No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Electric power systems are a recent feature of community infrastructure, little more than a century having elapsed since the first public electricity supply was offered. The speed with which they have spread across the world, and the extent to which electricity has displaced other energy sources in commercial, industrial and domestic applications, has been quite remarkable. The widespread availability of a reliable supply of electricity has become one of the dominant factors in the lifestyle of the citizens of developed countries, and one of the differences between developed and developing countries. Yet not many histories of this remarkable industry have been written, and most of those have confined their attention to political and administrative matters, although technical issues have virtually dictated the pace of development of the industry. In the 1920s, when power systems began to spread beyond city centres, lightning became a major adverse factor in their capital costs, operating costs and reliability, and inadequate reliability reduced the rate of acceptance of electricity supply by the public, especially in rural areas. Although lightning has long inspired fear and wonder, its fundamental nature - the fact that it is an electrical discharge - was not known until less than three centuries ago, and the first measurements of lightning currents and voltages were not made until the middle 1920s, when instruments for measuring the electrical properties of lightning first became available. Intensive research programmes were undertaken in America, Britain, and some European countries from about 1925 onwards, but no research on the effects of lightning on power systems was undertaken in Australia until after 1950. This delay of almost three decades forced Australian power system engineers to base some very important aspects of power system design entirely upon data from other countries, which was of doubtful applicability in Australian conditions. During this period, the uncertainty over basic design data resulted in some power systems being over-insulated, with consequent waste of capital expenditure, while others were under-insulated, and had to be modified later to achieve adequate reliability. It is believed that this long delay in commencing lightning research in Australia was caused by a number of factors, including community attitudes to higher education and research (other than primary industry research), and the belief of many managers in the electricity supply industry that only the major manufacturers of electrical plant, located mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could successfully conduct power system research. In 1948 the Senate of the University of Queensland decided to replace the Chair of Engineering with four Chairs in separate branches of engineering. The founding Professor of Electrical Engineering, S.A. Prentice, was appointed in 1950 and soon decided to adopt lightning and its effects on power systems as the principal research thrust of the new Department. By the late 1950s, the University of Queensland had become the recognised centre of Australian research in lightning and high voltage insulation. With financial support from the electricity industry, the University completed a new high voltage laboratory in 1960, and soon began to be recognised overseas as a significant contributor to the world-wide search for knowledge in those areas. During the next fifteen years, the cooperative research programme of the University and the electricity industry developed fully, and valuable research was pursued in a number of areas, including the impulse strength and arc-quenching properties of Australian hardwoods used in poles and crossarms, the prediction of lightning outage rates of transmission lines, the causes of high lightning-failure rates in distribution systems, the performance of insulation under pollution conditions, and the validity of high voltage test procedures. The work frequently involved people from the electricity supply industry as well as people from the university, and attracted attention in overseas countries as well as in Australia. In 1974 Prentice reached retiring age, but the principal members of the staff he had recruited continued to produce research of high quality, and of considerable practical benefit to the electricity industry. By 1995, Prentice's principal staff members had reached or were approaching retirement, and the nature of lightning research had changed somewhat, with the principal interest turning to the details of the lightning stroke itself, and to protection of buildings and electronic equipment rather than power systems.

The principle and policy of self-determination holds that Aboriginal people should have the right to pursue a lifestyle of their choosing and to have control over their interactions with the wider society. Self-determination policy has been in place at a federal level since the 1970’s, yet after thirty years of implementation, there is considerable disarray and disagreement over its merits. This study investigated the transactions of decision-makers as they practised two of the main policy instruments of self-determination: participatory planning and self-governance. The research settings were Mapoon and Kowanyama, two discrete Indigenous settlements on the West Coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the state of Queensland, northern Australia. Three typologies for settlements, planning, and organisations were established, which gave the context for the study, as well as a basis from which to generalise findings. From the types of planning in practice, a participatory plan at Mapoon was singled out for further study since it specifically recreated the language of self-determination. The Mapoon Plan was found to be successful technically, but it fell short of its stated social development goals. Planning proved to be a highly politicised and idealised activity, brokered by external consultants. The complex interplay among knowledge, ideology and politics, as observed, could not be described in terms of two separate domains, but rather in terms of intercultural production across an interethnic field. The anthropological literature tended to treat Aboriginal polities as cultural isolates, situated within administrative vacuums. To progress the study, it became necessary to apply a functional and administrative rationality to what needed to be done in practice. Twenty case studies of decision-making forums were analysed in the main research setting of Kowanyama. Each involved the contemporary practice of self-determination, as local decision-makers engaged with the wider society. In the majority of cases, all six proposed factors were found to be necessary, but not sufficient, for success: (1) participation, (2) technical expertise, (3) negotiation, (4) institutional capacity, (5) focal driver, and (6) jurisdictional devolution. A typology of actors was established to define the different decision-makers involved. Of the 600 adults in Kowanyama, only 30 were found to be actively involved in decision-making. This was unexpectedly low given the quantity of government activity purporting to further Kowanyama’s self-determination. Six determinants were found to influence the level of participation: efficacy in practice, jurisdictional devolution, representativeness, function, informality, language and motivation. In particular, form followed function, whereby the function of a decision-making forum decided the level of participation that was appropriate. Contrary to accounts in the anthropological literature, the study found a fledgling system of representation in Kowanyama, complete with informal ‘extra-constitutional’ checks and balances. Factions were a powerful aspect of Kowanyama society, but they did not monopolise politics. The local polity was better conceptualised in terms of its political pluralism, encompassing a complex array of balancing and competing interests. Significantly, constituents were beginning to exert local political influence over their leaders. The analysis found that notions of ‘community control,’ as promulgated in the community development literature, were not adequate to explain the intercultural production underway. The full spectrum of participation was relevant to the actors of governance, from political activism to ambivalent apathy. Community control was found in the absence of government interventions, imbedded within informal institutions and cultural norms. Yet, introduced political structures, including Councils, were no less a part of the local political arena. The notion of governance better encapsulated the array of decision-making activities and actors occurring across a broad range of institutional positions. The study documented multiple dilemmas and indeterminacies as actors practised self-determination in the interethnic field, especially the interplay between local and external ideologies and knowledge. All of the examples of political innovation in the contemporary history of governance in Kowanyama involved productive social contexts developing locally between leaders and trusted outsiders. The complexity of problems and their solutions were only revealed through practice, one step at a time. Successful initiatives in Kowanyama were to a degree inadvertent; it was not until the end that actors understood what they had done right or wrong. Significantly, political innovation occurred in practice, often without any active intervention by government. Ironically, one of the greatest obstacles limiting local capacity was the size of the task of administering the programs of self-determination. An accepted role for leaders and employees was radical action to manipulate the system and to create the institutional space to permit the subjects of self-determination to participate. The analysis suggested that the importance assigned to government policy, legislation, and structure has fallen out of balance with their actual practice. Rather than fixating on policy solutions to self-determination, policy-makers should be focusing more on creating an enabling framework for practice. The six success factors proven in the study give the basis for such a framework.

Electric power systems are a recent feature of community infrastructure, little more than a century having elapsed since the first public electricity supply was offered. The speed with which they have spread across the world, and the extent to which electricity has displaced other energy sources in commercial, industrial and domestic applications, has been quite remarkable. The widespread availability of a reliable supply of electricity has become one of the dominant factors in the lifestyle of the citizens of developed countries, and one of the differences between developed and developing countries. Yet not many histories of this remarkable industry have been written, and most of those have confined their attention to political and administrative matters, although technical issues have virtually dictated the pace of development of the industry. In the 1920s, when power systems began to spread beyond city centres, lightning became a major adverse factor in their capital costs, operating costs and reliability, and inadequate reliability reduced the rate of acceptance of electricity supply by the public, especially in rural areas. Although lightning has long inspired fear and wonder, its fundamental nature - the fact that it is an electrical discharge - was not known until less than three centuries ago, and the first measurements of lightning currents and voltages were not made until the middle 1920s, when instruments for measuring the electrical properties of lightning first became available. Intensive research programmes were undertaken in America, Britain, and some European countries from about 1925 onwards, but no research on the effects of lightning on power systems was undertaken in Australia until after 1950. This delay of almost three decades forced Australian power system engineers to base some very important aspects of power system design entirely upon data from other countries, which was of doubtful applicability in Australian conditions. During this period, the uncertainty over basic design data resulted in some power systems being over-insulated, with consequent waste of capital expenditure, while others were under-insulated, and had to be modified later to achieve adequate reliability. It is believed that this long delay in commencing lightning research in Australia was caused by a number of factors, including community attitudes to higher education and research (other than primary industry research), and the belief of many managers in the electricity supply industry that only the major manufacturers of electrical plant, located mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could successfully conduct power system research. In 1948 the Senate of the University of Queensland decided to replace the Chair of Engineering with four Chairs in separate branches of engineering. The founding Professor of Electrical Engineering, S.A. Prentice, was appointed in 1950 and soon decided to adopt lightning and its effects on power systems as the principal research thrust of the new Department. By the late 1950s, the University of Queensland had become the recognised centre of Australian research in lightning and high voltage insulation. With financial support from the electricity industry, the University completed a new high voltage laboratory in 1960, and soon began to be recognised overseas as a significant contributor to the world-wide search for knowledge in those areas. During the next fifteen years, the cooperative research programme of the University and the electricity industry developed fully, and valuable research was pursued in a number of areas, including the impulse strength and arc-quenching properties of Australian hardwoods used in poles and crossarms, the prediction of lightning outage rates of transmission lines, the causes of high lightning-failure rates in distribution systems, the performance of insulation under pollution conditions, and the validity of high voltage test procedures. The work frequently involved people from the electricity supply industry as well as people from the university, and attracted attention in overseas countries as well as in Australia. In 1974 Prentice reached retiring age, but the principal members of the staff he had recruited continued to produce research of high quality, and of considerable practical benefit to the electricity industry. By 1995, Prentice's principal staff members had reached or were approaching retirement, and the nature of lightning research had changed somewhat, with the principal interest turning to the details of the lightning stroke itself, and to protection of buildings and electronic equipment rather than power systems.

The principle and policy of self-determination holds that Aboriginal people should have the right to pursue a lifestyle of their choosing and to have control over their interactions with the wider society. Self-determination policy has been in place at a federal level since the 1970’s, yet after thirty years of implementation, there is considerable disarray and disagreement over its merits. This study investigated the transactions of decision-makers as they practised two of the main policy instruments of self-determination: participatory planning and self-governance. The research settings were Mapoon and Kowanyama, two discrete Indigenous settlements on the West Coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the state of Queensland, northern Australia. Three typologies for settlements, planning, and organisations were established, which gave the context for the study, as well as a basis from which to generalise findings. From the types of planning in practice, a participatory plan at Mapoon was singled out for further study since it specifically recreated the language of self-determination. The Mapoon Plan was found to be successful technically, but it fell short of its stated social development goals. Planning proved to be a highly politicised and idealised activity, brokered by external consultants. The complex interplay among knowledge, ideology and politics, as observed, could not be described in terms of two separate domains, but rather in terms of intercultural production across an interethnic field. The anthropological literature tended to treat Aboriginal polities as cultural isolates, situated within administrative vacuums. To progress the study, it became necessary to apply a functional and administrative rationality to what needed to be done in practice. Twenty case studies of decision-making forums were analysed in the main research setting of Kowanyama. Each involved the contemporary practice of self-determination, as local decision-makers engaged with the wider society. In the majority of cases, all six proposed factors were found to be necessary, but not sufficient, for success: (1) participation, (2) technical expertise, (3) negotiation, (4) institutional capacity, (5) focal driver, and (6) jurisdictional devolution. A typology of actors was established to define the different decision-makers involved. Of the 600 adults in Kowanyama, only 30 were found to be actively involved in decision-making. This was unexpectedly low given the quantity of government activity purporting to further Kowanyama’s self-determination. Six determinants were found to influence the level of participation: efficacy in practice, jurisdictional devolution, representativeness, function, informality, language and motivation. In particular, form followed function, whereby the function of a decision-making forum decided the level of participation that was appropriate. Contrary to accounts in the anthropological literature, the study found a fledgling system of representation in Kowanyama, complete with informal ‘extra-constitutional’ checks and balances. Factions were a powerful aspect of Kowanyama society, but they did not monopolise politics. The local polity was better conceptualised in terms of its political pluralism, encompassing a complex array of balancing and competing interests. Significantly, constituents were beginning to exert local political influence over their leaders. The analysis found that notions of ‘community control,’ as promulgated in the community development literature, were not adequate to explain the intercultural production underway. The full spectrum of participation was relevant to the actors of governance, from political activism to ambivalent apathy. Community control was found in the absence of government interventions, imbedded within informal institutions and cultural norms. Yet, introduced political structures, including Councils, were no less a part of the local political arena. The notion of governance better encapsulated the array of decision-making activities and actors occurring across a broad range of institutional positions. The study documented multiple dilemmas and indeterminacies as actors practised self-determination in the interethnic field, especially the interplay between local and external ideologies and knowledge. All of the examples of political innovation in the contemporary history of governance in Kowanyama involved productive social contexts developing locally between leaders and trusted outsiders. The complexity of problems and their solutions were only revealed through practice, one step at a time. Successful initiatives in Kowanyama were to a degree inadvertent; it was not until the end that actors understood what they had done right or wrong. Significantly, political innovation occurred in practice, often without any active intervention by government. Ironically, one of the greatest obstacles limiting local capacity was the size of the task of administering the programs of self-determination. An accepted role for leaders and employees was radical action to manipulate the system and to create the institutional space to permit the subjects of self-determination to participate. The analysis suggested that the importance assigned to government policy, legislation, and structure has fallen out of balance with their actual practice. Rather than fixating on policy solutions to self-determination, policy-makers should be focusing more on creating an enabling framework for practice. The six success factors proven in the study give the basis for such a framework.

The principle and policy of self-determination holds that Aboriginal people should have the right to pursue a lifestyle of their choosing and to have control over their interactions with the wider society. Self-determination policy has been in place at a federal level since the 1970’s, yet after thirty years of implementation, there is considerable disarray and disagreement over its merits. This study investigated the transactions of decision-makers as they practised two of the main policy instruments of self-determination: participatory planning and self-governance. The research settings were Mapoon and Kowanyama, two discrete Indigenous settlements on the West Coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the state of Queensland, northern Australia. Three typologies for settlements, planning, and organisations were established, which gave the context for the study, as well as a basis from which to generalise findings. From the types of planning in practice, a participatory plan at Mapoon was singled out for further study since it specifically recreated the language of self-determination. The Mapoon Plan was found to be successful technically, but it fell short of its stated social development goals. Planning proved to be a highly politicised and idealised activity, brokered by external consultants. The complex interplay among knowledge, ideology and politics, as observed, could not be described in terms of two separate domains, but rather in terms of intercultural production across an interethnic field. The anthropological literature tended to treat Aboriginal polities as cultural isolates, situated within administrative vacuums. To progress the study, it became necessary to apply a functional and administrative rationality to what needed to be done in practice. Twenty case studies of decision-making forums were analysed in the main research setting of Kowanyama. Each involved the contemporary practice of self-determination, as local decision-makers engaged with the wider society. In the majority of cases, all six proposed factors were found to be necessary, but not sufficient, for success: (1) participation, (2) technical expertise, (3) negotiation, (4) institutional capacity, (5) focal driver, and (6) jurisdictional devolution. A typology of actors was established to define the different decision-makers involved. Of the 600 adults in Kowanyama, only 30 were found to be actively involved in decision-making. This was unexpectedly low given the quantity of government activity purporting to further Kowanyama’s self-determination. Six determinants were found to influence the level of participation: efficacy in practice, jurisdictional devolution, representativeness, function, informality, language and motivation. In particular, form followed function, whereby the function of a decision-making forum decided the level of participation that was appropriate. Contrary to accounts in the anthropological literature, the study found a fledgling system of representation in Kowanyama, complete with informal ‘extra-constitutional’ checks and balances. Factions were a powerful aspect of Kowanyama society, but they did not monopolise politics. The local polity was better conceptualised in terms of its political pluralism, encompassing a complex array of balancing and competing interests. Significantly, constituents were beginning to exert local political influence over their leaders. The analysis found that notions of ‘community control,’ as promulgated in the community development literature, were not adequate to explain the intercultural production underway. The full spectrum of participation was relevant to the actors of governance, from political activism to ambivalent apathy. Community control was found in the absence of government interventions, imbedded within informal institutions and cultural norms. Yet, introduced political structures, including Councils, were no less a part of the local political arena. The notion of governance better encapsulated the array of decision-making activities and actors occurring across a broad range of institutional positions. The study documented multiple dilemmas and indeterminacies as actors practised self-determination in the interethnic field, especially the interplay between local and external ideologies and knowledge. All of the examples of political innovation in the contemporary history of governance in Kowanyama involved productive social contexts developing locally between leaders and trusted outsiders. The complexity of problems and their solutions were only revealed through practice, one step at a time. Successful initiatives in Kowanyama were to a degree inadvertent; it was not until the end that actors understood what they had done right or wrong. Significantly, political innovation occurred in practice, often without any active intervention by government. Ironically, one of the greatest obstacles limiting local capacity was the size of the task of administering the programs of self-determination. An accepted role for leaders and employees was radical action to manipulate the system and to create the institutional space to permit the subjects of self-determination to participate. The analysis suggested that the importance assigned to government policy, legislation, and structure has fallen out of balance with their actual practice. Rather than fixating on policy solutions to self-determination, policy-makers should be focusing more on creating an enabling framework for practice. The six success factors proven in the study give the basis for such a framework.

Electric power systems are a recent feature of community infrastructure, little more than a century having elapsed since the first public electricity supply was offered. The speed with which they have spread across the world, and the extent to which electricity has displaced other energy sources in commercial, industrial and domestic applications, has been quite remarkable. The widespread availability of a reliable supply of electricity has become one of the dominant factors in the lifestyle of the citizens of developed countries, and one of the differences between developed and developing countries. Yet not many histories of this remarkable industry have been written, and most of those have confined their attention to political and administrative matters, although technical issues have virtually dictated the pace of development of the industry. In the 1920s, when power systems began to spread beyond city centres, lightning became a major adverse factor in their capital costs, operating costs and reliability, and inadequate reliability reduced the rate of acceptance of electricity supply by the public, especially in rural areas. Although lightning has long inspired fear and wonder, its fundamental nature - the fact that it is an electrical discharge - was not known until less than three centuries ago, and the first measurements of lightning currents and voltages were not made until the middle 1920s, when instruments for measuring the electrical properties of lightning first became available. Intensive research programmes were undertaken in America, Britain, and some European countries from about 1925 onwards, but no research on the effects of lightning on power systems was undertaken in Australia until after 1950. This delay of almost three decades forced Australian power system engineers to base some very important aspects of power system design entirely upon data from other countries, which was of doubtful applicability in Australian conditions. During this period, the uncertainty over basic design data resulted in some power systems being over-insulated, with consequent waste of capital expenditure, while others were under-insulated, and had to be modified later to achieve adequate reliability. It is believed that this long delay in commencing lightning research in Australia was caused by a number of factors, including community attitudes to higher education and research (other than primary industry research), and the belief of many managers in the electricity supply industry that only the major manufacturers of electrical plant, located mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could successfully conduct power system research. In 1948 the Senate of the University of Queensland decided to replace the Chair of Engineering with four Chairs in separate branches of engineering. The founding Professor of Electrical Engineering, S.A. Prentice, was appointed in 1950 and soon decided to adopt lightning and its effects on power systems as the principal research thrust of the new Department. By the late 1950s, the University of Queensland had become the recognised centre of Australian research in lightning and high voltage insulation. With financial support from the electricity industry, the University completed a new high voltage laboratory in 1960, and soon began to be recognised overseas as a significant contributor to the world-wide search for knowledge in those areas. During the next fifteen years, the cooperative research programme of the University and the electricity industry developed fully, and valuable research was pursued in a number of areas, including the impulse strength and arc-quenching properties of Australian hardwoods used in poles and crossarms, the prediction of lightning outage rates of transmission lines, the causes of high lightning-failure rates in distribution systems, the performance of insulation under pollution conditions, and the validity of high voltage test procedures. The work frequently involved people from the electricity supply industry as well as people from the university, and attracted attention in overseas countries as well as in Australia. In 1974 Prentice reached retiring age, but the principal members of the staff he had recruited continued to produce research of high quality, and of considerable practical benefit to the electricity industry. By 1995, Prentice's principal staff members had reached or were approaching retirement, and the nature of lightning research had changed somewhat, with the principal interest turning to the details of the lightning stroke itself, and to protection of buildings and electronic equipment rather than power systems.