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(2012)ThesisBetween 1937 and 1986, Australian Indigenous people diagnosed with Hansen's disease (leprosy) were compulsorily isolated under the care of Catholic religious nursing Sisters in remote leprosaria across the north of the continent. This thesis explores the forces that gave rise to and maintained this policy; the underlying ideals and anxieties; and the ways the policy was executed across the four institutions that form the focus of the study: Derby (WA), Fantome Island (QLD), and Channel Island and East Arm (both NT). Missionary archival documents, oral histories and publications are used to examine the lives, work and traditions of the Sisters and other influential Catholic missionaries. Government records also reveal medical and social objectives implicit in the founding, staffing and ongoing operations of the institutions. Comparisons are made with management strategies for white Hansen's disease patients in Australia to unravel prevailing conceptions about the separate categories of race and disease. The Indigenous leprosaria derived from the Commonwealth government's interwar vision of a healthy White Australia, and the supervision and treatment of the inmates was considered a necessary corollary to this initiative. Catholic women religious were uniquely positioned for this role, being prepared for the incumbent risks, and having the requisite nursing and midwifery qualifications, resulting from a current upsurge in Catholic missionary activity in northern Australia. The Sisters expanded their nursing duties to encompass the holistic care of their patients and to educate them in Western skills, culture and morality. They ushered in the more intensive participation of Catholic Brothers and priests in evangelising the patients. In many ways the Catholic project aligned with government objectives for the social assimilation of the Indigenous population, but in the leprosarium, the object of such efforts was that ‘civilised’ and ‘Christianised’ residents would comply stoically with their enforced detention. Prescribed activities, whether hard work or leisure, were to keep patients occupied, diffusing their yearnings for home, and offering a gentler alternative to more punitive controlling measures. In later years, the Sisters became modern therapists, and agitators for better conditions and less stringent discharge criteria, thus more effectively helping patients regain their health and independence.
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(2021)ThesisMuseums are important cultural sites in cities to attract visitors. The physical context of museum buildings is essential in shaping the visitor experience, and it is important to understand the spatial and display layout and its impact on visitors’ experience. This thesis analyses the selected case study, the National Museum of Australia. It investigates the relationship between museum spatial properties and visitors’ movement and the influence of movement patterns on visitors’ experience to determine how the museum’s architectural characteristics affect visitors’ experience. Unlike extensive research in spatial and visitor experience studies, few studies have combined qualitative and quantitative assessment to understand visitors’ perspective of the museum visit. Unlike previous studies that only focus on behaviour mapping, this study included interviews with visitors to explore visitors’ experience and clearly explain the visitor perspective. Mixed-methods of data collection are used in the study, including the quantitative and qualitative assessments of the National Museum of Australia. In the quantitative analysis, space syntax techniques were used to assess the spatial characteristics of the museum. In the qualitative analysis, two types of data were used. First, behaviour mapping of 30 visitors in each gallery of the museum was used to record visitors’ movement patterns. Second, interviews were conducted with ten visitors who had completed their museum visit. The findings indicate that the difference in the layout of each of the four permanent galleries and the main hall resulted in various museum movement patterns and different visitor experiences. The results show a direct correlation between spatial characteristics, such as visibility, integration and connectivity, and visitors’ experience, encouraging visitors to move toward more integrated and visible space. The main recommendation to improve visitor experience is to increase the accessibility and visibility toward the garden to create the integration core for the museum. This combined approach illustrates how differences in layouts can create different visitor experience in the same environment. In conclusion, the study of spatial and display layout enables designers and curators to better evaluate the movement pattern of visitors and provide a better quality of experience, improving the museum’s ability to convey its messages.
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(2021)ThesisReal Estate Online Platforms (REOPs) are responsible for providing property-related information to their users. However, most of these users are not satisfied with the information provided to them. This thesis highlights the REOP users’ needs and regrets and the pertinent disruptive digital technologies (DDTs) to address these needs. Two models are developed for assessing the REOPs users’ perception and the two-way relationship between them. Also, the barriers to adoption of the DDTs from a managerial perspective are examined. For assessing the users’ perception, Smart Real Estate Technology Adoption Model (SRETAM) is developed, whereas Risk, Service, Information, System TAM (RSISTAM) is developed to assess the two-way relationship between the perceptions. Concepts of KANO and SISQual are used to assess the perceptions, whereas Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is used for assessing the potential two-way relationships. The barriers to adoption of the DDTs are analysed through Fault Tree Analysis. These models, coupled with the users’ needs and DDT adoption barriers, constitute the novel framework adopted in this study. Eight key regrets of the users are identified from the published literature and meta-analyses: complicated buy-sell process, lack of information, housing costs, house size, mortgage, agents, inspections and emotional decision-making. Nine key technologies can help address the REOP users’ needs and regrets. In terms of REOP users’ perception, 31 key factors have been identified, among which 19 are very important based on responses from 407 respondents. Graphical statistics, attractive design, immersive and novel content attract REOPs users, whereas tracing user location, learning tutorials and hyperlinks discourage them. Among possible relations between RSISTAM constructs, nine are categorised as two-way. There are 21 key barriers to adopting DDTs in the Australian real estate sector identified through a survey of 102 real estate managers. High costs, high complexity of systems and lack of government support, regulations and standards are the top reasons for non-adoption. This thesis addresses the users’ regrets and needs related to REOPs-based information through DDTs adoption and provides a novel framework for facilitating such adoption. The users’ perceptions, needs and regrets addressed through DDTs and the elimination of associated barriers can transform Australian real estate into the smart real estate sector.
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(2021)ThesisThis study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the 'gastronomic body' to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art. In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence or shape a subject's perception. Referencing key examples of food art, I trace a lineage of art that employs edible materials from the Futurist banquets of the early 20th century to neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s. Artists including Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, and Daniel Spoerri used foodstuffs in various applications from object-based work to participatory, performance, and installation art. I also examine food-based artwork from the 1990s by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Janine Antoni and more recent examples, including 21st-century edible installations by Elizabeth Willing and Sonja Alhauser. This examination of food art shows how the imagined dimensions of sensory experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of the 'virtual body' link sensory perception and encultured experience. I uncover how sociocultural customs and norms shape bodily responses and sensory feelings from pleasure to displeasure through the lens of Silvan S. Tomkins's psychological approach to affect theory. The gastronomic body bridges the sensory with the sociocultural to map the spectrum of sensations, memories, and gestures activated through the embodied experience of food art, connecting past and present, body and mind, self and others.
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(2021)ThesisAs increasing numbers of apartments are developed domestically and internationally, longstanding concerns about their livability for families with children become more pressing. This research explores how the quality and choice of apartment designs might be improved to better meet the needs of families with children. It focuses on unit layouts in Sydney, the city, which has the highest number of new apartment developments in Australia and a growing number and proportion of families with children. Unit layout is an important factor that influences residents’ desires and residential satisfaction, but there are few studies available on unit layout and residential desires. Firstly, the research investigated the units being developed in three areas (City of Sydney, City of Parramatta, and Liverpool City) through an analysis of sale information (unit plan, size, and price) before exploring the drivers behind current unit layouts through interviews with architects and developers. Secondly, the desires of families with children regarding unit layout were explored through interviews with parents living in apartments. The desires of parents were categorized as universal, consistent (according to children’s age), and diverse (according to personal tastes and cultural backgrounds). Thirdly, parents’ desires were compared with the unit layouts being delivered to identify synergies and mismatches and determine the aspects that need to be kept or need to be improved. Lastly, the implications of the research findings for designing and delivering units that better meet the desires of families with children are discussed. The research provides knowledge on the characteristics of delivered and desired unit layouts for families with children and contributes to academic research on the potential role the spatial layout of units has for improving residential satisfaction. The findings can assist governments in regulating apartment design and enable professionals in the building industry to better meet the desires of families with children. It also offers methodological innovation by combining different methods to measure spatial layout and compare this with abstract ideas about the desires of residents. While this thesis focused on the Sydney context and families with children, it provides insights into the impact and implications of apartment design for residents more broadly.
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(2021)ThesisThe thesis contributes to the scholarship on disaster recovery by centring the experiences of women as a category of analysis and a methodological approach. I argue that women s everyday realities are a site for disrupting the powerful circuits of knowledge and practice that articulate pathways of recovery through the notion of resilience. As a feminist research, analysing disaster recovery involves exploring possibilities for reclaiming alternative futures. Thus, my research asks: what possibilities for reimagining resilience might women s experiences of recovery reveal? I focus on the reconstruction of Tacloban City, Philippines, after its destruction by typhoon Yolanda in November 2013. To answer my question, I investigated: 1) how resilience has been inscribed in the institutional and social landscape of Tacloban, and 2) how women qualified, re-appropriated, or contested attempts to build their resilience as a way to map out possibilities for alternative pathways of recovery. Using PhotoKwento, a photo-based feminist method which I designed, the study focuses on urban poor women s experiences of disaster resettlement. My findings show that building back better has been enmeshed in a citizenship project aiming to produce responsible and resilient communities. I identify new modes of governing that employ state performances of care on one hand, and the instrumentalisation of women s participation and care-based practices in service of the state s visions for recovery, on the other. Foregrounded are women s navigations of precarity, insecurity, and the unknown amidst attempts to make them better . The thesis shows how the processes of self-formation; the workings of emotions and aspirations; and care relations with others and the environment counterbalance hegemonic views about resilient recovery. I underscore productive tensions as governmental practices, discourses, and prevailing ideologies are incorporated, negotiated, and contested in and through women s care-based practices, affective labours, and hopes for a better future after and beyond Yolanda. Lastly, I reconceptualise resilience as lived , grounded in feminist ethics of care. A lived resilience perspective requires broadening ethico-ontological horizons in order to view resilient recovery as a process of becoming not simply driven by the goal to rebuild what has been damaged, but as a regenerative practice that centers care as a normative basis for exploring post-disaster futures.
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(2021)ThesisIn the context of urban heat island, radiative coolers with high solar reflectance and strong emissivity in the atmospheric window can cool the substrate as well as the ambient air. Silica (SiO2) at its nano or micro-scale being randomly dispersed into a uniform transparent polymer can form scalable radiative coolers for large-scale application. Promising cooling performance has been reported for SiO2-polymers compared with conventional cooling materials, but their performance can be largely influenced by various fabrication parameters. So far, how fabrication parameters influence the emissivity and the cooling performance has not been experimentally demonstrated. Also, the cooling capacity of SiO2-polymers reported is not substantial compared to other superior radiative coolers. In this thesis, random SiO2-polymer has been optimized theoretically and experimentally. Using OptiFDTD and Mie theory, together with a well-validated thermal model, the cooling power of SiO2-polymer samples under various climates was predicted. Lab measurement and experimental testing of six fabricated SiO2-polymers under subtropical and desert climates indicated that samples with the lowest emissivity in either 8-13 microns or the whole infrared range have the best cooling performance under both climates, conflicting with most existing conclusions. If combined with superior reflectors with higher solar reflectance and especially the emissivity in 8-13 microns enhancing the heat dissipation ability, substantial cooling capacity can be achieved: when peak solar radiation reached over 1100 Wm-2, the combination presented a sub-ambient temperature of maximum 4.7 C when air temperature reached its peak, and the maximum daytime and night-time sub-ambient temperatures were 12.5 C and 15.9 C respectively. The application of radiative cooling roof can generate positive net annual energy savings under both humid subtropical climate and desert climate, with more savings observed for the latter. Positive net annual energy savings were also observed for both insulated and uninsulated buildings, with the advantage over conventional roofs more obvious in uninsulated buildings. On the city scale, we showed that broadband coolers can significantly mitigate urban heat but are not free of problems as the cooling island effect they generate would rise side effects such as decreases in the mixing layer of the atmosphere and increases of pollutants concentration.
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(2021)ThesisThis thesis presents the first complete study of twentieth-century Australian novels by women, for women, and about women. This project is biographical, historical, and literary: exploring the female subject from within both the fiction and the authors’ real lives. This is an historically specific study and will focus on texts which span the twentieth century; specifically, the decades subsequent to Australian Federation in 1901 and non-Indigenous Australian women’s suffrage in 1902. This thesis will explore the complex notion of assumed independence that accompanied these significant moments in Australian history: the independence of a newly federated nation, and, primarily, the independence of a newly liberated woman. It was at this time, at the turn of the twentieth century, that a fantasy figure known as ‘the Australian Girl’ was promoted as being synonymous with a ‘new’ (or rather, newly federated) Australia. This study will interrogate the idealised ‘girl’—informed by white, colonial, masculinist nationalism—and where she stood in a post-suffrage Australia. The potency of the Australian Girl character type was such that she appears—in assorted guises, and with varying significance—across the novels of each of the twentieth-century women writers discussed in this thesis. These writers and their works are integral to our understanding of the gendered roles being assigned to the literary female subject—‘girl,’ ‘woman,’ spinster’—at a time when rebarbative narratives of a white and ‘youthful’ nation, and subsequently a white and youthful ‘girl’, were saturating Australian literature. Extensive archival inquiry into the lives and literary works of the following six Australian women writers has been performed for this study: Alice Jane Muskett (1869–1936), Louise Mack (1870–1935), Mabel Forrest (1872–1935), Alice Grant Rosman (1882–1961), P. L. Travers (1899–1996), and Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020). It is by tracing the lives mapped by these writers and their heroines—both conventional and alternative—that this thesis can demonstrate that no fate is more abject for the Australian Girl—whether literal or literary— than that of fulfilling the promise placed upon her by forces of colonialism and patriarchy.
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(2021)ThesisThis thesis reports a linguistic investigation of how disputing spouses present themselves via their use of evaluative language in family dispute resolutions. Six episodes of a Chinese reality TV family dispute resolution programme were analysed. The study took a dramaturgical view of the discursive presentation of the ‘self’ and drew on insights provided by the Appraisal framework. The study characterised what is termed the ‘attitudinal dispositions’ of these spouses via tracking tendencies in the range of options for expressing positive/negative attitudes deployed by the spouses. It is proposed that differences in these attitudinal dispositions entail differences in the ‘selves’ being discursively presented, with the notion of ‘self’ having connections with ‘textual identity’ and ‘persona’. In order to group the spouses with respect to similarities and differences in their use of these resources, computational multivariate analysis tools were employed. There were two lines of inquiry. One attended to the nature of the attitudes the disputants conveyed – what types of attitudes, in what combinations, and at what frequencies. The other focused on how the disputants framed these attitudes – for example, whether they were intensified or mitigated, categorically asserted or modalised. Both a synoptic and a dynamic perspective were adopted in exploring such tendencies – with the synoptic perspective determining frequencies of use of particular attitudinal resources across the entirety of a single segment of the programme, and the dynamic perspective exploring the possibility that the spouses might shift in the course of a single segment from favouring some set of resources to favouring a different set. While some common tendencies were observed across the spouses, substantial differences were identified. This provided the basis for proposing that certain sub-types of attitudinal disposition, and hence styles of presentation of the ‘self’ could be identified. Under the dynamic perspective, it was discovered that the attitudinal orientations of the spouses did, indeed, shift both within a single segment of the programme and between different segments, in response to different contextual influences. A key finding, therefore, was that the ‘selves’ thereby being discursively performed were fluid, subject to the influence of the current communicative context, and multifaceted.
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(2021)ThesisThis creative practice thesis comprises a dissertation, 'Locating Consensual Biofiction: Genre, Ethics, and Fictionalising the Life Stories of Others', and a creative project written in the emergent genre of consensual biofiction, which this thesis names and defines as a form of biographical fiction written with the consent and participation of the person whose life the work portrays. Drawing from feminist ethicist Margaret Urban Walker's 'expressive-collaborative' understanding of morality as a 'socially embodied medium of understanding and negotiation over responsibility for things open to human care and response', the combined analytical and creative components of this research offer insight into an area of literary activity concerned with the effects of author-subject relational ethics on fiction projects drawn from the life stories of living subjects. The novel that accompanies this thesis, 'Behind the Back of God' (from a Hungarian idiom meaning far, far away), uses consensual biofiction to adapt the life story of a woman who migrated from Hungary to Australia as a political dissident just prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain. The novel, both in its narrative content and in the ways the author-subject relationship has influenced creative decision-making in its writing, explores the situated intersection of systemic constraints and personal convictions in embodied negotiations of freedom and commitments to care. 'Locating Consensual Biofiction' discusses manifestations of consensual biofiction in works such as Colum McCann’s 'Apeirogon' (2020), Julia Alvarez's 'In the Time of the Butterflies' (1994, 2019), and Dave Eggers's 'What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel' (2006), and proposes 'consensual biofiction' as a term that provides insight into the origins and authenticity claims of fictional texts adapted from life stories. It argues that the genre-based expectations of consensual biofiction arise from a combination of uses of the real in tandem with contemporary understandings of human rights, literary ethics, and ethical consumerism. In this light, consensual biofiction offers writers and living subjects of fiction projects a cooperative model that aims for mutual beneficence, as well as leveraging the affective powers of fiction to foster reader engagement with ongoing issues of social justice.