Suburban Melbourne Research Articles

To Brunswick and Beyond: A Geography of Creative and Social Participation for Marginalised Youth

To Brunswick and Beyond: A Geography of Creative and Social Participation for Marginalised Youth

The Waste Commons in an Emerging Resource Recovery Waste Regime: Contesting Property and Value in Melbourne's Hard Rubbish Collections

Practices of scavenging of Melbourne's hard rubbish collections are examined in the context of an emerging resource recovery waste regime linked with policy shifts that promote resource recovery over disposal through landfill. Waste regimes have many parallels with regimes in natural resource management and contestations over property are an important but neglected aspect. Based on research conducted primarily in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I argue that hard rubbish on the kerb-side forms an informal ‘waste commons’ that facilitates various forms of revaluing of municipal household waste. Results of a survey conducted by householders scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles suggest that informal scavenging activities were more effective for diverting waste from landfill by recycling than the formal processes of council hard rubbish contractors. Interviews conducted with residents, waste management contractors and self identified ‘professional’ scavengers revealed different perspectives on the waste commons and highlighted the contested nature of property in hard rubbish. Together with the survey findings, they allow tentative conclusions to be drawn about the role of the waste commons in the transition from a regime of disposal through landfill to one focused on resource recovery.

Catholic girls: the mother–daughter nexus

This paper examines Catholic girlhood, womanhood and the mother–daughter relationship, and its socio-historical construction within a range of disparate discourses. The aim of the paper is to deconstruct dominant patriarchal constructions and images of femininity, particularly those embedded within the doctrine of Catholicism. Moreover, the paper intends to reveal traces of maternal connections and relations which are often hidden by more dominant discourses. Rather than providing a historical account of Catholic girlhood, the object is to tell a perspectived story of the local and contextual experiences of growing up and being educated to be a ‘good Catholic woman’ in suburban Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s and 1960s. In telling the story it is hoped that other women can momentarily engage with this narrative of Catholic girlhood and the mother–daughter relationship.

Teaching old dogs new tricks: A Paediatric Transition to Specialty Program (PTSP) for adult trained nurses in the intensive care unit

Monash Medical Centre is a 21 bed mixed adult and paediatric unit in the South Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne. The hospital caters for a wide range of specialties including cardiothoracic, neurosurgical, obstetrics, general adult and paediatric patients. The recent population growth has prompted the unit to upgrade and enhance the skills of the staff to accommodate the growing neds of the community. Skill mix has played a major role in the past as not all of nurses were trained to look after critically ill paediatric patients. The unit was already running a successful Adult Transition to Specialty Program (TSP) which added positively to skill mix and staff retention. With the pressing need of the unit to cope with the increasing numbers and acuity of paediatric patients that needed ICU management, a PTSP was launched. As a result, there are an increasing number of adult trained nurses who are now clinically competent with complex paediatric patients. The PTSP has created a positive result in terms of both skill and confidence amongst adult trained nurses in the ICU.

Working together as a catalyst for change: the development of a peer mentoring model for the prevention of chronic disease in Australian Indigenous communities

This paper outlines the development of a model for an Indigenous peer mentoring program. The aim of this program is to improve the health of Indigenous people living in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Although the benefits of peer mentoring are well documented, particularly in relation to disease prevention, little has been written about the specific benefits for Indigenous people. While developing this model, it became apparent that to be successful, peer mentoring programs for Indigenous people need to be flexible, informal and draw on the knowledge and skills of the local community in partnership with local services.

The power of expert evidence: a cautionary tale

The power of expert evidence: a cautionary tale

Donald Eric Weiss 1924 - 2008

Don Weiss was born in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda on 4 October 1924 and died in Melbourne on 30 July 2008. He was educated in South Australia, at Scotch College, the South Australian School of Mines and Industry, and the University of Adelaide. He joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1948 and worked for CSIR and its successor organization, CSIRO, until his retirement in 1984. He was the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Chemical Technology from 1974 to 1979 and Director of CSIRO's Planning and Evaluation Advisory Unit from 1979 to 1984. He was a highly imaginative and creative scientist whose work was always driven by his clear understanding of its application. He made important contributions to separation science but is best known for his contributions to technology for water and waste water treatment. His enduring legacy is the more than twenty MIEX plants that have been installed around the world.

An examination of sport fandom in Australia: Socialization, team identification, and fan behavior

To examine sport fandom in Australia, a convenience sample of 163 university students (62% males, 38% females, M = 21.3) attending a large, multi-sector institution located in a western suburb of Melbourne voluntarily completed a 25-item questionnaire survey which included the Sport Fandom Questionnaire ( Wann, 2002 ) and the Sport Spectator Identification Scale ( Wann and Branscombe, 1993 ). Descriptive and inferential statistics revealed that males chose ‘friends’ as their most influential sport fan socialization agent while females ranked friends, parents and school about the same. Male socialization agents were very important for both sexes with ‘father’ chosen most influential. Males scored higher on every measure of sport fandom behavior including attending sports events, watching sports on television, listening to sports on the radio, engaging in a sports conversation with others, and accessing sport information via the Internet. Australian Football League teams were chosen ‘favorite team’ by 81 percent of the total sample; selection was unrelated to the respondent’s sex. Compared with similar data obtained from US, Norwegian and Greek university student samples, these Australian students were judged greater sport consumers and more heavily identified with the sport fan role and a favorite team.

Global flows as gendered cultural pedagogies: learning gangsta in the ‘Durty South’

This article theorizes empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in and around the economically disadvantaged suburb of Noble Park in southeast suburban Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). Exploring the politics around gendered identities of young people involved in the research, particularly Australian-Sudanese men, the authors theorize global flows of ‘gangsta culture’ as gendered cultural pedagogies that are (re)produced by young men who live in the area. In highlighting the pedagogical role of gangsta culture, the authors read Appadurai's theories of globalization and the imagination in relation to theories of hegemonic masculinity, to argue global flows of gangsta culture are gendered and carry with them specific kinds of idealized masculinities in relation to which young people in the study produce themselves. The authors also argue that gangsta culture clearly is not an American phenomenon, despite commonly being associated as such. Rather, its reach is globalizing, appearing everywhere global media texts form part of local communities. Gangsta pedagogies are thus in motion and disjunctive, operating transnationally and having differentiated effects in the lives of young participants involved in the research. In line with this, gangsta masculinities are ubiquitous and constitute sites of constant contest and reconstruction, with the young men involved in this research constructing their masculinities dialogically, in relation to the perceptions of peers, family members, teachers, members of the community and in relation to the contours of local space. Whether young people choose to actively engage with gangsta culture, or are unwillingly engaged with it by virtue of the spaces they traverse, its pedagogical forces effect both problematic and productive performances of racialized, gendered and spatialized identities.

‘I Want to Play When I Go to School’: Children's Views on the Transition to School from Kindergarten

THE BEGINNING OF A CHILD'S JOURNAL to formal schooling is a significant milestone in the early years of a child's life. Research literature has identified that the manner in which a child experiences the transition to school has significant implications for their future social and academic success at school. This article presents some of the findings from a recent study that examined the multidimensional nature of children's transition to school. The study specifically explored six children's views about their transition to school. The study was carried out across three long day care centres in inner suburban Melbourne that provided a kindergarten program for children a year before commencing formal schooling. The study indicated that children were very happy about starting primary school and children's understanding of school encompassed the social and physical changes to which they will need to adapt when commencing school. The study further suggested that children did not take into consideration the academic aspect of school but just wanted to have fun at school.

Clinical data extraction and feedback in general practice: a case study from Australian primary care

Quality improvement in general practice has increasingly focused on the analysis of its clinical databases to guide its improvement strategies. However, general practitioners (GPs) need to be motivated to extract and review their clinical data, and they need skills to do so. This study examines the initial experience of 15 practices in undertaking clinical data extraction and management and the support they were given by their local division of general practice. To explore the uptake of data extraction tools in general practice and understand how divisions of general practice can assist with their uptake. This study was conducted within a single division of general practice within the south-eastern suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Self-selected practices were offered a data extraction program ('tool') free of charge, with ongoing division support. Practice representatives, either GPs, practice nurses or other practice staff members, were given instructions on how to extract data using the data extraction tool. This was followed by discussion with division staff regarding which clinical areas might be focused on. Division staff systematically recorded information about the experience of the practices and collated their clinical data. Fifteen practices, representing 69 GPs, participated. The practices chose from the following areas to work on as quality improvement activities: improving data entry; inactivating patient files for those who no longer attended the practice; correcting demographic information; diabetes and coronary heart disease management. The recording of data, according to the extraction tool, was found to be incomplete. For example, one-third of the patients who had HbA1cs recorded were on target, i.e. <7%, but nearly half the patients with diabetes did not have HbA1cs recorded at all. About half the patients with coronary heart disease were not reported as taking aspirin and one-third were not on a statin. Nearly half the patients who had attended their practice in the previous 30 months did not have smoking status recorded. While data extraction programs provide GPs with useful tools for examining their clinical databases and identifying clinical practice issues which could be improved, external support, such as that provided by divisions, is helpful. Technical barriers, such as the failure of extraction tools to recognise some data and the failure to comprehensively enter data, are impediments, but in spite of these considerable interest exists in the use of clinical data to improve practice.

Locus of Control Beliefs Mediate the Relationship Between Religious Functioning and Psychological Health

Theistic and spiritually based beliefs and behaviors have been demonstrated to consistently predict physical and mental health, although the psychological processes underlying these relationships are unclear. This study investigated associative relationships and pathways of mediation between religious functioning, locus of control (LOC) and health. The sample consisted of 122 Christians (79 women, 43 men) who were predominately Catholic, ranging in age from 18 to 80 (M = 45.47, SD = 15.0). Participants were recruited from churches in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, and completed a questionnaire package measuring (1) psychological and physical health, (2) the religious variables of awareness of God, instability and impression management, and (3) God, internal and external LOC domains. Results indicated that awareness of God and internal LOC were associated with better health, whereas external LOC and instability were associated with poorer health. God LOC and impression management were not significantly associated with health. Sobel tests were used to analyse mediation hypotheses. Internal LOC was found to mediate the relationship between awareness of God and better psychological health, and external LOC was found to mediate the relationship between instability and poorer psychological health. These findings are of considerable clinical significance.

A Waste of Space: Bodies, Time and Urban Renewal

A Waste of Space: Bodies, Time and Urban Renewal

Resilient creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe

The relationship between culture and the economy is of growing interest to researchers, writers and policy makers. Advanced economies have become increasingly ‘culturalised’, pushing culture from the periphery to the centre of policy concerns and action. The economic downturn commencing in late 2008 generated predictions that ranged from the apocalyptic to the sanguine, across all sectors. This article offers an insight into the relationship between the economy, the creative industries and their geographic localities. It investigates creative industries situated away from the urban core, and located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. We suggest that for creative industries situated in outer suburbs, there are characteristics that may contribute to their economic resilience.

How I became a biochemist

Why did I become a biochemist? I certainly did not plan to be a biochemist, indeed I had not heard of such an occupation when I was growing up. I was born in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia in a place called Deer Park. This suburb was established in the 1870s as a site for the manufacture of explosives for the goldfields in Ballarat and Bendigo. It was located exactly 12 miles from the centre of Melbourne so management could make the trip from the city centre to the factory and back in a day; a distance that could be comfortably covered by horse and carriage. Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) took over the factory in 1928 and the factory expanded during World War II and over the following years as Australia’s mining industry grew. During my childhood, most of the people who lived in this suburb worked for ICI and their children expected to find employment there when they finished school. My brothers were sent off to do apprenticeships and learn a trade, an option that was not available to a girl. I did not know any women who stayed in the workforce after they were married. I thus had freedom to study whatever I liked during my education at primary and secondary school as I was not expected to have a career. I did well at school, driven by natural curiosity and quite a bit of boredom when I was home. I collected tadpoles and nurtured them until they turned into frogs and learnt to love plants as I followed my mother around the garden. I gathered some concepts from Sunday school that I could not understand. They still bother me. Just how long is eternity and how far is infinity? I enjoyed the broad range of subjects at school and found humanities and science of equal interest. The first big decision that set me on the path to becoming a biochemist was when I had to choose between the science and humanities stream at the end of year 10. My father, inspired by his career in the chemical industry, encouraged me to take the tougher option and do science. How strange when he did not encourage his own sons

Spaces to Speak: Challenging Representations of Sudanese-Australians

In September 2007, Liep Gony, an 18-year-old Sudanese-Australian man, was assaulted in a suburb in Melbourne's outer south-east, later dying in hospital. Despite the fact that Gony was the victim and not the perpetrator of this tragedy, the subsequent media and political attention on gangs and violence focused overwhelmingly on young men with Sudanese backgrounds and became intertwined with broader claims about Sudanese communities' failure to settle in Australia. This paper considers how, in focusing on issues of violence, refugee experiences and settlement challenges, these political and media responses served to position Sudanese people as strangers to Australian society. It contrasts these representations with the audio-visual outcome of a collaborative arts-based research project with Sudanese-Australian young women and discusses how this DVD constitutes both a reply to, and a complication of, the dominant representations of people with Sudanese backgrounds in Australia.

Reinvestigation of the crystal structure of the zeolite gobbinsite: A single-crystal X-ray diffraction study

The crystal structure of a natural Na-rich gobbinsite from Bundoora, a northern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia [(Na 4.97 K 0.07 Ca 0.48 ) ∑5.52 (Al 5.62 Si 10.29 ) ∑15.91 O 32 ·11.91H 2 O, Z = 1, a = 10.1035(15), b = 9.7819(10), c = 10.1523(9) A, and V = 1003.37(20) A 3 , space group Pmnb (no. 62)], has been investigated by means of single-crystal X-ray diffraction, elemental CHN analysis, and electron microprobe analysis in the wavelength dispersive mode. For the first time, an anisotropic structural refinement has been performed on the basis of single-crystal X-ray diffraction data collected at 298 K, with: R 1 ( F ) = 0.0608, 1362 unique reflections with F o > 4σ( F o ), and 114 refined parameters. The residuals in the final difference-Fourier maps are less than ±0.6 e − /A 3 . Previous structure solutions based on powder diffraction data were performed in the space group Pmn 2 1 , with a significantly different description of the channels’ content. In this study, the Si/Al distribution in the tetrahedral framework is found to be highly disordered. A complex configuration of the extra-framework population occurs, with two possible and mutually exclusive sites for cations (Na and Ca) and five independent sites partially occupied by water molecules (W1, W2, W2′, W3, and W3′). The coordination shell of the Na site is represented by a distorted polyhedron with coordination number CN = 6 (4 framework O atoms + 2 H 2 O molecules), with at least five possible mutually exclusive configurations, whereas the coordination shell of the Ca site is represented by a distorted polyhedron with CN = 7 (5 framework O atoms + 2 H 2 O molecules), with at least two possible mutually exclusive configurations.

Interethnic Understanding and Belonging in Suburban Melbourne

Modelling and mapping ethnicity is a methodological approach used to understand the changing socio-spatial structure of the city. Such an approach uses a range of indicators to identify ethnic groups, map them in urban space and explain the changing nature of ethnic concentrations. The unintended consequences, however, are the labelling, marginalisation and exclusion of ethnic minorities. Critical approaches, in contrast, focus on making visible the politics of representation that mark and stereotype ethnic minorities and ethnic concentrations. Within contemporary research on ethnicity such work has drawn attention to the exercise of power in the constitution of ethnic identities, the invisibility of whiteness and the inherent tensions that are likely to arise in negotiating ethnic cultural differences in local places. Although this article draws attention to such tensions in a particular place, Dandenong, it engages in this discussion to argue that the everyday negotiation of cultural difference also provides the potential to blur fixed ethnic boundaries and contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people who live and/or work in Dandenong, suburban Melbourne, this article underlines that such positive insights from everyday multiculturalism have the potential to inform and broaden policy debates on diversity and social inclusion in the multicultural city.

Negotiating emotions, rethinking otherness in suburban Melbourne

I argue that research that tries to makes sense of emotion provides a better understanding of the politics and ethics of doing face-to-face research. Reflecting on in-depth interviews with people who live and/or work in Dandenong, an outer suburban area of Melbourne, I draw attention to the emotional dimensions of the research process. In particular I focus on moments when the exercise of white privilege made it difficult to negotiate emotions. These were moments when the intersection of my ethnicity with my position as a new settler in Dandenong made me feel excluded. The outcome was that I found it hard to value the voice of participants who were eager to help me with my research. A critical reflection of the emotions produced during such interpersonal encounters, however, has enabled me to rethink moments when the Self/Other binary unintentionally emerged. Critical self-reflexivity that is attentive to emotions gave me the opportunity to move closer to my goal of being an ethical researcher.

An integrated care facilitation model improves quality of life and reduces use of hospital resources by patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic heart failure

As part of the Department of Human Services Hospital Admissions Risk Program (HARP), a group of acute and community based health care providers located in the western suburbs of Melbourne formed a consortium to reduce the demand on hospital emergency services and improve health outcomes for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic heart failure (CHF). The model of care was designed by a team of multidisciplinary specialists and medical consultants. In addition to receiving normal care, patients recruited to the project were assessed by 'Care Facilitators', who identified unmet health care needs and provided information, advice and education for the patient concerning their condition and self-management. Patients declining recruitment received all normal care services. The patients' rates of emergency department (ED) presentations, inpatient admissions and hospital inpatient bed-days before and after their recruitment were calculated from the Western Health patient activity records, and pre- versus post-recruitment rates were compared using ANOVA. Changes relative to the ongoing use by those who declined recruitment were compared using the group-by-time interaction. Patient health outcomes were assessed using established disease-specific tools, and pre- versus post-recruitment values were compared using paired t-tests. Patients recruited to the COPD project reduced (P<0.05) their emergency presentations, admissions and hospital inpatient bed-days by 10, 25 and 18%, respectively, whereas those declining recruitment increased their usage by 45, 41 and 51% respectively. Recruited CHF patients also displayed reductions in emergency presentations (39%), admissions (36%) and hospital inpatient bed-days (33%), whereas those who declined recruitment displayed lesser reductions for ED presentations (26%) and admissions (20%), and increased their use of hospital inpatient bed-days (15%). The recruited COPD patients reported a significant reduction in their symptoms (P<0.005) and the CHF patients reported an improvement in their overall health and quality of life scores (P<0.001). The outcome measures used in this evaluation suggest that an integrated care facilitation model that is patient focussed, provides an education component to promote greater self-management compliance and delivers a continuum of care through the acute and community health sectors, may reduce the utilisation of acute health care facilities and benefit the patient.