Australian Space Research Articles

The Sydney 2002 Gay Games and Querying Australian National Space

In what ways did Sydney's Gay Games reinvent the Australian nation? In this paper I set out to examine this question by drawing upon the idea that sports and parades of athletes during opening ceremonies have been definitive moments for the Australian nation. I investigate the social terrains or bodyscapes invoked by sporting gay pride during the participants' parade at the opening ceremony and sports venues of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games. This enables insights into whether these spaces subverted the heteronormativity of sporting bodies that are metaphors for Australian national space. I centre my argument within a post-Foucauldian performance theory to consider both lived experience and textual representations of queer sports spaces. This approach advocates a recursive relationship between power, discourse, and critically reflexive, geographically embedded subjects. The ethnographic basis of my findings is participant observation and a time series of in-depth interviews with over forty self-identifying gay and queer males living in Sydney. I extract two overarching themes from the bodyscapes of the games: transcendence and imprisonment. For those actively involved in the making of camp bodyscapes, mimicking the monopoly of the dominant order through the authority of national signification provided by the parade of athletes at opening ceremonies and by sporting bodies offered a transgressive vehicle. However, the pillar of hetero-normative sporting bodies in defining Australian national boundaries survived unchallenged. Sporting gay pride also worked to close rather than to open up a space for discourses about sexuality and national identity to occur. Closure from a mainstream audience occurred by jettisoning the shame that links sport, sex, and bodies. Closure also occurred amongst certain respondents who shunned the games, regarding it as disciplining bodies into ‘normalcy’.

Australia’s Antarctic Turf

Australia’s Antarctic Turf

Editorial

Editorial

The Proclamation Island moment: making Antarctica Australian

This article begins with a statement, and with a scene. The statement is a reasonably straightforward one: Australia claims 42 per cent of the distant offshore continent of Antarctica as its national territory. Or, to make this article’s governing statement speak directly to the themes of this issue: nearly half of Antarctica is part of the Australian nation; it is Australian space. This statement’s validity depends on national perspective: the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which upholds Australia’s claim, also allows other nations to refuse to recognise it. Only four nations — France, Norway, New Zealand, and Britain, all Antarctic claimants themselves — recognise Australia’s massive polar claim; to the rest, Antarctica remains non-sovereign, non-national space. Yet whether or not other nations recognise Australia’s Antarctic claim is not the focus of this article: the subject of analysis here is the complex set of cultural technologies through which six million square kilometres of Antarctica became Australian. How, exactly, did Antarctica become an Australian territorial possession? What are the cultural processes through which Antarctic land became Australian space? As a means of answering this question, this article focuses on a key moment, or scene, in the history of the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT). The article then unpacks this moment, examining the ways in which three articulated cultural technologies — representation, international territorial law, and the body of the explorer — together initiated this massive space of Australian national possession.

Gardening and the cultivation of Australian national space: the writings of Ethel Turner

In the romantic stereotypes of the ‘Bush Myth’, Australian national identity is formed through the confrontation between the bushman and the natural environment, particularly as depicted in ‘realist’ literature. This myth has been displaced from its centrality in numerous ways. Less attention has been paid to the many other competing literary figurings of national identity at the turn of the nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century. One of these tropes, often used by women writers, looked at the national space not as a hostile and alien environment but as a garden. By contrast, iconic fictions such as Lawson's ‘Water them Geraniums’ show gardening as a feminine pursuit antithetical to (masculine) Australian life. Australia as garden produced a different set of possibilities for the settler colonial plot. Instead of beleaguered fighters against an unyielding wilderness, fictions figuring the nation as a garden produced a potentially more fruitful and less doomed role for the protagonist, particularly the female protagonist. This plot also allowed some casting of urban space, particularly suburban space, as authentic Australian space, rather than second-hand European waste.

Re-Writing Suburbia

Re-Writing Suburbia

The City

The City

Crime and Control in Australian Urban Space

Crime and Control in Australian Urban Space

The Australian Space Activities Act: Creating a Regulatory Regime for Space Activities

The Australian Space Activities Act: Creating a Regulatory Regime for Space Activities

Australian space weather services — Past and present

HF radio and magnetic field changes were the first space weather problems experienced. Worldwide magnetometer and ionosonde networks were developed to better understand the problems and advance practical advice. The Ionospheric Predictions Service (IPS) was formed to co-ordinate Australian ionospheric monitoring and advise HF communicators and other groups interested in the effects of solar activity. Although customer numbers and sophistication have changed, service demand has remained steady. Currently, IPS distributes realtime services for HF radio, magnetic and space customers through the web ( http://www.ips.gov.au ) in addition to other conventional services. The Web HF services are based on an empirical ionospheric model updated hourly using ionosonde data. Magnetic services use similar, empirical, data-driven models.

Better ways of getting into the space business: microeconomic reform in Australian space affairs

This personal view of trends in global space enterprise suggests that, unless they adapt and re-structure, large-scale national and regional space agencies built on traditional lines may struggle to survive, at least in the developed world. With the growing maturity of speculative private sector space initiatives, the role of traditional space agencies as project managers and mediators between providers and the market may become redundant, while in the absence of a cogent national security argument, public interest in space is no longer to be relied upon to deliver large national space budgets. Australia’s newest space mission, the FedSat scientific microsatellite, was announced at the same time as the former national space program was terminated. This process and its consequences are examined as an instance of microeconomic reform, which seeks to improve productivity and competitiveness by producing a regulatory and infrastructure environment that gives business more flexibility. Historical circumstances unique to Australia may have contributed to this change of direction, but many contributing elements also apply elsewhere. The features of the new approach are identification of public sector space needs; selecting the most suitable team from both public and private sectors to manage the project; and the acceptance of a large proportion of the risk by the proponents.

Convergence and Divergence in the Australian Space Economy

Australia's space economy has changed rapidly since the 1970s through processes of globalisation, economic restructuring and demographic change. Trends in population distribution and patterns of employment and investment in economic activity highlight both spatial diffusion and concentration. Migration to ‘sun belt’ regions and suburban growth in the mega metro regions is creating population‐led demand for production and services, thus creating investment growth and new employment in some consumer‐oriented economic activities. However many internationally linked and national market serving economic functions are increasingly concentrated in the two largest cities at strategically located old and new nodes of agglomeration. No longer can population growth be equated directly with increased economic activity, and there are significant spatial mismatches between the outcomes of demographic and economic processes across the nation's cities and regions.

Outback

This paper is written in such a way that the style reproduces the epistemological problems, Memories, sounds, and feelings are part of the analysis of subjective relations to Australian spaces, accordingly these are reproduced ‘ficto-critically’. The aesthetic is both nomadological and immaterial. Apprehensions of Australian space are constructed as movement through them. Accordingly the reader is taken on a journey from the backyard to the Outback, and it is explained why these two spaces have a certain homology. Anteriority, it is claimed, is a central category for a non-Aboriginal Australian imaginary. But some accounts of Aboriginal apprehensions of space are brought out for the purposes of contrast (for Aboriginal people there is no ‘Outback’). The textual status of these Aboriginal accounts is contingent upon the structures of their knowledge and ways of obtaining it. Instances of the author's ‘capture’ on a tape recorder of stories by an Aboriginal woman, Bonnie Edwards, indicate the divergence of the form and purpose of her texts from the ‘textual suburbs’ of theory that the author usually inhabits. As he leaves her country, his practical solution to the material weight of theory and the self-presence of narrative subjectivity is an immaterial one. He gets lost.

Spirit of Place


 
 
 No other town in Queensland is so well favoured by nature for combining these rare advantages. We have the healthiness of climate, the coolness of a fine English summer, the pure and rarefied air of a moderate elevation, which dwellers along the hot and humid coast so much desire. We have beauty of scenery in picturesque variety, with a panorama of rolling Downs and far-reaching plain … ours is the first town on the elevated Downs after rising from the close and exhausting atmosphere of the ‘littoral’ country.
 
 So rhapsodised the editorial in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 14 June, 1890. From the nineteenth century the drop in temperature which greeted the traveller's ascent to the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs was greeted as a sign of a more vitalising and health-giving climate than the sub-tropical humidity of the Brisbane coastal plain. Katie Hume in 1866 felt Toowoomba's air 'cool and English like … after the heat of Brisbane’, while the consumptive Walter Coote argued in 1887 that the Downs possessed ‘a climate as healthful and even invigorating as that of any place in the World’ (Hume 160, Coote 201). The Social-Darwinist connection between the moral character of a people and the temperature of their climate was a frequent theme of nineteenth century culture. The imperial triumphs of European civilisation were often explained by Europe's temperate climate, for the cooler the climate the more ‘civil’ the people are deemed to be (Spurr); and Europe's temperate climate was also an acknowledged cause of the reasoned moral restraint of the civilised colonial settler. Thus the celebration of Toowoomba's ‘European’ climate served to familiarise an alien Australian space as a place which would support European settlement.
 

The Curse of the Smile: Ambivalence and the ‘Asian’ Woman in Australian Multiculturalism

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of ‘Asians’ in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire for Australia to become ‘part of Asia’ has resulted in a relatively positive valuation of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’, an inversion from the racist exclusionism of the past. Against the self-congratulatory stance of this discourse, this article signals the operation of ambivalence at two levels: at the structural level, insofar as it points to the inherent contradictions in the idea of the ‘multicultural nation’ and its fantasy of a harmonious ‘unity-in-diversity’, and at the subjective level, in the sense that the ethos of multiculturalism doesn't erase the ambivalent relations of acceptance/rejection between majority and minority subjects. Several instances of such ambivalence pertaining to the positioning and representation of the ‘Asian’ woman are given.

An Integrated National Space Program: Executive summary

In August 1988 the Government of Australia requested the Australian Space Board to review the programme content of the National Space Program. In June 1992 an Expert Panel duly produced a report entitled An Integrated National Space Program. The following is a slightly edited version of the Executive Summary and Proposal of that report.

A review of: “Australian Space Activities to the Year 2000.” Edited by M. BANNISTER and G. HARRIS. (Canberra: COSSA, CSIRO), COSSA Publication Number 28. [Pp.219

A review of: “Australian Space Activities to the Year 2000.” Edited by M. BANNISTER and G. HARRIS. (Canberra: COSSA, CSIRO), COSSA Publication Number 28. [Pp.219

Australia's Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society

Introduction Early Italian migration and the construction of European Australia 1788--1939 Italians in Australia during World War II Italian migration and settlement since 1945 Italians help build Australia Cappuccino capitalism: Italian immigrants and Australian business Place and community: the construction of an Italo--Australian space Community leaders in rural Australia and the construction of the Godfather Community networks and institutions Italo--Australians and politics Italian migrant women The second generation The Italian language in Australia: sociolinguistic aspects Narrating the migration experience Italian migration to Australia and Argentina The Italo--Australian community on the Pacific rim

Australia's space heritage

An overview is provided of Australian space activities and their legacy, including the Woomera launch centre, tracking stations, space science, technology and applications. The military basis for many of the larger activities is discussed and the importance of using space-based remote sensing to deal with mounting global problems is emphasized.

Australian opportunities in space science and applications

Australia has been involved in space almost since the beginning of the space era. In this edited version of a paper given at the 1990 Australian Space Development Conference, held in Sydney, 24–26 August, Jeff Kingwell looks at the part played by the country's largest research organization, CSIRO, in Australia's space activities and discusses whether there are any relevant precedents for national speculative investment in expensive exploratory ventures. In the Australian context economic benefits are likely in the resources, services and infrastructure sectors rather than in manufacturing industry. In addition, important though unquantifiable benefits can be expected in cultural, environmental and international relations domains.