Includes bibliography. / 2 v. : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / This thesis analyses the aquatic macrophyte vegetation of remnant wetlands in the South East of South Australia and of Bool Lagoon in particular. The study describes the diversity of aquatic vegetation in 11 remnant and ephemeral wetlands in the South East using a multivariate approach of classification and ordination of vegetation quadrats. The second section of the study characterises the seasonal pattern of fluctuation through a numerical description of water regime. The third section is a consideration of the population demography of Typha domingensis and Phragmites australis in relation to flooding frequency at Bool Lagoon. The final section of the study considers the influence of flooding frequency on the distribution of some important components of the vegetation of Bool Lagoon. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Botany, 1997?

Bibliography: leaves 214-239. / xviii, 239 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / The aim of this study is to identify the water use strategy of Malaleuca halmaturorum in response to salinity and waterlogging in the root zone and through this quantify groundwater use and the role of M. halmaturorum in the water balance. The water use strategy of M. halmaturorum is investigated in the saline ephemeral swamps of South Eastern South Australia to understand the effect of the wetland vegetation on the groundwater balance and the survival mechanisms and reasons for the decline in health of M. halmaturorum in the region. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Botany, 1997

"Conducted as a cross-institutional student between the University of Adelaide and the Australian National Universiity" / Includes bibliography. / 342 p. in various pagings : ill. (chiefly col.), maps (some col.) ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / The environmental history of the Upper South East revealed that the current management plan recommended by the EIA may benefit dryland areas, but degradation of wetland areas in likely to continue. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Geography, 1997

This thesis is a critical reflection on Vision Machine's North Sumatran film project, articulating a cinema practice that seeks to address a genocide that has barely been investigated. The primary footage comprises extensive interviews, re-enactments and dramatisations of the various practices and procedures that constituted the core of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide in Sumatra's plantation belt. The participants in these dramatisations and enactments are, for the most part, death squad leaders and members who participated in the killing. This data, comprising over 100 hours of video, constitute revelatory primary research into the history and operation of the Indonesian genocide. This research forms the historical context for the project, and is therefore summarised in the thesis. The reflection on the epistemological, cultural and historical status of these re-enactments constitutes the basis for the core argument of this thesis. To this day, in North Sumatra, the genocidaires remain largely in power. This fact transforms our film project into a unique laboratory for exploring the cultural politics of film, media and history within a context of victory and impunity. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which historical narrative - inevitably told by victors - becomes an instrument of terror within a spectral economy of terror. This project is both an intervention into this economy, as well as an analysis of its mechanisms and protocols. As such, the thesis comprises both completed films, extracts from works-in-progress and this writing, and lies at the intersection of the disparate fields of cinema studies, Indonesian area studies, trauma studies and film practice. This thesis proposes a theory of performativity, spectrality and genres of historical performance; specifically, it is argues that spectres are performatively conjured as the obscene to any symbolic performance - including both historical acts as well as their rehearsal and restaging in re-enactment, testimony, or dramatisation; such spectres constitute a power that may be claimed by the performer. This power interacts with actual structures of power, as well as processes that seek to record, circulate or excavate such historical performances, including our filmmaking process. In the case of this film project, perpetrators are lured by the apparatus of filmmaking into naming names and revealing routines of mass murder hitherto obscene to official histories, and they do so through dramatisations and re-enactments manifestly conditioned by the codes of film and television genres. This latter point reveals the complex ways in which remembrance is always already well-rehearsed, scripted and generic. Thus does the research excavate (by catalysing) perpetrators' performative use of film genres to conjure as a spectral force that which must remain obscene to the codes of genre. And thus does the research excavate (by miming) the way genre fashions historical narratives into instruments of terror. As perpetrators of the genocide name names and reveal secrets, the process by which they seek to claim and manifest their spectral power is short-circuited by the filmmaking process, which condenses a miasmic spectral into specific ghosts. By shorting one circuit, the filmmaking closes another through which the process of remembrance, working through and redemption may begin for survivors. From this emerges an understanding of both the filmmaking process and its products (i.e., the completed films) as filmic interventions into a spectral economy of terror. This thesis describes a film practice that is necessarily a social practice, at once producing works and doing work. Building on models of collective filmmaking developed by Jean Rouch and George Stoney, we incorporate experimental production techniques including spirit possession, re-narration, infiltration, and genre-based fiction filmmaking in order to define a new model for film production that the author has termed "archaeological performance". Moving beyond the interview-based approaches of Lanzmann and Ophüls, archaeological performance suggests a hybrid and interventionist form of cinema adequate to addressing a history whose very incoherence has served as an instrument of terror.

Similar to other countries in the South-east Asian region, Thailand has transformed its education policy so that it may be able to better face the challenges of the globalised world. In order to do this, constructs such as student-centred learning and critical thinking, as well as the teaching of English in a more communicative manner, have been promoted. There has been little critical or grounded research carried out on the current English policy in Thailand, which emerged from the National Education Act of 1999 and the subsequent Basic Education Core Curricula of 2001 and 2008, therefore, in order to better understand how this policy works, this study explores how a group of Thai-English language teachers conceptualise the English language policy in Thailand by investigating their practices and beliefs (dispositions). In order to do this, and drawing on a social constructionist perspective from Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this thesis adopts a qualitative methodology that incorporates exploratory and ethnographic elements. Employing a combination of data collection methods that include classroom observations, retrospective accounts and semi-structured interviews, the findings demonstrate that a gap exists between the goals of the policy and what actually occurs in the classroom. Thus, there were few examples of either the communicative approach or student-centred learning being employed, with teachers instead tending to transmit knowledge to their students in a teacher-centred manner. Reasons for this may be due to the influence that the national examinations has on teachers’ work, the suitability and / or relevance of imported teaching and learning approaches on local contexts, as well as the need for better implementation of change. Teachers would indeed benefit from more professional development concerning the policy, but this thesis also argues that the policy itself needs to be critically examined. This would then allow Thailand, as well as other countries in the region, to better inform and improve their current education policies.

Hillforts have dominated interpretations of later prehistoric society, but these have been based on an uncritical acceptance of their military or symbolic role and a ‘big is best’ mentality. Using the exceptional archive from Broxmouth hillfort in East Lothian, the research presented in this thesis had the unique opportunity to examine the boundaries of that site in detail. Drawing on ideas that sites should not just be seen in their final form, episodes of enclosure creation, maintenance and abandonment are examined. Constructing a biography of Broxmouth has highlighted the relative infrequency of these creation events and how social relationships were intimately tied to the enclosure boundaries. These events are not isolated and investigating the contemporary landscape has shown that the coastal plain would have been densely settled, yet the bleak hills of the Lammermuirs appear to have been avoided. Mapping old routeways and pit alignments shows that this landscape may have been a draw for the practice of transhumance, primarily for sheep and cattle as demonstrated in the Broxmouth evidence. Combining GIS analyses with more experiential approaches, shows how some sites took advantage of the topographical surroundings and were instrumental in the practice of transhumance. Creation events at other sites also appear to be infrequent and examining further excavated sites in East Lothian has allowed the formation of a broad chronology of changing enclosure patterns. Contextualising Broxmouth has documented changes in how people interacted with their landscape, how social relationships were enacted and how these changed from the late Bronze Age, through to the Roman Iron Age.

The absence of water catchment protection often results in contamination of drinking water supplies. Waters in South East Asia have been exploited to support extensive agriculture, industry, power generation, public water supply, fisheries and recreation use. Ammonia has been identified as a significant contaminant of drinking water because of its ability to affect the disinfection efficiency of chlorine. The interference of ammonia with chlorination is a prevalent and expensive problem faced by many water treatment plants (WTPs) located throughout South East Asia. The conventional approach for ammonia removal was to pre-chlorinate using high concentrations of chlorine, which has a number of disadvantages including the formation of disinfection by-products and high chlorine consumption. This thesis investigated the application of high rate nitrifying trickling filters (NTFs) as a means of ammonia removal from a polluted lowland water source as an alternative to pre-chlorination. NTFs are widely used for the biological remediation of ammonia rich wastewater, however their performance when required to operate under low ammonia concentrations for potable water applications was unknown. A NTF pilot facility consisting of one large-scale, and three small-scale NTFs were constructed at Hope Valley WTP in South Australia. The NTFs were operated to simulate the raw water quality of a polluted catchment identified in Indonesia (Buaran WTP), including variations in ammonia, biological oxygen demand (BOD5), and turbidity. Results confirmed that plastic-packed NTFs were able to operate equally successfully under low ammonia-N concentrations, some 10- to 50-fold lower that that of conventional wastewater applications, where complete conversion of ammonia to nitrate was consistently observed under these markedly reduced loadings. Results also showed that when operated under mass loads equivalent to typical ammonia loading criteria for wastewater NTFs, by increasing hydraulic flow¬, comparable apparent nitrification rates were achieved. These results confirmed that mass transport limitations posed by low ammonia-N concentrations on overall filter performance were insignificant. This thesis also investigated the impact of organic carbon quantity and biodegradability on the nitrification behaviour of the pilot NTF. Results demonstrated that organic carbon loading, rather than the C:N ratio, was an important regulator of filter nitrification capacity, where a linear decline in nitrification performance correlated well with sucrose and methanol augmented carbon loads. Extensive monitoring of inorganic nitrogen species down the NTF, to profile nitrification behaviour, showed sucrose-induced carbon loads greater than 870 mg sBOD5 m–2 d–1 severely suppressed nitrification throughout the entire filter bed. This study also confirmed that critical carbon loads for nitrification varied among carbon sources. In contrast to sucrose, when a more native-like carbon source was dosed (organic fertiliser), no significant decline in nitrification capacity was observed. This could be attributed to differences in carbon biodegradability. This research has provided new insights into the microbial ecology of a potable water NTF. The combination of fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) for in situ analysis of biofilms was successful in identifying the spatial distribution of ammonia oxidising bacteria (AOB), nitrite oxidising bacteria (NOB) and heterotrophs. When the NTF was operated under low organic loads, clusters of AOB and NOB were abundant, and were located in close proximity to each other. Uniquely, the study identified not only Nitrospira spp but also the less common Nitrobacter spp within the NTF biofilm. Biofilm analysis showed that the type of carbon source also strongly influenced the biofilms characteristics in terms of biomass ecology, morphology, and polysaccharide composition, which was correlated with NTF performance. Results showed that an increase in sBOD5 via the addition of sucrose promoted the rapid growth of filamentous heterotrophic bacteria and production of large amounts of polysaccharide. Stratification of nitrifiers and heterotrophs, and high biofilm polysaccharide concentrations were observed at all filter bed depths, which coincided with the impediment of nitrification throughout the entire filter column. High biofilm polysaccharide concentrations also coincided with a significant increase (40 %) in filter hydraulic retention time, as determined by hydraulic tracer experiments. In contrast to sucrose-fed biofilms, organic fertiliser-fed biofilms had a more uniform and dense ultra-structure dominated by many rod shaped bacteria, and was significantly lower in polysaccharide composition. This observation was coupled with superior nitrification performance. This study confirmed that a well functioning NTF is a viable, low cost alternative for ammonia removal from source water abstracted from poorly protected catchments found in many developing countries. Pre-treatment using NTFs has the potential to reduce the chlorine dose required for pre-chlorination. Thereby improving water quality by minimising the formation of disinfection by-products, and improving the control of chlorination. NTFs could also find ready application in other situations where ammonia interferes with chlorine disinfection.

Includes bibliographical references. / xvii, 144, [89] leaves, [18] leaves of plates : ill. (some col.), maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Botany, 1995?

none

No description available.