This project examines the contribution of Alistair Knox (1912-1986) to the development of an integrated approach to built form in the Australian landscape. Knox is renowned for his environmental building work in the Eltham area of Victoria during the second half of the twentieth century. This work responded to a unique set of circumstances involving postwar shortages of building materials, the prior history of earth building in the region, the existence and tradition of artistic communities challenging conventional practices, and the search for an appropriate landscape and architectural response to Australian conditions. Knox contributed articles to newspapers and magazines, gave numerous speeches and wrote three books, which describe his environmental building philosophy and the Eltham community. / The organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin are considered as possible influences on the development of Knox’s integrated architecture and landscape approach, along with the landscape qualities of Eltham, and the unique artistic community living there. The work of Knox is also considered against the Australian post World War 2 climate of change, characterised by a growing appreciation of Australian plants and concern for the environment. / This research comprised a content analysis of the three books written by Knox to distinguish his influences, values and philosophies. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to Knox’s impact on the development of an Australian landscape design ethos.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. / The Custom of the Country: Alistair Cooke and Race in America is a selected, annotated edition of 142 installments of Alistair Cooke's BBC broadcast, Letter from America, on race and the struggle for civil rights in the United States. Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), English-born American journalist, produced a variety of works over a seventy-year career, almost all about American politics, society, and culture. Besides writing numerous books, he was for 25 years American correspondent for the Manchester Guardian newspaper (later The Guardian). From 1946 to 2004 he wrote and recorded a weekly 2,100-word commentary, Letter from America, broadcast to the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth - a total of 2,869 broadcasts. Over the decades, the relation of white and black was a frequent concern of Letter from America. The Custom of the Country records events from Harry Truman's efforts to advance civil rights, through the Brown v. Board of Education decision, battles over segregation and passage of civil rights laws, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the riots of the 1960s, school busing and Affirmative Action, up to and beyond the O.J. Simpson case. The letters include profiles of such figures as Joe Louis, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, J. William Fulbright, and Jesse Jackson. They explore changes in the language of race and in black and white society. The texts also reveal the process of change (and lack of change) in the views of one immigrant over more than half a century. The Custom of the Country is an accurate edition of scripts as near as possible to the words as Cooke wrote and spoke them. The edition, spanning the years 1946-2003, was compiled from manuscripts and transcripts in the Alistair Cooke collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, England. Available versions were consulted and compared in the preparation of the text. In addition to the introduction, which contains specific references to the texts, footnotes report key variant readings, along with historical and biographical background, as well as extensive cross-referencing of topics and events.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-111). Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of New Brunswick, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them both to rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act in which personal landscapes are invested with structures of feeling that transcend local significance yet are manifested in everyday connections between ordinary people, and in daily (often unrecognized) struggles and acts of heroism. This includes a study of the means through which psychological evolution and trauma can be depicted. I also discuss how stylistic techniques such as fragmentation, repetition, self-reflexivity, and literary allusion function within these narratives. This aspect of my investigation provides the opportunity to engage more fully with the body of literary research that has already been produced on these authors.

Thesis(M.Arch.)--University of Melbourne, Faculty Of Architecture, Building and Planning.

Contemporary theology increasingly is concerned with 'inter-disciplinary dialogue'. There has, however, been little work done on the under-girding structures of such a dialogue. The central concern of this thesis is to explore the methodological foundations for the relation between 'theology' and 'secular discourse'. Although there are many possibilities for testing the relation between theology and secular discourse, theological anthropology and the doctrine of sin are used as the primary testing grounds because they are central to the concerns of much contemporary systematic theology as well as being areas to which the secular world has much to contribute. Alistair McFadyen's and Karl Barth's work in these areas is adopted as the particular focus of the thesis. Together their work offers a rich environment for analysing the methodological issues at stake in the relationship between theology and secular discourse. The primary aim of the thesis is to offer an approach to interdisciplinary dialogue which maintains 'the priority of God' in theological method whilst recognising that engagement with secular discourse enables theology 'to do its job better'. Drawing from McFadyen's and Barth's work in theological anthropology and the doctrine of sin, some methodological foundations for structuring the relation between theology and secular discourse are laid out and stated in a more widely applicable form.

The aim of this study is to explore how the concept of sin, guilt and responsibility can be used in the contemporary discourse of the climate catastrophe. In a comparative textual study on Sallie McFague’s A New Climate for Theology and Richard Bauckham’s Bible and Ecology these concepts are analyzed. The conclusion is that McFague and Bauckham both uses “responsibility” frequently, but neither “sin” or “guilt” are well used in there works. Yet, when they reflect on “sin”, both of them abandons the (in the western theology classical) Augustine theology on sin. McFague when she argues that “evil” is a perversion of good rather than a consequence of an external reality, Bauckham when he claims that the fall of sin is an ongoing process rather than a momentary event.   Hannah Arendt and Alistair McFadyen are used as an interpretative and theoretical background to the conclusions of McFague and Bauckham in the discussion that follows the comparative textual study. Arendt and McFadyen reflects on sin, guilt and responsibility with the Holocaust as context. In the discussion, their thoughts on the Holocaust are essayed to apply on the contemporary climate catastrophe. Hannah Arendt talks about “collective responsibility” and “personal guilt”, concepts that in the discussion part, when applied on the climate catastrophe and in a better way fits the contemporary situation, inverts to “collective guilt” and “personal responsibility”. The talk of collective guilt tangent the Augustine teaching of original sin where sin is a common heritage from the fall of sin. McFadyen uses original sin to explain the mechanism of the German people during the Holocaust which in many ways are similar to the processes of the climate catastrophe of today.    In the discussion of this study, original sin is used as a model to better understand the fact that people cannot escape guilt in the contemporary situation and to comprehend why people act as they do. The study intends accordingly to in a constructive way contribute with new perspectives on sin, guild and responsibility to the ecological theology of today.