Australian Scene Research Articles

Australian initial public offerings and US venture capital: different structures for similar early-stage funding?

PurposeAustralian Securities Exchange (ASX) initial public offerings (IPOs) are an important source of early-stage capital and have also driven a substantial increase in main-board listed companies post-millennium. By contrast, Australian venture capital (VC) funding has remained largely dormant. The opposite has occurred in the US: IPOs have fallen by half, and VC funding has surged. The authors examine the reason for this divergence between ASX IPO and US VC systems that, with their supporting ecosystems, have many features in common and function similarly. The authors explore the potential factors that could explain the US VC surge vis-à-vis Australia's VC stagnation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ analysis is predominantly qualitative. The authors describe the Australian listing process and its similar features and functions as for the prototypical VC. The authors also describe the developments in US VC driving its recent exceptional surge and highlight that such developments have not yet materialised on the Australian scene, where early-stage IPOs have served as a substitute.FindingsThe ASX's structure and ecosystem have been critical to its success in fostering early-stage main-board listings. While the US has succeeded in alternatively growing VC, there is an increasing concern that the latter has occurred partially because valuations are stretched, tax concessions for carried-interest capital gains are too high and corporate control benefits are becoming increasingly diluted. These developments could have important implications for Australia, where VC structures are currently being reviewed.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study has attempted to bridge the broad differences in IPO and VC funding trends for early-stage companies in Australia and the USA.

The Efficiency of Bacterial Vaccines on Mortality during the 'Spanish' Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19.

The worldwide 'Spanish' influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which extended into the 1920s, infected more than a third of the world's population and killed an estimated 50-100 million people, more than the civilian and military casualties of World War I. Present-day medical scholars, journalists, and other commentators have often ignored, downplayed or treated with scepticism the role of bacterial vaccines in reducing mortality during the pandemic. There have been repeated claims in this century that these vaccines were 'useless', 'concocted', and possibly harmful. Focussing on the Australian scene, I show that bacterial vaccines from reputable sources did indeed reduce mortality, perhaps to a greater extent in some cases than modern anti-viral influenza vaccines.

Review: Into the Sea, by Ash Watson

Review: <i>Into the Sea</i>, by Ash Watson

Signing on the dotted line: the lived experience of book contracts in contemporary Australian small-press publishing

ABSTRACT The publishing contract is the central legal feature of any publishing professional's life, whether creator, literary agent, or publisher. And with small press becoming an ever more important part of the Australian publishing scene, the contracts landscape has diversified and become more complex. There's a wealth of information on what you should and shouldn't do, and what the perfect contract looks like. But what's it like in reality, beyond the clause and sub-clause? For though it's an important legal document, the contract also represents an intense lived experience for all those who are a party to it, especially in the small-press sector. This article, based on interviews with a range of creators (authors and illustrators), literary agents, small-press publishers and industry body representatives, presents an illuminating snapshot of the contemporary contract experience in the Australian small-press sector. Not intended as a formal analysis of the contracts landscape but rather as an intimate insight into the individual lived experience of contemporary Australian contracts, whether that be for creators or publishers, the article addresses questions covering the contemporary challenges and opportunities of ‘signing on the dotted line’.

Wandering and Wildflowering: Walking with Women into Intimacy and Ecological Action

Wandering and Wildflowering: Walking with Women into Intimacy and Ecological Action

Forging traditions: continuity and change in the mid 2000s Australian Hip-Hop scene

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore how Hip-Hop enthusiasts in the Adelaide and Melbourne scenes related their practices to a romanticised ‘American’ or ‘South Bronx’ origin point. I draw on ethnographic research conducted from 2006 to 2008 to show that while some Hip-Hop fans and artists worked to connect their beliefs and behaviours to an idealised past, others sought to separate themselves from these historical narratives and to establish Australian Hip-Hop as a distinct cultural form. These differences created tensions as people debated how authenticity should be assessed in the Australian context and what it meant to be a Hip-Hop practitioner in Australia.

Violence in the mosh pit: assault within the Australian punk scene

ABSTRACTThe mosh pit is a unique crowd formation where audience members dance aggressively to engage with the music, the performers and each other. However, in this space, Australian punks may experience violations of bodily integrity. Multiple levels and types of transgression occur, as members break with mosh pit ethics by engaging in unwanted and unlawful sexual and physical violence. This case study provides an example of how group normative behaviour is confounded in liminal spaces – how transgression within such spaces undermines the supposed freedom experienced by its participants. Whilst the mosh pit is perceived to be a site governed by its own particular ethics, some defy these in word and practice. The rules of engagement are ambiguous, and offenders are able to rationalise their harms through neutralisation techniques and the diffusion of blame and responsibility. The consequence is that more often than not, offenders can use the unique physical nature of the mosh pit to execute personal vendettas and engage in intentional violence such as ‘crowd killing’ and sexual assault, with little social and legal consequence. Moreover, a certain culture of denial permeates participant responses to these issues. Throughout it all, the violence occurring has a decidedly masculine basis, reflecting overarching gender differences in interpersonal violence generally.

Landscape architecture and environmentalism in the expansion era for Australian universities: the work of Bruce Mackenzie and Associates

The 1960s and 1970s were an era of expansion of the tertiary education sector internationally with entirely new universities developed at an unprecedented pace. In the Australian context, the quintessential start-up suburban campus was usually set within a greenfield site - typically on postagricultural land at the fringe of rapidly expanding suburbia. An effective role for landscape architecture often materialised from symbiotic relationships between architects, engineers, planners, horticulturalists, and others. A significant driver in shaping and enacting a clear vision for a distinctive quality of campus landscape came internal to university administration. Communities consisting of academic staff, administrative staff, and other interested and talented practitioners have been found to be crucial in defining a niche for landscape architects in campus design, marking a significant moment in the recognition and due regard that would be paid to a small but influential profession on the Australian scene. This paper records the themes that define the distinctive nature of the Australian condition. Focusing on campus designs by Bruce Mackenzie and Associates (BMA), the paper provides a preliminary assessment of the roles and influence of people, organisations, and events in the creation of the modern campus in Australia. It concludes that the most effective results were achieved when the landscape architect was engaged at the formative stages of campus development and had broad support inclusive of collaboration with other consultants and with university administrators and on-ground staff. A significant ingredient for success in achieving innovative results was found to be the existence within the university of communities of interested and engaged people with joint aims and ambitions for the creation of high quality campus landscapes, often in line with a culture of environmentalism. Such communities often go unheralded yet without their involvement the establishment of campus landscapes that celebrated the conservation of Australian indigenous plants and forms may not have been as readily achieved.

One the Bear: A postcolonial radical hip hop herstory

ABSTRACTThis article explores the theatrical power and politics of a new Australian production called One the Bear by Candy Bowers and the Black Honey Company. This high-energy, magic realist hip-hop fairy tale sought to decolonize the TFY space by speaking out about the experiences, stories, and identities of First Nations women through its masterful use of allegory, music, dance, and rhyme. Informed by radical feminist and postcolonial politics, this game-changing production burst onto the Australian TFY scene, pushing the boundaries of form, style, and message to reposition audiences within complex narratives of oppression and power. It offers a multitude of provocations to young and old audiences to reconsider the impacts of colonization and how it shapes the present and the future.

On the ground and on tap—law reform, Australian style

ABSTRACTBeing governmental, the law reform processes of a country are closely associated with the constitutional framework of the country concerned. In the case of Australia, the framework combines English and American constitutionalism. Professor Saunders neatly describes the result as ‘hybrid, derivative but eventually Australian’. After a brief overview of sources of law reform advice in Australia, the article focuses on one part of Australian law reform processes—law reform bodies established by statute that advise in a particular area (‘specialist statutory advisors’). The main question the article poses is—like the constitutional framework, are specialist statutory advisors ‘hybrid, derivative but eventually Australian’? The research hypothesis is informed by an influential stream of Australian historical and legal thought. A number of commentators have propounded that Australian democracy is distinctive, and that Australians have time and again accepted a commanding role for government, and continue to give it great respect. It is said that Benthamite utilitarianism and legislation lie at the heart of the dominant political ideology. The article examines the Australian law reform scene in the light of these theories. The research hypothesis is that these distinctive aspects of Australian political life will manifest themselves in processes of law reform, namely specific legislative processes for facilitating law reform. The article identifies and analyses specialist law reform agencies established under statutes passed by parliaments of the Commonwealth, the States, and the Territories. This analysis is followed by an assessment of specialist advisors. They are compared with two other types of law reform bodies: Ministerial committees and generalist law reform bodies. The article concludes by reflecting on how specialist statutory advisors reflect the country’s constitutional framework. In their own way—on the ground and on tap—they too are found to be ‘hybrid, derivative but eventually Australian’.

From Sharpies to Skyhooks – On the cutting edge

Greg Macainsh is a major actor in the Australian popular music scene. He was the pioneer ethnographic filmmaker of the youth gang the Sharpies, and then bass player and songwriter for the most innovative band of the seventies, Skyhooks. Skyhooks combined new composition, driving music, sarcastic and local lyrics, and keen attention to visuals and costume. This article backgrounds Macainsh and his context. The interview that follows looks further into musical history and performative culture in Melbourne and its suburbs in the period.

‘Southern’ Northern Soul: Changing Senses of Direction, Place, Space, Identity and Time

‘Southern’ Northern Soul: Changing Senses of Direction, Place, Space, Identity and Time

Playing bluegrass in Australia across country and folk scenes

Bluegrass music has attracted Australian musicians and audiences since the 1960s. The popularity of hillbilly music in Australia from the 1930s onwards meant that Australian musicians were primed to engage with and appropriate the aesthetically related sounds of bluegrass. Because of its niche status, bluegrass has found musical homes across larger Australian folk and country scenes. In turn, the internal logics, ideologies and institutional structures of these two scenes have shaped Australian bluegrass musicians’ musical practices. Oral histories of key figures in the history and institutionalization of bluegrass in Australia illuminate the ways in which musicians have engaged with bluegrass across folk and country scenes.

Bringing It All Home

The emergence in late 1950s Australian architecture of what has come to be known historically as Brutalism was complex, diffuse and, across a vast continent, regionally split. This was due partly to Australia's geographic isolation and long-standing Commonwealth ties, partly to the arrival of British and European émigré architects already steeped in modernist critique and partly to local architect–critic Robin Boyd's reflections on Brutalism in his buildings and writings, both of which explored the implications of New Brutalism from an international perspective and were complemented by his two books on Japan, Kenzo Tange (1962) and New Directions in Japanese Architecture (1968). It was diffuse also because of long-standing professional traditions of working in England and the Americas made influential by shared experiences gained by cohorts of young Australian architects often working in the same architectural offices. On the whole, these experiences were not overly theoretical, but instead took the form of received knowledge made tangible through design, documentation and the physical experience of material and detail within the offices of others, but always on “bringing it all home”, repurposed for the local. This article outlines how, in “bringing it all home”, the translation of these experiences was made complicated by changed circumstances “at home”: Robin Boyd's overview of the Australian scene, a concomitant embrace of the indigenous Australian landscape, reaction against suburbia and discovery of the inner city; the dramatic expansion of existing universities and the creation of new ones; and a government-sponsored program of monumental public buildings in Canberra, the nation's capital, that would see that city become, by the late 1970s, a showpiece of Brutalist architecture, but of a distinctly Antipodean strain.

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

The Emergence of Contemporary Percussion in Australia: 1960–1975

Over the past forty years, contemporary percussion music has assumed an increasingly prominent role in Australian classical music performance and composition; however, no research has been undertaken to record how or why this prolific field of Australian music emerged in the 1970s. This paper closes a gap in Australian contemporary music history by examining the historical contexts that fostered the emergence of an Australian percussion scene in the 1960s and 1970s. An examination of significant events and individuals in the field that effected change is offered, using Australia's first professional percussion ensemble, the Australian Percussion Ensemble, as a case study.

The challenges of long-term monitoring

book reviews ISSN 1948-6596 The challenges of long-term monitoring Biodiversity and Environmental Change: Monitoring, Challenges and Direction. David Lindenmayer, Emma Burns, Nicole Thurgate & Andrew Lowe (Editors), 2014, CSIRO Publishing. 624 pp. AU$120.00 (hardback) ISBN:9780643108561; http://www.publish.csiro.au/ At a time of intense and innovative use of eco- logical datasets, obstacles to acquisition and archiving of fundamental long-term data re- main as pervasive as ever. As pointed out in this volume, effective long-term monitoring should extend over 10 years or more, have a well designed structure, a carefully thought out resampling strategy and secure funding. Cur- rent trends in how science is done work against this ideal. Public agencies and research institu- tions, which used to do the bulk of long-term monitoring, are now under great pressure to achieve efficiencies and to devote more effort and resources to immediate concerns. Univer- sity scientists, as a whole, are disinclined to invest in monitoring other than on a limited and short-term scale: the pressures to publish are too great and the rewards for basic data collection too meagre. Research funding agen- cies and highly ranked journals are fixated on innovative, ground-breaking research and of- ten explicitly exclude projects and papers mainly concerned with basic data or observa- tions. None of this can be wished away. The current situation is the product of thousands of individual decisions made by policy makers, managers and scientists. The consequence? ‘The recent and current reality of envi- ronmental reporting and environmental deci- sion making is that supporting data and evi- dence are rarely used.’ (from the Preface). The implications of this astounding state- ment should give us pause. Is evidence really regarded as irrelevant? While the multiple en- vironmental crises that afflict the globe may eventually force a radical rethink of our atti- tudes to ecological data, the immediate chal- lenge is how to sustain biodiversity monitoring in the meantime. This handsome, beautifully produced vol- ume shows how Australian ecologists have risen to the challenge. It is based in large part on work coordinated through the Australian Government’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Network – an Australia-wide collaboration between land management agencies, government depart- ments and universities. Within the TERN net- work is LTERN (Long Term Ecological Research Network) a collaborative enterprise that coor- dinates and makes available the data from 35 core studies comprising nearly 3000 long term plots and which forms a part of the Interna- tional Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network. Once a scientific monitoring group joins LTERN, they agree to share data and as- pire to certain standards while pursuing the diverse goals, targets and approaches appropri- ate to their sites and problems. It is a prag- matic response to the huge task of monitoring the vast Australian landscape and its hyperdi- verse biota. This book showcases the results of these independent approaches. David Lindenmayer, who led the editorial team, is an international figure in long term monitoring. Over the past 30 years he has pub- lished prolifically on the subject, deriving much of his inspiration from his own practical in- volvement in the day to day challenges of monitoring. The general overview chapters he leads here are impressive summaries of the LTERN enterprise and reflect his sustained thinking on the hows and whys of monitoring. They are essential reading for anyone contem- plating a monitoring project. The bulk of the book consists of a series of chapters setting the Australian scene and then moving systemati- cally through nine terrestrial biomes ranging from alpine communities to tropical rainforest. Each biome chapter is clearly set out with an overview, conceptual model of the major proc- esses and drivers, exposition of threatening processes, major trends and cases studies from the LTERN core sites. Extra material is included as boxes on a wide variety of other topics and frontiers of biogeography 6.3, 2014 — © 2014 the authors; journal compilation © 2014 The International Biogeography Society

Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation. (first paragraph)

I'm Not Dead Yet: music documentary's role in asserting and celebrating artistic independence and resilience

Music documentaries are often released as virtual eulogies for musicians, genres or musical traditions after they have passed on. In the case of I'm Not Dead Yet (2011), independent Australian film-maker Janine Hosking plays with the form to present the career and music of the still alive, and still very musically active, elderly independent country musician, Chad Morgan. As the film's name suggests, Morgan's profile in mainstream Australia is infamous but marginalized. This music documentary explores the politics and character of a strong arm of the Australian music scene, and while its content first appears to be very regionally specific, the music documentary form used to tell this story provides access points for a variety of audiences.The Australian country music scene in the 70s was like the American country music scene in the 50s, where you weren't allowed to have extra wives, you weren't allowed to cheat, and if you did, they tried to ostracize you as they did with Hank Williams. Chad Morgan got ostracized by the establishment, but he still had a huge fan base that the establishment couldn't stop. (Dave Dawson, Australian Country Music Journalist)If you're recording for the mainstream, you've got to do what the recording company and the publicist tells you. And of course, I don't and I wouldn't. I wouldn't conform to their rules. (Chad Morgan, Australian Country Musician)

Women’s and Gender History in Australia: A Transformative Practice

When a new wave of women’s history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women’s liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of “gender relations” enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women’s experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women’s movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders.