Day-to-day variations in nearshore bar patterns on a small sandy beach through a lunar tidal cycle

Nearshore water circulation and bar patterns at Coledale, New South Wales, were surveyed daily over thirty-six consecutive days, from 3 November to 8 December 1978, to identify sequences of changes that might occur in response to spring-to-spring tide cycles of fourteen days, changing barometric and wind conditions associated with the passage of anticyclonic weather systems across the coast, and day to day variation in the nearshore wave regime. During the survey the bar patterns tended to vary from transverse bars, through a composite arrangement incorporating longshore and transverse bars, to a longshore bar pattern as the tide changed from its spring to neap tide phase. However, this sequence was too brief to unequivocally establish variations in nearshore bar pattern that might be attributed to the fourteen day, spring-to-spring tide cycle. Nevertheless, morphologic changes occurring in response to wave regime fluctuation at Coledale were broadly in accord with studies from elsewhere by Dolan et al. (1979, 1982), and Clarke and Eliot (1982, 1983) in that bars and rips were systematically distributed along the beach. At Coledale, bars tended to relocate approximately 0.4 and 0.75 of the distance along the beach from its southern end. The preferred bar spacing closely matches hypothetical standing waves trapped between the headlands of the Coledale embayment. Temporally, the nearshore morphology is highly responsive to wave regime changes such that, as primary breaker heights decrease and remain below H_max=1.0m, the bar pattern changes from longshore through mixed to transverse bar patterns within three to five days. On one occasion the bar pattern switched from a longshore to a transverse bar pattern within twenty-four hours.     

Early postwar Sydney: a comparison of its portrayal in fiction and in official documents

Literature is a valid source for geographers. In particular, it can offer the humanistic geographer a source of information about the experience of living in certain environments and about the way people thought about their lives. When writers are dealing with their firsthand experience, literature can also be a source of factual data Two novels by Ruth Park and one by Dorothy Hewett, set in early postwar inner Sydney, are analysed on the basis of Ley's (1983) humanistic parameters of security and stress, stimulus and ennui, and stigma and status. The fictional picture is then compared with an official planning document published in 1948. It is concluded that not only literature, but also non-fiction should be approached sceptically.     

NATO expansion: ‘a policy error of historic importance’

European security depends on the effective collaboration of the five major powers; it will be undermined by the extension of NATO, a policy driven by US domestic politics. The main threats to security are: the breakdown of political and economic stability; unintended nuclear proliferation and/or failure of the START process; Russia's evolving political and territorial aspirations. All three will remain marginal as long as Russia is constructively engaged with the West. NATO expansion threatens that engagement. It is seen by all strands of Russian opinion as violating the bargain struck in 1990 and will likely lead to the withdrawal of cooperation. Invitations to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic cannot be rescinded, but the consequences can be mitigated by refraining from integrating them into NATO's military structure, by ceasing to insist that NATO membership is open to all, and by perpetuating the de facto nuclear‐weapons‐free zone that presently exists in Central and Eastern Europe. Britain's stance could be pivotal.