 1916) and Adelaide University, from which he graduated in medicine. Awarded a Rhodes scholarship, he entered Oxford University where he worked in the laboratory of Nobel Prize laureate, Sir Charles Sherrington. It was Sherrington who stimulated Florey’s interest in experimental pathology and, over the next few years, Florey held positions at Cambridge and Sheffield universities before returning to Oxford as Professor of Pathology. He remained there for the next 27 years.

Florey’s laboratory was under equipped and poorly financed but, with the help of the Medical Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, it became one of the best equipped laboratories in England, if not the world. Despite his interests in lymphocytes and the cause of atheromatosis, he is best remembered

for his work with penicillin. Although discovered by Alexander Fleming, this drug was developed by Florey into the most important therapeutic innovation of the 20th century. Florey hardly knew Fleming and relations between the two were not good because of Fleming’s belief that he had not received adequate credit for his discovery. Florey, unassuming as always, put it down to luck that, of the many anti-bacterial substances he could have chosen to work on, he selected penicillin, which, unlike most antibiotics, is not poisonous to human beings and other higher animals.

Penicillin was first tested on a human in February 1941. With only a small quantity of the antibiotic available, it was decided to use it on a man suffering from blood poisoning and on the point of death. Within 24 hours the patient showed a remarkable improvement and further injections were given. His improvement continued, but Florey’s stock of penicillin was soon exhausted and the patient died. Florey decided not to treat any more cases until adequate supplies of penicillin were available. When eventually two more patients were treated, both recovered and penicillin’s miraculous properties as an antibiotic for humans were demonstrated convincingly.

In 1945 Florey, together with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming, shared the Nobel Prize for

medicine. Florey always emphasised the serendipitous nature of his research and pointed out that the development of penicillin was a team effort. In 1965 he was created Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston

But Florey should also be remembered for his part in founding ANU, and his role as Chancellor from 1965 to 1968, the year of his death. His life is well summed up by Sir Peter Medawar, who wrote, “He devoted the more important part of his professional life to a single wholly admirable purpose which he pursued until he achieved it, showing, in spite of many setbacks and rebuffs, the magnanimity that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great’.”

The�ADB�is�part�of�the�National�Centre�of�Biography�and�is�located�in�the�History�Program�of�the�Research�School�of�Social�Sciences�at�ANU.

IN BRIEF

Professor Terence Tao’s lecture on prime numbers is just one of the podcasts available on the ANU webpage.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) presents the lives of many notable Australian artists among its 11,500 biographies. Research Editor Dr Brian Wimborne looks at the life and contribution of Howard Florey.

life sentences

Howard Florey

Structure and randomness in the prime numbersProfessor Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles

Prime numbers are a fascinating blend of structure and randomness. Until now, this ‘pseudorandomness’ has been frustratingly elusive to prove, argues Aussie maths wunderkind Terence Tao. Yet, as Tao explains, recently there has been progress to establish new results about the primes.

Rethinking the Australian LegendProfessor Graeme Davison, Monash University

Fifty years after its publication Russel Ward’s book The�Australian�Legend remains the

classic account of our national origins, tracing Australia’s national ethos to the folksongs and ballads of the ‘nomad tribe’ of bush workers. What can the story tell us about the continuing dilemmas of living in a ‘new’ country?

Darwin’s Compass: Why the evolution of humans is inevitableProfessor Simon Conway Morris, University of Cambridge

Orthodox neo-Darwinism very much emphasises the random and contingent. Re-run the tape of life, as Steven Jay Gould famously observed, and the outcomes would be utterly different. Conway Morris argues for the exact reverse, basing his argument on the power of convergence.

Missed a public lecture at ANU? Why not catch up at the ANU Podcasts page, where you’ll find audio from talks on a smorgasbord of subjects. Here is a taste of three presentations covering prime numbers, the Australian legend and Darwinian evolution. Visit www.anu.edu.au/podcasts for the audio of these talks and more.

Catch up BookshelfANU researchers have created the world’s first comprehensive visual atlas of global rainfall projections over the next 100 years based on all of the models used by the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report.

PhD researcher Wee Ho Lim and Dr Michael Roderick have created the Atlas of the Global Water Cycle, which contains some 300 pages of global maps and tables showing current and projected measures of rainfall, evaporation and runoff.

The atlas illustrates the projections of each of the 20 computer models used by different countries to forecast future water cycles – data drawn upon by the IPCC in its reporting on climate change, but not visualised in the same way and place until now.

Read the water atlas and other titles from the University at ANU E Press: http://epress.anu.edu.au/

ANU Reporter Summer 2009�� 9ANU Reporter Summer 2009 � 9

Staying powerDoes getting older mean accepting the decline of our mental and physical faculties? Professor Kaarin Anstey and her colleagues at ANU are investigating ways in which ageing can be a positive experience, including the kinds of activities that are likely to contribute to healthier senior years.

BY WILL WRIGHT

Keeping the mind sharp through crosswords and other puzzles is one likely contributor to healthy ageing, Kaarin Anstey says. Photo: Stuart Hay


“Ageing is a global phenomenon, so we

need to think about how Australia relates to the

rest of the world, in terms of ageing well and what we can learn from other

countries.”

Driving and surviving

HEALTH

No one likes the prospect of being incapable of caring for themselves in their old age. Yet advances in health care and living standards

mean that more of us are likely to live longer than our ancestors. With this in mind, having trouble walking, not being able to drive or forgetting a loved one’s name are possible future realities for many of us. But can we prevent the seemingly inevitable?

Professor Kaarin Anstey, director of the Ageing Research Unit at ANU, believes academics could provide the answers. She was recently presented with the 2009 Ewald W. Busse Research Award in Paris for her contribution to international research in gerontology, particularly the social and behavioural aspects of ageing.

“There are a lot of negative stereotypes about ageing, physically and socially, and researchers are addressing some of those stereotypes – we need to discover what people can do to age well,” Professor Anstey says.

“Ageing is a global phenomenon, so we need to think about how Australia relates to the rest of the world, in terms of ageing well and what we can learn from other countries.”

The Ageing Research Unit was established in 2004 as part of the Centre for Mental Health Research. The Personality and Total Health (PATH) Through Life Project and Dynamic Analyses to Optimising Ageing (DYNOPTA) are two studies that are central to the research unit’s work.

The PATH project provides information on mental health and well being, cognition, genetics and brain ageing. The project aims to track and define the lifespan course of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and cognitive ability, identify environmental risk and protective factors within these domains, and examine the relationships between depression, anxiety and substance abuse with cognitive ability and dementia.

“The PATH project is really unique because we’re looking at young, middle-aged and older people,” Anstey says.

“We’ve taken a whole set of people from the electoral roll, we’re following them up and seeing who ends up showing cognitive decline and, ultimately, dementia.

“We’re looking at some of the risk factors in mid-life associated with very subtle cognitive decline and we’re also collaborating with ANU Medical School to look at cardiovascular health in mid-life.

“We’re able to look at risk factors and health behaviours to determine how they affect long-term outcomes — there’s currently no other study in Australia that is doing that.”

Although researchers are only half way through the project, they have already made some interesting findings. One of these initial findings was that light drinkers outperformed abstainers in every age group in a series of tasks that measure the brain’s ability to process and retain information.

Anstey says we should not jump to the conclusion that drinking a couple of glasses of wine every night will enhance our ability to think. But she says evidence suggests that “safe levels” of alcohol consumption support positive ageing.

There are many ways people can age well — not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, reading, riding a bicycle, spending time with friends and undertaking a university course are just some lifestyle choices to consider.

Anstey says the DYNOPTA project is “really innovative” because it has the biggest dataset of older adults in Australia with more than 50,000 participants, and pools nine Australian longitudinal ageing studies, which involve repeated observations over long periods

Driving is one of the great markers of personal liberty for adults in our society — but there comes a time for many people when the mental and physical effects of ageing make it difficult or dangerous to stay behind the wheel. But what if clever computer vision systems could mitigate some of these effects, making it safer for older drivers to keep on cruising? Professor Kaarin Anstey and her colleagues in the Ageing Research Unit at ANU have been leading a project looking at how the thought processes and vision of older people contributes to how they perceive and react to potential road hazards.

Working with researchers from the University of Queensland, the Queensland University of Technology and National ICT Australia, the team has carried out an extensive Cognitive Ageing and Hazard Perception study funded by the NRMA ACT Road Safety Trust and the ARC. Project staff asked older people from the Canberra region about which road areas they found difficult or hazardous to navigate while driving. From this, the researchers were able to create a computer-based simulation of those areas, which allowed them to test people’s visual and cognitive reactions to various scenarios.

Over 300 older Canberrans have now been tested on the system, giving the research team a rich mix of information on perceptions and reactions. The test is currently being evaluated against on-road driving performance. In other epidemiological research, Anstey and colleagues have also evaluated factors that predict giving up driving, patterns of driving associated with licensing across states in Australia and the mental health impact of driving cessation.

ANU Reporter Summer 2009�� 11

Exercise combined with social or family connections are two other factors that increase

the chances of healthier ageing. Photo: ©istockphoto.com/mammamaart

of time. The project focuses on four outcomes that significantly contribute to the burden of disease and disability: dementia and cognition, mental health, sensory disability and mobility limitations.

“We can look at: what’s ageing like when you get over 90? What is mental health like in the 90s? What is normal cognitive decline? Through the project we’re addressing some major policy issues around ageing in Australia and internationally.”

The study’s researchers have already been able to start investigating rates of expected dementia prevalence and do modelling of different health futures.

“Epidemiology gives you a lot of answers to things that you can’t get any other way,” Professor Anstey says.

The researchers use this information about factors affecting the health and well being of populations to determine who is ageing well and assess their lifestyles more broadly, including social networks and volunteering.

Another key focus of the Ageing Research Unit is to develop national capacity in ageing research through postgraduate and postdoctoral training. It aims to produce researchers with outstanding methodological skills and a sound grounding in the central theoretical frameworks of lifespan development and ageing. Fourteen graduate students are undertaking research projects related to ageing and cognitive decline.

The studies’ findings will help inform policymakers, which Professor Anstey hopes will lead to better outcomes for Australia’s ageing population.

“At the moment, there isn’t a lot of evidence around older adults in a number of areas so decisions are being made based on what people think,” Professor Anstey says.

“We’ve got more people living to older ages than ever before — there are things we simply don’t know about what happens at ages 80 and 90. People are healthier and are living longer so we’re actually charting new territory. We’ve got to be careful we’re not making assumptions based on what it used to be like when you retired at 65 and your life expectancy might have been 70.”

Professor Anstey says academics “can make a difference” and they have a responsibility to provide policymakers with evidence-based research so the right decisions are made.

“The thought that we can discover ways to enable people to age better and optimise their brain function motivates me to do this research. There are public health initiatives that can delay or maybe prevent cognitive decline.”


CLASSICS

David Malouf speaks at the launch of the new

classics degree. Photo: Stuart Hay

A mirror for

our timesour timesDavid Malouf is an avid scholar of the classics.

The life of Ovid inspired his novel An Imaginary Life, and the Iliad was the foundation for his latest novel Ransom. In

September, Malouf spoke at ANU to launch the new Bachelor of Classical Studies degree and the reinvigorated Classics

Endowment Fund. Here is an edited version of his address, in which he explains how classical culture and literature is

reflected in contemporary art and anxieties.

A mirror for


My earliest contact with the classical world, and the Greek and Roman component in our inherited culture, came during my quaint, rather

old-fashioned primary school education in Queensland. Once each week we turned to the back of our soft–covered, bright green Language primers and devoted a whole period to Greek and Latin roots. We took a Greek or Latin verb, or noun, or prefix, or adjective, an ‘amo’ or ‘anima’ or ‘magnus’ or ‘epi’ or ‘ante’ and studied a half-dozen or more big words in English that derived from them, and as homework chased up a dozen even bigger and more obscure ones.

I loved the idea that they had roots that went deep down into the past which also extended luxuriantly above ground as well in our everyday speech. It was exciting to discover that there were dead languages that weren’t really dead at all and could spring up in new places; where now they were taken for granted as part of the living language, but could also be studied in their original form. I immediately determined when I got to high school to do Latin.

I was also delighted that our language, English, was so complex; a living thing that itself had roots in other languages. In Greek, Latin, French but also in bits of Dutch and Malay and Hindi, because as a little colonial growing up in an odd, out-of-the-way corner of the world, in a transplanted culture, and with mixed English and foreign parents, I had already begun to perceive that my real home was in English, which was itself mixed, and all the richer for it, and that through English I too had roots in many other languages and the ways of thinking that came with them.

The classical was only one of these, but an intriguing one. Through our Queensland Readers we got just a teasing glimpse of what might be. The stories of Persephone, and Echo and Narcissus, and Clytie who became a sunflower, and Hyacinthus; the story of Croesus, as told by Tolstoy; of Epimenthus and Pandora; of Midas, of Atlanta, of Damon and Pythias, of Horatius at the bridge of the slave and the lion, and various fables of Aesop, and the stories of the months and how they got their names.

I did go on to Latin at high school and was properly drilled. I can still recite, after more than sixty years (or rather sing) the list of prefixes that require the ablative: a ab absque coram de/ palam clam cum ex and e/ and unto these etc. We read the Aeneid Book XII and Cicero’s De�Amicitia, and in Senior the Pro�Ligario and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book VIII, and I got an early taste for Horace. I even did 1st Year Latin at university, and read the Agricola or Tacitus, the Aeneid Book II, and began to study for myself Ovid’s Amores and as much of the shorter Horace as I could — all of which, though I didn’t know it then, I was preparing, somewhere deep down in the distant future, to make use of, in ways that would be personal and essential to me.

I also read the Iliad for the first time, in the EV Rieu translation that I still go back and back to — it was, I think, the earliest of the Penguin Classics, and The�Golden�Ass and the Satyricon, both at that time newly discovered and in vogue, and found my way to Plutarch, who turned out to be a lifelong favourite. Also it goes almost without saying, the Greek dramatists and Plato.

I have written in a story how I sat reading Phaedrus, with my naked bottom sticking to the chair, while I waited on a hot Brisbane afternoon, aged just 17, for the medical examination which would induct me into the University Air Squadron. You cannot, I think, get a more fleshy or appropriate account of a relationship

with a classical text than that. What I mean to suggest, in telling all this, is how, when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, before we heard of post-colonialism or multiculturalism or Eurocentricity, and the anxieties that come with them, it was simply taken for granted that young people should be introduced to the whole of their cultural inheritance, as if it was still a living thing and mattered, and to the fullness, too, of what our language, which has always been opportunistic, all promiscuous appropriation and bricolage, had taken to itself and made its own and had also made ours.

As for us here in what is no longer, as I called it earlier, an odd out-of-the-way corner of the world, we too might see ourselves reflected in the Roman mirror, being involved as we are with the American imperium and part of a world that, at least for those of us in the first world, is global; being involved too with the same questions of how to hold together a multi-ethnic and multicultural society, and with global, if not quite imperial, obligations; and involved, as we have been for nearly half a century now, in small but almost continuous wars. I spoke … of how struck I was, looking at recent anthologies of Australian poetry, by how many poems, by a large range of poets, took either their subject or their form from classical, largely Roman sources. The late Roman world is clearly where we too find a mirror of the times. An imitation, direct reference back to classical sources is alive in the work of a good number of local writers.

My own practice here goes back almost to the beginning of my writing life and has been a continuous thread. In the late sixties, odes appear in my first full collection, Bicycle�and�other�poems, which was put together in 1969. There are two more in my latest collection, Typewriter�Music. My second novel, An�Imaginary�Life, which was published in 1978, is a longish dramatic monologue, spoken by Ovid in the form of a lost ‘letter from Pontus’ addressed directly to a reader of the distant future. It uses his exile, specifically, as I saw it, from his own language, as a way of exploring the relationship, for a poet of language and being, and took up the then unknown post-colonial question, as it was later called, of the relationship between the centre and the edge, the metropolitan world and the distant offshoot of that world that is the metropolitan world reconfigured and translated — a very Australian question, of course. Just this year I have published a novel Ransom about Priam, Achilles and the meeting between them that makes up the last book of the Iliad.

It has always seemed astonishing to me that the Iliad standing as it does at the very beginning, twenty seven centuries ago, of our literary culture, should remain after all that time perhaps the greatest single work our culture has produced. Readers at every point since then have found something in it that speaks powerfully to their human concerns and anxieties, and directly to their feelings. In 1941, Simone Weil wrote of it: ‘for

those who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the centre of human history, the Iliad is the most beautiful and purest mirror’.

But force is not the only quality we find there. There is also Priam’s extraordinary courtesy to the woman who has come in, a stranger, and destroyed his world. There is the tender scene between Hector, Andromache and the child Astyanax, when they laugh over the child’s fear of Hector in his warrior’s helmet. There are the hundred and more ways, brutally described, of meeting a warrior’s death, which Homer takes the time to make in each case individual and unique.

Most extraordinary of all, is the largeness of spirit, the all-encompassing sympathy, with which Homer treats both sides in this conflict: the same respect for both the horror and pity: ‘The Sun had already lit the fields with its first beams when the Trojan and Achaean parties met. Even so, they found it difficult to recognise their dead before they had washed away the clotted blood with water. Then, as they lifted them into the wagons, the hot tears flowed. King Priam had forbidden his men to cry aloud. So they heaped the corpses on the pyre in silent grief, and when it had consumed them in the flames they went back to holy Ilium’.

And over all hangs the fate, already known, of Ilium, Troy the emblematic city, with all, for the Greeks, that a city stands for. Again in 1941, we hear from Simone Weil, who sees in the fall of a great city, of which Troy is the first and lasting archetype, ‘the greatest calamity the human race can experience’.

Ransom begins, oddly enough, at pretty much the same time that Simone Weil was writing her great essay, in the midst of war. In 1943, to be precise, in Brisbane, a wartime city, where as a nine-year-old, I heard the Troy story for the first time on a rainy Friday afternoon when we were unable to go out in the playground as usual for our period of tunnel-ball, and our teacher, Miss Findlay, read to us instead. I immediately identified Troy, under the threat of imminent fall, with our own sand-bagged and blacked-out city that was waiting then, with the outcome of the war still unknown, for the Japs to arrive, and my own childish fears with the horrors of that earlier war. On several occasions afterwards, those old emotions rose up and haunted me in the shape of poems. One of them, An�Episode�from�an�Early�War, is quoted in part in the Afterword to Ransom. It took more than 60 years for those anxieties and questions — about force, about war, about the fate of ordinary men and women in war, about what in the midst of such horrors is to be grasped as enduringly human, to find its shape as a piece of fiction. One of the things that pleases me most about the success the book had is the number of readers it sent to Homer’s great original: to what so many have discovered or rediscovered as our great contemporary masterpiece, whose richness, and generosity of spirit, and feeling for what it is to be human — like so much that belongs to the world of classical feeling and thought — once found, they cannot do without.

More: Listen to David Malouf’s entire speech: http://www.anu.edu.au/discoveranu/content/podcasts/the_classics_today

Find out more about the Bachelor of Classical Studies: http://cass.anu.edu.au/BClassStudies

Find out more about the Classics Endowment Fund: http://www.anu.edu.au/endowment/

“We too might see ourselves reflected in the Roman mirror, being involved as we are with the American imperium and part of a world that … is global.”


Gandhi suggested that we ‘be the change.’ But when you’ve got an impending law exam, a resume to

build and a Facebook addiction, what does this really mean?

Last year, I was selected to be Australia’s Youth Representative to the United Nations. It took me around Australia, meeting thousands of young people, and then to New York, where I addressed the General Assembly. I learned vital lessons about what real change involves.

I had never imagined I would get to the UN. I was a disengaged Arts/Law student, who cared more about having fun than getting high distinctions. The law I learned was a series of rules, suspended in a vacuum outside culture and politics, to be memorised and regurgitated, memorised and regurgitated. Even my Arts degree seemed to prise open an artificial chasm between intellect and feeling. We debated Fukuyama and Waltz without asking why they mattered. What was the human impact of their theories? Who were these societies they analysed? Where were all the stories? I tuned out.

Life was good in Canberra: its challenges involved lying facedown on my bed, cramming constitutional law before my exam in six hours, pausing for glasses of wine with housemates. So why did I feel so restless?

After my first year of uni, I packed my bags and went to Kenya, where I had spent part of my gap year volunteering in an orphanage. This time, I worked at Kakuma Refugee Camp: a lifeless desert on the Sudan border, littered with crude huts, overflowing ditch-sewers and emaciated children.

I met people like Almerina, a woman who campaigned fiercely for female education even though she was dying of AIDS; like 18- year-old Alice, whose two beloved children were the product of rape. I was left wondering how such generosity and resilience can remain amongst the poorest, most desperate people in the world. I realised you can learn more by going somewhere than studying it.

With more context, university became more meaningful, but my restlessness continued. I studied in bursts, worked in bars and pestered Rotary until I accumulated sufficient travel funds. I ventured to places like the Northern Territory, where I worked for women’s advocacy services in remote communities; Iran, where I met desert nomads and showered naked under waterfalls; and Pakistan, where I watched sacks of opium being smuggled, and toured an AK-47 factory.

The stories I encountered in these places taught me Gandhi’s quote was more than just a platitude. I applied to be Youth Rep.

Working at the UN was simultaneously exciting, disillusioning and inspiring.

My first week was World Leaders Week, a surreal ‘spot the famous face’ experience. During one morning shift, in a temporary

ANU College of Law student Melanie Poole spent months meeting 4,000 young people in around 400 towns across Australia before taking their concerns all the way to the United Nations General

Assembly in New York. Poole was one of two Australians selected as a Youth Representative to the UN in 2008. She writes for ANU Reporter

about the fun, frustration and rewards of international diplomacy.

Being the change

STUDENT LIFE

Melanie Poole says life lessons are learnt in unlikely places. Photo: Belinda Pratten.

ANU Reporter Summer 2009�� 1�

hotel-based office, our pyjama-clad foreign minister, Stephen Smith, stumbled in on a confused coffee mission. A (light) beer with Prime Minister Rudd was another highlight.

Mostly I worked in the Third Committee, negotiating human rights resolutions. Negotiations could be controversial — especially on gender and sexuality. They could also drag on. One meeting lasted five hours because countries disagreed over where to insert the word “and”. We were meant to be resolving extreme poverty.

National face-saving was exasperating. As Sudan reported their brilliant treatment of women, I thought of young women like Alice, whose brutal rapes had been perpetrated by government-backed militia. Countries often completely ignored each other. I sometimes saw diplomats on Facebook.

Just as I was wondering if it all meant anything, I had the chance to address the General Assembly.

I said that young Australians expect the United Nations to do better. That we do not accept the logic that allows trade deals to be binding, but human rights protection to be optional. That we reject arguments of inevitability when it comes to poverty, environmental degradation and gender

inequality. That young people will challenge decisions that are mired in ideology and orthodoxy, and thus UN members should seek their input seriously — not just from a few youth representatives.

It was, however, a side event that I organised with the Dutch youth rep that was my most meaningful achievement. Our keynote speaker was a young African-American woman from Harlem, named Aja-Monet Bacquie, whom I had met at a women’s conference. She is a youth activist and a bold spoken-word poet.

The UN is its own world — diplomats rarely step outside. So it was moving to hear Aja say, “If you travel for 15 minutes, this is what you’d find,” and illustrate life in Harlem’s housing projects.

Because we were discussing the Millennium Development Goals, Aja commented, “if you asked people from my project what poverty was, they wouldn’t say any of the things you’ve mentioned.” She said they would define poverty as a lack of control over your life, lack of a voice, having no ability to participate — things that run deeper than material deprivation.

I wasn’t sure how Aja-Monet would be received in a UN setting — where people

were solemn and never applauded. But she received a standing ovation.

Overall, however, there was little ‘youth activity’ at the UN. There were only about 20 countries who sent youth reps, so it was hard to be visible. Young people in developing countries were not well represented. We were a small group who could not honestly claim to represent international youth. It felt fraudulent enough to claim representation of all Australian youth — and here I was, expected to be a voice for the youth of the world. Nonetheless, moments like Aja’s speech convinced me that I had achieved something.

My year at the UN was a political education. And yet, despite the cynical realities, I remain convinced that every person has the capacity to change the world. In order to do so, however, we need to seek out unconventional experiences. We need to remember that real success is not just about educational attainment or great resumes, but connecting deeply with the stories around us.

As a Youth Representative, wayward law student and slightly mad traveller, I have realised that we will learn our most important lessons in the unlikeliest of places.

“Real success is not just about educational attainment or great resumes, but connecting deeply with the stories around us.”

Time at the UN was also a chance for Melanie to meet leaders like former US President Bill Clinton, Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.


FINANCE


Behind the numbersThe thought of marrying the words forensic and accounting may seem like an odd coupling;

after all, forensics is all about science, isn’t it? Or is forensic accounting simply the latest in the seemingly never-ending series of catch-phrases devised to cash in on recent global events? On the contrary, forensic accounting is real, in demand, and likely to reshape accounting as we know it.

BY JANELLE ENTWISTLE

It’s hard to imagine accountants featuring in the next episode of CSI, but the time has come for them to take a starring role.

We think of forensics as being a high tech, foolproof, scientific way of making sure that ’good’ defeats ‘evil’, but what we don’t always think of is how accountants can use forensic principles to identify and respond to illicit activity and corporate failure.

Recent events have led to an ever-increasing need for financial accountability within the public and private sectors, but how do organisations really measure and communicate their financial performance? Most of us have spent time wondering how on earth large companies can simply collapse overnight and why nobody seemed to see it coming, let alone prevent it.

Given the volume of significant corporations such as HIH and OneTel that have made dramatic and expensive exits from the corporate landscape, now more than ever we need to understand how and why these collapses occurred, and, more importantly, how to learn from them.

Forensic accounting deals with the analysis of such corporate breakdowns in an effort to avoid repeating some of the less enviable moments in Australian corporate history. Through the marriage of principles from accounting, law, statistics and IT, the discipline focuses on prevention, fact-finding, diagnosis and review.

“The collapses of HIH, OneTel, and ABC Learning — as well as the Commonwealth Superannuation Scheme fraud — have each required considerable effort from forensic accountants who must sift through volumes of information in deriving evidence of financial positions, relationships and events,” says Dr David Lacey, Lecturer in the School of Accounting and Business Information Systems in the ANU College of Business and Economics, and Chair of the ACT Institute of Chartered Accountants Forensic Accounting Special Interest Group.

“Industry and government leaders are only now really coming to terms with how forensic accountants can add value to their organisations before it’s too late. Whilst the more public and high-profile collapses of late have cast forensic accountants as those that typically perform an accounting autopsy once an organisation is lost and uncertainty reigns, the real gains being made are for those corporate and government agencies that see forensic accountants as providing a key diagnostic

capability geared towards the prevention or the mitigation of business risk.”

Lacey should know. Prior to joining ANU, he headed the Australian Crime Commission’s financial crime special intelligence operations.

“My time at the ACC and before that in the financial services sector in Sydney highlighted the critical importance of forensic accounting in business today.”

Forensic accounting can also help us ‘non-accountants’ to better understand the implications of events that are happening now, and the impact that they might have on future generations by looking at human behaviour through the analysis of financial events. By using accounting data, forensic accountants can explore why people choose to take action or not take action in certain situations, and in doing so make sense of what many of us would term ’unpredictable behaviour’.

“It’s a very human trait to try to find cause and blame, to be able to point the finger, and to try to make sense of chaotic behaviour,” Lacey says. “Forensic accountants are just like investigators, while they may have a pre occupation with facts, opinions and assumptions, they are behaviouralists at heart.”

ANU is one of the first universities in the world to embark on the journey to make forensic accounting education and research more accessible to the accounting fraternity.

Lacey has conducted a national survey of forensic accounting practitioners and a number of focus groups with professional bodies to examine the nature of forensic accounting and the need for it within our society.

“To date, our research has been focused on the preventative and diagnostic aspects of forensic accounting. Working with some of the world’s largest banks, telecommunication carriers and insurers has proved invaluable in enhancing knowledge of key risk control behaviours and measures that are geared towards best practice prevention and detection strategies.”

His research also found that there has been a considerable investment in forensic accounting capabilities by Commonwealth and State governments, along with private practice: however, this is yet to translate into the development of tertiary courses to support growing demand.

ANU is bridging this gap through the introduction of a graduate course exploring financial analytics for investigation, making it one of the first tertiary institutions in the world to offer a course that captures the diagnostic elements and analytics of forensic accounting practice.

The course will be delivered intensively and has attracted strong interest from business and government.

As an additional contribution to defining and shaping the future of the discipline in Australia, the ANU College of Business and Economics will host the first National Forensic Accounting Research & Teaching Symposium in February 2010.

“The symposium will go a long way to defining the future direction of forensic accounting teaching and research in Australia in the short-to-medium term, and the discipline will benefit from the participation of researchers, teachers and forensic accounting practitioners throughout the region.”

“It’s a very human trait to try to find cause

and blame, to be able to point the finger, and to try to make sense of

chaotic behaviour.”


Robot world Music videos are usually about sex, romance, violence or other everyday dramas — but science? Would the post-MTV generation watch a pop video about physics? Chemistry? Biology? Robotics?

FOLIO

1 2

�


The answer to that last question is a resounding yes. PhD researcher Bobby Cerini from the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science has made a music video about robotics, using the pop video genre to raise consciousness on issues related to science. Her first effort – Robot�World – was celebrated at the

national Scinema festival this year, where it won Best Experimental Film. Cerini says she wants to encourage people to think about how robotic technologies are being used, and consider the social and ethical issues they raise. She plans to develop more videos about science, technology and its social contexts,

complementing her doctorate on the relationship between fame and science communication, in which she has interviewed people like David Attenborough, David Suzuki and the team from the TV show Mythbusters. More: Watch Robot World at Bobby Cerini’s website: www.robotworld.net.au

1. “Today’s humanoid robots are increasingly life-like to touch and interact with – right down to their facial expressions and the texture and appearance of their skin,” says Cerini.

2. “I found that robots now flood the consumer electronics market, from vacuum cleaners to simple toys like this HEXBUG robot, which responds to touch and sound.”

3. “The film asks questions about the line between human and robot, and how easily it can be crossed”.

4. “With the help of ANU’s Robotic Systems Group, I was able to film Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in flight on our campus. Robots like these have many potential applications, including in mapping, surveillance, defence and search and rescue operations”.

�. “Like many robots in use today, NASA’s Mars Rovers are an incredible feat of engineering, and their use helps and challenges us in many ways.” Image: NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org 6. “I had to build some simple robots for the film, including this solar spider by OWI Robotics. It provided some good science and some great visuals too!” �. “I was staggered by the diversity of robotics research and manufacture in Australia - including this Canberra-made AusRobot which can climb stairs, navigate corners and detect bombs”

3 4

�

6


ENVIRONMENT

Paddock trees provide shelter for livestock, homes for native animals, barriers against soil erosion and a host of other benefits.

They’re an icon of the Australian countryside — and they’re disappearing at an alarming rate. An ANU research project has developed simple steps that could turn the tree crisis around.

BY TIM WETHERELL

Reversing a tree regeneration crisis

It’s long been known that paddock trees in much of Australia’s temperate grazing region are not regenerating. With every

year we lose a few more as the old trees die, but nothing is coming through to replace them. In recent years there’s been a growing realisation that the situation is rapidly evolving into a crisis.

“Under existing management practices, millions of hectares of grazing country, currently supporting tens of millions of trees, will be treeless within decades from now,” says Dr Joern Fischer from the Fenner School of the Environment and Society. “And the loss of this tree cover is predicted to lead to massive declines in biodiversity and grazing productivity.”

Dr Fischer’s Sustainable Farms research group has spent the last couple of years documenting the extent of the tree regeneration failure and has been investigating if the situation can be reversed by changing land management.

“Although clearing has largely stopped, tree cover continues to decline because many existing trees are dying of old age, and few young trees are regenerating,” says Fischer. “We studied a 1,000,000 hectare

Older paddock trees are dying at a rapid rate. Photo: Kate Sherren

area in the Upper Lachlan catchment of New South Wales. Typical paddock trees are often over 140 years old and, in many locations, no young trees have regenerated for decades.”

But it’s not all bad news. The researchers also found that trees do regenerate under some management practices. For example, it was found that trees are more likely to regenerate in areas with low soil fertility or under high-intensity rotational grazing (as opposed to conventional continuous grazing).

“Our study identified a short list of management options for maintaining paddock trees,” says Fischer. “In some areas, natural regeneration is unlikely in the short term, for example, because there are few parent trees, or because soil nutrient levels are high. In such areas, scattered trees can be planted with reusable tree guards that protect individual trees from livestock — some pioneering farmers are doing this already. Another option is to temporarily exclude livestock from a paddock prior to reseeding it and resting it for several years — an approach successfully used by Greening Australia in the Canberra region.”

Ultimately, however, the study found that maintaining tree cover over vast areas

cannot be done without nature’s help — that is to say, via natural regeneration. Therefore, farm ecosystems must become self-sustaining, allowing for natural tree regeneration while also providing an income to farmers.

“Our findings suggest that self-perpetuating farm ecosystems with farm trees can be created by applying high intensity rotational grazing with long rest periods, and by phasing out fertiliser use,” explains Fischer. “Even where these practices are adopted, changes in tree regeneration will not occur overnight. But unless significant changes in management are introduced now, old trees will continue to disappear, and opportunities for natural regeneration will continue to be lost.

“The future of Australia’s paddock trees depends on urgent and widespread management action. While mature trees still exist, they provide regeneration nuclei throughout the landscape, thereby offering a window of opportunity to reverse the tree regeneration crisis.”

This article first appeared in ScienceWise: http://sciencewise.anu.edu.au

“Under existing management practices, millions of hectares of grazing country, currently supporting tens of millions of trees, will be treeless within decades from now.”


WRITING

The inspiration for Lily, Eliza Murray’s winning story in this year’s annual Uni Pub / ANU Short Story Competition, came from her grandmother — a

woman who could break apples in half with her bare hands and make a “mean” four inch tall scone.

Murray says that, although most of the events in the story are based on her grandmother’s life, the real Lily is not nearly as laconic as the book’s central character.

“The real Lily taught me the alphabet backwards when I was five, when she could still break apples in half with her bare hands,” Murray says.

“She was the darling of the local bowls circuit — for her bowling skills and not just for the scones. She’s flown in helicopters in Papua New Guinea and tells me it’s far too dangerous a place for me to visit.”

Murray says that the story illustrates the toughness of Australian women — particularly of her grandmother’s generation, “the way they just coped with whatever came their way and got on with things.”

Now in its third year, the Uni Pub/ANU short story competition has become one of Australia’s richest short story contests with a total prize pool of more than $10,000.

As author of the winning story, Ms Murray takes home $6,000 and her story will be published in Award Winning Australian Writing, a national anthology of short stories.

A panel of judges including ANU Dean of Students Professor Penny Oakes, Uni Pub co-owner and former journalist Eric Walsh, and Brian Johns, former managing director at Penguin Australia, shortlisted the competition’s ten finalists from nearly 150 entries.

The winners were announced on Thursday, 17 September 2009.

“We’re here to recognise and celebrate the great flowering of writing talent across our campus,” said Professor Oakes at the presentation ceremony.

“For the past year, ANU students from all corners of our campus — from Engineering through to Science to Music and Language Studies, and from first year undergrads to PhD students — have been drafting stories and redrafting them, pressing delete and starting all over again, giving up in despair, then having another go.

“As always, it was difficult - very difficult, but the full panel was unanimous in its view that the standard this year was extremely high, and that all ten finalists deserved special recognition.”

Professor Oakes congratulated Eliza Murray on her winning story and urged her to continue writing.

“This story charmed us all in an instant. Its fresh, unmannered prose captured so much with seemingly so little effort. Congratulations Eliza and keep writing.”

More: To read Eliza Murray’s story and see more details about the runners up, visit the Dean of Students website at: http://www.anu.edu.au/dos/story_comp/short_story09.htm

Family tie inspires winning story

For three years now ANU students have been swapping study for scribing as they vie for one of the prizes in the Uni Pub/ANU Short Story Competition. One of the richest short story prizes in Australia, this year the winner drew on her grandmother’s wisdom to secure first place.

BY PENNY COX

Uni Pub/ANU Short Story Competition prizes 2009

Eliza Murray accepts her prize. Photo: Christina Apps

1st Prize of $6,000: Eliza Murray, for her entry Lily

2nd prize of $3,000: Drew Ninnis, for his entry The�Joints�of�the�old�House�creaked�in�the�Breeze

3rd prize of $2,000: Kirani Carlin for her entry Dusk

Runners up: Adrian Power, Sianon Daley Hilary Manning, Claire Capel-Stanley, Sophie Wilkinson, Tim Collins, Will Glasgow


From left: Brian Schmidt is the lead scientist on the SkyMapper project. Photo: Belinda Pratten; The instrument is installed into its permanent housing. Photo: Donna Burton

SCIENCE

The history of seafaring is filled with romantic stories of faraway lands and fantastic things. Some of these can be dismissed as fanciful sea stories,

but others may turn out to have a grounding in real physics. One recurrent report is of rogue waves — giant walls of water that seem to rise out of the ocean from nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Within the laws of linear wave physics this makes no sense. Whilst two waves can meet to create a larger one, the likelihood of such an event concentrating the energy into one monster wave is essentially zero. Yet, over the years, reports from experienced mariners and physical evidence of damage to ships continues to mount.

Professor Nail Akhmediev of the ANU Optical Sciences Group is a world leader in the field of non-linear optics, spending most of his time modelling phenomena like solitons and laser pulses in waveguides. But although such work is driven by a desire to improve optical devices, it may also have important implications in explaining these rogue waves.

“Waves on the ocean and light beams may seem like totally different, things, but the underlying mathematics are almost exactly the same.” Professor Akhmediev

explains. “There’s no reason why models based on mathematical concepts like the non-linear Schrödinger equation can’t work as well for water as they do for light and quantum wave functions.”

This is a view shared by oceanographers like Dr Kristian Dysthe of the University of Bergen, who began adapting some of Professor Akhmediev’s solutions of the non-linear Schrödinger equation to ocean waves and looking at the higher than usual waves they predicted.

“Dr Dysthe’s work really got me interested in the applications of the non-linear Schrödinger equation to oceanography so I began to explore more advanced solutions that might account for rogue waves exactly as they’ve been described by mariners.”

One particular class of solution presents a scenario where two waves amplified by non-linear effects occur in the same place at the same time purely by coincidence. This leads to further non-linear behaviour, resulting first in a great hole appearing in the water followed by a massive peaked wave many times higher than the average wave height in the local conditions.

This is an almost exact description of an incident

experienced by the passenger liner Queen�Elizabeth�II back in 1995. The captain is quoted as saying “The ship’s bow dropped into a ‘hole’ of a trough behind the first wave and was hit by a second wave of between 91 and 96 feet high that cleaned a mast right off the foredeck.” Fortunately, none of the passengers or crew were injured and the ship survived, but not every vessel hit by a rogue wave has been so lucky. In 1978 the 37,000 ton MS�München, a modern and well maintained ship, was lost with all hands. Although no one can be certain of the cause, the ship’s lifeboat was found with damage to its mountings, suggesting that it was torn from the davits, almost 20m above sea level, by some huge force.

An accumulation of such incidents led the European Union to set up a program called MaxWave to gather data on wave behaviour. 30,000 satellite snapshots of the ocean surface, each five by 10km wide were analysed to investigate the frequency of rogue waves. Based on the MaxWave dataset, scientists have been able to calculate that at any given time there are something like ten rogue waves somewhere on the planet. Fortunately, the oceans are very big and these waves are relatively localized so the chance of

Rogue waves are massive walls of water that rise up in the open ocean for reasons unknown, damaging ships or dragging them down to Davy Jones’ Locker. What causes these waves remains a mystery, but some ANU physicists

think the answer may lie in studying beams of light. BY TIM WETHERELL


one hitting a ship is quite small. However given the hundreds of thousands of ships at sea every day, that small chance is definitely not zero.

It’s estimated that one ship every week disappears in unexplained circumstances and whilst many are small and poorly maintained craft that may have sunk due to lack of seaworthiness or human error, many others are not. 200 large modern ships have been severely damaged or even sunk by huge waves in the last 20 years. Such waves can reach incredible heights and when they crash into the side of a ship the force exceeds 100tons per square metre, far higher than any steel structure is designed to cope with.

Unfortunately, understanding the mechanisms behind rogue waves doesn’t mean that they can be easily predicted. There are some regions of the world where they occur with increased frequency, such as the southern tip of Africa, where the Agulhas current flows along the coast. But they also occur in the deep ocean where there are no such currents. “There are so many variables that the behaviour of ocean waves is a highly chaotic system,” Professor Akhmediev says. “So although there are conditions like bad weather and

current flows that increase their probability, when and where they appear is largely just a matter of chance.”

“But this doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. You never know what will happen in the future. Maybe now we understand what’s going on; one day it will be possible to predict or even disrupt such waves as they begin to form near ships.”

Professor Akhmediev and his colleague Dr Ankiewicz have recently found important new solutions for wave patterns, and these could be used to explain the formation of the rogue waves, or even find areas where they would not occur, thus benefiting shipping.

Coming full circle, these strange non-linear energy — concentrating ocean waves may now lead to advances in optics, possibly explaining mysterious energy spike damage sometimes seen in fibre optic infrastructure.

“We have begun to study rogue waves in optics. If they can be so powerful, we began asking ourselves, why not see if we can deliberately generate them and harness that energy in a useful way?”

This story first appeared in ScienceWise: http://sciencewise.anu.edu.au

Images are from the chemical tanker ship Stolt Surf, built in 19�0, caught in a large storm in the North Pacific Ocean in 19��.

The largest waves of the storm broke over the Bridge, more than 22 metres high.

Photos taken by and © Karsten Petersen. Used by permission.

Images are from the chemical tanker ship Stolt Surf, built in 19�0, caught in a large storm in the North Pacific Ocean in 19��. The largest waves of the storm broke over the Bridge, more than 22 metres high. Photos taken by © Karsten Petersen. Used by permission.

“The ship’s bow dropped into a ‘hole’ of a trough behind

the first wave and was hit by a second wave of between

91 and 96 feet high that cleaned a mast right off the

foredeck.”


HISTORY

After the Fall

Dr Ben WellingsConvenor of European Studies, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Personal memory is incredibly fallible, but I seem to remember hearing of the fall of the Berlin Wall on an inky black November night in England.

I was returning home from work — my first job out of school — and was already looking forward to starting university the following year. However, the events unfolding in Berlin were sufficiently important for me to scurry through the darkness and get in front of the news as quickly as I could. I remember seeing the bemused look on the face of an East German border guard as Berliners flooded through one of the check points that had formally symbolized the Cold War division of Europe. But it was the events that followed that really set the direction for my subsequent research.

What struck me in the year between the fall and the start of my undergraduate studies was the resurgence of nationalism on the European continent. I was excited at the end of communism in the east (not least since my fears about dying in a nuclear holocaust seemed to be at an end), but concerned about the potential effects of a nationalist resurgence.

My current research shows that I was not alone in these fears, particularly in relation to a reunified Germany. Being eighteen and a half — and having read three books and watched several television programs about Germany — I knew all too well what was coming if the Federal Republic and the GDR were to unite: a resurgent Germany would (somehow) dominate Europe, snuffing out long-held freedoms and casting Europe once again into darkness.

Although embarrassed that I once held these views, as a young barman I was at least peripheral to European debates about German reunification. The same could not be said for Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and held much the same views. Thatcher even went so far as to hold a seminar on the ‘German Character’ in the summer of 1990 in order to get a good sense of what the Germans were ‘really’ like. In this regard, the problem was not so much Germany, but England.

Thus, my current research examines the role played by resistance to European integration in generating contemporary English nationalism. German reunification sparked fears of a resurgent Germany within the Conservative Party of Great Britain, with the European Union being seen as the ironic triumph of Prussian militarism: was it possible that having won

two world wars the British would finally be suborned to the Germans via the institutions and policies of the European Union? Sadly, much of the debate about European integration in England since the fall of the wall has been conducted via the imagery of war — from the “Beef Wars” of 1996 to the celebrations of England’s 5-1 win in Munich in 2001. This preoccupation with the War is a conspicuous aspect of contemporary nationalism in England.

Perhaps the English will overcome their obsession with the War and conflict with their European neighbours, but it is hard to see what kind of national myth could fill the boots of the collective memory of wartime Britain. Reunification forced the Germans to think about their past; unfortunately, it forced the English to retreat across the channel once again.

Saskia HufnagelPhD researcher, National Europe Centre at ANU

On November 9, 1989, my parents had a dinner party when we got the news that the wall had fallen. Everybody gathered in front of the TV and

it was a very emotional evening.

Germans are gearing up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009. The destruction of the physical barrier between West and East Germany in

1989 became a symbol for the collapse of Soviet Europe and the end of the Cold War. But as three ANU researchers explain, it can also be seen as a springboard for contemporary exploration of

European politics, security and personality.


In March 1990 my parents and I travelled through the former East Germany and I started to realise then what the wall had meant for people. The same year, my father decided to go to the then ‘new federal states’ to help rebuild the administration. He stayed for six years and came back rather disappointed with the lack of support from former East and West German colleagues alike. Many of the ‘Western’ public servants employed there had used the times of change to make fraudulent deals, and the ‘Eastern’ public servants were unhappy with the pressure that was put on them and often boycotted the changes to administration. It was very difficult for the two systems to fuse and for people from different backgrounds and cultures to cooperate.

German reunification can in this way serve as an example of cooperation between former communist systems and other European states. My PhD is on cross-border police cooperation in Europe, covering how the end of the Cold War marked considerable changes to cooperation with the entry of Eastern European states into the EU. As the Eastern European states had very different organisational structures and cultures of policing, their integration was in many ways harder than that of other European states. Since the Second World War, West German relationships with other states had been built continuously, despite the differences in organisational structures, cultures, history and languages. On the one hand this cooperation was driven by economic considerations and the prospect of financial benefits. On the other hand — and that is more remarkable — it had been driven by security concerns.

Since the 1950s, it had become apparent that police and justice cooperation was an important part of state- to-state cooperation in Europe and that this required communication of sensitive information between states that did not necessarily trust each other. However, until the end of the Cold War, these efforts were mainly

between Western European states. Problems started to evolve after the wall had come down and German reunification was the first micro case study for East-West cooperation problems.

One could assume that the cultures between East and West Germany had not considerably changed during the time they had been separated. However, ideologies had. By the time the wall came down, East and West Germany were more ideologically separated than any western European country. The different organisations did not trust each other and, after the initial enthusiasm had evaporated, the resulting problems became obvious. It is still remarkable that these outstanding differences could be present within ‘one’ country. The separation of East and West Germany had achieved that people with a similar history, culture and language could be brought so far apart by an ‘ideology’ that it takes them the same effort as any other state to learn how to trust again.

Christian WickePhD researcher, National Europe Centre at ANU

My place in world history was in bed the night on 9 November 1989, somewhere in rural Lower Saxony, without being swayed by the

dream that the East German regime would accidentally open the borders to the West. I was not even nine years old, but still remember that before the fall I saw on TV when the Soviet Secretary General visited the German Democratic Republic and thousands of protesters shouted, ‘Gorbi help us’.

In June 1990, I finally got the permission from my parents to visit some family members in East Berlin for six weeks during my summer holidays. I came back with more pocket money than I could have ever saved

before. Almost every day I went with my cousin from Prenzlauer Berg to the Brandenburg Gate where we quarried out pieces of the Berlin Wall to sell them to tourists from all over the world. From all the pieces we sold, I kept one, which I recently brought to Australia — exactly 20 years after I removed it.

At that time I still had a heroic image of Helmut Kohl, who was then portrayed as the ‘Chancellor of Unity’. This image has changed greatly, but Kohl serves as a fascinating case study for those involved in nationalism studies. Kohl sought a normalisation of the German nation and therefore relativised the Nazi past to promote national identity.

This new normality becomes evident in today’s Berlin Republic, where the culture of ‘coming to terms with the past’ is on the decline. Interestingly, Kohl has very strong regional and European identities, which, however, do not stand in opposition to his nationalism. His romantic notion of Germany is also influenced by his Catholic background and the fact that he was trained as a historian. Notwithstanding this cultural nationalism, the achievement of a unified nation-state was not his predominant aim. The westernisation of Germany was his first goal. And his ideal of a unified Germany within the western framework ultimately succeeded on 3 October 1990.

I am currently doing a PhD at ANU, titled Helmut�Kohl’s�Quest�for�Normality:�A�Biographical�Approach�to�Nationalism. Biographical inquiry has the capacity to go beyond idealist, structuralist, and elitist approaches to nationalism and to challenge established ideal-typologies in that field. It can illuminate the personal in nationalism, its ideological constellation and reveal how individuals internalise nationalist ideas. It can help us understand the motivations and intentions of the subject, without dismissing the particular ideological, social and political contexts.

Christian Wicke Saskia Hufnagel Dr Ben Wellings


Bruce Smyth and Juliet Behrens have been surveying people about issues related to relocating children after relationships break down. Photo: Belinda Pratten

Moving on, moving kidsA new study into the impacts of relocation disputes between former partners who are also parents could help improve outcomes for children and their parents, Michael Cavanagh writes.

A certain song from the 1960s has made the phrase sound trite, but there is no denying that breaking up is hard to do — especially when there

are children involved and one parent wishes to move a considerable distance from their former partner.

What if the parent left behind disputes their former partner’s decision? After all, distance often makes it difficult for someone to maintain a relationship with their offspring. How should the Family Court decide what is in the best interest of the children involved and their parents?

According to the conclusions of a three-year study surveying people involved in relocation disputes, courts should consider the past when ruling on the future.

Researchers Dr Juliet Behrens from the ANU College of Law and sociologist Dr Bruce Smyth from the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute at ANU spoke to parents who had turned to the court to try and resolve the question of relocation.

The work — conducted with Dr Rae Kaspiew from the

LAW


Australian Institute of Family Studies — was part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, and the findings are in the process of being peer reviewed.

The researchers approached the Family Court to send out letters asking parents if they would take part in the study and, if so, to contact Smyth and Behrens who were hoping to speak with even numbers of parents in four categories: those who had unsuccessfully opposed relocation, those successful in fighting relocation, those who had unsuccessfully applied to relocate and those who were successful in their request to be allowed to move.

Of those approached, 38 responded. Most interviews were characterised by “a longer story of conflict, enmeshment and poor relationships,” Behrens says.

The largest number of respondents were those who were unsuccessful in stopping the other parent from moving — almost all of these were men.

“Those unsuccessful may harbour a sense of injustice and want to voice their disapproval of the system,” Smyth explains. “But it is interesting that we heard from so many unsuccessful men but very few unsuccessful women, despite the fact that we know there was only around a 57 per cent chance of being allowed to relocate at the relevant time,” adds Behrens.

Data from the study suggest that understanding the pre-court situation helps make sense for what would happen later on.

Family Law has tended “to require a future focus rather than an exploration of the past. Yet it may be that our best way of understanding the future is to understand the past,” the researchers say. They are also quick to point out that this doesn’t mean that individuals aren’t capable of breaking from the past, particularly if there are good processes in place to support them doing that.

Courts often have to rule on the vexed issue of a child being moved when one parent decides for a multitude of reasons to up sticks. This sometimes can mean moving from one side of the continent to the other.

Yet Smyth says, “You can’t legislate love,” and it is here that problems can arise in how the law deals with such an emotional issue.

The interdisciplinary nature of the study is one of its strengths, suggest the researchers. “Law and social sciences struggle with the same problems but come at them from very different angles ... Law is black and white; social scientists love grey,” Smyth says, “But multiple perspectives can produce clarity.”

Both concluded that there is a need for the courts to look more at how the relationship fared in the past. They argue that this should be done prior to a decision being made on the future and what is deemed as best for the child at the centre of the dispute.

“One of the interesting themes in the interviews has been the way in which the past predicts the future- in the sense that, if there was a high conflict pattern before the court decision, the pattern of high conflict is likely to continue after the relocation decision,” Behrens says. “The law can empower and protect people, but the law cannot create or maintain relationships — that’s up to people.”

The researchers found that often the decision to relocate did not come easily.

Behrens said talking to the respondents revealed that, while relocation may have been the stated reason

for the conflict, when they delved into it, there were often “more complex and multi-faceted reasons” behind the move, such as the need to move away from conflict or abuse, the poor quality of the relationship with the other parent, inability to agree care arrangements, and a need to refind oneself or return to family.

Those opposing relocation put up reasons for not moving themselves to join the children in the new location that were less complex, citing concerns such as that the person relocating could again move.

The researchers identified three emerging patterns in the data: ‘Rough Roads’; ‘Smoother Paths’; and ‘Separate Pathways’.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the most prevalent pattern was Rough Roads. This category captures relationships with a history of abuse or conflict. Even after relocation was approved, the ’rough roads’ behaviour often continued, reflecting that there was more to the story than just one person opposing the other parent’s wish to relocate.

In the case of the ‘Smoother Paths’ category, the decision to relocate was the trigger for the dispute. In these cases there had been less conflict both before the court’s intervention and after the court decision.

The smallest group, ‘Separate Pathways’, involved cases where contact after relocation was either minimal or non-existent. These cases tended to involve extreme factors such as drugs use, controlling violence and mental illness.

Controlling violence was cited by a number of women as part of the reason why they wished to relocate.

A finding that surprised the researchers was that a sizeable number of the people who agreed to take part in the study had been in their relationship for a very short time before it turned for the worse. This small subset often parted either during pregnancy or soon after birth.

Smyth and Behrens say that some parents in this situation faced a variety of issues that made it even more complex and difficult to resolve.

“It may be that a relocation dispute is more likely and more hard fought when there is little history of effective communication and sharing of parenting. It also may be that a parent is less likely to want to stay in one location without the bonds that go with a longer association with the place where the child is born.”

The researchers conclude from their study that the courts might need to take a different approach when dealing with children from high conflict and abusive relationships.

They say the data provides a little more understanding of the kinds of relationships where relocation ends up in court and what happens afterwards.

“Aspects of this understanding … include that most parents had poor quality relationships with the other parent prior to the relocation decision. For most parents the issues between them were not simply about relocation, and the study tentatively suggests that it is likely this pattern will continue after the court decision.”

It is also suggested that more resources be put into improving the parental relationship if it is not abusive and some improvement can be expected.

More: Hear an interview with Juliet Behrens and Bruce Smyth at www.anu.edu.au/reporter

Family Law has tended “to require a future focus

rather than an exploration of the past. Yet it may

be that our best way of understanding the future is to understand the past.


Speaking of tonguesWhat has the Spangled Grunter got to do with saving the world’s disappearing languages?

A leading linguist argues that the connections between words, peoples and places can tell us a lot about the richness of our planet — and we lose those words to our grave detriment. BY MICHAEL CAVANAGH

In Arnhem Land there is a fish called, in English, the Spangled Grunter. It lurks in billabongs and creeks, feeding on the fruit

that falls into the water from the shore-hugging White Apple Tree.

Yet in the Indigenous Kunwinjku language from that region, both the fish and the tree share the name bokorn.

The speakers of this tongue understand the connection between animal and plant. As a consequence they are much more likely to know where to cast their line to secure an evening meal.

Once bokorn is translated into the English names Spangled Grunter and White Apple Tree, however, the in-built link is gone. It goes to show that an understanding of languages can even assist in hooking that elusive one, which all too often gets away.

Professor Nick Evans, Head of Linguistics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at ANU, argues that the worldwide

CULTURE

decline of linguistic diversity means we’re set to lose a lot more than a fish dinner. He makes the case in his book Dying�Words:�Endangered�Languages�and�What�They�Have�To�Tell�Us.�What they have to tell us, it turns out, has a lot to do with peoples and places, like the Kunwinjku of Arnhem Land.

A greater understanding of particular environments is just one of the many reasons Evans believes there is a need to maintain and record languages at risk. He says that by understanding the origins and linking of words, we can apply that knowledge in a variety of fields.

Take the field of law, for example. The understanding of a language proved central to legal argument when Evans was enlisted to help lawyers involved in Native Title. He explains that language helped prove how people from the Wellesley Islands in Queensland were directly linked through different generations to their traditional sea territories.

“The use of language helped reveal the Indigenous framework we were dealing with,” says Evans, who speaks around 12 languages at “varying proficiencies”. As an interpreter during the land claims, he assisted a number of the claimants whose English was not of the standard that enabled them to express their case directly to the court.

“It was the older people whose evidence counted for the most … Their compelling evidence was crucial in establishing the nature of traditional land tenure. But getting it across was an uphill battle. At one point a lawyer asked the question, ‘What is the word in your language that means to own?’ discounting the possibility that the concept of ownership — which turned out to be surprisingly parallel to European notions — could be expressed instead by a suffix, the so-called ‘proprietive’ suffix,” Evans says.

His book tells how over the next century more than half of the world’s 6000 languages will disappear. “Language is like an

A greater understanding

of particular environments is just one of the many reasons Evans believes there is a need

to maintain and record languages

at risk.


Nick Evans speaks 12 languages, but

he says many times that number are at

risk of disappearing from the planet.

Photos: Stuart Hay

“Language is like an oral encyclopaedia

for the people who speak it...vast

tracts of human knowledge of the world is enfolded

in these languages. That knowledge is not available

to us if we don’t speak, document

and translate these languages.”

oral encyclopaedia for the people who speak it,” Evans says.

“Vast tracts of human knowledge of the world are enfolded in these languages. That knowledge is not available to us if we don’t speak, document and translate these languages.”

To achieve this requires resources to support the type of work needed, such as “around five person-years for a talented person to make a reasonable first-pass description [of a new language].”

Evans argues, that although ANU has traditionally done more than almost any institution around the world to record this fragile linguistic heritage, the field is shifting, with Europe recently overtaking Australia in the level of support it gives for this kind of work. Australian resources are now far from adequate for the problem — which is more acute and relevant in our part of the world than anywhere else.

‘Doctoral and postdoctoral students are the engine of scientific advances here, since they have the time and freedom to immerse themselves in the 18 months or more of intensive field research that it takes to make a reasonable first-pass analysis of a language,” Evans says.

“The knowledge of these languages is in the heads of its speakers and nowhere else. This is work that can only be done on-site. Resources for supporting Australian PhD students are not too bad, although we need

support for them to spend an intradoctoral year working on materials for community use, like dictionaries or school materials, and during this time they could deepen their knowledge of the language.”

Evans also argues we need to do more to train people with a background in the languages of the region. “In the last year we have accepted two doctoral students from West Papua to work on languages from there. One was supported by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and one by Ausaid. These students know that we need to expand training in that area. Indonesia is increasingly supportive, but opportunities for students from Papua New Guinea or the Solomons lag far behind.”

A recent step in the right direction is the Wurm Endowment, Evans says, a bequest by the department’s first head, Professor Stephen Wurm, who died in 2001.

This will support around two doctoral students at any one time, but Evans is keen to expand the level of endowment support. One motivator for this is his belief that, for a language to be revived or saved, it requires massive resolve by speech communities, as well as general societal and political support for the value of traditional languages

Evans cites Hebrew as an example of how an ancient language was revived and is now in everyday use in Israel, thanks to enormous political and social will. Hebrew had been partly used for religious ceremonies and so it had

some relevance to the Jews who had moved to Palestine. “People learnt it to understand the keys to the universe,” Evans says.

Closer to home, he says Aboriginal communities have been told how their languages are “gibberish” and “rubbish.”

“People have said to me, ‘Oh, you study Aboriginal languages. That must be easy. Nothing to do there.’ That really has a negative effect on people’s views of their language. When an outsider comes in and starts to study it, starts to produce a dictionary, suddenly people say, ‘Wow, this is a language that potentially has the same status as any other language.”

“People need to understand that you extend your brain by using more languages … [In Australia] people need to get over the view that we are taking resources away from learning English. As a country, we face a huge problem because of what has been a very underexamined monolingual outlook. Having a Prime Minister who has gone through the mind-expanding discipline of learning two foreign languages to a high level is a great step forward. Now we need to take this to all levels of the education system.”

More: Hear an interview with Nick Evans at www.anu.edu.au/reporter


EDUCATION

New Caledonia is known for its picturesque tourist spots, such as Pine Island, but its society is richer and more complex than a superficial paradise. Photo: ©istockphoto.com/suebr

Troubled in paradiseThe trip could have been just another excursion for French language lovers. Instead a group of ANU students gained a perspective on the complex and

sometimes difficult issues that affect New Caledonian society. BY MICHAEL CAVANAGH


Being cooked and served dinner by a country’s vice-president and then sleeping on the concrete floor of a community hall – also organised by the

island nation’s number two – was part of the experience for a group of ANU students in New Caledonia.

The 12 students who were majoring in French had been taken to the Pacific nation during the lead-up to that country’s election earlier this year by Dr Peter Brown, Head of the School of Language Studies.

“I like to get them out of their comfort zones,” Brown says. “There was the sense that it was not all programmed and there was a sense of uncertainty … yet at no time were they in any danger.”

Brown wanted to give the students an intensive experience of cultural diversity by exploring aspects of New Caledonian culture, so they could understand the cultural and social transition that the country has gone through. This included staying in Kanak villages in the country’s Northern Province.

Helping Brown in his quest to get the students to experience Melanesian and French culture was Déwé Gorodé, who up until this year’s poll had been the country’s vice-president since 2001.

Whenever her official duties in the capital, Noumea, allow it, Madame Gorodé goes home to Ponérihouen on the north-east coast of New Caledonia. It was there that she spent time with students, more in her role as a leading New Caledonian writer than as Minister.

Gorodé has addressed the United Nations and attended university in France, yet she also demonstrated to the students how Melanesian culture imposes certain roles and norms on men and women, regardless of their accomplishments.

During the evening that she hosted, there was a moment when Gorodé stood with her husband in front of the Canberra visitors and the two paused for a short time, while they quietly discussed who would address the students as host in a customary ceremony of exchange with the students and their teacher.

Despite Gorodé’s standing in the wider community, it fell to her husband to make a speech, reflecting the traditional patriarchal character of Kanak society.

This, along with the experiences the group encountered while staying with families in New Caledonia’s capital Noumea, greatly differed from what they had expected based on the ‘travel brochure image’ of the French colony.

Which is not to say the students were untravelled. Brown noted that, unlike his own generation at university, many of his students had passports decorated with numerous stamps from the countries they had visited.

Emma McDonell Wilson had spent her preschool and kindergarten years living in Vanuatu before returning to Canberra, where she attended several schools that had French curricula.

She has since completed an Arts (International Relations) degree with a major in French and plans to do Honours next year in International Relations.

As part of her initial degree at ANU she looked at the political and social history of New Caledonia.

Despite this perspective, she says travelling to New Caledonia was an eye-opener, particularly in Noumea where she was billeted with a woman whose family were from Indonesia and Vietnam.

“It was a lot more realistic. I stayed on the outskirts of the city … Many of us had gone with the vision of travel brochures,” McDonell Wilson says. “The tourist part of the city is nice but other parts revealed how the tourist area was fake.”

She says she was struck by the disparity between the people who have moved from France to New Caledonia, those of French origin but born in New Caledonia, and the indigenous population.

She says many of the non-indigenous population were either unaware of, or did not want to acknowledge, the problems in their society, something she came across while staying in the capital and interacting with local teachers.

“I was struck by the hovels in the mangroves where some lived. The French teacher wouldn’t acknowledge that this existed,” McDonell Wilson says. “There is a lot of inequality. Noumea is a small city but the inequality is startling.”

This view is backed up by fellow student Sam Vincent, who is now doing his Honours thesis.

Sam grew up on a farm just outside Canberra, discovering a love of French language and culture while in his penultimate year at Dickson College.

Despite having travelled widely, including a year living in Brittany where he tutored English at the local school, he says the New Caledonia trip certainly widened his horizons.

He says he was struck by what appeared to be a three-tiered society.

“Most of us here in Australia have a stereotypical image of it being Paris in the Pacific. It was good for us to get off the track and speak and listen to indigenous people and to go beyond the stereotypical person from New Caledonia,” Vincent observes.

The students also received a lesson in being culturally aware and being able to read and understand the mood of Melanesian culture.

They visited Tiendanite, the village of Jean-Marie

Tjibaou, the Kanak independence activist who was assassinated 20 years ago.

For the students who had learnt about the fallen leader, a visit to the village was to be a highlight. They were not alone in this ambition, as over the years many had made the same pilgrimage, including French Presidents.

On the day of the students’ arrival, the village head was ill and could not greet them. Furthermore, Tiendanite was busy with the preparations for the ceremonies that were to take place within a few days in honour of Tjibaou, with French television cameras rolling as the students waded across the river to enter the village. While they were not turned away, it soon became obvious to Brown and his students that in the circumstances it was not appropriate to linger and so they took their leave.

Vincent says this was a good lesson in being aware of different cultures and how to ‘read’ what is going on.

The students were at times also startled by the passion for all things French exhibited by the people they encountered, despite many of the islanders being born in New Caledonia.

“Some were so patriotic, so French, who wanted to maintain some form of umbilical cord with France,” Vincent says. “This is even if their only contact was their military service in France.”

At the same time, Vincent said many islanders were determined to prove that their roots in New Caledonia went back several generations.

He thought this was partly due to the push by hardline Kanaks that only those with clear indigenous links should be allowed to remain once full independence is achieved.

Those who had links to France or other parts of the region are equally determined to prove that they have strong ties to the French colony.

This insight into New Caledonian society is more than many of the students bargained for when they signed up for a trip to bolster their French language skills. Just as the experience was richer and more complex than they’d anticipated, so too has it drawn them together. Brown says the group remain in touch on a regular basis, despite the fact that most have now finished their studies.

The trip has also inspired some of the group to learn more about the differences between Australian society and the societies of other nations. McDonell Wilson intends to finish her studies in International Relations. Vincent, meanwhile, intends to pursue a career in journalism once he’s finished his Honours. He has had several articles published, inclusive of his New Caledonian experiences, and now wants to further his Pacific knowledge and use it to report on the issues to the rest of Australia.

More: Hear an interview with Emma McDonell Wilson and Sam Vincent at www.anu.edu.au/reporter

“Most of us here in Australia have a stereotypical image of it being Paris

in the Pacific. It was good for us to get off the track and speak and listen to indigenous people and to go beyond the stereotypical person

from New Caledonia.”


Anyone who thinks that archaeology is a dusty, backward-looking task with little contemporary relevance should ask the women of Jebel Khalid

for their view.

This agricultural settlement on the west bank of the Euphrates River in North Syria is home to a large number of Bedouin widows — widows in both in a literal and pragmatic sense.

These women exist in a bride-price society where the high cost of securing a wife means that men tend to be considerably older than their spouses, and hence closer to the grave, or else forced by the lack of employment in the region to work away from home.

How is a woman to support herself and her children once her breadwinner has gone, whether to a Saudi oil field or his final resting place?

She can try to earn a living from harvesting more crops than her family requires for food, but this is a fraught business in the arid interior of Syria.

However there is another harvest that has been a source of income for the local women for decades now.

For 25 years archaeologists from the west have been uncovering the remains of a Greek military colony, spanning the period from roughly 300BC to 100BC, that existed in modern-day Jebel Khalid.

Founded in the wake of Alexander the Great’s eastward push for his Hellenistic empire, Jebel Khalid

was once a garrison settlement, complete with acropolis, temple and gymnasium.

Some 10,000 people might once have lived here, including a sizable number of troops charged with controlling the local countryside and defending a strategic river crossing on the Euphrates.

Researchers have uncovered more than 500 coins from that period. Much of this currency bears the seal of the mint at Antioch, a nearby Greek capital, supporting the theory that the garrison community was an important stronghold for Alexander’s former general, Seleucus, who became ruler of Babylon after his leader’s death.

Instead of coins from Antioch, today it is Syrian lira that are paid by the western archaeologists to the Bedouin working on the various digs at Jebel Khalid.

“We employ up to 100 local people,” says archaeologist Professor Graeme Clarke from ANU. “I’ve seen them grow up and have children. We have a lot of women, because the men are often away working on building sites in Damascus or Jordan, or working in Saudi Arabia on the oil fields. They are terrific workers.”

Clarke has been leading the dig at Jebel Khalid for over a quarter of a century. He says that for the local Bedouin, who are Sunni Muslim, the archaeological activity is a welcome source of employment but not necessarily a source of personal curiosity.

An ongoing archaeological dig in Syria is providing welcome employment to Bedouin women, and enriching our understanding of ancient Greek culture in its colonies.BY SIMON COUPER

Daily bread,

The ancient ruins in Syria are revealing how Greek and local cultures mingled. Photos: Graeme Clarke

ancient bones

For the local Bedouin, who are

Sunni Muslim, the archaeological

activity is a welcome source of

employment but not necessarily a source

of personal curiosity.


ENDOWMENT

Graeme Clarke walks away from the dig at day’s end, while local workers take the truck home.

“Some of the local people take an interest,” Clarke says. “I tell them when it is, and who it was. But by and large it’s a pre-Islamic past, so it’s not their past. That has a resonance generally in the area. Things Greek are valued by the west, where Greek civilization has a certain cachet, but it’s not the Bedouin’s past at all. So they’re happy to rob tombs if nobody is looking.

“Considering that the site housed a sizeable population over 200 years there were a lot of deaths, so there are a lot of tombs. It was the practice at the time to bury the dead with grave goods in their tombs. We find jewellery, coins and pottery.”

Clarke says that the Greek tombs have been a lure for tomb raiders since antiquity, joking that “archaeologists were the last robbers”.

But push him on his motivations and he’ll set out something nobler and more intellectually rich.

“Archaeology is a bit like academic gardening in one sense, but it’s a bit like detective work in another way,” he says. “You’ve got inference-free data that you’ve got to make inferences about. You’re constantly having to interpret. Otherwise there is no point. What do these material remains tell us about how these people lived, who they were and how they constructed their world? It leads from materials to ultimately something quite subjective.”

One of the key finds at Jebel Khalid shows just how subjective archaeology can become. Clarke and his team

have revealed the ruins of a gymnasium, a space where the Greek soldiers and their sons would have practised hand-to-hand combat.

The building was a large, open courtyard surrounded by a covered ambulatory. Spectators would have stood in the shade bordering the sandy yard and cheered on their favourite naked, oil-drenched and grit-speckled wrestler. Among their finds, the archaeologists have discovered many oil jars and a metal strigil used for scraping off the sand and oil after a wrestling match.

But the building’s ambulatory would also have been a place of learning, where boys were tutored in philosophy and poetry.

This mix of physical and academic education brings to life how Greek this settlement tried to be, despite its distance from the cradle of Greek civilization.

“This is the first building of its kind to be found from those 200 years after Alexander in inland Syria,” Clarke says. “It tells us a fair amount about the ‘Greekness’ of the aspirations of the city fathers at that time.”

The nearby ruins of an acropolis also point to how much the military settlement looked to Greek culture as its model. This lofty citadel consisted of a large hall flanked by twin kitchens. This was most probably a site for carousing amongst the soldiers. “The Macedonians are famous for drinking,” Clarke says, adding that they enjoyed feasting too.

Yet the scholar says that it’s a mistake to think of the Hellenistic world as being exclusively Greek, arguing instead that they were great absorbers of other people’s cultures. “The Ptolemies [a dynasty founded by one of Alexander’s generals in Egpyt] represented themselves as Egyptian pharaohs. On the whole, the Hellenistic people were extremely adaptable and absorbed cultures from elsewhere.”

At Jebel Khalid, the soldiers might have married local women, or at least took them as servants. Clues to this trend can be found in the kitchen equipment and scraps of antiquity. The researchers have found examples of stewing pots used in Persia, and not the casserole dishes of the Greek peninsular. They also suspect that, in the private residences of the lower classes in the settlement, cooking was carried out in the local style that favoured stewing.

“You get large bones, lots of cattle bones, gazelle, deer eaten up on the acropolis, which was in the Greek style,” Clarke says. “On the other hand, we find very few bones in the domestic quarters, and those we do find are all minced up and stewed. This would suggest that, at home, the soldiers and their families were eating as the local population would have eaten.”

Cultural mixing is also evident in aspects of the architecture and in other artefacts at the settlement. A temple appears Greek from the outside, but inside is configured along Mesopotamian lines. Depictions of the Greek gods lie side by side with statues for local deities. Houses were built around the courtyard, as in the east, but feature frescoes of chariots drawn by goats, driven by cupids.

This intermingling of colonial and local cultures presents a rich puzzle for Clarke and his colleagues, including specialists on coinage, glass and metals.

“My real interest is in putting it all together,” Clarke says. “How does it all add up? It’s very intense business. We go there for six weeks and we work desperately hard. It takes a long time to put all these pieces together.”

The site at Jebel Khalid stretches over 30 hectares of limestone mesa above the Euphrates, an expanse that might take another 25 years to sample properly. Given the rare opportunity to study a largely unsullied Greek colonial settlement from the third century BC, Clarke says it’s important that the work continues so we can enrich our understanding of the Hellenistic world. He says the plan is to expand the dig to look at more of the domestic housing and graves of the poorer people from the garrison, to counterbalance the picture of the lives of the elite.

The research at Jebel Khalid is supported via contributions to the Australian Syrian Euphrates Project, managed by the Foundation Office at ANU.

Clarke says he is grateful for this support, as it allows him and his team to learn more about a singular location, as well as continue to work alongside the local Bedouin.

“Ours is a very rare site,” Clarke says. “It’s a window of opportunity to see what it was like to be a Greek coloniser and how they interacted with the indigenous population.”

As for the interactions between the western scholars and the local Bedouin, Clarke says he hopes it continues for years to come.

More: www.anu.edu.au/endowment


Blogging

High in the Himalayan mountains of northwest Nepal, 16 day’s walk from the nearest road, technology is helping to improve the lives of the

local Nepali. In these remote and often impoverished areas, the life expectancy of women is lower than that of men, a consequence of inhaling smoke from the fires necessary in their small huts. Northwest Nepal’s literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, so options for learning are limited.

Volunteer engineers from the not-for-profit organisation Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB) and its local partner Rural Integrated Development Services Nepal have been helping these communities access the knowledge, resources and appropriate technology necessary to improve their lives. Volunteers have helped to redesign stoves to decrease the health and environmental impacts of smoke, while a parallel project developed small-scale solar power lighting to enable night-time lessons in reading and writing.

Undergraduate engineers from ANU have been contributing innovative ideas and their engineering skills to overcome challenges such as those faced by disadvantaged communities in Nepal. Some of these projects include solar cookers for an orphanage in southern India and remote villages in southern Africa, water treatment, floating bridges and disability access for sanitation in rural Cambodia, and solar-powered water pumps for the villages of Nepal. Students are exploring complex challenges not only through technical design and engineering, but also through consideration of local cultures, customs, knowledge and community values. This experience is fostered through an active engagement between the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science and EWB.

The partnership enables first year students to contribute to the EWB Challenge, a team design and build program involving over 7,000 first year engineering students from Australia and New Zealand. The focus in 2009 was on challenges related to energy, water supply, transport, housing and infrastructure for people living on and around Cambodia’s Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia. Final year research students are supported on cross-discipline projects in engineering and development, highlighting consideration of not only design but knowledge exchange, capacity building and inclusion. Community outreach to schools and the public is undertaken, to help inform and engage with potential new students and the broader public around the role of engineers in community and sustainable development, and enables

Engineering a sustainable visionA partnership between the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science and Engineers Without Borders Australia is encouraging students to recognise and experience their role in improving the everyday quality of life of communities around the world, writes engineering researcher Jeremy Smith.

last word

Nepali women carry small solar photovoltaic panels to their village, where the units will help generate power. Photo: EWB Australia

students to learn to communicate their engineering expertise and become role-models for future engineers.

Yet as communities everywhere are confronting the challenges of climate change, energy and water usage and management, and environmental extremes, this focus on community development within engineering is fundamental to all applications of science and technology, whether in Nepal, remote Australia or our local community. Engineers are a vital member of the interdisciplinary teams necessary to lead and develop the new solutions, technologies and individual action

required to overcome these challenges. By equipping engineers with the essential skills and experience required to work with different communities in varying cultural and social contexts, we are aiming to avoid the danger of developing technical solutions that do not include careful consideration of long-term community use and environmental impact. The partnership between the College of Engineering and Computer Science, ANU and EWB is not only contributing to direct, ongoing overseas development work, but also inspiring action, learning, and a sense of responsibility within our own communities at home.

staying power - australian national university...in brief 6 news from australia’s national...

Documents