The Sydney Cove shipwreck project

Lost in 1797 during a voyage from India to Australia, the wreck of the merchant ship Sydney Cove was rediscovered in 1977. A project to excavate and present material from the site was carried out by the designated management agency during the 1990s. The work has provided a unique insight into the merchant ships and cargoes that were vital to the early development of the Australian colonies. This paper presents a summary of the project upon its completion in 2001.     

On Equality

Locke builds a world that has benefits and costs. While economics has illustrated the benefits, this work illustrates the costs, by contrasting Two Treatises of Civil Government to the work of Aristotle. Generally, the cost one must bear from entering the world that Locke built is a compression of human experience, where qualitative equality of all things is asserted to exist. More importantly, a trivialization of all the outcomes, which emanate from all human decisions, must accompany the equality that Locke asserts. Even though Locke provides the elementary operating system for modern economics, through his proposition of the principle of qualitative equality, this operating system effectively divorces man, not only from nature but also from the very thing with which man has always used to interpret the natural world; works of great literature. While great literature has little patience for the trivial outcomes of human existence, except to highlight the importance of non-trivial outcomes, this work suggests that economics, under the influence of Locke, is permanently incapacitated from ever considering non-trivial outcomes.     

Social dominance orientation,fear of terrorism and support for counter-terrorism policies

Following September 11 and the subsequent heightened fear of terrorism from more recent events, this study examines the role of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) in explaining individuals’ support for counter-terrorism policies that infringe individual liberties in pursuit of defending community security. Three hypotheses are proposed: (1) that SDO positively predicts support for ‘defensive’ counter-terrorism policies such as the maintenance of strong border protection; (2) that SDO positively predicts fear of terrorism and fear of Islamic extremism; (3) that the relationship between SDO and support for defensive policies is mediated by fear. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1200 Australian adults, with support found for each hypothesis. Counter-terrorism policies commonly encounter trade-offs between community-wide security and individual-level liberties; pursuit of optimal security tends to require infringement of those liberties. This research demonstrates that high SDO citizens will support such policies, particularly as fear increases.     

Learning to love the republic: Jacobin propaganda and the peasantry of the Haute‐Garonne

The political societies, or Jacobin clubs, formed during the first years of the French Revolution undertook as one of their many projects the political and civic education of the peasantry. The political society of Toulouse, the large republican administrative centre of the south‐western department of the Haute‐Garonne, was particularly active in this mission. By 1790, society members had embarked upon a campaign of written propaganda, using both educational tracts and revolutionary almanacs. However, this initial method was of only limited effectiveness, due to the prejudices of urban society members with regard to the peasants, the widespread illiteracy and non‐comprehension of French in the countryside, and the difficulty of distributing written material to isolated villages at the end of the eighteenth century. The Jacobins of Toulouse attempted to conquer these obstacles through the composition of tracts in the local patois, the use of peasant‐oriented newspapers delivered to local, literate intermediaries, and finally, the sending of their own members into the countryside as political missionaries, armed with leaflets and a copy of the constitution. By the time political clubs were made illegal in 1795, the influence of Jacobin sociability had greatly facilitated a precocious political acculturation of rural communities, prefiguring their more complete politicisation during the course of the nineteenth century.     

Introduction: towards trans geographies

Gender geographies have focused on normatively gendered men and women, neglecting the ways in which gender binaries can be contested and troubled. Trans people question hegemonic conventions that link sexed bodies, gender roles and lives. This collection spans a range of theoretical fields in this context, including trans theories, queer engagement, feminist geographies, gender geographies and sexualities geographies. It offers empirical investigations of trans lives, while addressing the often theoretical use of ‘trans’ to render gender fluid, incoherent and unintelligible. As a whole this themed section questions geography's presumption of man/woman and male/female.