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In the past decade, there have been several efforts in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to increase the opportunities and improve the experiences of women cyclists in recreational and racing contexts. However, cycling in Victoria and Australia more broadly continues to be a male dominated sport. This study incorporates a digital ethnography of two Melbourne-based women's cycling Facebook groups including 11 interviews with stakeholders over the period of 2017–2018 to analyse how women and girls are harnessing social media to create counter sports spaces to enhance women's cycling. The paper explores the emergence of the "virtual clubhouse" which operates as a digitally networked counterpublic, providing a space for women and gender diverse cyclists to connect, coproduce and engage in knowledge sharing practices, and build a more inclusive culture for cycling that challenges dominant, mainstream narratives of women's sport. The "virtual clubhouse" addresses a gap in the physical bicycle landscape in which cycling and cycling knowledge (including bicycle maintenance) is largely mediated by men and cycling clubs are configured as masculine spaces within Australia. This research adds further depth into a specific localised network of women cyclists to consider how physical and online sports cultures and communities are intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the spatial frames that are mobilised in the discourse and practice of border policing in the Australian context and the ideological content in which those frames are embedded. On the one hand, a deterritorialised frame positions unwanted migrants as a global threat from beyond. On the other, a territorialised frame enables the possibility of sovereign territorial defence. Neither of these frames, I contend, adequately captures contemporary techniques of border policing which increasingly open borders to global market ideology in the very act of their defence. Nor do they capture the strategic opportunities that exist across different places and scales to resist sovereign logics of control. The paper drills down to the level of the city and the experience of asylum seekers in Melbourne in order to further highlight the limits of simplistic spatial frames. I show that both in local sites and at territory's edges, border policing is indicative of a new terrain of sovereign practice. Accordingly, I present an analytical and normative case for a multidimensional approach to spatial framing. I argue for theoretical openness to spatial metaphors that assist in the tasks of empirically investigating and politically unsettling technologies of contemporary border control. Este articulo investiga los marcos espaciales que se han puesto en marcha en el planteamiento y la practica de vigilancia de la frontera en el contexto australiano y contenido ideologico, en los que se han incluido aquellos marcos. Por un lado, un marco de desterritorializacion situa a los migrantes indeseados mas alla de una amenaza global. Por el otro, un marco territorializado habilita la posibilidad de una defensa de soberania territorial. Ninguno de esos marcos, yo sostengo, capta adecuadamente las tecnicas contemporaneas de la vigilancia de frontera, que progresivamente abre fronteras a la ideologia del mercado global al mismo momento de su defensa. Tampoco captan las oportunidades estrategicas que existen a traves de lugares y escalas diferentes, para resistir las logicas soberanas de control. El articulo va hasta el nivel de la ciudad y la experiencia de los buscadores de asilo en Melbourne, para resaltar mas aun los limites de los marcos espaciales simplistas. Demuestro que tanto en los sitios locales, como en los bordes del territorio, la vigilancia de frontera es un indicativo de una practica soberana de un nuevo terreno. Por consiguiente, presento un caso analitico y normativo para un enfoque multidimensional, a una enmarcacion espacial. Yo sostengo una apertura teorica, a las metaforas espaciales que colaboran con las tareas de la investigacion empirica y las tecnologias politicamente desestabilizantes del control de frontera contemporaneo. [image omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the data from a sample of women converts to Islam residing in Melbourne, Australia, and the difficulty they face in accessing mosques. Although conversion requires structure and support through the performance of religious rituals, Muslim women converts are hindered in their ability to freely access and enjoy mosques. This is despite historical freedom for women to access the Prophet's mosque. It appears that the trend to exclude women from mosques has been imported into the Australian context due to the strong ethnic identification of mosques with immigrant communities that are used to greater degrees of sex segregation than is generally practiced in Australia. The paper briefly reviews the role of the mosque in Muslim community life and its importance for new converts in facilitating their transition as a source of support after conversion. After examining the pattern of attendance at the various mosques in the greater metropolitan area, the paper reviews the historical debate over women's presence in the mosques; analyses the challenges of gender discrimination posed by culture, ethnicity and exclusion; and relates it to the hardship for new women converts to Islam in Australia, prompting some of them to a passive boycott. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Master planned estates have grown in number Australia and internationally as a favoured form of development in new and infill estates. This paper explores the use of legal entities known in the state of Victoria as owners' corporations to hold communal assets in private ownership for the exclusive use of those living in master planned estates. The privatization of assets that would normally be held by municipal government has been associated by some with heightened conflict in estates, greater costs for residents and increased separation from the larger community. This paper seeks to investigate the motivations and attitudes of both local government planners and developers in utilizing forms of private collective ownership in residential estates in a major city of Australia, Melbourne. This empirical investigation demonstrates that developers generally utilize these ownership structures in order to provide a different, but not necessarily better, standard of facilities as a means of market differentiation. Planners, on the other hand, are more diffident in their endorsement of privatized community ownership and demonstrate a degree of concern about their changed relationship to residents in such estates. The research suggests that issues relating to this choice of ownership of community assets have not been fully considered by local government, particularly in terms of protecting the long-term interests of residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goldrush colony of Victoria, Australia, was a favoured destination for aspirational emigrants from nineteenth-century Britain. Yet the persistence of high rates of infant mortality blighted the happiness of many first and second generation immigrant families alone in a new land. Drawing on birth, death and inquest records this paper interrogates the experience of infant death amongst the poorest families in the capital city popularly known as 'Marvellous Melbourne' during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although few infants died alone, the familial and community networks in which they were enmeshed were not always committed to their survival. While the paper argues that there was a hierarchy of value which determined the degree to which the death of a child would be welcomed or mourned, it also contests popular notions that evil baby farmers and unfeeling mothers were a major cause of infant death. ☆ This paper derives in part from research undertaken for a project funded by the Australian Research Council. The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of co-researchers Professors Janet McCalman and Ruth Morley, and research assistants Cecile Trioli and Jo Townsend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Privileged' Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such situations, which exemplify what influential theorist Lawrence Langer terms 'choiceless choices', are the chief concern of Primo Levi's paradigmatic essay on the 'grey zone'. In light of these key conceptualizations of the ethical dilemmas of Holocaust victims, the paper analyses the representation of 'privileged' Jews in several videotestimonies recorded at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHMRC) in Melbourne, Australia. It will be shown that judgements of victims in extremis cause considerable problems for attempts to testify to the complex situations and experiences of 'privileged' Jews. The role of the interviewer is a crucial factor in this, particularly when interviewers are themselves Holocaust survivors. The paper reveals that while it might be argued that moral evaluations of 'privileged' Jews should be suspended, judgements are often imposed on Holocaust testimonies in various ways and have a significant impact on their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a recent resurgence in Australian spatial planning has been superseded by a resort to infrastructure to address urban problems. The paper uses case studies of the Melbourne and South East Queensland (Brisbane) metropolitan regions to chart the renewal of new spatial planning, after a period of neglect. This paper then shows this spatial planning renewal has given way to a new emphasis on urban infrastructure planning as the primary mode of intervention in these cities. The infrastructure turn raises important questions about the spatial planning and infrastructure of cities within a new era of global strategic challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports the findings of survey research recently completed in Melbourne, Australia, among a sample of 455 club and rave festival patrons. This research aims to provide a clearer account of the prevalence of drug driving within such settings in Melbourne, as well as identifying relevant ‘predictors’ of this drug driving. Just under half of the sample (48%) indicated that they had driven a motor vehicle within four hours of consuming an illicit substance at least once in the past year; 22% of respondents reported driving while ‘knowingly intoxicated’ in the previous year. Fifteen percent reported such behaviour ‘several times’ or more in this time. Relatively permissive attitudes towards drug driving, coupled with higher than average prevalence of drug driving in one's peer group, were found to be significant predictors of drug driving. So too was the reported frequency of the use of cannabis and ecstasy, and the propensity to use these substances in ‘rave’ and ‘party’ settings. Given the levels of drug driving revealed in this study, the paper closes with a series of recommendations regarding the design and delivery of more effective anti-drug-driving strategies within rave and club settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improved understanding of both community attitudes toward tourism and host–guest interaction is vital for the sustainable development of tourism. However, there are significant research deficiencies and gaps in these two related research areas. This conceptual paper looks into these glaring research gaps through a review of literature and attempts to provide solutions suggested by an ongoing research project being conducted in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. In particular, while this paper addresses the impacts of personality and ethnicity on community attitudes toward tourism and points to the urgent need for a well-established theoretical framework in order to understand and predict host–guest interaction, it also highlights the above issues in the context of the urban–rural fringe, the bordering region connecting neat ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic information systems (GIS) are a rapidly evolving technology that has recently been integrated into undergraduate and postgraduate learning. GIS is also a multidisciplinary technology that has important relevance beyond its traditional disciplinary homes. This paper describes an initiative developed by the Department of Geomatics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, to create multimedia-based self-learning modules for teaching GIS to undergraduate and postgraduate students. The modules are designed to complement rather than replace existing approaches to learning such as formal lectures, practical laboratory assignments and major project requirements. The learning modules have been developed using Macromedia Director and are delivered interactively via the Internet. This paper examines the pedagogical issues of learning that accompany technological advancement and practical issues of module development. It discusses results from preliminary student evaluations and examines the broader learning opportunities associated with flexible delivery mechanisms such as the Internet. Further details and access to all modules are available at http:// www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/gisweb/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to map how two Melburnians of Anglo-Indian heritage make sense of their belonging through connections to cities within the South Asian diaspora, in particular, Lahore, Kolkata and London. As diasporic writers of mixed descent working within the disciplines of geography and visual culture, we use food and images of public space as entry points to explore our everyday experiences as translocal subjects who inhabit several spaces simultaneously. The exploration of such stories of intercultural encounter is interesting and significant in the field of diaspora studies because as South Asians we were historically an ‘out-of-place’ group of mixed descent in a colonial context, a community without a regional home in independent India/Pakistan, and an imagination that we were entitled to a home in Britain and Australia by virtue of our whiteness and Anglo-ness. Our stories provide a nuanced understanding of the dominance, power and privilege of whiteness in colonial and post-colonial contexts and an insight into how mobility impacts on our sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital map products are routinely used by land managers and policy makers for environmental decision-making. This paper assesses the ability of such products to detect woody vegetation, particularly remnant patches which serve as critical landscape structures. Comparisons are made between two map products (NCAS and a SPOT-based classification) and a high spatial resolution reference dataset, across contrasting landscapes. Spatial analysis and statistical association tests are used to determine the ability of these map products to produce accurate measurements of woody vegetation. It is demonstrated that landscape structure is fundamental in determining the fitness-for-use and function of the digital map products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on a research project undertaken with members of a community garden in Port Melbourne, Australia, to investigate the ways in which such a facility contributes to the enhancement of health, wellbeing and contact with nature for urban dwellers. Ten members from an urban community garden were interviewed using qualitative semi-structured questions exploring perceptions of health and wellbeing benefits associated with membership. The garden was felt by members to be a sanctuary where people could come together and escape daily pressures, a source of advice and social support, and a place which gave them a sense of worth and involvement. Members also identified spiritual, fitness and nutritional benefits arising from participation in the community garden. It is evident even from this small qualitative study that community gardening offers many health and wellbeing benefits to members. This study provides a basis for the benefits of community gardens in Australia to be taken into account by policy-makers and practitioners to enhance urban community health and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with broadcasters of two distinctive Hebrew radio programmes in Melbourne. The two programmes are part of a weekly Jewish programme broadcast in Hebrew, English and Yiddish. They operate within the setting of a local ethnic community radio station, a manifestation of Australian multicultural policies whereby nearly 63 different ethnic and language groups produce radio programmes for their distinct communities. Focusing on the Israeli broadcasters who present the Hebrew radio programmes, I examine how different political identities and a sense of being away from Israel are translated into the programmes they make. Despite their shared cultural background, Israeli immigrants have different personal and collective readings of the past in Israel and of present life in Melbourne. The weekly programmes in Hebrew operate as a cultural site in which political and migratory experiences interact and intervene to produce migratory mediascapes in which contradictory interpretations of identity are played out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]