Anne-Louise Semple

Highlighting the Need and Potential for Use of Interdisciplinary Science in Adaptive Environmental Management: The Case of Endangered Upland Swamps in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

The Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, including the World Heritage listed Blue Mountains National Park, is arguably one of Australias most highly valued and iconic wilderness areas. Common to this region are upland swamps (formally ‘temperate highland peat swamps on sandstone’), which play a vital hydrological role at the headwaters of the river catchments, as well as providing the habitat for an array of flora and fauna species. This paper involves an interdisciplinary examination into the need and potential for adaptive management in the Blue Mountains. It uses geomorphic (physical) knowledge of swamp condition and social data about the volunteers who rehabilitate them. Research involved using the River Styles river condition framework across 47 swamps and questionnaires and interviews with local rehabilitation volunteers. It is proposed that there is a need and a potential to combine geomorphic understanding with further engagement of community volunteers in order to enable an interdisciplinary approach to adaptive management. Such an approach could result in the effective environmental management of upland swamps in the Blue Mountains.

Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: the challenge of embedding field-based learning

Abstract In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, the community and public sector settings, to engage and collaborate across significant boundaries. This article outlines the scope and nature of the curriculum reform, then considers the way geographers have both shaped and responded to the opportunities it created. In so doing, it proposes a number of challenges and recommendations for geographers who might seek to extend their longstanding commitment to field-based learning through similar reforms. In this regard, the discipline of geography and its tendency to engage with the “field” can offer much in fostering deeply transformative learning.

Reflection for learning: a holistic approach to disrupting the text

Reflective practice can support a mindful and focussed approach to deep learning, enabling the bridging between theory and the students’ learning experience. This practice can range from creative pursuits to heeding felt knowing, integrated into the curricula to support praxis. Indeed, the embedding of reflective mechanism(s) is a requirement of learning through participation known as PACE (Professional and Community Engagement), a pillar of the undergraduate curriculum, and core to the university’s new vision. Through this curriculum requirement and a number of fora extending beyond PACE, Australia’s Macquarie University engages with diverse reflective practices including digital storytelling and art. This chapter presents the holistic approach adopted to integrate reflective practice mechanisms across PACE curricula and practice. Firstly, the role of reflection for learning through participation (LTP) is established. The approach taken to achieve a holistic approach to practice is then unpacked. This holistic approach recognises the need to scaffold and embed reflective practice at, and across, many levels.

Building a Community of Ethical Practice Through PACE

Ethical practice is a core principle of PACE. Partners must conform to the University’s ethical standards and values, and PACE activities must promote the well-being of people and the planet. Students are expected to engage in an ethical manner, and their activities might include research that requires ethics approval. Approaches to telling the PACE story must also be ethically sound. This chapter identifies the practical and epistemological imperatives behind collaborative efforts to foster ethical understanding and practice across the program. These attempts have raised questions such as ‘What constitutes an ethical activity?’ and ‘How might students be prepared for ethical complexities?’ It has led to pushing pedagogical and institutional boundaries, resulting in benefits for Macquarie students, the University as a whole, staff involved in PACE, and community-based partners. This chapter also acknowledges a number of complexities that pose challenges and further questions, as well as suggesting future directions for both practice and research.

Music festivals and regional development in Australia

multi-nation region (ASEAN), the opportunity is not fully explored. Without a significant discussion of the interdependencies of the region, examples of neighbouring nations are no more revealing than comparisons from around the world. As such, the analysis of the shared challenges and complementarities is essentially left as an exercise for the reader. Thus, this compact yet highly informative book is best suited to readers with some prior experience of the field.

Water, sovereignty and borders in Asia and Oceania

Mark Twain reportedly once commented that ‘Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over’. Although his words were in response to human attempts at flood control in the Mississippi River during the 1870s, they remain pertinent today. Controversy and conflict over water is a matter of concern at local, national, and international scales. For example, Turkey’s proposed Southeast Anatolia Project has stirred new hostilities between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Elsewhere, fishing continues to be an important tradition as well as an economic source in many cultures; but there is much debate over matters such as rights, zoning, supply, and technique. Contention also surrounds the governance of water in drought-prone Australia and particularly issues of authority over the Murray-Darling Basin. In light of these ongoing battles, and those yet to unfold, Water, sovereignty and borders in Asia and Oceania is both timely and forward thinking. As Hirsch has written (p. 131), there is a ‘fundamental tension between water as a common resource and water as a commodity’. The introductory chapter illustrates well the book’s ‘interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary’ approach to the subject. This is strongly supported by Malpas’ chapter on the different ways in which water is perceived and often overlooked. The author writes (p. 17): ‘the ways in which water appears in the air and through the forms of weather, and not only as a feature of the earth and land, reinforces the key role of water as an element of place’. Indeed, the book overall is valuable for the way in which it addresses issues involving water and engages the reader in the visible and invisible; human and environmental; fresh and salt; ebbing and flowing; unifying and divisive; bountiful and destructive. The individual chapters are similarly thought provoking as they tackle diverse contexts: Indigenous principles and Pacific Islander practices in conjunction with maritime sovereignty (Chapter 2); the political history of fishing in Japan (Chapter 3); the precarious realities of climate change and sea-level rise in the Marshall Islands (Chapter 4); the impact of capitalist modernisation on fisherfolk of Goa and Mumbai (Chapter 5); contestation and constraints over water that flows over several borders in South Asia (Chapters 6 and 7); issues of water governance and management over the Mekong and Yellow Rivers (Chapters 8 and 9); legal constructs and the regulation of water in Australia; and differences in Indigenous and non-Indigenous conceptualisations of water in Australia (Chapters 11, 12, and 13; the latter two focusing on the Kimberley Region and Sydney). Each segment