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Drawing on early ethnography as well as more recent studies, this paper summarises the results of a comparative study of Aboriginal economy and society in seven contrasting regions of Australia as they were at the threshold of colonisation. The comparison proceeds along several dimensions: environment and population, resources and technology, settlement and mobility, key institutional forms (modes of identity, kinship, cosmology and governance), and economy (control of production, organisation of production, distribution and consumption, exchange and trade). The study indicates that in spite of widely contrasting environments, very varied population densities, and degrees of mobility, the organisation of production and basic patterns of distribution were very similar in all regions. Institutional forms varied considerably, however. The paper traces some of the conditions and consequences of this variation.

This paper explores some of the properties of sets of vernacular definitions of kin-relational expressions and draws implications for the status of structural semantic analysis. A comparison of three sets of definitions shows them to have several properties in common, including ordering and hierarchical reduction. An account of the significance of the definitions suggests that they form the basis of bodies of discursive knowledge: they are constitutive of sets of kin-relational expression; they articulate with theories of sexual reproduction as well as laws and conventions governing marriage and adoption, etc.; and the forms of the sets are closely related to patterns of learning and reasoning about kin relations. This account has implications for the problem of the cognitive validity or psychological reality of structural semantic analysis, as well as its analytical status.

This paper investigates the orthotropic properties of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM)-printed Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate (ASA) material with different raster configurations. The elastic properties were determined using a non-destructive ultrasonic technique. This technique allows us to deduce the orthotropic elastic constants from the material density and the velocities of the longitudinal and shear waves propagating through the material along different directions. Tensile tests were performed in addition to ultrasonic tests to obtain the yield properties of the ASA material and to validate the elastic constants determined by the ultrasonic tests, which have shown very close correspondence. Finally, numerical verification was performed by comparing the experimental results of the three-point and four-point bending tests with the finite element simulation results which have as input the material properties from the ultrasonic testing. The simulation results have shown excellent agreement with the experimental results, implying that the material properties obtained from the ultrasonic testing were highly accurate comparing to the actual orthotropic elastic properties of the 3D-printed ASA material.