Composing Connections between Continents: Tracing the History of Australia’s Engagement with Antarctica through Music

This article explores the history of Australia’s engagement with Antarctica through music, from the earliest songs and an opera created by the first Australian explorers to Antarctica, to the popular Antarctic-related classical music of Australian composer Nigel Westlake and the soundscape-based compositions of Australia-based sound artists Philip Samartzis and Lawrence English. Drawing on the field of musicology, but also the scholarly turn to the senses as part of the broadening reach of cultural history, the article argues that Australia’s musical engagement with Antarctica constitutes a significant, though understudied, aspect of our aural heritage. Further, deeper and critical appreciation of this music as cultural and aural heritage enhances our ability to reflect on the full extent of Australia’s relationship with, and contribution to knowledge about, its ‘Great Frozen Neighbour’ and its identity as a ‘gateway’ to the Antarctic region.     

Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.     

Claiming Their Own Space: Australian Women Missionaries in Korea, 1891–1900

The first group of Australian women missionaries arrived in Korea in 1891, representing the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria. Their pioneering work was soon hindered by tensions that arose between themselves and a male cleric authority in the field. The article investigates this dispute, which lasted for several years and eventually entangled not only the individual Australian missionaries but also their home organisations as well as North American missionaries. It argues that Australian women missionaries’ involvement in this public dispute is a rare but significant example of a paradox in the foreign missionary enterprise, which imposed patriarchal order and at the same time established conditions that helped women enter the public space and even challenge the male-centred gender order. The article goes on to identify some distinctive characteristics of the Australian women’s missionary work.     

Citizen-led democratic reform: innovations in Indi

Contemporary political systems are experiencing a democratic disconnect between formal institutions of representative government, and the more informal spaces of political participation. Rather than offer an institutional remedy, this article turns to practice and considers how citizens themselves are seeking to transform dysfunctional democratic practices. The article provides an in-depth analysis of democratic events that have unfolded between 2012 and 2017 in the Australian federal electorate of Indi. The analysis explores the intertwined participatory efforts of the citizens’ group, Voices4Indi, and the local Independent federal member, MP Cathy McGowan. The Indi experience demonstrates that while citizens may be frustrated with ‘politics as usual’, they are not rejecting the system but rather instigating creative democratic reforms.     

Radiocarbon Dating and the Historical Archaeology of Korea: An Alternative Interpretation of Hongryeonbong Fortress II in the Three Kingdoms Period,Central Korea

Relying heavily upon historical records to build archaeological chronologies, many Korean historical archaeologists question the utility of radiocarbon dating. To challenge this tendency, we test a model based on historical records by analyzing radiocarbon dates. We dated two bulk samples from Hongryeonbong Fortress II, Seoul, South Korea, which is known historically to have been occupied between a.d. 500 and 551. By dividing bulk samples into smaller aliquots, we dated 40 subsamples and statistically estimated consensus dates. The consensus dates do not support expectations of the historical model, as they do not lie within the temporal range provided by historical records. We propose an alternative model that explains both the radiocarbon dates and the historical records. It is suggested that radiocarbon dating can be successfully applied to the reconstruction of historical periods and is a way of mitigating possible biases of models based solely on historical records.