Danielle Drozdzewski

The experiences of weak and non-swimmers caught in rip currents at Australian beaches.

ABSTRACT Beach rip currents present a risk to weak and non-swimmers, whose limited open water swim competencies may render them incapable of swimming out of these common and strong offshore flows. Here, the aim has been to explore this groups vulnerability by identifying how the limits of their swimming competencies influence their abilities to successfully execute a rip current exit strategy. It provides empirical detail on their knowledge of rip currents, their behavioural responses when caught in the rip current, the advice they recalled and the educational messages they recommend to other swimmers. A secondary aim has been to begin a dialogue that recognises the capacity of the Australian beach cultures—as places of relaxation and natural beauty—to influence peoples decisions to enter the water. This cultural contextualisation may help explain why some self-identified weak and non-swimmers still enter the water despite their limited competencies. Through a synthesis of survey and interview data, we argue that weak and non-swimmers need to take the threat of rip currents seriously. Pre-emptive safety advice should be sought, especially if people intend to swim regardless of their swimming ability.

Commentary: Career progress relative to opportunity: how many papers is a baby 'worth'?

Career progress relative to opportunity: how many papers is a baby ‘worth’? How many papers is a baby ‘worth’? We were prompted to ask this provocative question by recent experiences, working on appointment committees and writing research grants in Australia, where provisions to quantify research track-records ‘relative to opportunity’ call for applicants to explain how fl uctuations in their publication outputs have been impacted by ‘career interruptions’ such as childbearing. In this age of the increasingly neoliberal university—where every activity, output, and impact is audited (Castree, 2000; 2006)—our commentary seeks to question how decision makers account (or not) for the career impacts of having children. Our interest in this issue is both personal and political. We are both female early-career researchers and each of us had our fi rst (and currently, only) child within one year of attaining our doctorates. One of us has a continuing/tenured position at an Australian university; the other is on a fi xed-term contract. The demands on our time have been stretched considerably since starting our families; and an acute watchfulness of output and productivity is never far from our minds. We worry about not being able to keep up with the expected pace of publishing, gaining grants, and teaching in between, thus remaining competitive and employable. Of course, we are not the fi rst academics to feel like this. Well-documented coping strategies adopted by female (and some male) academics include: waiting until tenured before having children or not having children at all, timing children to fi t the academic calendar, working part-time, increasing research collaborations, hiding caring responsibilities, sleeping less, sacrifi cing personal lives and, for some, moving into the ‘second tier’ (1) or opting out of academia altogether. It is against the backdrop of such prospects, and in the spirit of fi nding ways to incorporate parental responsibilities into the expectations of academic labour, that we fi nd ourselves taking seriously the seemingly callous question of how many outputs childbearing might be ‘worth’ within the academic workplace. Although we are interested in the parenting experiences of female and male academics, childbearing and childrearing undoubtedly remain key sources of gender inequity in the academy. The underrepresentation of women in academia (particularly at the professorial level) has been explored by academic feminists since at least the 1970s (McDowell, 1979; Monk et al, 2004). Our concerns are positioned within a more recent body of scholarship that considers the gendered implications of neoliberalism, particularly for academics with caring responsibilities (Berg, 2002; Crang, 2003; 2007). Notwithstanding the neoliberal audit culture of contemporary Western universities, academia does enable valuable fl exibility around work times and locations, not found in (many) other professions. However, policies designed to assist with ‘work – life balance’, and achieve greater gender equity, have had limited success (Bailyn, 2003; Berg, 2002). Important progress has been made in terms of increased access to paid parental leave, increasingly fl exible working arrangements and (in the United States) scope to extend/stop the tenure clock to account for childbearing. But such policies remain inherently problematic: when academics (usually women) make use of them, they may be shooting themselves in the foot.

Resident Attitudes to Farmland Protection Measures in the Northern Rivers Region, New South Wales

Abstract In-migration to popular ‘sea change’ and ‘tree change’ regions has produced conflicts between rural land users. In the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, new residential developments have been built on much of what was previously prime agricultural land, while farmers (in particular, those negatively affected by the deregulation of the dairy industry) have sought to secure retirement incomes by subdividing land for sale. Although developers, local councils and individual farmers sometimes see eye to eye on the mutual benefits of in-migration and population growth, land use has none the less become the subject of a hotly contested local political battle. Conflicts occur at the interface of growing urban developments and surrounding farmland, with new residents finding the sights, sounds and smells of rural production intrusive. More generally, there is considerable concern that the best farmland in the region may be lost to urbanisation and rural residential subdivision. This paper discusses the results of a survey that collected opinions from local residents about the pressures on the regions land uses by in-migration, the future role of farmland as both an economic and cultural landscape, and views on proposed measures to protect prime farmland in the region. Results highlighted a strong and consistent ‘pro-farmland’ and ‘pro-protection’ attitude throughout the region, and across social groups. Yet, variations emerged when respondents were asked about why they attribute value to agricultural landscapes. For some, ‘economic’ values dominated, while for others, value was attributed in ways that reflected an emerging ethos of ‘localism’ and village lifestyle. Although values differed, a clear message from this study is that the population of Australias pre-eminent ‘sea change’ region strongly support measures to curb urban development and the more destructive consequences of a dynamic property market.

A place called ‘Bielany’: negotiating a diasporic Polish place in Sydney

This paper examines the creation of a distinctly Polish place by Polish migrants and their children, in Sydney, Australia. I explore the use of place as a means of maintaining distinct ethno-cultural identity in diaspora by evaluating how different groups of Polish people contextualise their diasporic identity, attribute meaning to place, and how these meanings change through time. Differing generational cohorts and waves of migration within Sydneys Polish diaspora (re)create Bielany as a place for maintaining Polish identity by reproducing a familiar and homely place and by centring Bielany as a main venue for recreation and social functions. Notions of place attachment, expressed through participation in activities, ownership and maintenance of a communal Polish place, and emotional linkages to that place, evince their preference for and their connection to a shared and distinctly Polish place.

Language Tourism in Poland

Abstract This paper explores the drivers for language tourism through an examination of a group of foreign students studying the Polish language in Poland. Travel for education represents a growing sector of the international tourist market. Polish language courses for foreigners are an emergent form of tourism in Poland. This research examines two distinct groups of Polish language students: those with and without Polish heritage. For those students with Polish heritage, drivers for tourism have been considered within the context of diaspora tourism. Learning Polish is part of these students’ wider search to (re)connect with the ancestral language and culture. Overall, learning, self-development and cultural immersion have been integral stopovers on their tourism experiences.

Rip Current Survival Principles: Towards Consistency

ABSTRACT Bradstreet, A.J.; Brander, R.W.; McCarroll, J.R.; Brighton, B.; Dominey, H.D.; Drozdzewski, D.; Sherker, S.; Turner, I.; Roberts, A., and MacMahan, J., 2014. Rip current survival principles: Towards consistency. Advances in applied rip current research over the past 10 years have dramatically increased our collective understanding of the hazard posed to communities by rip currents. Repeated drifter, dye, swimmer, in situ instrumentation, and model experimentation has demonstrated the highly variable nature of rip currents, which has significant implications for long standing survival strategies. Analysis of prevalent rip current survival advice revealed that under variable rip current conditions, the advice may not prove effective in-situ, resulting in individual adopting alternative behaviours, which may or may not have been endorsed or promoted by safety authorities. This paper discusses evidence supporting key principles prominent in the discourse between public safety practitioners and rip current researchers, and presents how these principles relate to each other in practice. The principles are set into two categories: avoidance and survival. They have been developed to support consistent engagement, education and communication strategies for community resilience and further reduce the burden of rip current related drowning globally.

“Dye in the Water” A Visual Approach to Communicating the Rip Current Hazard

Many beaches are characterized by rip currents—strong, narrow flows that can quickly carry bathers offshore, often against their will. However, despite long-standing efforts at community education and awareness strategies, people continue to drown in rip currents at high rates. Here we describe a simple, but powerful visual-based risk communication approach involving imagery associated with releases of colored dye into rip currents that has been used as an outreach tool with success in Australia. This approach has the potential to transcend limitations of traditional education approaches and bring the rip current hazard to life for a largely unaware public.

Capturing commemoration: Using mobile recordings within memory research

This paper details the contribution of mobile devices to capturing commemoration in action. It investigates the incorporation of audio and sound recording devices, observation, and note-taking into a mobile (auto)ethnographic research methodology, to research a large-scale commemorative event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. On May 4, 2016, the sounds of a Silent March—through the streets of Amsterdam to Dam Square—were recorded and complemented by video grabs of the march’s participants and onlookers. We discuss how the mixed method enabled a multilevel analysis across visual, textual, and aural layers of the commemorative atmosphere. Our visual data aided in our evaluation of the construction of collective spectacle, while the audio data necessitated that we venture into new analytic territory. Using Sonic Visualiser, we uncovered alternative methods of “reading” landscape by identifying different sound signatures in the acoustic environment. Together, this aural and visual representation of the May 4 events enabled the identification of spatial markers and the temporal unfolding of the Silent March and the national 2 minutes’ silence in Amsterdam’s Dam Square.

Co-opting the Night: The Entrepreneurial Shift and Economic Imperative in NTE Planning

Abstract The City of Sydney Council has presented their night-time economy plan (NTE) – Open, Future directions for Sydney at night – as a unique and substantial contribution to global city planning literature. This paper critiques the plan and demonstrates how Open is strongly aligned with, and constrained by the neoliberal-inspired cultural-economy framework of the Council’s overarching policy vision: Sustainable Sydney 2030. Such co-opting of policy evinces an entrepreneurial shift in NTE planning where economic interests procure substantial voice in the consultation, and eventual policy directions of changing the nightscape. The paper explicates the economic imperative(s) of Open within the context of one inner city Sydney suburb, Surry Hills.

Knowing (or Not) about Katyń: The Silencing and Surfacing of Public Memory

Abstract For Poles, the Katyń Forest, in Russia, is a place immediately associated with national suffering. Katyń is one of three sites where approximately 20 000 Poles were executed during World War II, by the Soviet secret service. To shore up wartime political dependencies, knowledge of Katyń was silenced by the dominant hegemony. The public absence of Katyń narratives compelled their safeguarding and presence (where possible) in private spheres of the home. In 2010, the death of 96 people at Katyń—en route to commemorate the massacre—etched a new scar on an existing wound. The shifting of Katyń narratives between public absence and private presence exemplifies the importance of power in silencing public memory narratives.