Seven Versions of an Australian Badland and two films: Jindabyne and The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson

Some recent performances have addressed events that created ‘human no-go zones’ such as Chernobyl (CEZ), Fukushima (FEZ) and the Korean DMZ. In the wake of the destruction that results in the absence of humans, non-human residents begin the process of recuperation, and the ‘no-go zones’ become inadvertent sanctuaries for wild and abandoned domestic animals. Each of the following productions takes a different view of what occurs when both the norms of nature and the practices of human societies and economies are profoundly disrupted. In addition, one play has depicted a community exercising a new restraint to establish an intentional ‘no-go zone’ to ensure its own survival. When confronted with catastrophes that threaten the existence of all life, as well as the surprising possibilities of renewal, dramatists employ heightened poetic diction and resort to mythical precedents in the attempt to capture the immensity of both the event and its aftermath.

The focus of this article is on the mundane nastiness of language. Drawing on Arendt’s (1963) banality of evil and Briggs’s (2005) notion of infectious communicability, the article highlights the moral dimensions of political and media discourses that spread a communicable image of Sweden as a country in disarray. I demonstrate that this image is made of two discursive ingredients: the spatial trope of the no-go zone, and the truthiness of its discursive elements, which, through a web of communicable intertextual links, create the illusion of an accurate and coherent account of society. Each of the discursive devices and links are like mycelia in a growing fungus of evil that encourages us not “think from the standpoint of somebody else” (Arendt, 1963: 49), that concomitantly normalise a problematic subjectivity of the threatening migrant, a barbarian at the gates that needs to be excluded from the Swedish future.

Better mining corporations want to adopt “Responsible Mining”. This paper outlines the essentials of responsible mining and offers a guide to corporations who want become responsible. Eight principles are discussed: (1) Social and environmental assessment, (2) Transparency, (3) Acceptance by stakeholders, (4) Food production trumps questionable mining, (5) Compliance with international standards, (6) Corporate prequalification, (7) Insurance and performance bonds, and (8) Royalties, taxes and fees. These principles are followed by a discussion of No-Go Zones to mining: why some types of sites should be off-limits to all mining. The Annex on Compensatory Offsets suggests that, on occasion, there may be exceptions to a No-Go Zone.

A rapid process of water reform in Australia has seen governments rely heavily on ‘expert’ or ‘scientific’ panel advice for river condition and environmental flow assessments. These multi‐disciplinary teams of scientists have enabled a quick and relatively inexpensive injection of science into what is often a data‐poor decision process. However, expert panels suffer from several important drawbacks including a lack of transparency and repeatability, and unquantified uncertainty. In the case of the Snowy Mountains hydro‐electric scheme, a government initiative to corporatize the government‐owned authority led to the establishment of the Snowy Water Inquiry (SWI) that was required by law to propose and evaluate (within a six month period) a range of options for future river regulation, diversion and environmental flows. A Scientific Reference Panel (SRP) was therefore established to assess current (1998) river condition and to assess the likely environments benefits of a range of environmental flow options. The SRP attempted to overcome a number of the typical shortcomings of the expert panel approach by (i) integrating available data with expert opinion in its assessments, and (ii) developing a composite River Condition Index (RCI) underpinned by a conceptual framework that links habitat and biotic condition and comprises several sub‐indices that translate qualitative assessments (relative to a pre‐disturbance reference condition) into numeric values in a transparent and repeatable manner. The SRP estimated the level of uncertainty associated with its various assessments, and used these to quantify uncertainty estimates on RCI values. In this paper the RCI is described and its use is illustrated through presentation of the assessments of current (1998) river condition and the associated uncertainty analyses that were made for the rivers in the Snowy Mountains area. The results suggest that in spite of high levels of uncertainty associated with individual assessments, the SRP was able to demonstrate significant difference in current condition between rivers, and in likely future condition between different environmental flow scenarios. Although further investigations and lengthy negotiations occurred subsequent to the SWI to achieve corporatization, the environmental assessments made in the SWI provided the most comprehensive source of information available to governments and the community regarding the likely environmental outcomes of the proposed changes. Subsequent to the SWI the scenario‐based approach to environmental flow assessment has become increasingly common internationally, and major Australian river condition assessments have adopted a similar conceptual framework to the RCI. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

10 - Austral - Asia and Beyond

This paper introduces the story of the 1940s debate between the Australian state of Victoria and the north-bordering state of New South Wales, over Australia's Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme. It describes the campaign imagery generated by the state of Victoria and the Murray Valley Development League (MVDL) to promote their vision for a Murray Valley TVA. The focus is on Australian documentary film-maker John Heyer and The Valley is Ours (1948). The Valley was created to support the MVDL's claims that a scheme to benefit their valley would be the best post-war scheme for both New South Wales and Victoria, and for the nation. This paper takes a transnational and cultural approach to investigating this story. This is because Heyer used nationalist US concepts to strengthen Australian national myths - the film's transnational content was set to a nationalist purpose. This paper describes the environmental imagery - not just images, but sound and text, used by Heyer and the MVDL campaign, to convey a transnational set of ideas. It retrieves a material record from the archives, of what these transnational environmental ideas actually looked and sounded like. And it sheds light on the cultural influences and political forces behind the Murray TVA campaign and the film's creation.

<i>Jindabyne</i>’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland

The Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme

The rhetoric, mythology and practical consequences of nation-building are inextricably bound in the Australian story. Iconic infrastructure projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme are embedded in the collective national memory because of their audacity, scale and impact upon the shaping of the nation. However, it can be argued that other national institutions, from the ABC, to the CSIRO to the Australian Parliament also had nation-building as a primary raison d’etre. In a decidedly post-Keynesian age, however, the ascendancy of economic rationalism as the dominant public policy framework appeared to have consigned nation-building to an historical footnote. It has for some time been out of fashion to expect governments to intervene to correct market failure, other than through the reduction of regulatory or policy barriers to market participation. The nation was largely ‘finished’: the market largely ‘mature’ and the private sector could be leveraged to fill any gaps in the national patchwork using a mixture of deregulation and public private partnerships. This chapter asks the following questions: Has nation-building really been abandoned as a policy frame, or has it simply gone underground? Are today’s major infrastructure projects the natural descendents of Keynesian era nation-building? What are the new frontiers of nation-building in the information age? Why ‘Nation-Building’? In the months leading to the 2007 Australian general election, ‘nation-building’ re-entered the national political debate in spectacular fashion. The major political parties vied with one another to prove their nation-building credentials. The then Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, former Opposition Leader, Kim Beasley, then Prime Minister John Howard and then Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party, Mark Vaile — among others — invoked the term at various times during the federal election campaign. Even State Premiers like the former Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, weighed in on the nation-building angle. In so doing, each evoked a paradigm of nation-building as a policy framework for meeting the long term social and economic obligations of government. The election campaign embedded the term in the consciousness of politicians, the electorate and the media. ‘Industry welcomes nation-building Budget’, or

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (Snowy Hydro) was a frontier for technological advancement, transnational expertise, and migrant labour from 1949 to 1974. This article offers a discussion of the Snowy Hydro project and its representation as part of the ‘Immigrant Networks’ exhibition held in Melbourne in 2022–23. As a multidisciplinary dialogue, it brings together perspectives from Construction History, Heritage Studies, and Architectural History to reconsider the exhibition object and its capacities to communicate the migrant experience. As such it opens questions about place-making and domesticity, exploring the nature of transience and the ritualising of the seemingly insignificant. It further investigates the influence of architecture in the physical staging of these domestic practices, and the evolving relationship between labour practices and cultural approaches to space and materials. Finally, it explores the subjectivity of the researchers and the research process, and investigates the question of who gets to write migrant history.

Announced by South Australian Premier Thomas Playford in 1960, the plan to build Chowilla Dam on the River Murray aimed to secure water rights crucial for the state’s economic growth. This article examines the political wrangling between South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria over River Murray management, exploring the historical and political context of the proposed dam in South Australia. Through analysis of newspaper reports, horticultural newsletters and government documents, the article reveals the complexities of water management and salinity crises from 1965 to 1968. The Chowilla project exemplifies mid-twentieth-century ideologies of large-scale infrastructure as solutions to environmental and economic challenges. But its downfall also shows the impact of changing political and scientific fields through the later 1960s. By contextualising the dam within broader national development schemes like the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, the article highlights the connection between regional water politics, environmental science and economic imperatives during a critical period in South Australia’s history.

Australia's National Broadband Network – A cybersecure critical infrastructure?

Large interbasin water transfers for hydro-electric power generation have substantially changed the hydrology of the Snowy River below the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in southeastern Australia, since 1967. Annual, monthly, mean daily and peak instantaneous flows have been significantly reduced and flood variability greatly increased along 352 km of channel. The first 70 km of river has responded by substantial contraction through the reworking of tributary mouth bars into downstream pools, bars and benches. The tributary mouth bars formed where actively eroding gullies and incised channels debouched into the main stream. These recent deposits have been invaded and stabilized by a number of exotic and native tree and shrub species but particularly willows. Lichens have also colonized the formerly inundated bedrock and boulder surfaces since 1967 in the first 20 km of channel and are now found at elevations up to 2.15 m closer to the river bed. Exotic plants are also invading the riparian corridor downstream of the contracted sections due to reduced disturbance caused by flood suppression. The interaction of reduced flows with high sand and gravel loads has reduced the amount of available habitat. Alternating, bank-attached side bars and their associated pool–riffle sequence have been replaced by transverse and longitudinal bars with a flat featureless bed on the most downstream reach due to a significant reduction in the duration of formative flows between 23.15 and 138.9 m3/s. The rehabilitation of the Snowy River involves the adoption of an environmental flow strategy that includes channel maintenance flows, habitat maintenance flows, minimum acceptable flows, habitat maximizing flows and flow seasonality. This strategy will increase the total amount, duration and variability of releases. A Water Inquiry has been set up as part of the corporatization of the Scheme and will address the issue of environmental flows. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Australian media reporting of climate change and renewable energy, along with public perceptions of the science and solutions of climate change, have shifted in ways that have increased pressure on politicians and policy makers. With the promotion of renewable energy central to ending Australia's heavy reliance on fossil fuels, it is critical to understand how this complex intersection of media and politics is evolving with regard to Australia's renewable energy options. Therefore, this paper examines Australian newspaper reporting of a pivotal moment in Australia's renewable energy discourse: the Australian Government's announcement, in March 2017 to expand the seventy-year-old Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme (known as Snowy 2.0), which marked a turning point in conservative energy policy. Qualitative content analysis reveals that, while political discourse delimited newspaper narratives, the sentiment of the framing was most strongly associated with the partisan alignment of the publishing organization. Regional influences also had a minor association with the framing of renewable energy. Through close analysis of this decisive moment in Australian media's political representation of renewable energy, this paper offers insights that can be used to inform media strategies for renewable energy policy in Australia, and to track changes in framing over time.

W.D. ERSKINE, L.M. TURNER, N. TERRAZZOLO AND R.F. WARNERProfessor Seddon’s submission to the SnowyWater Inquiry (Seddon, 1999) expresses manyof the local community’s concerns about thepresent environmental condition of the SnowyRiver caused by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. We also share these concernsand welcome the opportunity to expandSeddon’s (1999) assessment.The terminology relating to river rehabili-tation is often confusing and needs to beprecisely defined. In this paper, river restorationrefers to the complete structural and functionalreturn to a pre-disturbance state,rehabilitation,to a partial return to a pre-disturbance structureor function and enhancement, to anyimprovement in environmental quality (Brookesand Shields, 1996). The aim of all previouswork on the Snowy River has been directed atriver rehabilitation or enhancement, not resto-ration (Pendlebury et al., 1996; Anon., 1998;Bevitt et al., 1998; Erskine et al., 1999). Due tospace limitations, we concentrate here on theaspect of the Snowy Water Inquiry concernedwith rehabilitation of the Snowy River.The purpose of this paper is threefold,namely:1. To summarise the scientific support forSeddon’s (1999) graphic descriptions ofchannel response to the Snowy MountainsHydro-electric Scheme.2. To outline the role of an environmental flowregime in river rehabilitation.3. To emphasise that such rehabilitation is nowdependent on a political process that speci-fies an increase in the releases from LakeJindabyne into the Snowy River (Anon.,1998; Erskine et al., 1999).In October 1998, the Snowy Water Inquiryrecommended the implementation a new flowregime (their composite option D) togovernment but, as of July 1999, no furtheraction had been taken.‘A great environmental wrong perpetratedwith little thought to the consequences’The designed diversion flows out of the Snowycatchment (interbasin water transfers for hydro-electric power generation) were 1101 10