Bushfires,Human Health Economics,and Pyrogeography

Bushfires (landscape fires) are a key Earth system process that affects humans and our societies and economies. In a recent article, we explored the coupling of humans to landscape fire through the lens of human health impacts of bushfire smoke. We noted that such an approach demands recognition of the indirect impacts and costs of bushfires that cannot be captured by simplistic proxies such as deaths directly attributable to a fire front. Evaluation of direct and indirect economic costs of bushfire disasters, and bushfire fire management remains a poorly developed research frontier that demands collaboration of expertise from a broad cross‐section of fields that often have limited experience of collaborating together. The need for such synthetic thinking about fire's place on Earth has spawned the discipline of pyrogeography.     

Flexing Femininity: Female body-builders refiguring 'the body'

This paper considers the built bodies of female body-builders and their training environments. Empirical findings suggest that place of training provides a material and discursive environment that reworks bodies in the feminine/masculine binary. However, the female body-builder works her body within this binary as well as beyond the acceptable feminine/masculine dualism. Three possible, non-exclusive, readings of female body-builders are offered. I argue that the specific materiality of female muscled (built) bodies provides the ground for contestation of the feminine/masculine binary as well as other binaries such as nature/culture, body/mind and sex/gender, thereby opening up new spaces to reconceptualise sexed bodies in geography. The ontological and socio-political status of female body-builders demands a refiguring of sexual difference.     

Rural and Urban Crime Rates Amongst Aboriginal Youth: Patterns of Different Locational Opportunity

In the 1960s the crime rates of Aboriginal juveniles in Adelaide were substantially lower than those of their rural counterparts. By the 1980s, this pattern has been reversed. Moreover, appearances by city-dwelling Aborigines are now more likely to take place by way of arrest rather than summons, are more likely to come before a Children's Court rather than an Aid Panel, and are more likely to involve youths with a previous record than is the case for country youths. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal youths in the city and country commit broadly similar offences. These factors may be contributing to the virtual cessation of Aboriginal migration into Adelaide in recent years.