Bob Weis

It's funny how connections work. I had seen Rosie Jones' marvellous film "The Family" on Monday and told her I was going to write about it that night.  In fact I wanted to let it sink in while the various connections and reverberations kept coming so I decided I would do it after my usual Tuesday morning swim. On the way to my car from Il Fornaio after breakfast I ran into Rosie's partner, Peter Tapp, and commented that I had seen the film and how  much I liked it.  Then Robert and I drove off to get his car from Mary St. 

We were chatting and as I had done a thousand times before signalled my turn from Park St to Mary St at the roundabout and almost got through it when a deafening noise accompanied by the side air bags and a swerve of the car alerted us to the tram that had hit the car.  

I was in shock, I now realise, and pretty soon I was being led out of the car by Robert, my swimming partner, and told to sit on the ground and an ambulance was called as well as a tow truck.  Pretty soon there was a crowd with all of the above, the car stuck on the roundabout blocking trams in both directions and now three trams sitting there immobilised.  

Two policewomen from South Melbourne station attended and they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.  The ambo paramedics got me into the ambulance and cleaned me up, I had some blood from cuts around the nose and under one eye and eventually Robert drove me to my doctor who I was due to see but was running late for now! She took me in straight away and did all the tests to make sure I had nothing broken and that I had no internal injuries or bruising.  Blood pressure and so on. Finally I got home and thought about writing this piece but then though better of it.

When I was watching the film it brought back to me something else. In the sixties I went to Monash University and in my second or third year met Cypra Helmer and friends of hers  As it turned out I had come across her brother Michael who was at Scotch College when I was at Caulfield Grammar and although I didn't know him well we did both belong to a wider friendship group.  My one abiding memory of Michael was him facing me as I bowled him out in a school cricket match and him refusing to walk after the umpire raised his finger.  No big deal. He was annoyed. Not out!!

Cypra was a tall willowy young woman who was high spirited and loved to chat and laugh and sing. I don't think she finished University and when I did I went to London to go to film school so it was probably the early seventies by the time we caught up again. She had a few musician boyfriends and I think also went to live in London for a while with one of these who it was said was physically abusive to her. In any case by the eighties we had drifted apart and she was becoming, by reports, more involved with drug taking and behaving erratically. The sixties lifestyle, sex, drugs and rock and roll, was embraced by most of us but some didn't see the onset of latent problems.

In 1988 I was shocked to hear that she had died after jumping from the top of the Trak building on Toorak Rd. She was naked and there was a note. She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic before this some time before this event but I hadn't heard about the involvement of The Family at this point.  I also don't know if it was a Family doctor who had made the diagnosis,

As is Jewish custom I went to the home of mourning that night which was Cypra's parent's home also In Toorak Rd.  The parents, Maurice and June were overcome with grief. Cypra's two brothers were studies in opposite reactions.  Her elder brother John said to me "what do you think happened?", and I was too shocked to answer only having heard the mental illness suicide version at that point. Michael on the other hand looked calm and smiled the beatific smile that was on display in Rosie's film where he was the only sect member who spoke positively about Anne Hamilton-Byrne. He said, "she's gone to a better place" and continued smiling while holding my look which must have been one of complete disbelief.

Rosie has crafted a feature length documentary that thriller or film noir style takes us through the setup of the cult that became known as The Family through reconstructions, interviews with both survivors and the two main policemen, Lex de Man and Peter Spence who led the task force and whose lives were changed and affected by the four year process and which still showed through years later both in the film and in the follow up Q&A at the Melbourne Film Festival following the screenings - of which there were four after the scheduled two had created more demand.

As it turned out I saw it at the Nova at a 1pm screening that was so full that the seat I had been removed for a wheelchair at a previous screening and so I saw the film from the discomfort of the stairs.  Anyway the film was so engrossing and disturbing I noticed the postural issues less than the horror story unfolding before me.

The end credits revealed two more connections.  I was on the Council of the national film school, AFTRS, and one of the two student reads on that council was Anna Grieve the Producer.  Anna showed then that she was and is very bright and had great values, and the film was beautifully shot by James Grant who I met when he was a tertiary student and then we worked together on Pure Shit which I produced and he was the camera assistant for.  Round and round.

Rosie came to directing from the cutting room and has made a number of films now.  The previous doc of hers that I saw was a chronicle of the community battle in St Kilda with developers and the Council against the Triangle development next to Luna Park, a battle which was ultimately successful and which saved the Palais and the site for community use.  The film was inspiring and as a long time resident of St Kilda it was a boost to my love of the place.  The film was The Triangle Wars and I recommend it too.

Bob Weis

I read Magda's book on my iPad and it is available from the iBook store.  I read it in the period over the past year or two of reading memoirs including Oliver Sacks, Jenny Diskin, Caro Baum and now this.
​
Magda Szubanski was born 12 April 1961 in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. Her mother Margaret is Scottish-Irish and came from a poor family. Her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, came from a well-off Polish family and, as recorded in the Official Archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, was an assassin in a counter-intelligence branch of the Polish resistance movement in World War II. She attended high school at Siena College, Melbourne, and later studied fine arts and philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

In 1976, as a year 10 student, she captained a team on the television quiz It's Academic. - Wikipedia entry

What the Wiki entry for Magda doesn't say in as many words is that she is a multitalented individual with abilities across a number of disciplines that most of us don't possess or even come close to hoping to have.

Bob Weis

In my experience, and increasingly in that of many other Melburnians and travellers, it is the name of a complex, in the Burnley area, which includes a restaurant, gym and wellness centre and all the creation of a remarkable young woman, Emillie Hazell, 26.

​When you walk into the restaurant, Serotonin, you are greeted by any one of the staff and if you are lucky taken to a table. The first time I went I thought the staff were impossibly friendly and nice but over time I realised that it is genuine because the people who work there are proud of what they do and confident of their product, the food and the environment.

​The menu, in typical Emillie fashion, is not only by and large vegan it is also local, organic and complex. So no white flours, white sugars or processed foods. The food is tested in-house before ever being served to paying customers and Serotonin has scientific advisers who have an input to the final product.

Back in 1991 the “Iceman” was discovered in the snow high in the Alps on the Italian/Austrian border. His well preserved body was more than five thousand years old. Who was he? How did he live? What did he eat? What could he tell us? What could we learn from him? The world was quite excited, as was I.

It was crushingly disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising to learn two years later that he had been killed with an arrow in the back. How I had hoped he had died from natural causes, or fighting off a predator, or from experimenting with a food source; but alas, he was murdered. The oldest naturally preserved body in Europe was a victim of foul play at the hand of another human being.
 
It is generally accepted we ‘evolved’ from ancient ancestors to our modern form around 200,000 years ago and there is evidence of a skull from China believed to have been crushed by another human, that is almost that old. It seems we have been bashing each other to death for as long as we have been standing on two feet.

For me it begs the question ‘why’? Given the amazing brain we have developed we had the potential to be the greatest of creatures – a magnificence – a guiding and protective light for other creatures on the planet and perhaps beyond.

How and why has humanity failed to get even close to its potential is the question I am asking and readily confess I don’t have the answer? It is a question that has been asked before of course, but I haven’t seen an answer that has any real currency. I am not talking about individual magnificence, because many humans do rise above these limitations and there are plenty of self-help gurus urging us to discover our untapped potential, but they are dealing with individuals. Why, as a species have we failed?

Peter World wrote to me earlier this year - "I'm am studying a degree in Indigenous Studies through UniSA and am currently enrolled in a paper titled "Being and Belonging: Culture and Identity" under the guidance of Dr Rosie Roberts.
I have an assignment to select a TV series or film as a case study to answer the question, discuss connections between language, culture and identity.
I have chosen Women of the Sun as my case study."
I asked if I could publish his work on this site and what follows is his piece.

by Peter John Worland

Language is a fundamental part of personal and group identity and can provide information about a person’s nationality, culture, religion, age, gender, level of education, profession or socio-economic class. Drawing upon appropriate academic literature and using one or two TV series or films as case studies discuss the connections between language, culture and identity.

Introduction

This essay presents a case study of the historic, four-part Australian television dramaseries Women of the Sun as a way to discuss the connections between language, culture and identity. The 1981 series signals dramatic shifts for Indigenous voices, national television broadcasting and academics writing on Indigenous culture of the time, as well as presenting a historical perspective heretofore unheard or seen by a mass audience.

Widely acclaimed as ground-breaking television, screening a representation of colonisation in Australia from first contact to the present day (early 1980’s), Women of the Sun is a unique collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people for which
the experience of making continues to resonate today. It has the authenticity of Aboriginal voice and a rich Indigenous philosophy that emanates authority, wisdom, truth and power. Twenty-five years later a followup documentary shifted the Women of the Sun narrative on from it’s original, historical basis to deeper conversations around how the series came to be, consolidating the series it to it’s current position as a highly respected exemplar of Indigenous knowledge transmission, relational responsibility and interconnectivity.
Throughout this essay I acknowledge the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ of modern-day Australia and respectfully use language-group and traditional names of people and places where possible. In the making of movies we have to consider not just the narrative in the production, the storyline, but the narratives about production, what "we" think we are doing. (Muecke 1994, p. 5)

Inheriting Stories

​Women of the Sun was the inspiration of Yorta Yorta/ Wurundjeri woman Hyllus Maris who returned to Australia in the late 1970’s after studying social policy and community development with sociologist Richard Hauser, in London (FNAWN 2017). Maris was a visionary leader following in the footsteps of her Elders to fight for Aboriginal rights, to walk off the Aboriginal reserve of Cummeragunja and to realise her own dream of building the first independent Aboriginal school in Victoria, Worawa (eagle in Aboriginal language)
College, which opened in 1983 (Dept. Premier and Cabinet 2014). As Huggins (2005, p. 1) states, “Maris’ achievements were all about using relationships between people to improve communities for everyone” and the five-year collaboration with television writer Sonia Borg on Women of the Sun was no exception. McCallum (2009, p. 266), writing about theatre in the late 70’s and early 80’s, recounts that the era heralded “stories focused on communities and individuals who had previously been the Other in Australian drama which challenged ideas about identity and culture” and “opened up new conceptions… about multiculturalism.” This was the environment into which the Women of the Sun scripts arrived on the commissioning editor’s desk at the newly formed public broadcaster SBS
and into the hands of television producer Bob Weis who, although never having met an Aboriginal person, committed to making the series as a matter of personal and national importance.

Speaking of Others

In his 2006 documentary Women of the Sun - 25 Years Later, Weis shared that his natural empathy toward the Aboriginal people of Australia was akin to the pain he felt for his own family who experienced persecution in the Holocaust of World War II. It was this sense of connection, responsibility and justice that propelled him to bring the history of colonisation, and it’s continuation in Australia, to public attention by producing Women of the Sun (Weis et al., 2006). From an Indigenous standpoint there are risks in such cross-cultural
representations of Aboriginality, and, as Muecke (1994, p. 2) points out, can be “whitefella obsessions - romantic love of difference, the exotic, the mobilisation of knowledge, liberationist politics, [or] guilt trips”, particularly when being intersubjectively negotiated in
collaborative, creative pursuits such as television.

Goldman (2000, p. 9) adds that “we are all participants in historical and contemporary colonial clashes, falling into one or more of the categories: survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders [and] no person who is resident in Australia can claim ignorance or neutrality in
this struggle.” With both Women of the Sun productions Weis did not shy away from his intersubjectivity instead proceeding with “a dialogue situation in which both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people participate in a mutual construction of identities (Langton in Muecke 1994, p. 3)” and heeded Langton’s advice that “[Whitefellas] should analyse their comings and goings around Aboriginal communities (Langton in Muecke 1994, p. 3)”.

The Sources of Knowledge

In 1985 Nancy Peck filmed interviews with Hyllus Maris and her mother Mrs Geraldine Briggs for the Victorian Women’s Film Unit production, Return to Cummeragunja. The interviews reflect the deep connection between generations of Aboriginal women and
illustrate the lived experiences contained in the storylines of Women of the Sun. Within two lifetimes we hear first-hand accounts of when fluent Wemba Wemba and Yorta Yorta language was heard, when Aboriginal people answered the prayers of and fed starving
missionaries, when Briggs stood up against the tyranny of mission-station matrons and when together they walked off Cummeragunja Mission Station in a sign of defiance and autonomy (Peck 1985).

The frequency of references by both women to their ancestors and ancestors’ ancestors are presented in a process akin to Martin’s (2003) Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing. It becomes apparent that the narratives of Women of the Sun come from the ground-up, from what Maris (1985) describes as a “spiritual culture… [that] can never be broken down, as it’s part of the land.” This example of Aboriginal identity-creation stands in stark contrast to what Goldman (2000, p. 6) describes as the desire for many Anglo-Australians to “try and forget the past, or easily gloss over [it], so as to get on with the future.” Indeed McAuley’s (2006, p. 289) book of academic essays called Unstable Ground illustrates too that there was a priority for intellectuals to remedy the colonial past and reach a ‘conciliation’ between “Anglo mainstream and the Aboriginal minority… to achieve… [a] kind of social order that all can comfortably live with.”


Timing and Politics

​Although the Australian socio-cultural environment of the early 1980’s was hostile to marginal voices “timing, as well as a political and broadcasting climate… played a part in the production of the original [Women of the Sun] series (Kalina 2006).” The formation of
Australia’s second, non-commercial television broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) early that decade was the result of 30 years of post-war immigration policy and the next multicultural step in answering the high proportion of middle-class, Australian
voters from non-English speaking countries (Smaill, 2002, p. 396). Apart from screening foreign language programs SBS also purchased and commissioned content from independent producers, pushing it to the “forefront of social, cultural and aesthetic transformations (O’Regan 1989, p. 13).” It seems ironic that multiculturalism, in replacing the failed assimilation, should also provide a screen-home for Australia’s First Peoples and awaken White Australia to Aboriginal history with Women of the Sun.

​Bob Weis (2006) recalls SBS’s founding manager Bruce Gyngell, with Maris’ and Borgs’ finished scripts in hand, being asked by a senate committee hearing ‘what are you doing about Aboriginal Australia?’ and replying 'I just got these scripts that I'm going to do’ (Kalina 2006). Couple this uncanny timing with a recent merging of talent between feature-film and television production creatives, and Women of the Sun acquired a vanguard status “becoming an important sign that innovative, cultural and socially important work was being done in TV (O’Regan 1989, p. 15).” Apart from being the first time an Aboriginal language had been heard on mainstream television Langton (Weis et al., 2006) says the series was way ahead of it’s time, before historians, anthropologists and sociologists confirmed the
veracity of Aboriginal accounts of Australian history, and the series sparked a nationwide discussion (see Appendix B).

Against Cultural Hegemony

According to Smaill (2002, p. 394) public broadcasting in Australia shares the principles formed by John Reith for the BBC, to provide equality of access and education, making it a place where viewers can measure themselves against national narratives. Even in
multicultural Australia the “prevalent mode of identification has functioned… to foster a sense of unity and oneness (Smaill 2002, p. 394).” Maddison (2012, pp. 701 - 703) adds that “both settler and immigrant Australians derive pleasure in feeling that as a nation we
share the values of equality and ‘mateship’”, connected via television in the comfort of our own living rooms.

Australian commercial television in the 1980’s reflected the attitude of the times, “greed was good” (Television.au 2017), and produced a host of Anglo-Australian, saturated shows including A Country Practice (1981), Sons and Daughters (1982), Neighbours (1985) and
Home and Away (1988) that reinforced a “narrow citizenship and… left the nation as a whole ill-equipped to deal with contemporary diversity (Maddison 2012, p. 701).” Even though Women of the Sun was first broadcast in this cultural setting it’s impact suggests
the mainstream audience was ready to move from what Hall (in Longhurst et al., 2008) calls a ‘dominant-hegemonic’ reading to a ‘negotiated’ one. As Kalina (2006) points out Women of the Sun’s “accounts of the stolen generation, of the dispossession of Aboriginal
homelands, of challenges to white Australia's laws and customs… put the untold history of Indigenous Australia on the agenda.”​

A Negotiated Representation

As the work of historians, anthropologists, linguists and cultural scientists now attest the veracity of Women of the Sun’s screen content is bonafide but also a negotiated representation. Episode 1, Alinta - The Flame depicts first contact between the ‘Nyari' people and the shipwrecked convicts and early settlers from Great Britain. For producer Bob Weis there was no argument about making the film in Aboriginal language (Weis et al., 2006) and, despite the concerns of the Yolngu community portraying the original inhabitants, the men and women wore traditional dress meaning partial, if not shameful, nudity. Twenty-five years after playing the character of ‘Alinta’, Nakalyan of the Yolngu people shared that “she is still being taught culture by her Elders” and lamented that “Yolngu and Balanda (Yolngu language for white man) laws are on their own” not knowing if they will ever come together (Weis et al., 2006). The making of Episode 1. on the coast of Princetown, Victoria, traditional Gadubanud country, was viewed by the visiting Yolngu tribe as a respectful reenactment of the Gadubanud people’s survival and was portrayed in memory of their ancestors and on behalf of their surviving relatives (Weis et al., 2006). Non-Indigenous farmer Matt Bowker recalls, as a nine year old, the cast and crew of Women of the Sun coming to Princetown and staying at his parents camp Kangaroobie, and the significance of the Episode’s narrative relative to his own family story (Bundle
2014).

Bowker (Bundle 2014) shares that the Aboriginal midden sites on the property where the episode had been filmed have been scientifically dated to thousands of years eclipsing his own family’s 150 year connection to the site, a similar realisation of Goldman’s (2000, p.
167) that he is more deeply connected to the struggle and history of Indigenous Australians than he had previously thought.

The Uses of Language

Actress Justine Saunders shares that she was encouraged to follow her own instincts as a black woman when portraying the character ‘Nerida’ in Episode 3. of Women of the Sun and to let the words of the script tell their own story, as “honesty was so important” (Weis
et al., 2006). As mentioned previously one of the greatest achievements of the series was the respect for and listening too other voices which also highlights the centrality of language in the formation of group culture and individual identity. When convicts ‘McNab’
and ‘Findlay’ are washed up on the lands of the ‘Nyari’ people, in Episode 1., they are given Aboriginal names, translating as ‘Man of the Sea’ and ‘Hair of Fire’, their presence explained in Aboriginal terms as being ‘displaced from their people… lost’. Unable to
speak ‘Nyari' language they are dependent on the goodwill of their hosts for nourishment and safety, and quickly learn that without a shared understanding their lives are imperilled. Language is centre-stage again in Episode 2. with the insistence by church missionary
'Mrs McPhee’, played by Julia Blake, that English is the only language to be spoken on the mission, the rationale being that it is the language of the Lord, the result however being cultural genocide; control the language and you control the people. Later in the year of
1890, the time setting of Episode 3., the Aboriginal people interned on ‘Koomalah Aboriginal Reserve’ turned the colonisers’ language against them petitioning the government for Indigenous rights with a command of English. Today, language is still the
site of contestation over sovereignty on the international stage (Berson 2009, p. 43).

Towards the Culture of Sharing

As actress Eva Johnson (nee. Birrit) who played ‘Alice Wilson’ in Episode 4. recounts, it was the viewing of Women of the Sun that led nurses on the ward of her dying mother to initiate a turbulent, real-life, mother-daughter reunion, a not uncommon story for Aboriginal
peoples of the stolen generations (Weis et al., 2006).

Johnson’s lived experience of that event, as recorded in Women of the Sun - 25 Years Later, is well-equal to the emotional impact of the analogous, fictional drama in which she plays, and ironically she “was afraid of not taking the opportunity to do the film on behalf of
the women who did have their children taken from them (Weis et al., 2006).” The connections that Women of the Sun made between history, people and place was not lost on Weis and extended to the male and non-Aboriginal directors of the series (McNiven
2017) acutely illustrated by a photograph of director Geoffrey Nottage and Johnson in ATOM's (Australian Teachers of Media) study-guide (see appendix A). The photograph illustrates a knowledge-relationship resonant with the character ‘Findlay’ and the ‘Nyari’
people of Episode 1.; Nottage captured with all the intensity of a non-Indigenous, first-time viewer of cultural practice and Johnson poised with Indigenous percipience. Despite the cross-cultural learnings of the past, Indigenous women still struggle to pave the way for the
next generation as Lisa Flanagan describes of playing the first Indigenous female character in Home and Away in 28 years of the show’s history (Rawsthorne & Byrnes 2016), a decade and 473 episodes of which were also directed by Nottage, without female
Indigenous representation (IMDb 2017).

Conclusion

The words of ‘Doug Cutler’ warning his daughter ‘Lo-Arna’ against contacting her Aboriginal birth-mother, in Episode 4., “why… the highest jail rate, terrible social problems, drink, the lot”, could well be the language used tomorrow by Australia's media to describe
Aboriginal culture, some 35 years hence. As Hyllus Maris and her mother Mrs Geraldine Briggs illustrate we inherit stories over generations, stories in the Indigenous sense that need telling and retelling to maintain culture and connection with the past, to guide our
future. The cultural abyss between the world’s oldest peoples, Aboriginal Australians, and the world’s most invasive coloniser, Great Britain, is bound to confound personal identity, contest language and blur cultural boundaries, but as Women of the Sun illustrates,
connection, understanding and shared histories are possible if not crucial for everyone’s wellbeing. As Bob Weis’ personal journey of longing and belonging and Eva Johnson's family reunion both attest, reconnection with the past is rarely pain-free, but more often
than not the resulting clarity of purpose and place (identity) outweighs the mediated, hegemonic culture which numbs our humanity.

In today’s contexts of reconciliation, treaty and sovereignty Women of the Sun continues to question how we relate to each other through language, how we propagate our culture on and off the screen and how we view ourselves, reflected and through each other, to form
our identities, in the endless process of becoming.

ABT17: Being and Belonging: Studies in Culture and Identity, University of South Australia - Lecturer Dr. Rosie Roberts

Appendix 
Women of the Sun - Broadcast Dates (SBS - Channel 0/28)
Episode 1. Alinta - The Flame, first broadcast - 5th July 1982
Episode 2. Maydina - The Shadow, first broadcast - 12th July 1982
Episode 3. Nerida Anderson, first broadcast - 19th July 1982
Episode 4. Lo-Arna, first broadcast - 26th July 1982

Awards
1982 United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize
1983 AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Outstanding Script of the Year
1983 AWGIE Best Original Writing for Television
1983 Grand Prix - Banff Television Festival
1983 Penguin Awards x 5 - Television Society of Australia

References
2005 Hyllus Maris memorial lecture - union hall of the Melbourne (Bundoora)
campus, Latrobe University, Aboriginal and Islander health worker journal, Vol. 29 - 5.

IMDb, 2017, Geoffrey Nottage - director, producer, writer, website, viewed 22nd Feb. 2017, http://
www.imdb.com/name/nm0636616/

Kalina P, 2006, Return to women of the sun, The Age - Green Guide, 3rd August 2006.
Longhurst B, Smith G, Bagnall G, Crawford G and Ogborn M, 2008, Introducing cultural studies,
2nd Ed., Routledge, New York.

Maddison S, 2012, Post colonial guilt and national identity: historical injustice and the Australian
settler state, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Vol. 18 - 6, pp.
695 - 709.

Martin, K & Mirraboopa, B 2003 Ways of knowing, being and doing: A theoretical framework and
methods for indigenous and indigenist re-search, Journal of Australian Studies, 27:76, 203-214,
DOI: 10.1080/14443050309387838

McAuley G, 2006, Unstable ground: performance and the politics of place, Peter Lang S.A.,
Brussels, Belgium.

McCallum J, 2009, Belonging: Australian playwriting in the 20th century, Currency Press,
Strawberry Hills, NSW.

McNiven L, 2017, Women of the sun (1982) - curator’s notes, website, viewed 22nd Feb. 2017,
National Film & Sound Archive, http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/women-of-the-sun/notes/

Muecke S, 1994, Narrative and intervention in Aboriginal filmmaking and policy, Continuum: The
Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 8 - 2.

O’Regan T, 1995, Film and its nearest neighbour: the Australian film and television interface,
webpage, viewed 11th February 2017, Culture & Common Reading Room at http://
wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/film/AFTV.html

Peck N, 1985, Return to Cummeragunja: Hyllus Maris and her mother Mrs Geraldine Briggs speak,
video, viewed 15th February 2017, Victorian Women’s Film Unit, http://search.library.unisa.edu.au/

Rawsthorne S. & Byrnes H, 2016, Home and away heads to Alice Springs to film ‘special event’
with Braxton brothers storyline for Foxtel, webpage, viewed 22nd Feb. 2017, The Daily Telegraph,
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au

Smaill B, 2002, Narrating community: multiculturalism and Australia’s SBS television, Journal of
Communication Inquiry, Issue 26 - 4, pp. 391 - 407, Sage Publications.

Television.au 2017, 1980-1989, website, viewed 21st Feb. 2017, http://televisionau.com/timeline/
1980-1989
​
Weis B, Hyllus M & Borg S, 2006, Women of the sun: twenty five years later, documentary film,
Generation Films and Ronin Films, A.C.T.

From Hugh Saddler @ The Conversation.

On the early evening of Wednesday, February 8, electricity supply to some 90,000 households and businesses in South Australia was cut off for up to an hour. Two days later, all electricity consumers in New South Wales were warned the same could happen to them. It didn’t, but apparently only because supply was cut to the Tomago aluminium smelter instead. In Queensland, it was suggested consumers might also be at risk over the two following days, even though it was a weekend, and again on Monday, February 13. What is going on?
The first point to note is that these were all very hot days. This meant that electricity demand for air conditioning and refrigeration was very high. On February 8, Adelaide recorded its highest February maximum temperature since 2014. On February 10, western Sydney recorded its highest ever February maximum, and then broke this record the very next day. Brisbane posted its highest ever February maximum on February 13.
That said, the peak electricity demand in both SA and NSW was some way below the historical maximum, which in both states occurred during a heatwave on January 31 and February 1, 2011. In Queensland it was below the record reached last month, on January 18.
Regardless of all this, shouldn’t the electricity industry be able to anticipate such extreme days, and have a plan to ensure that consumers’ needs are met at all times?
Much has already been said and written about the reasons for the industry’s failure, or near failure, to do so on these days. But almost all of this has focused on minute-by-minute details of the events themselves, without considering the bigger picture.
The wider issue is that the electricity market’s rules, written two decades ago, are not flexible enough to build a reliable grid for the 21st century.

Vast machine

In an electricity supply system, such as Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), the amount of electricity supplied must precisely match the amount being consumed in every second of every year, and always at the right voltage and frequency. This is a big challenge – literally, considering that the NEM covers an area stretching from Cairns in the north, to Port Lincoln in the west and beyond Hobart in the south.
Continent-sized electricity grids like this are sometimes described as the world’s largest and most complex machines. They require not only constant maintenance but also regular and careful planning to ensure they can meet new demands and incorporate new technologies, while keeping overall costs as low as possible. All of this has to happen without ever interrupting the secure and reliable supply of electricity throughout the grid.
Until the 1990s, this was the responsibility of publicly owned state electricity commissions, answerable to their state governments. But since the industry was comprehensively restructured from the mid-1990s onwards, individual states now have almost no direct responsibility for any aspect of electricity supply.
Electricity is now generated mainly by private-sector companies, while the grid itself is managed by federally appointed regulators. State governments’ role is confined to one of shared oversight and high-level policy development, through the COAG Energy Council.
This market-driven, quasi-federal regime is underpinned by the National Electricity Rules, a highly detailed and prescriptive document that runs to well over 1,000 pages. This is necessary to ensure that the grid runs safely and reliably at all times, and to minimise opportunities for profiteering.
The downside is that these rules are inflexible, hard to amend, and unable to anticipate changes in technology or economic circumstances.
Besides governing the grid’s day-to-day operations, the rules specify processes aimed at ensuring that “the market” makes the most sensible investments in new generation and transmission capacity. These investments need to be optimal in terms of technical characteristics, timing and cost.
To borrow a phrase from the prime minister, the rules are not agile and innovative enough to keep up. When they were drawn up in the mid-1990s, electricity came almost exclusively from coal and gas. Today we have a changing mix of new supply technologies, and a much more uncertain investment environment.
Neither can the rules ensure that the closure of old, unreliable and increasingly expensive coal-fired power stations will occur in a way that is most efficient for the grid as a whole, rather than most expedient for individual owners. (About 3.6 gigawatts of capacity, spread across all four mainland NEM states and equalling more than 14% of current coal power capacity, has been closed since 2011; this will increase to 5.4GW and 22% when Hazelwood closes next month.)
Finally, one of the biggest drivers of change in the NEM over the past decade has been the construction of new wind and solar generation, driven by the Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme. Yet this scheme stands completely outside the NEM rules.
The Australian Energy Markets Commission – effectively the custodian of the rules – has been adamant that climate policy, the reason for the RET, must be treated as an external perturbation, to which the NEM must adjust while making as few changes as possible to its basic architecture. On several occasions over recent years the commission has successfully blocked proposals to broaden the terms of the rules by amending the National Electricity Objective to include an environmental goal of boosting renewable energy and reducing greenhouse emissions.
Events in every state market over the past year have shown that the electricity market’s problems run much deeper than the environmental question. Indeed, they go right to the core of the NEM’s reason for existence, which is to keep the lights on. A fundamental review is surely long overdue.
The most urgent task will be identifying what needs to be done in the short term to ensure that next summer, with Hazelwood closed, peak demands can be met without more load shedding. Possible actions may include establishing firm contracts with major users, such as aluminium smelters, to make large but brief reductions in consumption, in exchange for appropriate compensation. Another option may be paying some gas generators to be available at short notice, if required; this would not be cheap, as it would presumably require contingency gas supply contracts to be in place.
The most important tasks will address the longer term. Ultimately we need a grid that can supply enough electricity throughout the year, including the highest peaks, while ensuring security and stability at all times, and that emissions fall fast enough to help meet Australia’s climate targets.

Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

MEXICO CITY — On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks.
When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.
Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.
It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.

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