Two steps backwards: Equal opportunity policy under Howard and Hawke

Despite the deliberate attempt by the Labor and Liberal parties to pursue the ‘women's vote’ in the July Federal election, both parties have been retreating from previous commitments to equal employment opportunity (EEO). The Australian Democrats (AD) have been the only party consistently to support EEO objectives and to appear to mirror this commitment in their own practice (three of the seven AD Senators, including the Federal Parliamentary Leader, are now women).     

‘The women's lobby’: Networks,coalition building and the women of middle Australia

The ‘women's lobby’ or the ‘powerful feminist lobby’ has been held responsible for a range of evils including the undermining of the traditional family, public expenditure on community services, social engineering and the imposition of ‘political correctness’. To what extent is there a ‘women's lobby’ working from inside or outside government to influence public decision‐mating? In this paper we explore this question, using data from a social network analysis of the Australian women's movement conducted in 1992–3.

Our findings are that there is a large, very loosely connected network of organisations engaging in advocacy on behalf of women. Density of ties is less than is found in a comparable study of the Canadian women's movement but there are more ties between non‐government groups and government agencies. Issues of organisational philosophy have inhibited the development of a ‘peak body’ for the non‐government women's movement and led to reliance on issue‐specific coalitions. Latterly, awareness of increasing fragmentation has led to a series of attempts to create more effective national networking.     

Effect of heat treatment on siliceous rocks used in prehistoric lithic technology

Stone tool manufacture by many prehistoric and recent societies was characterized by deliberate heating of fine grained siliceous rocks to improve their flaking properties. Extensive mechanical testing of heated and unheated cryptocrystalline and macrocrystalline quartz lithologies has shown that thermal treatment causes a consistent marked reduction in fracture toughness. This mechanical property can be used as an objective measurement of the flaking qualities of stone materials, and a reliable criterion for the recognition of intentionally heated artefacts in the archaeological record. X-ray diffraction studies and scanning electron microscopy have demonstrated that the change in fracture toughness with heating is the result of recrystallization. The poorly ordered, strongly interlocking cryptocrystalline fabric of the unheated samples becomes more equigranular and better crystallized with thermal treatment. As a consequence, fractures propagate more readily in heated samples, accounting for their better flaking properties.     

Cluster analysis of mixed-level data: Pottery provenience as an example

Provenience or “sourcing” studies of archaeological objects most commonly employ quantitative measurements of amounts of chemical constituents in the artifacts and source materials. These are then used in statistical grouping procedures known as cluster analyses. Many additional attributes of artifacts and sources, yielding lower-level qualitative data, are also of potential importance in determinations of artifact origins. These attributes are usually neglected because of the longstanding difficulty in treating “mixed-level” data, that is, combining both qualitative observations and quantitative information in a single powerful statistical procedure. A series of cluster analyses were run on two data sets consisting of archaeological pottery, using mixed-level characterization data in the CLUSTAN program with Gower's coefficient of similarity. The clustering solutions are interpretable in terms of provenience and production strategies.