This sociological investigation examines the changing role of parents in the education of their children in Catholic schools in New South Wales over the twentieth century. Catholic Church documents specifically state primary parental responsibility for their children???s religious education. Catholic schools were established to inculcate faith, and assist parents??? role. This thesis asks, to what extent that role has been realised? It unravels the processes that determined and defined the changing role of Catholic parents during this period, and identifies significant shifts in institutional thinking and practices related to parents and resultant shifts in cultural and social perceptions. After half a century of conformity and comfort, a significant era followed as the Australian Church responded to challenges, including financial crisis for Catholic schools, reform in the Australian education system, and the impact of the Second Vatican Council. Cohorts from three generations were selected. Interviews and focus groups elicited memories that were recorded and analysed, in terms of the integral questions; the role and involvement of parents in Catholic schools. Participants recalled their own childhood in Catholic schools and, where applicable, as parents educating their own children, or as religious teachers. The analysis was theoretically informed by the work of Durkheim, Greeley, Coleman and Bourdieu. A review of Church documents and commentaries through the twentieth century, bearing on the education of children, showed the official Church position. Despite numerous rhetorical statements issued by Catholic authorities, emphasising the role of parents as ???primary educators???, the practical responses ranged from active encouragement to dismissal. Teachers in Catholic schools and related bureaucracies were, seemingly, reluctant to initiate a more inclusive partnership role. Gradually, and in a piecemeal fashion, the Catholic Church and its schools have been responding to growing parental consciousness of their role and responsibilities. A significant shift was signalled by the New South Wales Bishops in establishing the Council of Catholic School Parents, to be supported by a full-time, salaried Executive Officer, in 2003. But any accommodation to new understandings of parent/teacher, or family/school relation is complex and not to be oversimplified as a simple sharing, or ceding of authority.

This sociological investigation examines the changing role of parents in the education of their children in Catholic schools in New South Wales over the twentieth century. Catholic Church documents specifically state primary parental responsibility for their children???s religious education. Catholic schools were established to inculcate faith, and assist parents??? role. This thesis asks, to what extent that role has been realised? It unravels the processes that determined and defined the changing role of Catholic parents during this period, and identifies significant shifts in institutional thinking and practices related to parents and resultant shifts in cultural and social perceptions. After half a century of conformity and comfort, a significant era followed as the Australian Church responded to challenges, including financial crisis for Catholic schools, reform in the Australian education system, and the impact of the Second Vatican Council. Cohorts from three generations were selected. Interviews and focus groups elicited memories that were recorded and analysed, in terms of the integral questions; the role and involvement of parents in Catholic schools. Participants recalled their own childhood in Catholic schools and, where applicable, as parents educating their own children, or as religious teachers. The analysis was theoretically informed by the work of Durkheim, Greeley, Coleman and Bourdieu. A review of Church documents and commentaries through the twentieth century, bearing on the education of children, showed the official Church position. Despite numerous rhetorical statements issued by Catholic authorities, emphasising the role of parents as ???primary educators???, the practical responses ranged from active encouragement to dismissal. Teachers in Catholic schools and related bureaucracies were, seemingly, reluctant to initiate a more inclusive partnership role. Gradually, and in a piecemeal fashion, the Catholic Church and its schools have been responding to growing parental consciousness of their role and responsibilities. A significant shift was signalled by the New South Wales Bishops in establishing the Council of Catholic School Parents, to be supported by a full-time, salaried Executive Officer, in 2003. But any accommodation to new understandings of parent/teacher, or family/school relation is complex and not to be oversimplified as a simple sharing, or ceding of authority.

SP, resistivity/IP and seismic refraction responses of the Woodlawn Orebody and Mt.Bulga Deposit are examined and compared. Both exhibit similar responses produced mainly by uneconomic and disseminated sulphide mineralization and host rock features, demonstrating that the magnitude and character of electrical and seismic responses are not reliable indicators of size and economic sulphide content of volcanogenic sulphide ores. SP, soil geochemistry and electrogeochemistry are found to be the most effective exploration methods followed by resistivity/IP and seismic refraction. The large SP responses over both ore zones are simulated using new methods which allowed the width and depth of oxidation to be computed. Conventional and compensation array resistivity responses best define the deposits. Computer simulation shows that dipole- dipole and Unipole arrays are most useful. First order IP responses are large and similar, but the ore zones are not easily distinguished from polarizable host rocks. Second order responses, at Woodlawn, better define these lithologies and cross-plots of EM coupling removed first order parameters prove useful. The supergene and gossan zones are defined as sources of electrical anomalies and correlate with interpreted SP sources. Seismic velocities of fresh Woodlawn ore samples indicate only small contrasts with host rocks. Refraction travel-time data are highly complex but host rocks are clearly distinguished by their seismic velocities. Both deposits appear as low velocity zones at the general bedrock level which are shallower and narrower than the electrical sources associated with the ore zones. Extensive model simulation shows that the Reciprocal interpretation method is most useful when compared to other time- term methods for refraction interpretation but has some limitations. Computer simulation shows the significance of non- critical refractions, diffractions and laterally hidden zones which define the lateral resolution of the refraction method. The results of this study and the interpretative techniques developed will assist the exploration for similar and deeper massive volcanogenic orebodies in comparable geological environments.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Edinburgh, 2002.

No description available.

Knowledge of the convict period in New South Wales has been substantially expanded and enriched through a number of revisionist scholarly studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The cumulative result has been the establishment of a number of new orthodoxies. These studies have drawn on a number of analytic frameworks including feminism and cliometrics, successfully challenging the previous historiography. The rich archival sources in New South Wales have been utilised to reformulate the convict period by a number of scholars, demonstrating the complexity of life in the penal colony. Academic divisions between what are regarded as “Australian” history and “British” history have imposed their own agendas on writing about transportation. This study challenges this imposition through an examination of petitioners’ approaches to the home and colonial administrations. A lacuna in the scholarly studies has been a lack of attention to transportation’s consequences for married couples and their children. This study seeks to narrow that gap through these petitions. The findings of the study demonstrate the continuation of links between those who were transported and those who remained in Britain. It is argued that these findings have important implications for future research within Britain, and that what is disclosed by these petitions and the individuals who were involved in on-going communications cannot be restricted either to Australian or convict histories. Our knowledge of what transportation meant to individuals in the periphery as well as those in the metropole is diminished if the focus remains firmly on the settler community. Supplementary material from contemporary sources as well as the official records passing between the two administrations has been utilised and these supplementary sources suggest that there was a broad division between official publicly stated policy and practice in respect of transportees’ family circumstances. Chapter One establishes the architecture of the thesis and explains the methodology adopted. Chapter Two offers a reinterpretation of the colony’s formation in 1788 and inserts the “convict audience” of that day into the historiography . Chapter Three examines two petitioners writing from different gaols in Britain prior to their expected transportation. A resolution of the division between cliometrics and this more qualitative humanist approach is proposed. Chapter Four is a study of petitioners in Britain and a study of the process required for a reunion and reconstitution of family units in New South Wales. Chapter Five seeks to a resiting of male convicts as family members through an examination of a number of contemporary sources. Chapter Six examines the petitions raised by husbands and fathers for their wives and families to be given free passages to the colony. Chapter Seven provides case studies of three transportees and their experiences of the petitioning process. In Chapter Eight the focus broadens out from married men to examine and provide a revision of convicts’ correspondence with their relatives and friends in Britain. Such correspondence has previously provided the basis for nationalist interpretations; the revision here suggests that such interpretations are anachronistic. Chapter Nine is an extended metaphor drawing the material together to the conclusions of the study.

Doctor of Philosophy / During the 1990s, governments, managements and unions have been focused upon improving the cost efficiency of firms. This focus has been strongest for firms in the public sector where improved outcomes can be expected to significantly improve the Gross Domestic Products of whole economies. This case study looks at the cost efficiency of NSW rail passenger services over a 41 year period to 1991/92, long suspected (but hitherto only tentatively demonstrated) as a paradigm of cost inefficiency. The case study focuses upon the use of the total factor productivity (TFP) index, as a datum point for measuring change in productivity in four markets: suburban, internrban, country and interstate passenger services since 1951/52. From this datum, changes over the years in management, technology and other external factors can be identified and assessed. The thesis identifies management quality (the organising element in the firm) as the preeminent factor in determining productivity change, and the role that new technology plays in its impact on failures in management. We establish the linkages between management and innovation, with TFP, pricing efficiency and economic resource use efficiency, to present a rich paradigm for assessing the economic performance of any business firm. Borrowing from systems theory and other management practices such as total quality management, we disaggregated the case firm into its component systems, sub-systems and processes, for separate study in relation to impact on TFP. The database for 41 years of rail behaviour is the richest ever compiled for any railway in Australia, and with enhanced modelling, enables a systematic treatment of the performance through time of State Rail's passenger services.

Policy-makers, funding bodies and treatment providers need current, comparable and accurate information on the activities and outcomes of alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment services to respond to the needs of the sector. If meaningful comparisons are to be made at the jurisdictional level, a standardised treatment outcome monitoring system must be developed and implemented, that takes into account differences in client characteristics, treatment settings and modes of service provision. A brief, multi-dimensional instrument, the Brief Treatment Outcome Measure (BTOM) has been developed for routine, ongoing treatment outcome monitoring with clients receiving opioid maintenance pharmacotherapy (OMP) services in New South Wales (NSW), and for use in treatment evaluation research. This is the first time in Australia that an attempt has been made to integrate outcome monitoring into routine clinical practice across an AOD treatment sector. The BTOM contains thirty-three items across the domains of dependence, blood-borne virus exposure risk, drug use, health/psychological functioning and social functioning. The internal reliability of the BTOM is satisfactory; retest reliabilities for the measures are good to excellent and concurrent validation of BTOM scales yielded acceptable agreement. Average completion times of the BTOM were 14.5 minutes when administered by researchers and 21 minutes by clinicians. A 30-month feasibility trial was conducted in selected NSW OMP treatment agencies to determine the practicability of implementing an OMS; to identify issues that would impact on the quality of the data; and identify administrative processes that could facilitate implementation whilst minimising the burden on agency staff. In addition, clinicians who had administered the BTOM were surveyed 18 months into the trial to ascertain their attitudes towards the clinical utility, acceptability of content and the level of support given to them to administer the BTOM as part of routine clinical practice. Results from the trial indicate that the BTOM measures are sensitive to change over time; that the change observed is consistent with that reported in the OMP treatment outcome literature; and that clinicians, whilst generally being positively predisposed towards using the instrument, express concerns relating to the burden of administering and the clinical utility of conducting outcome monitoring.

The study on different extension approaches was undertaken in the Bathurst area of New South Wales, Australia. One hundred farmers were surveyed in random pairs according to those who belong to the formal group, ???Landcare???, and those who did not. The survey included questions on personal, physical resources, ecological and economic factors, farm practices and management (including actual practice, use of extension methods and information sources) Focussing on behavioural change over time, attitudes, perceptions and intentions. The impact of extension approach on different levels of innovation was considered: simple (e.g. tree planting), medium (e.g. pasture development) and complex (soil erosion control) on behavioural change. It was hypothesised that the ???group??? extension approach should be more effective with complex innovations, but the main significant differences found were in level of tree planting (higher in government funded Landcare), money spent on erosion control (including tree planting) and attitudes to the severity of local erosion (all higher in Landcare members). There were no other differences in attitudes, intentions or change in farming practice except that non-Landcare farmers planted more pasture and applied more lime. The outcomes did not support the hypothesis, and it was not possible to distinguish the differences that did occur in performance from extension approach versus access to funds. Field days are an important extension method for the adoption of cropping by landholders. Among the different extension methods, those who conducted erosion control through pastures, preferred government officers and meetings. Those who adopted tree planting and were in Landcare preferred magazines as the extension method. This added further weight to the argument that the formal group extension approach may not be perceived by its members to have any influence on adoption at this level. Generally, mass media was more important in the early stages of adoption and personal influence more important in the evaluation stage. This also applied to simple versus complex innovations. Surprisingly all farmers placed a very high reliance on government officers for information and decision-making, particularly those in Landcare, compared to neighbours or family. Formal group extension still needs assessing but using models other than Landcare.

The gay sauna played a central role in the battle for gay liberation in Sydney during the latter part of the twentieth century. This thesis examines the conjunction of social and political forces which contributed to the acceptance of the gay sauna by Sydney???s civic society. Two questions reveal this process: 1. How was an illegal and clandestine place for homosexuals, perceived as a threat to the moral standards of Sydney, transformed into an institutional entity, legally recognised as ???crucial???, and important within particular environs of this city? 2. How did the evolving public domain of gay saunas contribute to the development of gay culture in Sydney by fostering the opportunities for individual and collective expression of homosexual practices? This study is contextualised within international and Australian studies of the sexualisation of urban spaces???such as Michel Foucault???s, Manuel Castells??? and Lawrence Knopp???s???and the role of the built environment in the development of sexual identity and sexual practices???such as Gayle Rubin???s, John Ricco???s, and Joel Brodsky???s. The first part of the thesis is an empirical analysis of development applications for gay saunas in Sydney between 1967 and 2000 which reveals the play of forces within state and local government, legislative processes, the homosexual community and broader civic stakeholders through which the gay sauna achieved acceptance in Sydney???s civic society. Two principal research approaches???documentary research and twenty in-depth interviews???were used in this first part. The second part of the thesis is an ethnography that uses twenty-nine in-depth interviews to provided a unique insight into the evolving public domain of Sydney???s gay saunas and how they fostered the experiences of gay men, allowing gay men to develop individual and collective sexual identities and practices. This exploration of the interplay of built form, sexuality, civic governance, social identity and social action provide a sociological contribution which will also be of interest to gay studies, anthropology, architecture, geography and planning. Essential to an experience of the thesis is a concurrent reading of the Special Enclosures???a schematic chronology of Sydney gay saunas, plans of Sydney and architectural plans of its saunas.