Victorian Environment Research Articles

Gambling in Victoria: Changes in Participation, Problem Gambling and Gambling Environment Between 2008 and 2018

Gambling and its impacts are an important public health issue. The relationship between gambling, problem gambling and gambling harm is complex and dynamic. Replicate prevalence studies are useful for surveillance and monitoring gambling impacts within jurisdictions. The purpose of this study was to compare changes in gambling and problem gambling in the Victorian adult population between 2008 and 2018 by investigating individual gambling activities and exploring their relationship with the Victorian gambling ecosystem. Gambling participation has decreased; problem gambling prevalence has not. Investigation beyond these summary measures reveals important details: (a) Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs), casino table games, race and sports betting (‘high-risk activities’), informal private betting, and Keno, and their associations with problem gambling endure. Further, the strength of this association is unaffected by changes in product technology, delivery, or the Victorian environment in which they reside, (b) participation in high-risk activities, excluding EGMs, increased while for other activities they decreased, (c) EGMs continue to pose the greatest risk for Victorians, (d) males and young adults continue having a higher problem gambling prevalence rate and preferring both online gambling and high-risk activities (excluding racing favoured by an ageing, older cohort, and Keno, by all ages), and (e) gambling access and exposure proliferated enabling single site multiple gambling opportunities on high-risk activities. Young adults represented a new vulnerable group as they reach the legal gambling age. The most effective interventions (based on major falls in real expenditure (losses) on EGMs, the highest risk activity) were the smoking bans, removal of ATMs from venues and decreases in bet size. There is great potential for prevention, intervention, and minimising harm in the gambling environment.

Development of a guideline for the assessment of low frequency noise in Victoria, Australia

The Victorian Environment Protection Act 2017 commenced in July 2021 and includes a general environmental duty to minimise the risk of harm to human health and the environment from pollution and waste (including noise), as well as an obligation to not emit “unreasonable noise”. Unreasonable noise occurs if limits set by the Environment Protection Regulations 2021 are exceeded, or having regards to factors included in the Act’s definition of unreasonable noise. The Regulations prescribe ‘frequency spectrum’ as one of these factors. In this context, the Environment Protection Authority Victoria developed the ‘Noise guideline: Assessing low frequency noise’ (publication 1996) that applies to commercial, industrial and trade premises. This guideline provides the steps for assessing low frequency noise from existing and the approach to follow when planning and designing new developments in Victoria. It is the reference document to understand the risk of harm from the emission of low frequency noise and assess and address low frequency noise. The development of the guideline and the underlying considerations are presented.

The Geopolitics of Beauty

Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and instrumentality and their corrosive effects on social life. Readers of 19 will be familiar with the Victorian environment — the workhouses, the poverty, the invention and technology, the urbanization, the Empire. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Islamic world saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the effects of European colonization, and modernizing forces in China led to the greatest rejection of a 3000-year-old tradition in world history. This Forum contribution compares Western, Islamic, and Chinese aesthetics. My argument is that since the nineteenth century, modern aesthetics have typically functioned dialectically against the constraints of scarcity, exploitation, and tyranny, and that within them Nature and the natural world play a particularly valuable role, one that is threatened today in the market failure of global warming and unsustainability.

Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison

Reviewed by: Victorian Environmental Nightmares ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison Ailise Bulfin (bio) Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison; pp. xi + 273. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, £79.99. Seeking to open new lines of inquiry for Victorian ecocriticism and address a notable gap within it, Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison’s Victorian Environmental Nightmares focuses on the dark side of Victorian literary engagements with the environment, aptly encapsulated in its arresting cover image of a spectral figure symbolizing deadly Thames pollution. This edited collection thus focuses on texts that offer insight into what it calls Victorian environmental nightmares, defined briefly as “actual and imagined environmental crises during the Victorian Age” (8). In doing so, it follows the relatively recent turn in ecocriticism from examining how the nonhuman world is represented in literature to focusing more specifically on representations of environmental degradation and catastrophe, often through the lens of the Anthropocene and inspired by contemporary awareness of the spiralling climate and biodiversity emergencies. As such, the collection is an important intervention in Victorian environmental criticism and one of the first full-length works to address this subject. A key strength of the book is its broad, inclusive approach, expanding the parameters of what the editors view as a “developing” “canon” of Victorian ecocritical genres, authors, and texts (4). The collection places essays on expected authors, such as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and H. G. Wells, in productive conjunction with essays on authors not yet typically considered from this perspective, such as Ouida and Oscar Wilde. Chapters pursue the theme of environmental crisis across an extensive range of sources, from mid-century realism and poetry to travel writing and children’s natural history, finde-siècle speculative fiction, and fairy tales. Taken together, the essays demonstrate both the transgeneric prevalence of this theme in Victorian writing and the corresponding presence of some form of environmental awareness and concern in Victorian society. In keeping with its inclusive stance, the collection imposes no prescribed critical or theoretical approach, though many contributors deftly apply critical tools from the interrelated frameworks of environmental humanities and postcolonialism to reveal [End Page 433] how the texts problematize human exceptionalism and critique the capitalist socio-economic structures underpinning the environmental degradation depicted within them. John Miller and Alicia Carroll use the lens of eco-apocalypse to reveal, respectively, the radical, even utopian, extinctionist strain in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and the paradox in Ouida’s environmentalist The Waters of Edera (1900), in which “nature” versus “modernity” is framed as a zero-sum game that leaves no room for recovery, “thereby effectively curtailing an ecological futurity” (149). Other contributors deploy the concept of the Anthropocene. Mark Frost reads late-Victorian disaster tales as “early intimations of the crises of identity, being, and agency that the Anthropocene prompts,” while Shun Yin Kiang critiques the concept’s inherent anthropocentrism by showing how Wells decenters the role of the human in the island ecology depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) (249–50). Together, these two essays draw attention to the ways in which all Victorian literature can be viewed as Anthropocene writing, extending Jesse Oak Taylor’s contention regarding the novel’s complicity in producing this epoch of massive human inscription on the nonhuman world. Despite, or perhaps because of, the collection’s wide-ranging, theoretically diverse approach, many synergies arise from the assembled essays—though the editors could have done more to highlight these in the introduction. Most notably, the essays collectively work to nuance scholarly understandings of Victorian environmental consciousness by revealing key differences as well as similarities between nineteenth-century and current perspectives, rather than simply reading contemporary views onto historical texts. Several contributors show how some Victorian authors conceived of the unadulterated nonhuman world as a threatening, hostile environment, notably Morrison’s deployment of the eco-gothic to illuminate Frances Trollope’s horror in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) at the threat posed by the uncultivated parts of the Western U. S. to the nascent domestic realm. Sara Atwood convincingly argues that the mythic and apocalyptic...

Book Review of Victorian Environments. Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture

Book review of Victorian Environments. Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture.

‘Dover Beach’ and the uncertain afterlife of Victorian environments

ABSTRACT Ian McEwan was among the writers, historians, and philosophers from twenty-one countries who signed a letter published last year in papers across Europe that warned of the rising tide of anti-liberalism and ersatz-populism threatening ‘disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster.’ One signatory, Orhan Pamuk, said, ‘Without the idea of Europe, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, egalitarianism is hard to defend in my part of the world’ (Henley and Rice-Oxley). Fifteen years earlier, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia decried the waning of international solidarity ‘in the era of actually existing internationalism which has perversely created an environment where cosmopolitanism and translocal affiliations became suspect and are now virtually unthinkable outside of the limited codes of human-rights talk, medical emergency, and environmental catastrophe’ (5). In the years since, the contradiction has only sharpened. This perverse internationalism—neoliberal global capitalism coupled with the rise of various right-wing nationalisms—has gone a fair way to eliminating the social environment in which even climate change and the mass extinction of plants and animals matter across borders. While on the right side of this moment in history, both McEwan and Gilroy have thought quite a lot about Matthew Arnold’s iconic ‘Dover Beach’ in this context and, in their different ways, got it rather wrong. In this context, that of the last few hundred years and its relation to the last few decades, I will examine ‘Dover Beach’ and the afterlife of its Victorian environments. The Dover poet’s exclamatory turn to romantic love in stanza four is not simply an ‘inward turn’ away from public concerns, a ‘defensive gesture’ against warfare and turbulence as Gilroy argues. Our individual and collective need for love, an insistence on this truth, and those that follow from it, is, I will argue, always social and has real political value.

SUN-058 Variations in Environmentally Sustainable Practice within Australian Dialysis Units: Time for a Nationwide Approach?

Climate change has been identified as one of the key threats to global health and well-being in the 21st century and will require national and global efforts to combat greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Health care systems are responsible for a significant proportion of overall GHG emissions and dialysis programs contribute a disproportionate amount to this. While previous studies have documented environmental practice within dialysis units in the state of Victoria, Australia, no studies have compared practice between Australian states. The Victorian Environmental Sustainability Special Interest Group questionnaire was used to assess and compare environmental practice at 4 satellite dialysis units within Australia; 2 in Brisbane, Queensland and 2 in Sydney, New South Wales. The survey asked 107 questions on energy/water use, waste management, resource consumption and procurement, transport and environmental policies and initiatives. Nurse unit managers completed the survey at each site and were encouraged to discuss with colleagues to improve the accuracy of data recorded. The median number of haemodialysis (HD) sessions performed at each satellite unit was 168/week [157.5-270]. All units reported health service support for waste recycling practices, however this was graded as ‘moderate’ by 2 units and ‘could be better’ by 2 units. 3 units reported available recycling bins for hard and soft plastics but only 1 unit reported available polyvinyl chloride (PVC) recycling bins. Only Sydney based units reported that product suppliers removed pallets after supply delivery. Cardboard was not removed by suppliers at any site, but all 4 units recycled cardboard. No unit captured reverse osmosis (RO) reject water for reuse elsewhere. Procurement of supplies occurred at least weekly across all sites, with the frequency universally determined by storage space. Only 2 units considered environmental sustainability when choosing supplies. None of the units were aware of their power supplier, whether any of their energy was derived from renewable sources or of the green star rating of their building. Movement sensitive lights were only present in 2 units. Only 2 sites offered bicycle storage facilities and 1 site an area for showering and changing. 3 units were accessible by public transport but only 1 unit provided information to patients and staff about this. The level of awareness of sustainability in health was variable, reported as low in 2 units, moderate in 1 unit and very high in the other unit. Only 1 unit reported having an environmental policy in place and 1 other an active green group within the hospital. No units had undertaken a sustainability audit. One of the units also served as a home training facility for both HD and peritoneal dialysis (PD). This service offered both cardboard and PVC recycling to patients; however only 26-50% of patients utilised this service. No patients reclaimed RO reject water, despite potential assistance in establishing a water capture system. There is no universal approach to environmental sustainability within Australian dialysis units, with inter-state and inter-unit variation in practice. This study highlights the need for nationwide data collection regarding environmentally sustainable practice as an important first step in addressing the environmental impact of dialysis.

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice, edited by Dewey W. Hall | Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice, edited by Dewey W. Hall | Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith

360-degree stakeholder management driving successful CO2 storage research

The CO2CRC Otway Project continues to demonstrate that carbon capture and storage is a viable option for CO2 mitigation. The CO2CRC Otway Project is Australia’s first CO2 demonstration project, with two projects completed, involving geological storage of some 80000 tonnes of CO2 over the past 10 years. The project was initially authorised for a single stage with a finite life, but the growing requirements of the global carbon capture and storage community required further research on carbon capture and storage technologies and behaviour (via Stages 2 and 3), and so the project was extended. CO2CRC has undertaken 360-degree stakeholder engagement processes throughout the project, regularly consulting with regulators, governments, industry, partners, researchers and the community. This has been especially important as the project changed, operating in a niche space between Victorian environment, petroleum and water Acts. This process has allowed CO2CRC to contribute to alignment efforts within regulatory bodies, to enhance regulations to cover project activities, ensuring best practices are documented and observed to the satisfaction of the regulators and wider community. The Otway Basin in south-west Victoria is a region not immune to broader community concerns regarding the oil and gas and other industries. The surrounding area is predominately dairy farming, with locals relying heavily on the aquifers beneath their land. Although such a backdrop suggests potentially high levels of concern and scrutiny, especially when projects necessitate drilling or other invasive activities, the project has maintained strong local stakeholder engagement and support due to ongoing implementation and evaluation of the stakeholder management processes.

Five years on: monitoring of Long Island Point’s Western Port wastewater discharge

The Esso Long Island Point facility is situated on the edge of Western Port, an important Ramsar designated wetland for migratory birds in Victoria, Australia. The gas fractionation and crude oil storage facility has operated for over 40 years and has discharged treated wastewater to Western Port for most of these years in accordance with its environmental regulatory licence. The 2003 State Environment Protection Policy for Waters of Western Port is the Victorian Environment Protection Authority’s regulatory framework for licensing wastewater discharges to the wetland, and among other items, requires that discharges must cause no ‘detrimental change in the environmental quality of the receiving waters’ or ‘chronic impacts outside any declared mixing zone’. A major upgrade to the water treatment facility in 2010 included a risk-based marine ecosystem program to monitor key environmental indicators including water quality, jetty pile invertebrate communities and seagrass condition. The program’s longer-term monitoring record has allowed assessment of potential chronic effects on invertebrates and seagrass by comparing temporal changes at monitoring sites over the period from pre-operations (2010) to present (2016) and spatial changes between near-field to far-field sites, kilometres from the discharge point. The program has shown that management of the discharge maintains beneficial uses and environmental objectives at the boundary of the mixing zone, and the marine ecosystem is protected from potentially slower and longer-term adverse effects in the far-field. The program demonstrates that the treated wastewater discharge has had no adverse impact on key environmental indicators in Western Port over the longer-term study period.

Punchdrunk, participation and the political: democratisation within Masque of the Red Death?

Democratisation is a term frequently applied to participatory art as an indicator of its value, not necessarily by artists themselves but by arts’ organisations, producers, funding bodies, policy-makers or the media. This article examines the ways in which democratisation might be understood and considers the extent to which it occurs within Punchdrunk’s immersive performance, Masque of the Red Death. I relate this democratisation to a personal experience of the show; to the company’s signature use of masks; and to the piece’s ‘game-like’ structure, which examines perceived divisions between the art world and the entertainment industry. Incorporating two of the four essential features of ‘game-play’ outlined by Roger Callois – that of chance (alea) and vertigo (illnx) – I examine the potential the show has to play on the ‘undecidable’ relationship between the entertainment industry and the art world. For example, the performance bears more than a passing resemblance to Dickens’ World in Kent, where visitors are presented with re-enactments of Dickens’ literature in a Victorian environment not dissimilar to Punchdrunk’s immersive world of Poe. It is therefore unclear – or ‘undecidable’ – how one is defined (or funded) as art and the other as market entertainment. For Rancière, there is a danger, within contemporary exhibitions of the ‘game’, in art losing its identity and becoming indistinguishable from those produced by power and the media, or by the market’s own forms of presentation.

Letters from the Highlands: Scribal Publication and Media Shift in Victorian Scotland

This essay argues that a little-studied text, Elizabeth Grant’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady , offers insights into conditions of authorship and publication for middle-class provincial female authors from the early nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. While critics have often seen manuscript declining as a form of literary publication by the end of the Romantic period, I argue that Grant—who completed her memoir in 1854—chose to “publish” in manuscript even as she presented herself as historian and historiographer of the Highlands. Grant shows her awareness of a shifting Victorian media environment by analyzing changes in systems of communication and circulation. Her manuscript memoirs demonstrate that Victorians, like ourselves, often viewed history through the lens of media shift.

Strategic public land use assessment and planning in Victoria, Australia: Four decades of trailblazing but where to from here?

While various attempts have been made to establish strategic environmental assessment (SEA) processes and institutions in various jurisdictions within Australia, the success of these often short lived attempts at institutional approaches for managing public land use conflict has been patchy. The experience in the State of Victoria has been somewhat different, with public land use assessment and planning having been informed by a series of independent statutory bodies since 1970 (the Land Conservation Council, Environment Conservation Council, and Victorian Environmental Assessment Council). These SEA bodies have played a major role in mediating environmental conflict over public land use, and have significantly contributed to the increased size and coverage of Victoria's protected area system. However, while there has always been a statutory body in operation, the roles and responsibilities of these bodies have been subject to significant legislative change, with existing bodies replaced by new bodies in 1997 and 2001. Justifications for these reforms included changing circumstances and new understandings about environmental management, as well as changing views about public administration. As a way of contributing to enhancing the design of institutions and processes for strategic environmental assessment, this paper provides an assessment of Victoria's approach and discusses possible future directions.

Field evaluation of phalaris, tall fescue and cocksfoot cultivars and accessions in western Victoria, Australia

To assess their potential usefulness in the central and south-western Victorian environment, cultivars/experimental varieties and accessions of each of three perennial grasses, phalaris (Phalaris aquatica L.), tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb. = syn. Lolium arundinaceum. (Schreb.) Darbysh.), and cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata L.), were established as swards by spring-sowing and then evaluated under rotational grazing by sheep. Pasture establishment, production, and survival following severe drought were measured at two locations. Persistent novel material of phalaris and tall fescue was identified that could increase the cool-season and year-round production relative to that obtained from current commercial cultivars. Phalaris and tall fescue varieties were compared at Hamilton. Results indicated that, in contrast to tall fescue, the seedling vigour of winter-active phalaris types was similar in spring relative to that of summer-active types. Most phalaris cultivars were more productive than tall fescue in autumn and winter (P < 0.05). For the experimental phalaris variety Perla × Sirocco, dry matter (DM) production during these seasons was 19% greater than for the most productive tall fescue, cv. Fraydo (P < 0.05). In a short growing season site at Warrak, winter-active cultivars of tall fescue produced up to 17% more DM in winter (P < 0.05) than the highest yielding, summer-active cv. Quantum MaxP, but for cumulative production over 3 years, Quantum MaxP was significantly more productive (P < 0.05) than 18 other entries. However, the persistence of Quantum and Quantum MaxP declined considerably post-drought; a more persistent accession from Sardinia, FA 005, was as productive as Quantum MaxP. Of the 13 cultivars compared in the longer growing season of Hamilton, Fraydo and Resolute MaxP were the most productive in winter (P < 0.05). For cumulative herbage yield over 4 years, Fraydo, Quantum MaxP, Quantum, Resolute MaxP, and Tanit were the most productive cultivars (P < 0.05). Infection with the MaxP endophyte did not affect persistence of Quantum at either site but improved the persistence of Resolute at Hamilton (P < 0.05). At Warrak, MaxP endophyte-infected Quantum was 35% more productive in summer–autumn than the endophyte-free cv. Quantum (P < 0.05). Compared with the most productive commercial cv. Holdfast, experimental varieties from breeding populations of winter-active phalaris selected for grazing tolerance and which incorporated Perla, were superior for seedling vigour (rating 5 v. 3), winter growth (by ≥15%), and cumulative production over 4 years (≥12%) (P < 0.05).

Can we move beyond ‘Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad’ in thinking about people and the environment?

Abstract Bucknell and Mannion (2007) commented that student responses in the 2006 VCE Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) exam could be boiled down to a pat answer of "Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad" (p. 8). They suggest that the subject of OES is too rich for such a simple answer. This paper uses the expression of 'Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad' as a springboard to explore some of the ways notions of the environment, race and ethnicity intersect and how this might lead to an exam question being answered in such a uniform and simplistic way by some students. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the productive tensions of environment, race and ethnicity as a strategy for richer and more complex debates around peoples' interactions with the environment. Introduction The suggestion that the answer to a question about the historical relationships between people and the environment can be reduced to Indigenous good/ non-Indigenous bad raises some questions about what is occurring around the Victorian Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) curriculum to enable such a pat answer. There is a need for caution when using students' exam responses to make inferences about curriculum and the way it is taught. However, in this paper I use the OES curriculum as a context to examine some of the broader social processes at work that may be informing what Bucknell & Mannion (2007) perceive to be such a uniformly reductionist response of Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad. Curriculum does not stand alone; rather it is "shaped by and reflects the content and organisation of society, including the distribution and relationships of power" (Reid, 2004, p. 59). As such, curriculum documents are a rich site to explore the content and organisation of society. I would suggest that the OES curriculum is not unique in producing a 'pat' response of Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad, but rather, this response reflects broader social discourses. The intent of this paper is to explore the content and organisation of society through the OES curriculum, rather than a critique of this curriculum area as such. This paper starts with a brief description of the OES curriculum to provide a context through which to examine the ways in which race, ethnicity and environment intersect. This is further located in the outdoor and environmental education literature. Then I turn to a discussion on some of the ways in which race and environment are written about. I return to the curriculum documents and look how the terms Indigenous and Australians are portrayed in this curriculum area via the text book that supports it. The paper finishes with a discussion foregrounding whiteness as a strategy to engage with questions of race, ethnicity and environment. Before proceeding, it is important to point out that this paper is written from the perspective of a white educator who is grappling with how to meaningfully engage with questions concerned with relationships with the natural environment. These questions have come into focus more sharply since moving from New Zealand to Australia in 2005 as I try to make sense of new landscapes and new curricula. The 'we' I refer to in the paper's title and in the text is to non-Indigenous people given that, as I argue in the paper, stories around race usually serve the needs of non-Indigenous people. Outdoor and Environmental Studies The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) refers to the final two years of secondary schooling in Victoria. The rationale for Outdoor Environmental Studies (OES) is as follows: Outdoor and Environmental Studies is a study of the ways humans interact with and relate to natural environments. Natural environments are understood to include environments that have minimum influence from humans, but they may also include environments that have been subject to human intervention. Ultimately, the study is directed towards enabling students to make critically informed comment on questions of environmental sustainability and to understand the importance of environmental health, particularly in local contexts. …

Manchester v. Thirlmere and the Construction of the Victorian Environment

The proposed conversion of Thirlmere, in the Lake District, into a reservoir for the city of Manchester sparked a conflict that has served as a prototype for subsequent environmental confrontations. The debate had a heavy symbolic charge: the icon of progress confronted the icon of unspoiled countryside. During construction, and even after the reservoir opened in 1894, critics attempted a rearguard defense of what they regarded as the pristine Lake District landscape. The appeal of the pristine was the most compelling element of anti-reservoir arguments, but the exigencies of municipal progress proved still more powerful.

Persistence of winter-active phalaris breeding populations, cultivars and other temperate grasses in diverse environments of south-eastern Australia

Three winter-active populations of phalaris (Phalaris aquatica L.), selected over two generations for improved persistence under grazing, were evaluated with commercial cultivars of phalaris and other temperate perennial grasses from 1999–2003 in three environments of south-eastern Australia as part of a program to develop a cultivar for more sustainable pastures and to assess genotype × environment interaction. Grazed sites were located at Bulart in western Victoria, and Rye Park on the Southern Tablelands and Tamworth on the North West Slopes of New South Wales. At the conclusion of the experiment, the frequency of live plant base was highest at Rye Park despite soil acidity and drought. Significant variance among half-sib families in each population was also observed most frequently at this site. Frequency was intermediate at Bulart but lower than expected considering high soil fertility, probably because of high grazing pressure. Frequency was lowest at Tamworth where severe drought occurred from 2001 onwards. There was significant genotype × environment interaction for frequency among half-sib families. Significant common family variance for frequency across the Bulart and Rye Park sites was demonstrated, but not between Tamworth and either of the other sites in later years. The relationship between winter herbage mass potential and persistence differed with population and site, and was negative for one population at Bulart but positive for another population at Tamworth. Mean persistence of all families was 30% higher than winter-active controls at Rye Park and at least 40% higher at Bulart. Phalaris generally persisted better than cultivars of tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.), cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata L.) and perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.) with some exceptions, particularly at Bulart. Development of a winter-active phalaris cultivar with improved persistence under grazing was considered possible for the Southern Tablelands and western Victorian environments with these populations but a separate program using additional germplasm will be needed for the North West Slopes environment.

Mineral nitrogen supply from pastures to cereals in three northern Victorian environments

An experiment at 3 sites (Birchip, Elmore and Speed) in the northern Victorian cropping belt compared dry matter (DM) production of short-term (2 year) pastures and their contributions to soil mineral nitrogen (N) and subsequent wheat and barley production. The pastures included different varieties of subterranean clover, annual medic and lucerne, and these were compared with ryegrass-dominant pasture, which represented the experimental control. More productive legume pastures generally resulted in greater accumulation of soil mineral N at sowing of the following cereal at both Elmore and Speed; however, at Birchip, soil mineral N remained high under all treatments. At Elmore and Speed, significant (P<0.10) positive relationships were observed between available N at sowing and subsequent wheat and barley production. Cereal grain yield at Birchip was not associated with available N at sowing. The quantities of soil mineral N available at sowing (152 kg/ha) of the cereals were in excess of crop demand at Birchip. At Elmore, the soil mineral N supply (83 kg/ha) was below that required for wheat and barley to reach their water-limited potential yield (20 kg grain/mm of growing season rainfall). However, at Speed, the supply of soil mineral N (63 kg/ha) was sufficient to achieve the water-limited potential grain yield and to produce malting-grade barley, but not sufficient to elevate wheat grain protein concentrations above 11.5%. In environments with low soil N levels, the amount of residual N following short-term pastures increased the availability of N to following cereals. Whether this is sufficient to satisfy subsequent crop demand is largely determined by water availability in the year of cropping. In cases where available N is already high, short-term pasture phases may have little effect on increasing crop production.

The productivity of irrigated legumes in northern Victoria. 1. Effect of irrigation interval

An experiment was undertaken to determine the production and water use of pure swards of white clover (Trifolium repens L. cv. Haifa), red clover (Trifolium pratense L. cv. Redquin) and lucerne (Medicago sativa L. cv. Validor) between December 1987 and December 1990. The experiment was a split plot design with 3 irrigation interval treatments, which were the main plots, and 3 legume species, which were the subplots, all of which were replicated 4 times. Irrigation frequency was determined by evaporation minus rainfall (E-R) and was scheduled to occur at intervals of about 40, 80 or 120 mm of cumulative E-R. Annual amounts of harvested dry matter (DM) ranged from 8 to 22 t/ha depending on irrigation and species treatment. There was an interaction (P<0.05) between irrigation interval and species during each irrigation season. White clover DM harvested was reduced (P<0.05) by an average of 23 and 41%, respectively, as irrigation intervals were extended beyond 40 mm E-R (where up to 12 t DM/ha was recorded in an irrigation season). The decline in white clover growth in the less frequently irrigated treatments, relative to the 40 mm E-R irrigation treatment, was most pronounced between December and February, the months of highest evaporative demand, when these swards were 30 and 52% less productive (80 and 120 mm E-R, respectively). This compared with reductions of 16 and 32%, respectively, for red clover and 1 and 4%, respectively, for lucerne during the same period. Red clover, a dense productive stand initially, lost vigour and density in the second summer of this experiment, and from February in the second year was not harvested. However, for the period during which it was harvested, red clover production was reduced (P<0.05) by 21%, on average, when the irrigation interval was 120 mm E-R compared with the 40 and 80 mm E-R irrigation treatments. The production of lucerne was not affected (P>0.05) by the range of irrigation frequencies used in this experiment, although its crown density in the most frequent irrigation treatment was 30% less than in the 2 less frequently irrigated treatments when measurements were terminated in December 1990. However, after the first year, the lucerne swards were all highly productive, producing up to 21 t DM/ha in an irrigation season. For white clover to be productive, frequent irrigation is essential. However, all the indices of plant and sward performance measured during intensive studies showed that frequent irrigation of white clover resulted in earlier onset of water stress relative to the less frequent irrigation intervals. Despite this earlier onset of water stress, the yield advantage of frequent irrigation was large. Red clover and lucerne were less reliant on frequent irrigations to maintain productivity than white clover. However, red clover may need to be re-sown on a regular basis in the northern Victorian environment because of its failure to persist beyond 2 years. It is suggested that lucerne should be considered in preference to white clover because of its greater water use efficiency and its less critical reliance on irrigation management to maintain productivity.

Introduction: African American Student Activism in the 20th Century

In the 20th century and political activism was an important aspect of student life and culture in the United States. As historians and other scientists begin to assess the dominant patterns and trends in movements for change over the past century, they are beginning to conclude that student activism was an important element in itself and as part of larger reform movements. At the dawn of the 20th century when the Progressive reform movement was in full swing, the Settlement Movement was launched by undergraduate men and women who opened settlement houses in poor immigrant neighborhoods in U.S. cities. The college students moved into the settlements and provided education and welfare services in the form of English and Americanization classes, health and child care, industrial training, and recreational programs. The settlement house movement laid the groundwork for the new field of social work as an area of research, governmental activity, and professional training and advancement, particularly for college-educated women. (1) College students were privileged and elite population, but in the 1920s many sought even more personal freedom to accept or rebel against the conventions and cultural traditions they inherited from the generations that spawned the War. College students were in and of the Jazz Age in the 1920s, and the roaring on college campuses was confined to weekend sporting events. (2) Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in her examination of life and undergraduate cultures found that after World War I, a new kind of adolescent entered college, one who rejected parental ways and questioned the broader society. College rebels claimed much that college life had guaranteed: its pleasures, commitment to the present moment, and intensity. To this the rebels added repudiation of conformity and belief in youth's special ability to perceive and aesthetic solutions to contemporary problems. (3) African American college students not only questioned the rules and regulations that governed their lives on campus in the 1920s, but many also viewed themselves as New Negroes who should use their collegiate training to advance the race. To very great extent, the black college rebellions in the 1920s were generated by the cognitive dissonance black collegians experienced when they left the real world of the New and entered the Victorian environment maintained on campus by white and black administrators. Although W. E. B. Du Bois, through his blistering commentaries in The Crisis magazine, helped to stir up the rebellions, the protests at Fisk, Howard, and Lincoln Universities and Hampton Institute represented efforts aimed at modernization of race relations on campus and bid for intellectual and independence on the part of students who openly challenged the traditional authorities. Student activism in the 1920s paved the way for larger reforms in the organizational structures and administrative practices in black higher education. (4) The widespread mobilization of students for peace and against the advance of fascist movements in the 1930s represented one of the high points in student activism in the 20th century. Thousands of students joined campus branches of socialist and communist organizations that came to be considered the Old Left and organized their own groups, such as the American Student Union, National Student Federation, National Student League, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, and the American Youth Congress, with its black counterpart Southern Negro Youth Congress, formed in 1937. (5) African Americans who attended college during the era of the Great Depression were truly privileged. Unlike their counterparts in the 1920s, black collegians in the 1930s were pleased with themselves and their position, and were generally not interested in bringing the horrors of the outside world to the campus. …