I first encountered Walker’s work on resilience when I was a novice researcher in human geography, coming to terms with our failure to mitigate climate change in a timely enough way, and needing something other than mitigation or adaptation to think with. A little over a decade later, I approached Walker’s new book with some hesitation. I have grown worried that resilience places too much importance on strength or robustness, and is insufficiently attentive to what is valuable but intrinsically vulnerable – beings, relations, systems, that cannot be made resilient, but are nonetheless worthy of existence. I also loathe how the term can deflect attention away from the causes of ecological and social harm, busying us with the ever-intensifying task of coping with increasing onslaughts, instead of dismantling the structures causing them. Walker almost immediately won me over with the concluding sentence of his first chapter: ‘There are limits to humanity’s resilience’ (2019: 11). Walker is precise and critical in his use of the term, not over-stretching its usefulness. A resilient system isn’t one that ‘bounces back’ to a prior state, he argues, but one that learns and reorganises itself in response to disturbance, improving its overall adaptive capacity without changing its core functions. He reminds us that resilience is not always positive – some invasive species are frustratingly resilient to efforts to manage them, and some harmful systems are troublingly resilient to transformation. Walker’s book refreshes resilience, revisiting how we have come to understand it, clarifying its usefulness in thinking about socio-ecological systems. The book is organised in five parts. Part 1 comprises introductory matter and scene-setting. Part 2 describes resilience in natural systems, what it is and the history of its formulation in ecological research, addressing familiar ecological concerns like keystone species, interconnectedness, disturbance and diversity. This is perhaps Walker at his best – he is, after all, an ecologist, and his love of and fascination with the natural world are contagious. Part 3 considers resilience in human systems, beginning with more individual, psychological understandings of resilience before considering how resilience operates on the scale of communities. Part 4 attempts to synthesise Parts 2 and 3, and Walker grapples more explicitly with questions of inequality, inequity and the role of economic systems in ecological harm. Part 5 outlines ‘a way forward’. Throughout, the writing is engaging, accessible to a Book Reviews
{"title":"Brian Walker , Finding Resilience: Change and Uncertainty in Nature and Society, Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2019, 157 pp., ISBN 9 7814 8631 0777, A$43.75.","authors":"N. Osborne","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.20","url":null,"abstract":"I first encountered Walker’s work on resilience when I was a novice researcher in human geography, coming to terms with our failure to mitigate climate change in a timely enough way, and needing something other than mitigation or adaptation to think with. A little over a decade later, I approached Walker’s new book with some hesitation. I have grown worried that resilience places too much importance on strength or robustness, and is insufficiently attentive to what is valuable but intrinsically vulnerable – beings, relations, systems, that cannot be made resilient, but are nonetheless worthy of existence. I also loathe how the term can deflect attention away from the causes of ecological and social harm, busying us with the ever-intensifying task of coping with increasing onslaughts, instead of dismantling the structures causing them. Walker almost immediately won me over with the concluding sentence of his first chapter: ‘There are limits to humanity’s resilience’ (2019: 11). Walker is precise and critical in his use of the term, not over-stretching its usefulness. A resilient system isn’t one that ‘bounces back’ to a prior state, he argues, but one that learns and reorganises itself in response to disturbance, improving its overall adaptive capacity without changing its core functions. He reminds us that resilience is not always positive – some invasive species are frustratingly resilient to efforts to manage them, and some harmful systems are troublingly resilient to transformation. Walker’s book refreshes resilience, revisiting how we have come to understand it, clarifying its usefulness in thinking about socio-ecological systems. The book is organised in five parts. Part 1 comprises introductory matter and scene-setting. Part 2 describes resilience in natural systems, what it is and the history of its formulation in ecological research, addressing familiar ecological concerns like keystone species, interconnectedness, disturbance and diversity. This is perhaps Walker at his best – he is, after all, an ecologist, and his love of and fascination with the natural world are contagious. Part 3 considers resilience in human systems, beginning with more individual, psychological understandings of resilience before considering how resilience operates on the scale of communities. Part 4 attempts to synthesise Parts 2 and 3, and Walker grapples more explicitly with questions of inequality, inequity and the role of economic systems in ecological harm. Part 5 outlines ‘a way forward’. Throughout, the writing is engaging, accessible to a Book Reviews","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.20","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49435560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The thirtieth anniversary of the election of Wayne Goss’s Labor Party to government in Queensland was marked on 2 December 2019. Considered a landmark political event, the 1989 state election saw the once-dominant National Party dispatched from office after thirty-two years of conservative government in this state. The election of an energetic new premier kick-started a period of purposeful public administration reform and public accountability renewal that many have described since as ‘the birth of modern Queensland’. Yet the end of the divisive Bjelke-Petersen era, as Goss’s ascent was characterised, was for some an uneasy time of accelerated transformational change. From these varied perspectives, and through the recorded recollections of public figures and senior administrators of the time, this article looks back at a modern benchmark for ‘historic’ state elections in Queensland.
{"title":"Commentary: ‘It was “year one”’ - Insiders’ reflections on Wayne Goss and the 1989 Queensland election","authors":"Chris Salisbury","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The thirtieth anniversary of the election of Wayne Goss’s Labor Party to government in Queensland was marked on 2 December 2019. Considered a landmark political event, the 1989 state election saw the once-dominant National Party dispatched from office after thirty-two years of conservative government in this state. The election of an energetic new premier kick-started a period of purposeful public administration reform and public accountability renewal that many have described since as ‘the birth of modern Queensland’. Yet the end of the divisive Bjelke-Petersen era, as Goss’s ascent was characterised, was for some an uneasy time of accelerated transformational change. From these varied perspectives, and through the recorded recollections of public figures and senior administrators of the time, this article looks back at a modern benchmark for ‘historic’ state elections in Queensland.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47863605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Frederic Jones became the Queensland Commercial Agent in the Far East in 1904. He worked assiduously to extend Queensland’s trade with Asia, often pursuing a vigorously competitive approach in his dealings with the other states. Based in Shanghai from 1906, he became the first official from Australia to serve in China. He persuaded the Commonwealth government to authorise him to provide visiting Chinese merchants and travellers with documentation that would allow them to enter without undergoing the dictation test. Foreseeing the potential for trade complementarity between Queensland and China, after his appointment concluded in December 1907 he remained in business in Shanghai.
{"title":"‘We are nearer the East than the other states’: Frederic Jones of Queensland, the first official from Australia in Shanghai","authors":"J. Cotton","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Frederic Jones became the Queensland Commercial Agent in the Far East in 1904. He worked assiduously to extend Queensland’s trade with Asia, often pursuing a vigorously competitive approach in his dealings with the other states. Based in Shanghai from 1906, he became the first official from Australia to serve in China. He persuaded the Commonwealth government to authorise him to provide visiting Chinese merchants and travellers with documentation that would allow them to enter without undergoing the dictation test. Foreseeing the potential for trade complementarity between Queensland and China, after his appointment concluded in December 1907 he remained in business in Shanghai.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48056045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Political commentary is a key component of news coverage in any liberal democracy. Yet theorising the role played by political commentators in a rapidly transforming media sphere – further destabilised by voters’ increasing mistrust of expertise and of political and media institutions – is rare in the social science literature. This article adopts a mixed methodological approach to argue that political commentators today perform one or more of three functions – ‘public educator’, ‘value educator’ and ‘polemicist’ – with commentators now falling into one of seven types. Given the broadening and flattening of news media dissemination and consumption – and arguably the ‘dumbing down’ and ‘shallowing out’ of news media coverage in a postmodern social media age where truth and facts are too often subordinated by rhetoric and opinion – this article argues that the role of the academic political commentator is now more critical than ever. It also argues that academic commentators must offer not only objective descriptive analysis of political events but also potentially subjective normative analysis – in effect, narrative ‘guardrails’ – to remind voters of what is and is not acceptable political behaviour in a ‘post-truth’ anti-expert age.
{"title":"Raising guardrails: The role of the political commentator in a post-expert age","authors":"Paul D. Williams","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Political commentary is a key component of news coverage in any liberal democracy. Yet theorising the role played by political commentators in a rapidly transforming media sphere – further destabilised by voters’ increasing mistrust of expertise and of political and media institutions – is rare in the social science literature. This article adopts a mixed methodological approach to argue that political commentators today perform one or more of three functions – ‘public educator’, ‘value educator’ and ‘polemicist’ – with commentators now falling into one of seven types. Given the broadening and flattening of news media dissemination and consumption – and arguably the ‘dumbing down’ and ‘shallowing out’ of news media coverage in a postmodern social media age where truth and facts are too often subordinated by rhetoric and opinion – this article argues that the role of the academic political commentator is now more critical than ever. It also argues that academic commentators must offer not only objective descriptive analysis of political events but also potentially subjective normative analysis – in effect, narrative ‘guardrails’ – to remind voters of what is and is not acceptable political behaviour in a ‘post-truth’ anti-expert age.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47254322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article considers the history of the Australian bush hut and its common building material: bark sheeting. It compares this with traditional Aboriginal bark sheeting and cladding, and considers the role of Aboriginal ‘bark strippers’ and Aboriginal builders in establishing salient features of the bush hut. The main focus is the Queensland region up to the 1870s.
{"title":"Australian settler bush huts and Indigenous bark-strippers: Origins and influences","authors":"Ray Kerkhove, C. Keys","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.1","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article considers the history of the Australian bush hut and its common building material: bark sheeting. It compares this with traditional Aboriginal bark sheeting and cladding, and considers the role of Aboriginal ‘bark strippers’ and Aboriginal builders in establishing salient features of the bush hut. The main focus is the Queensland region up to the 1870s.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42609450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The spaces of our childhood maintain a particularly enduring hold when they cease to exist or are so reconstructed that the previous version is effectively obliterated. Recollections of an early home that no longer exists provide the framework for David Malouf’s celebrated 12 Edmondstone Street. In this article, I juxtapose Malouf’s experiences with recollections of my own family home in Kyogle, coincidentally situated at the other end of the old railway line that began just a couple of hundred metres from Malouf’s childhood dwelling. In addressing both the similarities and differences between Malouf’s and my own example, the discussion will develop around the fact that in contrast to the physical non-existence of the address of 12 Edmonstone Street, my own family home in Kyogle has not been extinguished; instead, it is today a disfigured ‘renovation’ of its former self. Ultimately, 12 Edmondstone Street – a piece of writing whose poetic power and mnemonic resonance go beyond the mortal limits of physical space – will operate as a literary shelter through which the power of memories of former living spaces can be articulated.
{"title":"The Kyogle line: 12 Edmondstone Street, hospitality and memories of home","authors":"Suzie Gibson","doi":"10.1017/qre.2020.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The spaces of our childhood maintain a particularly enduring hold when they cease to exist or are so reconstructed that the previous version is effectively obliterated. Recollections of an early home that no longer exists provide the framework for David Malouf’s celebrated 12 Edmondstone Street. In this article, I juxtapose Malouf’s experiences with recollections of my own family home in Kyogle, coincidentally situated at the other end of the old railway line that began just a couple of hundred metres from Malouf’s childhood dwelling. In addressing both the similarities and differences between Malouf’s and my own example, the discussion will develop around the fact that in contrast to the physical non-existence of the address of 12 Edmonstone Street, my own family home in Kyogle has not been extinguished; instead, it is today a disfigured ‘renovation’ of its former self. Ultimately, 12 Edmondstone Street – a piece of writing whose poetic power and mnemonic resonance go beyond the mortal limits of physical space – will operate as a literary shelter through which the power of memories of former living spaces can be articulated.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2020.4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42622757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article analyses the musical work of the Brisbane Musical Union (BMU) between its founding in 1872 and the consolidation of its position by 1898. During this period, the BMU benefited from the dedicated leadership of its main conductor, R. T. Jefferies, who drew upon his high standing as a violinist, ensemble player and conductor in Brisbane to present regular choral concerts, mainly comprising oratorios, with an amateur choir. Despite financial challenges, difficulties over rehearsal and concert venues, periodic problems concerning the choice of repertoire, an insufficient number of available professional musicians and competition from rival local musical societies, Jefferies’ work with the BMU promoted an important aspect of high musical culture to the public and laid the foundations for further development of classical musical performance in Brisbane.
{"title":"Promoting high culture: The evolution of the Brisbane Musical Union, 1872–98","authors":"K. Morgan","doi":"10.1017/QRE.2020.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/QRE.2020.2","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyses the musical work of the Brisbane Musical Union (BMU) between its founding in 1872 and the consolidation of its position by 1898. During this period, the BMU benefited from the dedicated leadership of its main conductor, R. T. Jefferies, who drew upon his high standing as a violinist, ensemble player and conductor in Brisbane to present regular choral concerts, mainly comprising oratorios, with an amateur choir. Despite financial challenges, difficulties over rehearsal and concert venues, periodic problems concerning the choice of repertoire, an insufficient number of available professional musicians and competition from rival local musical societies, Jefferies’ work with the BMU promoted an important aspect of high musical culture to the public and laid the foundations for further development of classical musical performance in Brisbane.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/QRE.2020.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45299358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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