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Small community halls in Australian country towns have distant precedents in guildhalls, town halls and civic centres of Europe and city halls of the United States of America. In Australia, they also enjoy strong historic associations with nineteenth-century schools of arts and mechanics institutes. Small halls have been used by key institutions such as schools, churches and worker educational movements. They have been hired out for weddings and parties, acted as temporary cinemas, enabled fundraising activities and hosted passing entertainers from nineteenth-century minstrel shows to twenty-first-century touring bands. As public venues maintained by volunteers and regulated by local councils, such halls are central to negotiations between the complex hopes, assumptions and constraints of placemaking in out-of-the-way places. Stories told about them help us understand how generations of different users - long-time residents, in-migrants and passing visitors - adapt to the ideals of belonging and becoming that an individual community claims as its own.

For the past ten years, a substantial international community of cinema historians has been drawing attention to factors that traditional cinema studies had a tendency to overlook: first, that wherever cinema attendance is a social habit, it is not exclusively or even strongly shaped by the content of films themselves, but by the attractions and distractions of public cultural participation; and second, that what is social is also inevitably spatial. Surviving evidence of the mass commercial orchestration of cinema as a cultural practice has offered digital historians a gold-edged invitation to count, to measure, to analyze, to aggregate, and above all to map. Several project teams internationally, some of which are featured in this book, have spent years developing large-scale digital collections of historical data related to cinemagoing and have been doing so in a way that increases the potential to share commonly managed data across collections. The potential of this kind of global collaboration in the humanities is dazzling; it tempts us to imagine an “histoire totale” of cinema attendance founded on rigorous analysis of statistically significant changes to the routines of commercial, political, and social regulation of cinema markets worldwide, over more than a century. The opportunity to build capacity for this kind of panoptic overview is surely equal to those in which we have treated the history of films and their production as matters of industrial scale or presumed wide cultural impact.

In this article the transcript of a three way discussion between Jan Fook, KateBowles, and Laura Béres is presented. The discussion begins as an interviewof Jan Fook regarding the development of her approach to critical reflection onpractice. The interview then becomes more conversational as Jan, Laura, andKate explore how critical reflection and narrative therapy draw upon similarunderlying theories, connecting their reflections to their various practices,which include therapy, teaching, organizational planning, and research. Theyalso discuss the possibilities provided by interdisciplinary inquiry into humanexperience.

Cinema was one of the prominent public institutions of the 20th century, and despite experiencing a slight decline in the twenty-first, it remains a significant feature of the global cultural landscape. At its heart is the proposition that getting together with strangers in darkened public venues to watch movies together makes some kind of sense. This is clearly both a spatial and a social practice, involving decisions based on considerations of place, timing and other people. Yet the history of this changing social experience has proved difficult to accommodate within the traditional practice of film history, that has been focused on the history of films. Instead, cinema has been bracketed with history for the purposes of demonstrating that popular films make bad history; or conversely that history films are `celluloid evidence¿ of the vanished past, that will entertain and engage history students. This essay examines the reasons why a social cinema history has been slow to develop, and charts the recent emergence of a new mode of cinema history focused on the social and spatial dimension of film distribution, exhibition, and everyday practices of cinema attendance.

Advertising or Marketing Communications for Food and Beverage Products shall not undermine the importance of healthy or active lifestyles nor the promotion of healthy balanced diets, or encourage what would reasonably be considered as excess consumption through the representation of product/s or portion sizes disproportionate to the setting/s portrayed or by mean otherwise regarded as contrary to Prevailing Community Standards.

Cinema-going is a cultural experience shaped by logistics and mobility, as film distributors and exhibitors operate to enable films to be screened in places and at times when audiences can physically assemble to view them together. A historical understanding of the geography of cinema distribution, exhibition and attendance can therefore help us to understand what factors other than the choice of film title may have shaped the experience of the cinema audience. This article uses samples of trade commentary on small country cinemas in the late 1920s from the Australian trade journal Everyones, and suggests that historical GIS maps could help us to understand regional differences in the cinema-going experience, or track phenomena such as the diffusion of racial and social segregation in cinemas. Nevertheless, we need to remain mindful of the limits of maps to adequately explain the cultural experience of encountering these phenomena.

"You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture." — Ivan Kreilkamp, co-editor of Victorian Studies (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2009) John Hartley’s entertaining and polemical defense of a disappearing art form (the print copy journal designed to be ripped eagerly from its envelope and read from cover to cover like a good book) came my way via the usual slightly disconcerting M/C Journal overture: I believe that your research interests and background make you a potential expert reviewer of the manuscript, "LAMENT FOR A LOST RUNNING ORDER? OBSOLESCENCE AND ACADEMIC JOURNALS," which has been submitted to the '' [sic] issue of M/C Journal. The submission's extract is inserted below, and I hope that you will consider undertaking this important task for us. Automated e-mails like these keep strange company, with reminders about overdue library items and passwords about to expire. Inevitably their tone calls to mind the generic flattery of the internet scam that announces foreign business opportunities or an unexpectedly large windfall from a deceased relative. At face value, this e-mail confirms John Hartley’s suspicions about the personalised craft of journal curation. Journal editing, he implies, is going the way of drywalling and smithying—by the time we realise these ancient and time-intensive skills have been lost, it’ll be too late. The usual culprit is to the fore—the internet—and the risk presented by obsolescence is very significant. At stake is the whole rich and messy infrastructure of academic professional identity: scholarly communication, goodwill, rank, trust, service to peers, collegiality, and knowledge itself.

In their introduction to a recent collection of essays by British film historians, James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (2007: pp. 1, 8) suggest that what differentiates film history from other types of historical investigation is that its primary source document, and simultaneously the central object of its enquiry, is Uthe film text". Their account is conventional in its medium-specificity: the film historian, they argue, needs to understand "that films are cultural artefacts with their own formal properties and aesthetics," and therefore has to acquire "skills of formal and visual analysis that are specific to the discipline". These are the methods that we have so far used for two purposes. The first has been to construct film history as a curatorial history of films and their production. Secondly. we have juxtaposed and contrasted film and history, in accounts of films as either representing or interpreting a set of extrafilmic phenomena identified as "history", or else as impacting on extra-cinematic conditions identified as "society". Film history of either stripe has compartmentalised accounts of particular types of films - national cinemas or genres, for example - in a way that is often historically sensitive to the time and place of their production, but detaches them from the equally specific circumstances of their consumption.

What kind of denial does it take to look at a major industrial city in the midst of a crisis of self-reinvention involving millions of dollars of urban infrastructure, and see only a small country town going about its business as usual? And how does this relate to the strategic marketing of an urbanised coastal tourist destination that downplays the amenities of urban life in favour of the intangible qualities of small town experience? Whatever its literal dimensions in terms of population or location, the imagined small country town functions-in Australian media and other public discourse-in multiple ways. The country town image is, on one hand, easily dismissed and criticised and, on the other hand, a source of comfort and reassurance. A relatively stable image of the country town continues to make a curious kind of sense, at least in terms of seemingly persistent national myths and ideals. 'Come on,' such an image seems to proclaim, 'we're all Australians, we know what country life is about'. Of course, most Australians don't have direct experience of small country towns. Rather, they have a perverse familiarity with popular Australian television serials and movies-from Bellbird to A Bed of Roses, as well as imaginary communities from Mt Thomas to Summer Bay (see Botterill)-and how they promote images of 'rural' or regional life in a national context. It's this familiarity with a set of ideas about rural charm and hospitality that makes media promotion of Wollongong as a small country town an ideal means of attracting tourists. At the same time, less desirable associations-such as parochialism or a town's insignificant profile on the national scene-can be called on to minimise the State political implications of a local corruption investigation. This is only a small country town, after all: charming, harmless and easily misunderstood by outsiders.