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In October 1936, Australia's Minister for the Interior, Thomas Paterson, ordered customs officials to bar a married, white British woman travelling with a married army officer from entering Australia. Mabel Freer's exclusion sparked a media sensation and captured public attention for months. In re-examining the Freer case, this article focuses on questions of morality, respectability and marriage, and how these intertwined with racial identity formation in interwar Australia. Freer's exclusion struck a chord with the general public, and with women in particular, who condemned Paterson's action and demanded Freer's admission. However, while this mobilisation against government overreach successfully challenged the sexual double standard and patriarchal assumptions about marriage and women's respectability, it simultaneously reinforced the racist logic underpinning the White Australia policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrestrial evaporation is an essential variable in the climate system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles over land. Despite this crucial importance, it remains one of the most uncertain components of the hydrological cycle, mainly due to known difficulties to model the constraints imposed by land water availability on terrestrial evaporation. The main objective of this study is to assimilate satellite soil moisture observations from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission into an existing evaporation model. Our over-arching goal is to find an optimal use of satellite soil moisture that can help to improve our understanding of evaporation at continental scales. To this end, the Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model (GLEAM) is used to simulate evaporation fields over continental Australia for the period September 2010–December 2013. SMOS soil moisture observations are assimilated using a Newtonian Nudging algorithm in a series of experiments. Model estimates of surface soil moisture and evaporation are validated against soil moisture probe and eddy-covariance measurements, respectively. Finally, an analogous experiment in which Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) soil moisture is assimilated (instead of SMOS) allows to perform a relative assessment of the quality of both satellite soil moisture products. Results indicate that the modelled soil moisture from GLEAM can be improved through the assimilation of SMOS soil moisture: the average correlation coefficient between in situ measurements and the modelled soil moisture over the complete sample of stations increased from 0.68 to 0.71 and a statistical significant increase in the correlations is achieved for 17 out of the 25 individual stations. Our results also suggest a higher accuracy of the ascending SMOS data compared to the descending data, and overall higher quality of SMOS compared to AMSR-E retrievals over Australia. On the other hand, the effect of soil moisture data assimilation on the evaporation fields is very mild, and difficult to assess due to the limited availability of eddy-covariance data. Nonetheless, our continental-scale simulations indicate that the assimilation of soil moisture can have a substantial impact on the estimated dynamics of evaporation in water-limited regimes. Progressing towards our goal of using satellite soil moisture to increase understanding of global land evaporation, future research will focus on the global application of this methodology and the consideration of multiple evaporation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This is the most detailed examination of heavy metals in Deception Bay since 1975. [•] XRF and various pollution indices were used to determine sediment quality. [•] There is ample evidence of lead contamination and enrichment of other heavy metals. [•] Multivariate data analysis gave insights into the underlying structure in the data. [•] The results have implications for pollution in complex marine environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the engagement of students in the writing process, the use of picturebooks to engage students in reading and writing, and the current curriculum directions in Australia.