The effect of a top predator on kangaroo abundance in arid Australia and its implications for archaeological faunal assemblages

The dingo has received considerable attention in the Australian archaeological literature as an agent of bone fragmentation and accumulation. Dingoes have also been studied with respect to their commensal relationship with Aboriginal people. Study has not been directed, however, to the meta-role of dingoes as prey regulators that suppress kangaroo abundance, and the subsequent impact on human subsistence that direct competition between dingoes and humans over the same animal resources could have produced. This study presents data gathered in two adjacent cultural landscapes defined by human land use, one with dingoes and one without dingoes – to illustrate the archaeological effect that dingoes may have had on human economic systems by suppressing kangaroo abundance. Live kangaroos and kangaroo skeletal remains were on average 14-fold and 32-fold more abundant in the absence of dingoes, and contemporary commercial kangaroo harvesting and sheep grazing were restricted to areas where dingoes were absent. Given the marked effects that dingoes have on contemporary kangaroo abundance and the human economy, we argue that dingoes likely shaped the human economy in the past through human–dingo competition for the same limited resources. Evidence for competition between humans and dingoes could be investigated in the archaeological record by comparing the relative frequency of prey of different body sizes, as well as the degree of fragmentation of kangaroo skeletal elements, before and after the arrival of dingoes.     

Suit of power: fashion,politics, and hegemonic masculinity in Australia

In 2010 the Australian Labor Party selected Julia Gillard as leader, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Between 2010 and 2015 there was a renewed focus on issues of gender inequality in the way that women politicians have been treated in Parliament and in the media. Specifically, women in positions of political and institutional power such as Julia Gillard, Julie Bishop, and Quentin Bryce, were critiqued on their clothing choices in the Australian media. In this article, I argue that the Australian media’s attention to the fashion choices of women in politics is problematically gendered, because it subordinates aesthetic features that do not conform to hegemonic masculinity. I argue that in response to the dominant masculine aesthetic norm in politics, women politicians are using their sartorial choices to challenge this marginalisation of femininity in the political sphere.     

Naming practices among the Irish secular nobility in the high middle ages

The Anglo-Norman ‘invasion’ had a profound impact on the names used by Irish families. New names such as Seán and Uilliam, introduced in the thirteenth, became widespread by the fourteenth century. In a number of cases a link can be established between the first occurrence of an Anglo-Norman name in an Irish family and an Anglo-Norman magnate with the same first name in the same region. This may have been the case for women also. Women's names were possibly more open to change, but in this field in particular more research needs to be done. The societies of both the Irish and the Anglo-Normans were patriarchal and as a consequence the naming pattern of the paternal family was usually followed. There are many similarities between the practices in Ireland and those in the rest of Western Europe, but it seems that Ireland differed in that here the eldest son rarely received the name of his paternal grandfather. Within the upper classes, the high nobility seems to have had a different attitude towards imitating Anglo-Norman names then did the lower nobility.     

Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2019–2020 has the potential to transform the tourism industry as well as the context in which it operates. This global crisis in which travel, tourism, hospitality and events have been shut down in many parts of the world, provides an opportunity to uncover the possibilities in this historic transformative moment. A critical tourism analysis of these events briefly uncovers the ways in which tourism has supported neoliberal injustices and exploitation. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis may offer a rare and invaluable opportunity to rethink and reset tourism toward a better pathway for the future. ‘Responsible’ approaches to tourism alone, however, will not offer sufficient capacity to enable such a reset. Instead, such a vision requires a community-centred tourism framework that redefines and reorients tourism based on the rights and interests of local communities and local peoples. Theoretically, such an approach includes a way tourism could be ‘socialised’ by being recentred on the public good. This is essential for tourism to be made accountable to social and ecological limits of the planet.