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This paper describes the strategies used by Aboriginal young people to build positive relationships and sexual wellbeing. It does so to counter the risk-focussed narratives present in much existing research and to showcase the resourcefulness of Aboriginal young people. We used peer-interview methods to collect qualitative data from 52 Aboriginal young people living in western Sydney, Australia. Participants reported a strong desire to stay safe and healthy in their sexual relationships and to achieve this they relied heavily on oral communication and yarning strategies. Participants viewed communication as a way to gain or give advice (about bodies, infections, pregnancy, relationships); to assess the acceptability and safety of potential partners; to negotiate consent with partners; to build positive relationships; and to get themselves out of unhealthy relationships. Participants also discussed 'self-talk' as a strategy for building sexual wellbeing, referring to narratives of self-respect and pride in culture as important in establishing Aboriginal young people's positive views of self and as deserving of respectful and safe sexual relationships. These findings suggest that future programmes and interventions based on yarning could be well-regarded, given it is a cultural form of pedagogy and a strategy Aboriginal young people already use to build positive relationships and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID‐19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID‐19's many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales. It analyses both a questionnaire of food relief providers in 2022 and media articles, social media posts, reports, and websites. It provides much‐needed insights into the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on the demand for food, interruptions to food provisioning, changes to food supply, and alterations made to suppliers' ways of operating. Those insights show how infrastructures of care are place‐based, responsive, dynamic, and constrained by caring capacities. Such insights are increasingly important for understanding infrastructural failures, documenting the real extent of household food insecurity, and challenging dominant discourses of Australia as a food‐secure nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) can have severe impacts on function and quality of life. Up to one third of patients will have an inadequate response to their first line of treatment, with subsequent lines of therapy associated with lower remission rates and higher relapse rates. Recently esketamine has become available for Australian patients, and this agent provides an additional treatment option for those with MDD who have had an inadequate response to two or more antidepressant therapies during the current moderate to severe depressive episode. This paper provides an expert panel's practical recommendations and clinical guidance for establishing esketamine clinics in Australia. Methods: An expert panel (n = 11) comprising psychiatrists, mental health care nurses, pharmacists, and individuals with experience establishing esketamine clinics was convened in Sydney. The panel developed practical recommendations and clinical guidance, which were then further refined. Results: Five key areas were identified: practical considerations for esketamine clinic set‐up, including multidisciplinary care considerations; patient selection; administering esketamine; adverse event management and long‐term follow‐up. Conclusions: Guidance presented in this paper should assist Australian clinicians to set up an esketamine clinic, and provide practical advice on the infrastructure and clinical requirements for treatment of patients with this agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment policy internationally places significant importance on the use of assessment criteria across all subject areas. However, in order to ensure effective use of criteria, it is critical for teachers to develop an in-depth understanding of them. This paper reports on a study of a range of Australian Science teachers' views and uses of criteria in practical work. Six Science teachers working in secondary schools across Sydney were interviewed, their classroom activities were observed, and the data obtained were analysed using a qualitative constant comparative method. The findings indicate that despite the emphasis on Assessment for Learning (AfL) in assessment policy in Australia, teachers generally consider criteria as a marking tool, for Assessment of Learning (AoL), rather than a learning instrument. Consequently, they use criteria exclusively as a framework for assigning grades. This paper argues that teachers need to consider the use of criteria from a learning perspective in addition to its other multipurpose functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of public opinion in shaping Australian foreign policy. It emphasizes the need for an informed public and discusses the changing global landscape, with the decline of globalism and the rise of nationalism and protectionism. The article highlights the challenges Australia faces in navigating this changing world and the role of the recently released foreign policy White Paper. It emphasizes the importance of engaging the Australian public, including the new generation of policymakers and the diverse society, in foreign policy discussions and decision-making. [Extracted from the article]

1 Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney;... I Implementation Science 2023, i B 18(2): b SP a sp Mitchell Sarkies and Hossai Gul contributed equally to this paper SP b sp Andrew Baillie, Lauren Christie, Caleb Ferguson, Julie Gawthorne, Helen Goldsmith, Nicolette Hodyl, Natasha Howard, Karen Hutchinson, Marlena Klaic, Joanna Moullin, Nicole Nathan, Sanne Peters, Nicole Rankin, Ben Smith, Serene Yoong. Only one study reported facilitators to the IMPLEMENTATION of CDS systems, none reported on barriers to the implementation of CDS systems and none reported any information on successful strategies to MAINTAIN implementation of CDS systems. B Methods b A sequence of three studies were conducted via a mixed method methodology and structured by the process model Implementation Mapping (IM) to guide the development of implementation strategies. B Conclusions b Process mapping successfully identifies site-specific variation in complex clinical processes and facilitates a shared understanding of the current systems and factors that affect implementation. [Extracted from the article]

This paper draws on the example of Dyarubbin (Nepean River), an urban river in Sydney, Australia, to illuminate how community engagement facilitates the expression of diverse river values. Combining Indigenous water justice, critical planning scholarship, and a scalar approach to values, and drawing on qualitative research conducted in 2021, we discuss how diverse community values have been represented in strategies for the river and consider which values are overlooked in these processes. We conclude by arguing that values for Dyarubbin are contested and diverse, however the rigid nature of engagement frameworks and the scalar nature of government responsibilities have reduced engagement's influence on planning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Upper Permian sedimentary successions in the northern Sydney Basin have been the subject of several stratigraphic, sedimentological and coal petrographic studies, and recently, extensive U-Pb zircon dating has been carried out on tuffs in the Newcastle Coal Measures. However, detailed petrographic and geochemical studies of these successions are lacking. These are important because a major change in tectonic setting occurred prior to the Late Permian because of the Hunter-Bowen Orogeny that caused the uplift of the Carboniferous and Devonian successions in the Tamworth Group and Tablelands Complex adjacent to the Sydney Basin. This should be reflected in the detrital makeup of the Upper Permian rocks. This study provides data that confirms major changes did take place at this time. Petrographic analysis indicates that the source area is composed of sedimentary, felsic volcanic and plutonic and low-grade metamorphic rocks. Conglomerate clast composition analysis confirms these results, revealing a source region that is composed of felsic volcanics, cherts, mudstones and sandstones. Geochemical analysis suggests that the sediments are geochemically mature and have undergone a moderate degree of weathering. The provenance data presented in this paper indicate that the southern New England Orogen is the principal source of detritus in the basin. Discrimination diagrams confirm that the source rocks derive from an arc-related, contractional setting and agree with the provenance analyses that indicate sediment deposition in a retroarc foreland basin. This study offers new insights on the provenance and tectonic setting of the Northern Sydney Basin, eastern Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of daylight saving time (DST) on fatal road crashes in Australia. I exploit within year transitions to and from DST in a regression discontinuity in time framework. To examine the long run effect of the policy, I use trials of DST implemented in various states, and a DST extension due to the Sydney Olympics. Neither the transition to or out of DST, nor the long run effects of DST have an impact on fatalities on the road. However, there is evidence of reallocation of accidents over the day due to ambient light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To describe a recent process by which mental health service sector leaders identified key elements of strategic, systemic and structural mental health reform. These elements could guide an incoming Federal government. Method: The paper describes the process undertaken by the Sydney Mental Health Policy Forum between 2019 and 2022. This work generated principles, key domains and finally a set of actions. Results: Five immediate actions were identified that are cost neutral or require minimal investment. Five further actions requiring realignment of existing funds and/or new funds were also identified. Conclusions: The task of mental health reform in Australia is both large and overdue. Continued investment in fragmented or piecemeal programmes and services will not propel desired change. Reform must facilitate new regional control of planning, funding and responding to community mental health needs. The actions identified by the Forum set out a menu of opportunities to guide reform over the life of the next Parliament, starting now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts around transport mega-projects, driven by social and environmental impacts, are increasingly prevalent around the world. While environmental impacts have received significant attention, less is known about how the intangible social impacts of these projects stimulate conflict. Assessment of these impacts is crucial; however, the process is often influenced by the underlying power relationships within neoliberal governance. This paper analyses the discursive context of state-community conflicts in transport mega-projects and explores how power dynamics shape the perceptions of both the intensity and extent of its social impacts. Drawing on a case study of the WestConnex project, a controversial motorway development in Sydney, the paper analyses government policy documents and online community submissions to explore the conflicts around the project. Through critical discourse analysis, the paper provides insights into the nature of power relationships that limit the scope of impact assessment and underpin conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of group formation and social identity are key to understanding human behaviour in social domains. In football, 'ultras' groups are currently considered the most visible style of fandom across the football world. By binding individuals together, these groups create new social identities that make them an ideal context for understanding how people behave within group contexts. This paper employs identity fusion theory to analyse a one-year study of the Red and Black Bloc (RBB), an ultras formation in Western Sydney, Australia. With data collected using active interviews, online surveys, participant observation in football stadiums and fans' online forums, the paper discusses the set of circumstances that bought the RBB together as a cohesive unit. It concludes with a set of recommendations to Australian football administrators and beyond, offering a comprehensive view of fans' tribal behaviour and how to make the most of these findings for the betterment of their emergent leagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating health information quickly and effectively with diverse populations has been essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, health communication practices are often top down and poorly designed to rapidly meet diverse health literacy, cultural and contextual needs of the population. This paper describes a research and practice partnership focused on health literacy, multicultural health, and community engagement to address COVID-19 in Australia. The partnership became influential in the local and state-based response to the COVID-19 Delta outbreak in Western and South Western Sydney, an area of high cultural and socioeconomic diversity. Our approach, bringing together academic researchers and frontline health staff working with multicultural populations using a model of co-design and community engagement and action via the "4 M model," has been successful. It supported the Western Sydney community to achieve some of the highest vaccination rates in the world (>90%). There is an ongoing need to engage respectfully and responsively with communities to address specific challenges that they face and tailor communications and supports accordingly for successful pandemic management. Combining co-designed empirical research with community engagement and action ensures needs are robustly identified and can be appropriately addressed to support an effective public health response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines young Indian-Australians' understandings of identity expressed through their preferences in an intimate partnership. Studies in comparable contexts have indicated that diasporic Indians may identify as generically 'Indian', and express a desire for partners who are the same. This is no less true for many of Australia's Indians. Based on fieldwork with members of the diaspora in Sydney, this paper looks at the extent to which the social hierarchies of regional/linguistic identity, religion, caste and class are reproduced through this group's marriage and partnership practices. I find that their varying relationships with these hierarchies are often unconsciously shaped, and find expression in a sense of 'Indianness' and adherence to 'Indian' values. This paper further disrupts essentialising conceptions of inherent, intransient diasporic identity by highlighting that the diasporic negotiation of self is deeply personal and prone to differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of "caring with" as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring‐with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring‐with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co‐constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring‐with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring‐with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research. At a time when care is being cast as an individual responsibility, this paper asks what makes care possible. It develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analysis of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking to place care in a sociomaterial, temporal, and spatial frame. The paper theorises the production and translation of care across space and identifies the assemblages that enable future care. Empirically it asks how older women care in precarious housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia and internationally, domestic violence is a major cause of homelessness for women and children and yet provision for accommodation for this user-group is not well documented or understood. When designing emergency accommodation, the concerns, preferences, and perspectives of individuals who access refuge services must be sought in order to create spaces that are conducive to the needs of this diverse and vulnerable group. An empathic 'lens' can provide meaningful insights that can inform the design of refuge services specifically targeted at addressing these needs. This paper describes an authentic interdisciplinary learning experience for nursing, architecture and landscape students at a university in Sydney, Australia, and presents the results of a study designed to measure the impact of this initiative on participants' empathy towards women and children who access refuge services as a result of homelessness and/or domestic violence. Empathy levels were measured using the Comprehensive State Empathy Scale, a validated measurement tool. The learning experience consisted of collaborative meetings with stakeholders from the refuge sector, fieldwork, individual research, exchanging ideas and problem-solving in teams. Students then developed design guides for refuges that demonstrated their emerging understanding of the specific needs and perspectives of the issues faced by women and children who had experienced violence and found themselves homeless. Pre-post Comprehensive State Empathy Scale results indicated that the empathy levels of nursing and landscape students increased and those of architecture students decreased, however, these results were not statistically significant. The significance of the results from this study include an ability to compare the changes in empathy in students working collaboratively on a project and to ascertain possible reasons for this using a validated measurement tool. As empathy is one of the strongest negative correlates of prejudice, authentic teaching and learning activities, such as the one described in this paper, have the potential to positively impact the lived experience of women and children leaving situations of domestic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to recognise and account for the influence of working from home on commuting activity has never been so real as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only does this change the performance of the transport network, it also means that the way in which transport modellers and planners use models estimated on a typical weekday of travel and expand it up to the week and the year must be questioned and appropriately revised to adjust for the quantum of working from home. Although teleworking is not a new phenomenon, what is new is the ferocity by which it has been imposed on individuals throughout the world, and the expectation that working from home is no longer a temporary phenomenon but one that is likely to continue to some non-marginal extent given its acceptance and revealed preferences from both many employees and employ where working from home makes good sense. This paper formalises the relationship between working from home and commuting by day of the week and time of day for two large metropolitan areas in Australia, Brisbane and Sydney, using a mixed logit choice model, identifying the influences on such choices together with a mapping model between the probability of working from home and socioeconomic and other contextual influences that are commonly used in strategic transport models to predict demand for various modes by location. The findings, based on Wave 3 (approximately 6 months from the initial outbreak of the pandemic) of an ongoing data collection exercise, provide the first formal evidence for Australia in enabling transport planners to adjust their predicted modal shares and overall modal travel activity for the presence of working from home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel method to simulate multifunctional biomimetic adaptive facades is proposed. • Multifunctional adaptive facades can be simulated with script-based controls. • 600 iterations of a multifunctional shading and ventilating Bio-ABS is analysed. • PVC glazing achieves shading, and SMA springs trigger ventilation by openings. • An adaptive façade over a non-adaptable one improves thermal comfort by 18 to 37.1%. Biomimetic adaptive building skins (Bio-ABS), being adaptable to changing environmental conditions, can foster improved comfort and reduced energy demand. Bio-ABS are climate-adaptable façades, and biological functions inspire their design. Buildings often require multiple functions for improved environmental performance. Multifunctionality refers to hosting multiple triggered by diverse stimuli interdependently. The realisation of multifunctional Bio-ABS may be challenging due to difficult construction processes, expensive materials, and the complexity in their application. Thus, digital modelling and simulation of multifunctional Bio-ABS are important to predict their performance. This paper reviews the studies on simulating Bio-ABS, proposes a novel simulation framework for multifunctional Bio-ABS and demonstrates it through a parametric case study. Performance comparisons among twenty base-case scenarios and 600 iterations of shading and ventilating multifunctional Bio-ABS provides shading through photovoltachromic (PVC) glazing and ventilation through Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) springs triggered openings. It is multifunctional by changing its morphology and physiology due to photovoltachromic glazing triggered by solar irradiance and Shape Memory Alloys being triggered by temperature. The results show that Bio-ABS improves building performance when compared against non-adaptable façades, reaching 37.1% for 90% acceptability limits and 18% for 80% acceptability limits for adaptive thermal comfort in an educational building in the humid subtropical climate of Sydney. Australia. The main outcome and contribution of this study is a novel simulation framework to predict the performance of morphology and physiology changing multifunctional Bio-ABS. Future work may focus on prototyping and validated experiments to close the gap between theory and the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a comparative study of political activism in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks in Sydney from 1971 to 1974 and from 2014 to 2017, this paper examines the more‐than‐human force of bodies and buildings in redemocratising cities. The paper brings theoretical insights from urban assemblage and Deleuzian scholarship into dialogue with post‐political theory. In doing so, it shifts the focus in urban political geography from a concern with diverse social groups to the political potential in more‐than‐human assemblages. Through a re‐reading of Sydney's Green Bans in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks, the paper first shows how the withdrawal of labour and stilled building sites comprise informal pathways of planning rejection that centralise social and ecological concerns in decision‐making in urban development. That first case is then contrasted with the contemporary case of privatisation and displacement at the same sites, showing how aged bodies can energise latent deliberative spaces across diverse (if repressed) institutions in liberal democracies. Given the capacities of materials and bodies to produce planning outcomes, the paper conceptualises planning as a more‐than‐human process enhanced by immersion in the experimental materialism of political movements—and this materialism is inherently geographical. The paper concludes with my reflecting on whether the proximity of workers and residents to the materials of the built environment in social movement activism of the 1970s intensified the reach of the event compared with the uncertain struggle over Millers Point today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the short-term reduction in money and time costs associated with a reduction in car and public transport commuting activity in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area (GSMA) during a period of the COVID-19 pandemic in which Australia started to see an easing of restrictions (see Beck and Hensher 2020a). As of late May 2020, three months after COVID-19 resulted in restrictions in Australia, we saw an annual travel time reduction for car and public transport commuters in the GSMA of $5.58 billion, representing a 54.02% reduction in the Pre-COVID-19 total time costs, much of which we would suggest can be associated with reductions in congestions costs. Adjusting further for reduced employment volumes relative to pre-COVID-19 levels, to take into account reduced commuting activity due, in part, to a lower volume of work associated with a loss of employment or lower employment hours, the annual time cost reduction for all commuters who still have regular pre-COVID-19 levels of employment are estimated as $4.4 billion. Hence there is $1.17 billion worth of reduced time costs associated with significantly reduced employment hours, including a loss of employment. The implications for road investment linked to congestion in particular is profound, and shows how much of an increase in benefit to society, through congestion busting, can be obtained by more flexible work arrangements, even allowing for some switching into car out of public transport. Whether the current decrease in travel costs will be long-lasting is unknown, but it does support the appeal of working from home, if it is sustainable, as a policy lever to reduce levels of congestion on the roads and crowding in public transport. • Estimates the short-term reduction in money and time costs associated with commuting activity during a period of the COVID-19 pandemic. • Annual travel time reduction for all car and PT commuters of $5.58 billion, a 54.02% reduction in the Pre-COVID-19 total time costs. • The implications for road investment linked to congestion in particular is profound. • Shows how much of an increase in benefit to society, through congestion busting, can be obtained by more flexible work arrangements. • Support the appeal of working from home as a policy lever to reduce levels of congestion on the roads and crowding in public transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue Addressed: Drowning is a global public health challenge with a need to ensure equity to drowning prevention information and interventions. In Australia, people born overseas are identified as being at greater risk of drowning. This paper presents findings from a community-based qualitative evaluation of swimming and water safety (SWS) programs delivered to adults from migrant backgrounds in Sydney, Australia.Methods: A qualitative study was conducted in November-December 2019 among 35 female participants of SWS programs targeted to adult migrants. While offered to all SWS program participants, no males took part in the study. Focus groups and interviews were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed using a deductive approach. The domains of enquiry were guided by the health belief model and the theory of planned behaviour.Results: Study participants were ≥25 years, first generation and most had lived in Australia for ≥10 years. Most were nonswimmers and were fearful of water prior to the program. Key themes were: direct SWS program outcomes, health and well-being; enablers and barriers to participation including: motivation, a program coordinator, fear and settlement priorities.Conclusion: Findings suggest that in order to increase SWS participation among migrant communities, the broader determinants of health need to be considered. Culturally appropriate strategies are required to enable both men and women equal opportunities to access SWS programs.So What: SWS programs provide multiple benefits for adult migrants; however, the impact on reducing inequities is limited, with broader multi-strategic health promotion approaches and policies required for inclusion and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public libraries are quintessential civic and education institutions which have undergone significant transformation. In the context of digital knowledge platforms and the neoliberalisation of public space, libraries are increasingly framed as knowledge portals, community hubs, refuges, and rare examples of universally accessible public spaces. If public libraries are transforming as educational, public and civic spaces, what does this mean for the way libraries work as everyday pedagogical spaces? This paper explores this question by considering how citizen-subjects might be 'curated' through the everyday materialities and spatial ordering of a community library in an ethno-culturally diverse neighbourhood in suburban Sydney. Drawing on interviews with users and staff in the library, I examine how material, spatial and interactional codes shape habits and constitute a pedagogical assemblage oriented around civic instruction, particularly for recently arrived migrants. I suggest that the library as conditional, semi-public space and spatial-material assemblage includes subtle forms of citizenship training, including training in openness to forms of 'commonplace diversity'. I argue that examining community libraries in this way can offer insights into the everyday pedagogies of social spaces and the way people practice civic belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wood utility poles are widely applied in power transmission and telecommunication systems in Australia. Because of a variety of external influence factors, such as fungi, termite and environmental conditions, failure of poles due to the wood degradation with time is of common occurrence with high degree uncertainty. The pole failure may result in serious consequences including both economic and public safety. Therefore, accurately and timely identifying the health condition of the utility poles is of great significance for economic and safe operation of electricity and communication networks. In this paper, a novel non-destructive evaluation (NDE) framework with advanced signal processing and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques is developed to diagnose the condition of utility pole in field. To begin with, the guided waves (GWs) generated within the pole is measured using multi-sensing technique, avoiding difficult interpretation of various wave modes which cannot be detected by only one sensor. Then, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and principal component analysis (PCA) are employed to extract and select damage-sensitive features from the captured GW signals. Additionally, the up-to-date machine learning (ML) techniques are adopted to diagnose the health condition of the pole based on selected signal patterns. Eventually, the performance of the developed NDE framework is evaluated using the field testing data from 15 new and 24 decommissioned utility poles at the pole yard in Sydney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underground urban development is rapidly expanding. Like all forms of 'development', utilising the underneath of cities can present a range of possibilities and problems. Much underground urban development, however, has been conceptualised through a technical rather than a broader social lens. This is problematic, not least as these developments are usually financed with public money, while their governance is often realised through complicated and opaque public–private partnerships. In this context, the urban underground is often present as sub terra nullius: an epistemologically blank slate waiting to be exploited with the necessary technology and funding. In this paper, the author presents four analytical strata to help us to rethink how urban undergrounds are conceptualised and developed. Drawing on examples from Australia, she presents how we need to appreciate the more-than-human geographies of the underground (stratum 1); critically understand the dynamics of volumetric dispossession (stratum 2); question who owns the underground and how (stratum 3); and rethink how the underground is accessed (stratum 4). By engaging with these themes, we can explore ways to move subterranean urban development away from a technoscientific tunnelling decision-making process to one that engages with the social, political and economic implications of urban infrastructural projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Literature suggests that value of time (VOT) may decrease due to advent of AVs. • Reduction in VOT may impact households' residential location choices. • This expectation was tested empirically using stated choice methods. • Empirical results do not suggest drastic changes in VOT due to AVs. The literature suggests that autonomous vehicles (AVs) may drastically change the user experience of private automobile travel by allowing users to engage in productive or relaxing activities while travelling. As a consequence, the generalised cost of car travel may decrease, and car users may become less sensitive to travel time. By facilitating private motorised mobility, AVs may eventually impact land use and households' residential location choices. This paper seeks to advance the understanding of the potential impacts of AVs on travel behaviour and land use by investigating stated preferences for combinations of residential locations and travel options for the commute in the context of autonomous automobile travel. Our analysis draws from a stated preference survey, which was completed by 512 commuters from the Sydney metropolitan area in Australia and provides insights into travel time valuations in a long-term decision-making context. For the analysis of the stated choice data, mixed logit models are estimated. Based on the empirical results, no changes in the valuation of travel time due to the advent of AVs should be expected. However, given the hypothetical nature of the stated preference survey, the results may be affected by methodological limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L. Burarrwanga. 2013. 'Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.' Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185–197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to 'walk with good spirit', embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Share housing is changing. Once considered a form of short-term housing and a lifestyle choice for young adults fresh out of the family home, share housing is increasingly playing a broader role into advanced adulthood. Recent work has claimed the emergence of Generation Rent; however, the reconfiguration of housing experiences is illustrated not only by renting but also by an increase in house sharing and the emergence of 'Generation Share' within the renting cohort. We know surprisingly little about share housing and its increasingly important role in housing. This paper draws upon exploratory research conducted on share housing in Sydney, Australia, and argues that share housing as traditionally understood is changing. Share housing has a widening demographic and it is driven primarily by economic factors. Despite this, the social affordances offered by share housing are highly valued. Share housing therefore offers us a unique lens into changing housing pathways and values and provokes us to think of ways to produce more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive cancer centres are on the rise as patients seek a more holistic approach to maintaining their wellbeing when living with a cancer diagnosis. Many cancer centres worldwide now incorporate a selection of evidence-based complementary therapies and qualified therapists into their offerings. The Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, a comprehensive cancer centre in Sydney, Australia, provides integrative oncology services including acupuncture, massage, reflexology, dietetics and exercise physiology for individual patients, along with group programmes, and an integrative and supportive care medical specialist. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on one model of integrative oncology service and approach to integration and team and service development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author, English born and living in Sydney, Australia, presents an argument for the usefulness of the recognition of the implicit simultaneous links between the following: development of psychic skin and the establishment of the body schema development of a sense of identity relationship with place such that the formulation psychic skin< > mind < > body < > self < > place < > world can be thought of as an organising gestalt or implicit continuum of 'skin' experience and process upon which the explicit always depends. This constitutes a taken-for-granted ground-plan of the self-in-place. The author follows this with an exploration of the consequences for psychic health of a traumatic rupture of this gestalt for both individual and group. Material from two cases is presented: first, a young woman whose family fled the Balkan wars which splintered the former Yugoslavia; second, the transmission of displacement trauma into the third generation of a family who arrived in Australia after WW II from the former Yugoslavia. For the purposes of this paper I will not make a distinction between migrants/exiles/refugees and instead refer to either displacement or dislocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In self-governing residential communities processes of governance through community appear to be triggering a contractualisation of neighbouring and demise in socially inflected relations. Research to date has examined the socio-political dimensions of neighbouring, highlighting governance frameworks and the social context as key forces shaping transformations in community practice. Meanwhile, the material space of residential estates has largely disappeared from view, assuming a static role as either a container for social relations or a symbol informing estate standards. This paper advances a different perspective, arguing that residential materialities must be taken seriously as agents within community governance and neighbouring. Through a case study examining the management of pets and nuisance noise in strata-titled apartments in Sydney, Australia, the paper shows that community governance takes place through the material environment. Understandings of community self-governance and the ‘building event’ are productively combined to re-place understandings of community self-governance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Australia, as in other Western countries, peri-urban farmland is increasingly being considered a public good, contributing to urban sustainability and climate change mitigation. To retain local food production, advocates have called for the implementation of farmland protection policies that restrict urban development, such as exclusion zoning. Many such policies have been abandoned due to protests, often from the very people the policies are ostensibly intended to protect - farmers. Examining the failure of Sydney's latest 'green zones' through a political ecology lens, this paper challenges the prevailing narrative that these protests indicate a lack of community support for the ideal of farmland protection. The failure of the green zones was one of political process, specifically the lack of consultation with Sydney's culturally and linguistically diverse small-scale farmers, rather than community rejection of the principle of protection. Interview responses from farmers suggest that a bottom-up approach to policy-making would have yielded alternative and more successful approaches to maintaining farming on the fringe. This paper concludes that ensuring small-scale farmers have access to and agency in the environmental decision-making process generates options for farmland protection policy that move beyond a housing-versus-farming dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the complex and continuously evolving processes of de-democratisation evident in urban planning practice in Sydney between 2011 and 2017. New South Wales' successive rounds of planning reform, establishment of a metropolitan commission, and amalgamation of local governments over that period have aimed to reduce local democratic participation in planning decisions, but they have had uneven success. I argue that while New South Wales' efforts to streamline development and de-democratise planning have evolved considerably in response to multiple forms of opposition, the success of the neoliberal project is still uncertain. The insights this story offers add complexity to theorists' claims about the inevitability of depoliticisation and the end of meaningful democratic engagement. The story also offers insights about how power is created, lost, and regained in particular local circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the role of women in the Sydney branch of the New Theatre, from 1936 to 1969. In contrast to other gendered spaces found in the theatrical, industrial and political spheres, women held together the New Theatre. Not only did the theatre give opportunities to women as performers, but women embraced roles as directors, stage managers, writers, designers as well as holding elected offices. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, this study presents new scholarship on Australian women’s leadership in the theatre, arguing that their pattern of involvement was shaped by the voluntary nature of the work, the longevity of involvement, their political commitment and the theatre’s democratic structure. The blending of organisational and creative leadership created spaces for women’s voices in ways that were crucial to the long-term success of the Theatre, at a time when women were generally expected to focus on the domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most models of immigrant minority enclave formation in cities represent their situation as relatively transient elements in urban residential mosaics. As minority group members become both economically integrated and socially-culturally assimilated into the host society, so they move away from the enclaves where they initially concentrated. Such shifts are especially likely in the second and later generations of group members, who are more likely to overcome the disadvantages experienced by many of the original settlers with regard to human capital. This paper evaluates that model using data on the residential distributions of three generations of those claiming one of 19 different ancestral groups in Sydney in 2011, at four nested spatial scales, deploying a recently developed inferential method for evaluating the intensity of residential segregation. The findings are not consistent with the model: in general, members of the second and third generations in any ancestral group are as segregated as the first generation (that is, those born outside Australia) at both regional and neighbourhood scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly popular “supersized” dwellings, often twice as big as the traditional detached suburban house, have been widely criticized on social, environmental, economic and aesthetic grounds. This paper examines the emergence of infill-supersized dwellings in the older post-war suburbs of Sydney, Australia, through piecemeal replacement of older houses in a process known as knockdown-rebuild. The paper explores the reasons which encourage owners to build supersized houses, demonstrating the prominence of speculative aspirations, supported by Australian tax policies. It considers the consumption of supersized dwellings, and the implications for contemporary suburban lifestyles and communities. This paper concludes that infill-supersized dwellings ultimately represent a process of accentuating existing patterns of suburban settlement in Australia as opposed to a new departure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the social, ecological and economic benefits of green buildings become more established, firms, especially professional service firms, are responding by adopting sustainable office space (SOS). Accelerating this uptake demands a nuanced appreciation of firms’ understandings of and motivations for adopting SOS. Through a qualitative study of professional service firms in Sydney, this paper brings together a decentred understanding of the contemporary firm drawn from the ‘new economic geographies’ approach and theories of corporate social responsibility to trace and interpret the diverse and overlapping motivations shaping the uptake of SOS amongst these firms. The firm is shown to be a site of plurality and agency, governed by multiple logics. Whilst motivations informed by economic logic remain persuasive and pervasive, the adoption of SOS is simultaneously informed by a wider palette of logics, including environmental and social logics. The paper argues that a decentred conceptualisation of the firm brings the multiplicity of firms’ orientations towards SOS into view and, in so doing, has the potential to inform a politics of intervention for steering firms towards more socially and environmentally sustainable behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the redevelopment of the site of Sydney’s 2000 summer Olympics, locating it within debates over the legacy of these events. The paper describes some of the key stakeholders involved in the redevelopment and planning of the site. It provides an overview of the regulatory context and governance bodies that have structured the space since the staging of the Olympics, then identifies two key areas of private-sector involvement, in event space and in business development, where tensions emerged over how the site should best be governed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Questions of property rights are central to the organisation of urban space yet remain weakly theorised in the context of sexuality. Tracing battles over spaces of commercial sex in inner Sydney, this paper argues that particular claims to privacy and property underpin exclusionary actions restricting the boundaries of sexual citizenship. However, the paper also notes the potential for the emergence of ‘sexual commons’ where claims to an enhanced notion of sexual citizenship can be made. The paper concludes that property rights consist of overlapping and complex claims to space in which questions of sexuality and the sanctity of family life are often brought to the fore. In arguing this, the paper demonstrates that property rights constitute a key mechanism in the management and regulation of the (nocturnal) city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quarantine was used by British colonial authorities and later by Australian governments to manage and control the introduction of infectious diseases. Facilities at North Head, Manly, New South Wales, were initially built as a specialist institution but as the need for mass quarantine declined over time, the site was used for other forms of social regulation and welfare. This paper explores an enduring tradition of memorialization, commemoration, and in some instances, resistance to the conditions of isolation and confinement found in the mark-making practices of people held at the Quarantine Station from the 1830s to the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's quarantine regulations have their roots in colonial practice. This paper is concerned with the 'matter' of quarantine-its location, spatialization, and materialization-and the ways in which it contributed to the colonial agenda. Through an exploration of Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station, quarantine is shown to be a technology through which the colony and the continent were framed as simultaneously pure and vulnerable. These colonial roots of quarantine practice are then brought back to the present, drawing on Stoler's (2008) concept of 'imperial debris' to contemplate the contemporary ruins, both material and ideological, of colonial quarantine practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the needs and expectations of communities towards their urban environments often vary, landscape management strategies can often be prone to fail in the absence of social considerations. It is therefore incumbent on policy-makers to investigate and attempt to reconcile diverse community perceptions toward the natural and built environment for more equitable governance. This is of particular interest when planning and managing nature-based solutions (NBS) for river protection. We considered this challenge in understanding human values, perceptions and behaviour in a multilayered ecosystem that includes waterways, NBS, green open spaces, and a built environment. This paper analyses perceptions and behaviour around a public urban park next to the Georges River in Sydney Australia, utilizing a proxy-based approach and a mixed-method comprising community surveys and behavioural mapping. The results showed that while users perceive the significance of the urban river environment differently, naturalistic (ecological), humanistic (recreational) and utilitarian (well-being) values are dominant. Urban river catchments are highly valued for recreational purposes, with a strong perception of potential flooding hazards. Through exploring the literature, we recognized that the dominancy of leisure-related values around urban river catchments can be generalized to similar cases worldwide. While NBS, as an urban stormwater management solution, address some user values (e.g., naturalistic) around urban river catchments, they may lack further delivery of humanistic and utilitarian values due to the poor integration with recreational and cultural spaces. It was also the case around the Georges River, where low prominence of cultural features was observed. We concluded that NBS development around Georges River and other urban river catchments should incorporate socio-cultural considerations and community values, in particular the ones related to leisure. The gaps between users' beliefs and behaviour do not greatly challenge governance, provided that the decision-makers utilise these gaps for optimising management actions. • We used mixed-method approach to show community values in urban environment. • Behavioural mapping was a complementary process in value perception analysis. • Study highlighted the importance of ecological, recreational and utilitarian values. • Existing NBS addresses naturalistic values, but lacks cultural, recreational values. • Management actions need to consider socio-cultural values and landscape integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a narrative framework to analyze the role of newspapers in discursively reestablishing social order during times of social crisis and upheaval. Using the coverage by three diverse newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, and Koori Mail) of the 2004 Redfern Riot in Sydney, Australia, the article will explicate the way each paper narrates social actors, discourses, and events in order to make sense of the riot and promote a way to reestablish social equilibrium. It is argued that the narratives of the two mainstream papers (Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph) converge in a coverage that draws on powerful cultural tropes of race and crime in Redfern to explain the riot. The Indigenous owned and run Koori Mail, in challenging many of those same tropes, is left with fewer publicly available narrative resources through which to conclude its story of the riot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between spirituality/religion and health is receiving increasing academic interest, but few studies have explored the experience of Australians. This paper presents data from an exploratory survey of patients and families in a public teaching hospital in Sydney. The findings show that the majority of hospital service users: • believe there are links between spirituality/religion and health; • believe that rituals and customs can help people when they are sick/suffering; • have valued practices associated with their beliefs; • feel it is helpful for health staff to know their patients' beliefs; • are willing to be asked about their beliefs; or • want hospital staff to respect and support the beliefs and practices of all patients. Spirituality and religion, and the beliefs and practices associated with them, were found to be eclectic, individualised and evolving in response to life events such as loss and health crises. This paper concludes that a person-centred framework of health practice includes attention to the religious/spiritual dimension of patients and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with enduring histories and micro-geographies of the (post)colonial Australian nation, played out through contemporary connections between Aboriginality, inner Sydney and educational policy change. This paper traces the 'racialization' of space and place in the Sydney inner city suburb of Redfern, including the Aboriginal-'owned' residential area commonly known as the Block; it then outlines aspects of an educational policy change in inner Sydney, specifically the relationship of policy proposals to the positioning of Aboriginal people; and, last, focuses on connecting the notions of Aboriginality and space to educational policy change through Derek Gregory's idea of the 'colonial present'. It explores how the idea of the 'colonial present' as 'performance of space' might help to understand the racialisation of the inner city and education policy discourses. It concludes that the 'colonial present' is a way of understanding how the 'racialisation' of the inner city and education policy discourses can, on the one hand, 'reaffirm' deficit views of Aboriginal people as irredeemably 'Other' and as 'failure', yet, on the other hand, can however precariously mobilize undo colonial enclosures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study into schooling responses to youth crime in south-western Sydney, Australia. The project was a partnership between the New South Wales Department of Education and Training and the University of Western Sydney's School of Education. Specifically, the paper analyses interviews with school leaders who were interested in understanding how to support young people constructed 'at risk' of engaging in criminal activity. A content analysis, drawing on the concept of 'emotional capital', revealed discourses of safety, hope, engagement, and justice and fairness in the narratives of participants. The various ways in which 'emotion' is operationalized in education is explored so that the nature of emotional capital and its class and gendered inflections are made clear. Emotional capital, as a theoretical framework, also provides new insights into the strategies used by school leaders and helps situate the experiences and interests of the participating principals and key staff in the schools in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pilot research on community conflict resolution, conducted in a local government area in southern Sydney in late 2006, revealed paradoxical findings: the simultaneous presence of both high levels of cross-cultural mixing and appreciation of the area's culturally diverse population; and the prevalence of prejudice against Arab and Muslim residents and visitors to the area. Many respondents, who supported cultural diversity, saw Arab and Muslim Australians as an exception and even a threat to harmonious community relations. Particularly striking was the anxiety and anger caused by their apparent large numbers, seen to be taking over certain public recreational spaces. This paper explores the contradictions in these findings in light of other contemporary Australian research and identifies complex and difficult issues to be addressed by research and by local government. In particular, the paper discusses the need to address the interconnections between both everyday multiculturalisms and everyday racisms, to distinguish between 'victim' claims amongst diverse communities, and to ground research and policies on 'place-sharing' in Indigenous sovereignties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent NSW state government reassessment of the role of live music venues, and the gradual inclusion of live music within broader urban cultural policy across Australia. Focusing on Sydney, it maps the live music venue at the intersection of competing policy agendas, alternatively viewed as 'vibrant', exciting sites that represent a rejuvenated inner-city culture; or as sites of disruption, encouraging anti-social activity on the margins of legality (or sometimes both). The 'rehabilitation' of live music in the eyes of key government sectors was not simply a matter of 'good' cultural policy, but the result of a combination of many factors. The paper documents and analyses a six-year campaign by various stakeholders to implement noise, building code, late-night trading and liquor law reforms designed to ensure the survival of live performance venues and scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the convergence of urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and posits a politics of place as a useful frame to both understand policy and undertake policy analyses. It reiterates calls for place to be taken seriously in education policy studies, but also proposes that it is equally important to strive for preciseness when using concepts such as space and place. The theoretical component of this paper concerns the intersection of relational notions of place and space with discursive concepts of the identity. The paper then applies these ideas to analyse urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and teases out possible understandings of how schooling may be implicated in a politics of the inner city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that including urban renewal as a factor in analysis contributes to more nuanced understandings of educational policy change in inner Sydney. The educational policy change investigated is Building the future, with a focus on a newly created school. Urban renewal is positioned as a component of convergent processes and practices that aim to 'revitalise' the inner city and inner-city education. This paper illustrates how educational policy draws, in part, on geographical aspects to argue for the restructuring of state schooling in inner Sydney. The paper also explores how policy practices conflate discourses of urban renewal with the constitution of 'middle class' and 'non-Aboriginal' subjects, a practice that consequently repositions the new school in an education market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovative Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) systems are being investigated at three locations to the north and south of Sydney, Australia, These systems contain porous concrete pipes that are designed so that stormwater exfiltrates through the permeable walls of the pipes into the surrounding substrate media material. The porous pipes and media material treat the passing stormwater. The primary aim of the overall project is to develop a model to describe the treatment effectiveness of confined WSUD systems. This paper focuses on the system located at the Weathertex Industrial Site, Heatherbrae. Due to wood processing operations that occur at this site, it is recognised that the surface runoff will carry a heavy organics loading. Granulated Activated Carbon (GAC) is recognised for its ability to reduce the concentration of dissolved organics present in both wastewater and stormwater. GAG was therefore chosen as a filtration medium to be investigated at this site. To maximise the effectiveness of the GAC, extensive laboratory batch studies were undertaken prior to the field system being constructed to determine the optimum GAC/sand ratio. The purpose of the experimental work was to assess the dissolved organic removal potential through sorption of various concentrations of GAC. The aim of this paper is to describe these laboratory experiments and discuss how they related to the field system. Through these experiments it was determined that a sand/GAC ratio of 25:1 was ideal for the media material at the Heatherbrae site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]