Morphological Impacts and Implications of a Trial Release on the Wingecarribee River,New South Wales

A trial, monitored release on the Wingecarribee River over 27 days had a peak discharge below the Wingecarribee Dam of 1090 ML/d, which had a flow duration of 0.95 per cent. Morphological impacts on 29 km of channel below the dam included bank erosion, concentrated neck overflow, bed degradation and channel widening at recent cutoffs, sedimentation in weir pools and overbank flow, particularly at discharges greater than 800 ML/d. Prolonged operational releases at bankfull discharge (400–800 ML/d) will have the greatest morphologic impacts and should be avoided. Pulses which dissipate stream power over a broad, well-vegetated floodplain should be incorporated in the operational release policy, provided such pulses are phased to facilitate channel and vegetation recovery.     

Do We Really Understand Our Rivers? or Rivers in the Pooh - Semper in Excreta!

This address is concerned with the lack of detailed understanding we have of rivers. It is argued that to manage river systems for environ- mental and ecological sustainability, there must be understanding of riverine biophysical processes. These are explored through a consideration of: (1) channel airspace and water; (2) the perimeter conditions of the channel as the boundary between erosional channel and depositional floodplain, both of which occupy the valley-floor trough; (3) ecological components of channels and (4) the human components where human interactions with catchment environments have such impacts on the biophysical systems. Finally, the implications of these four components for understanding the systems for more sustainable management are discussed.     

Nixon,Kissinger and the rapprochement with China, 1969–1972

Few would have predicted in 1969 that the new Republican administration of Richard Nixon would initiate a rapprochement between the United States and communist China during his first term as president. That he succeeded in doing so was helped by the severity of the Sino‐Soviet dispute, which erupted into armed clashes in the spring and summer of 1969. By the end of 1970 China made it clear that it would not only be willing to receive a presidential envoy, but also the president himself. Two missions to Beijing by Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger—one secret in July 1971 and the other public in the following October—paved the way for a presidential visit in February 1972. The talks in July and October 1971 and February 1972 covered a whole range of issues including the war in Indochina, the potential threat from Japan and relations with the Soviet Union. The most dif cult problem, however, proved to be that of Taiwan, where the American‐backed Nationalist government not only laid claim to be the legitimate government of the whole of China, but occupied the Chinese seat in the United Nations. A modus vivendi was eventually reached in February 1972, helped perhaps by the United Nations General Assembly vote in October 1971 which unseated the Taiwan regime in favour of mainland China. The US negotiating position was not made any easier by the intense rivalry between Kissinger and the State Department and the latter's exclusion from much of the negotiation process led to a last‐minute crisis which threatened the success of the entire project. While neither the United States nor China achieved all that they had hoped, Nixon's visit to China had an enormous symbolic impact and contributed to a reconfiguration of the global balance of power.     

Legacy databases and GIS: a discussion of the issues illustrated by a case study of archaeological site data from southeast Alberta,Canada

Many institutions and agencies are currently faced with the issue of geographic information systems‐enabling legacy databases. The problems can be acute for data sets that have been compiled through many years, using different standards and levels of recording. To explore these issues further, we report on a data quality assessment undertaken in 2002 for a subset of the archaeological site database of the province of Alberta, Canada. Our work shows that positional ambiguities in the data set can be highlighted and corrected by relatively straightforward procedures. This case study also provides an indication of the amount of work effort that will be involved in validating or ‘cleaning up’ data sets so model results and analyses undertaken with them are more reliable.     

The United States and the Cyprus crisis of 1974

Based upon two recently published volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series of declassified diplomatic documents for the period of the Nixon and Ford presidencies, this article focuses upon the crisis which erupted in Cyprus in the summer of 1974 at the time of the transition between the two administrations. A Greek-sponsored coup on the island led to a Turkish invasion and the threat of war between two of America's NATO allies and culminated in the collapse of the Greek military junta and the de facto partition of Cyprus. Emphasis is placed upon the role of Henry Kissinger and his advisers in their efforts to defuse the crisis, efforts which were only partially successful. The conspiracy theories which surround the episode are found wanting and the limitations of the Anglo–American 'special relationship' highlighted.