Fashioning the Italian nation: Risorgimento and its costumeall'italiana

This article retraces the debate that emerged during the nineteenth century about the need to create a modern Italian fashion that could restrain the popular use of foreign clothing, in particular that imported from France and Austria. While we usually refer to the 1950s when we think of Made-in-Italy fashion, it was during the Risorgimento that a public discussion began to take shape on the possibility of creating a national self, vested in Italy's specific character and history. Made of black velvet and accompanied by a hat with a feather, the nineteenth-century costume all'italiana was supposed to incarnate the essence of the modern Italian, although it never turned into a commercial reality. What it did, however, was successfully to communicate a message of national unity based on the notion of national sacrifice and expressed through a visual image of blackness – a message that resonated widely in Italy's nationalist discourse throughout and beyond the nineteenth century.     

Paracordyline aureonemoralis (Lomandraceae): an Eocene monocotyledon from South Australia

A monocotyledonous leaf macrofossil taxon from Golden Grove in Adelaide, South Australia is recognised as being close to several extant Australasian species of Cordyline, especially those in the C. stricta (Sims) Endl. / C. fruticosa (L.) A. Chev. complex. The fossil is assigned to the form genus Paracordyline, known previously from the Oligocene Kerguélen Islands. However, as the Golden Grove taxon differs markedly from the Kerguélen species, it is considered to be a new species, P. aureonemoralis Conran & Christophel.     

Prospects for the Rural‐Urban Fringe in Australia: Observations from a Brief History of the Landscapes around Sydney and Adelaide

Despite being a major site of recent population growth and, arguably, a key arena for sustainability concerns, the rural‐urban fringe has received relatively little attention in the literature concerning Australian cities and urban policy. To address this shortcoming the authors review post‐World War II efforts to plan the rural‐urban fringes of Sydney and Adelaide and find a number of issues for contemporary policy‐makers. First, the fringe is becoming increasingly complex due to multi‐faceted demographic change, a broadening economic base and demands for better environmental management, all within the context of an evolving understanding of sustainability. Second, water resource management, partly under the auspices of integrated natural resource management, is assuming a much higher priority than in early fringe planning endeavours, which emphasised urban containment, agricultural land protection and landscape conservation. Third, and partly as a consequence of this shift of priorities, there is also evidence of changes to the nature and focus of policy tools used in the fringe, with land management concerns now cutting across traditional land use planning. Finally, and fundamentally, these observations raise questions about how future governance of the fringe should be organised. Together these four themes pose an enthralling series of challenges for policy‐makers for which much more research and discussion are needed.     

Constructing the Port: External Perceptions and Interventions in the Making of Place in Port Adelaide,South Australia

Port Adelaide, South Australia has been stigmatised as ‘Port Misery’ for over one hundred and fifty years. The origins of this stigmatised discourse can be traced prior to actual colonisation, having their genesis in wide political debates. This reflects the complex and contested nature of landscape, revealing that ‘Port Misery’ constitutes a powerful meta‐narrative that has been projected onto Port Adelaide by powerful and often external actors. This stigmatising discourse may lie dormant for prolonged periods of time, only to be remobilised to serve specific political, social and economic objectives. Recently, the ‘Port Misery’ discourse has been remobilised to justify the redevelopment of Port Adelaide from an industrial to a post‐industrial landscape.     

The Spatial Organisation of Women's Soccer in Adelaide: Another Tale of Spatial Inequality?

Although sport is considered an important component of Australian society and a precious vehicle of social interaction, sports geography remains in many ways a neglected field of investigation. Nevertheless, geographical studies of sports can add valuable insights to more acknowledged geographical discourses. They can also contribute to regional sporting success. This paper analyses the current spatial organisation of women's soccer in Adelaide and outlines the unequal spatial expression of its recent professionally‐oriented approach, the achievement phase. A significant proportion of Adelaide's female population experiences limited opportunity to participate fully in the sport. The sport therefore fails to maximise its human resources and its spatial organisation constitutes a limit to the competitiveness of South Australian women's soccer as a system. The paper uses the concept of social capital to explore the unequal engagement of four sub‐regions in women's soccer. Many of the areas experiencing relative exclusion from women's soccer are the same ones that suffer the most from disengagement from the global economy. In those areas, socio‐economic disadvantage is matched by limited opportunities for self‐fulfilment through sport, and the effectiveness of social networks is weaker. This work aims to provide information for South Australian women's soccer institutions to foster enhanced equity in terms of access to the sport in metropolitan Adelaide. It also provides a base from which to investigate the reasons behind sub‐regional differences in the ability to produce quality players, knowledge that, if applied to these less productive areas, may contribute to the general enhancement of overall sporting outcomes.