This thesis examines how Dickens positions education between self-help and philanthropy in "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit." The first chapter examines Dickens’s own education as well as his education-related charitable activities to provide context for the following analysis of "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit." The second chapter focuses on education in "Bleak House" as a locus both for Dickens’s critique of the government’s irresponsible failure to educate the poor and for Dickens’s depiction of social responsibility motivating individuals to teach others. Finally, the third chapter considers the role of education in "Little Dorrit" by studying Amy Dorrit as an exemplar and teacher of social responsibility who stands in contrast to the prevailing irresponsibility that characterizes her family and “Society.”

Both House of Cards and Scandal have similar conceits (White House? Check. Sex? Check. Murder? Check.) but use different platforms: House of Cards is a Netflix Original production while Scandal is a broadcast television program on ABC. Through the course of this paper, I will examine how the platform and type of consumption affects the content and distribution of the show and the types of relationships they forge with their viewers.

Attention worldwide has been placed towards reducing the global carbon footprint. To this end the scientific community has been involved in improving many of the available methods of carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS involves scrubbing flue gases of greenhouse gases and safely storing them deep underground. MOFs, a family of functionally tunable three dimensional nanoporous frameworks, have been shown to adsorb gases with great selectivity and capacity. Investigating these frameworks using computational simulations, although faster than in-lab synthetic methods, involves a tedious and meticulous input preparation process which is subject to human error. This thesis presents Dave's Occupancy Automation Package (DOAP),a software which provides a means to automatically determine the gas uptake of many three dimensional frameworks. By providing atomic coordinates for a unit simulation cell, the software acts to performs the necessary calculations to construct and execute a Grand Canonical Monte Carlo simulation, determining the gas uptake in a metal organic framework. Additionally an analysis of different convergence assessment tests for describing the end point of the GCMC simulation is presented.

William Shakespeare’s influence on the genre of tragedy is both powerful and undeniable, while contemporary notions about tragedy have shifted into a modern light through the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. This study concentrates specifically on Hamlet and A Doll’s House in order to indicate the ways in which ideas of tragedy have evolved. By investigating the effect of religion in Hamlet and the absence of it in A Doll’s House, I will argue that the main shift in tragedy is the loss of God. This thesis examines the transformation of the two heroes throughout the course of their respective plays and, in doing so, identifies the formal features which mark their claims to tragedy. While their processes differ greatly—Hamlet’s transformation is through a super-textual and self-analytic process while Nora’s process is one that emphasizes action over thought—both of their journeys are tied to the crucial and utterly tragic truth that they must face: the breakdown of their family.

The play One Man's Vision covers the period 1963 to 1966 when Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect of the Sydney Opera House, resided in Sydney until his resignation or dismissal in February 1966. The play draws on the tensions and hostility towards Utzon, which builds in the government of the day, cultural groups, press, and also with some senior architects. Rowdy scenes in the N.S.W. Legislative Assembly paint a broad canvas of construction, funding, and political problems. These further escalate with a change of government. Utzon's daily work features interaction between his assistant, consulting engineers, and Public Works Department inspectors, as pressures develop to overcome operational and financial problems. His forced dismissal, resulting in a public rally and march, puts in doubt the completion of the opera house. The exegesis takes Arthur Miller's argument for the playwright as an interpreter of history as its starting point, in order to examine the issues of balancing history with drama in the writing of my play, One Man's Vision. To bring unity to existing reports and to construct a play capable of holding an audience, a playwright must make many choices shaped by the conventions of the theatre and of the genre of the work being attempted. A historical play based on existing records will also draw on the imagination of the playwright. The playwright, therefore, makes decisions as to the blend of history and imagination which will be used to serve the story and represent ideas and concepts through dialogue. In making these artistic decisions history becomes just one component rather than the predominant one.

In Melbourne, Australia, current debates regarding the ongoing provision of suburban residential development to meet housing demand tend to focus on its capacity to contribute to the overall achievement of sustainable development at the metropolitan scale. Within this context, sustainability issues are framed as an environmental problem, and the legislative proposals to address them, in general, are technology focused. However there is growing evidence that deeper changes in human behaviour and understanding are required to achieve a sustainable outcome at the residential scale, and that these 'sustainability issues' are in fact environmental symptoms of a wider human problem. This thesis presents the results of an investigation of domestic architecture, as experienced by thirteen people, eleven of whom have voluntarily chosen to design, build and live in sustainable houses in and around Melbourne. The respondents' complex, multidimensional lived experiences of house, home, place and sustainability are explored within a framework based on theories of place. The first of these theories is Heidegger's concept of Being, especially Being-in-the-World, and the way in which this relates to the human experience of place. The second is the related concept of Dwelling, which for Heidegger is the basic character of Being and is intimately connected with building. The third perspective draws heavily from Heidegger's concepts of Being and Dwelling to define place as the experience of rootedness, authenticity, and insidedness, and the absence of these as placelessness. The fourth theory is the genius loci of place, also referred to as the spirit of place. Dwelling is the point of departure for this theory which discusses the way in which architecture concretises the spirit of place, so place may be experienced as an integrated totality. The final theory, articulated by Bachelard, suggests that place, as memory, is the conflation of intimate experience, memory, and imagination. This perspective is explored through the experience of home, especially the memories of home. Using phenomenography as a research approach, the qualitatively different ways the respondents describe their understanding and experience of house, home, place and sustainability, and the relationships between these, are explored. Insight into these understandings and experiences is achieved through the use of unstructured, in-depth interviews and a purposefully designed mixed-media package (cultural probe) which aims to provoke inspirational, creative and emotional responses. Conclusions are drawn regarding the interplay of notions of house, home and place and sustainability, and the ways in which the relationships between these phenomena influence sustainable behaviour.

This thesis includes an introduction to my bonsai container design along with a history of bonsai, discussion of the philosophies of key bonsai masters, the details of two bonsai containers based on Japanese courtyard culture and Japanese architectural philosophy. It also documents the design process of all 1:1 scale Bonsai containers and the exhibition space, which includes bonsai planted in each container on the presentation day.

Abstract This thesis examines the raison d�etre of the Australian Senate, the upper house of the Australian bicameral parliament, established in 1901. It explores the literature that might have influenced its establishment and structure, and the attitudes, ideals, experience and expectations of the men (and they were all men) who initiated its existence and designed its structure during the Federation Conventions of the 1890s. It goes on to study whether similar western and British influenced institutions were seen as models by the designers of the Senate, followed by an examination of its architecture, d�cor, and procedures, to determine the major influences at work on these aspects of the institution. The study was undertaken in view of the paucity of studies of the history and role of the Senate in relation to its powerful influence on the Government of Australia. Its structure can allow a minority of Senators to subvert or obstruct key measures passed by the lower house and is a serious issue for Governments in considering legislation. Answers are sought to the questions of how and why it was conceived and created and what role it was expected to play. The study does not extend beyond 1901 when the Senate was established except to examine the Provisional Parliament House, opened in 1927, which realised the vision of the Convention delegates who determined that the Senate was the house we had to have. The research approach began with an exhaustive study of the Records of the Federal Conventions of the 1890s, where the Constitution of Australia was drawn up, along with contemporary writings and modern comment on such institutions. A study of the men who designed the Senate was carried out, augmented with field visits to the Australian State Parliaments. Research was also conducted into upper houses identified by the delegates to the Australian Federal Conventions, to consider their influence on the design of the Senate. The conclusion is that the Senate was deliberately structured to emulate the then existing British system as far as possible; it was to be an august house of review and a bastion against democracy, or at least a check on hasty legislation. The delegates showed no desire to extinguish ties with Great Britain and their vision of an upper house was modelled directly on the House of Lords. The vast majority of delegates had cut their teeth in colonial upper houses, which were themselves closely modelled on the Lords. To not establish a Senate would have been to turn their backs on themselves. The Senate then, is not a hybrid of Washington and Westminster: the influence of the United States was limited to the composition of the Senate and its name and mediated through the filter of its British heritage. The example of other legislatures was unimportant except where it solved problems previously experienced in the Colonial Councils and which might have otherwise occurred in the Senate. The Senate was the upper house we had to have; it was a decision that was taken before the delegates even met.

This dissertation reveals the method by which architects in Melbourne have designed the single family house in the period 1945 - 1975 and thus extends Robin Boyd's attempt in 1947 to describe a regional architectural manner for the state of Victoria. Critical to the study is an initial outline of a local tradition of condoned eclecticism in 1930s domestic architecture and the presence of an evolving housing stock that was mixed rather than predominantly that of the single family house. Modernism in 1930s Melbourne architecture is found to be part of a compositional tradition rather than emerging from ideological imperatives. Robin Boyd’s idea of a so-called Victorian Type is also found to be part of this compositional tradition. The study then examines the suppressive effect of World War 2 on this tradition and its eventual re-emergence during the ensuing three decades.The circumstances which encouraged the adoption of the language of modern architecture and its subsequent effects are examined via prevailing architectural themes. These include: the post-war Victorian Type; structural experiment; geometry; the influence of the East Coast Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright; the continuing idiosyncratic assimilation and reformulation process (albeit under the guise of the Modern Movement) which described the modern house in Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s; the renewed interest in texture, exposed materials and compartmented planning in the 1960s; and the eventual re-emergence of artifice in the composition of space, form and detail and a renewed variety and intricacy in choice of texture and materials. (For complete abstract open document)

This thesis includes an introduction to my bonsai container design along with a history of bonsai, discussion of the philosophies of key bonsai masters, the details of two bonsai containers based on Japanese courtyard culture and Japanese architectural philosophy. It also documents the design process of all 1:1 scale Bonsai containers and the exhibition space, which includes bonsai planted in each container on the presentation day.