Common heliotrope (Heliotropium europaeum L.) is an herbaceous Mediterranean summer annual that grows on areas devoid of vegetation in the dry-land cropping region located in the north-west of the state of Victoria, Australia. This region is known as the Mallee, and common heliotrope is considered a weed here because it transpires soil water that could otherwise be used by ensuing crops, and is toxic to livestock. / In this study, laboratory experiments have shown that germination of seeds of common heliotrope is not limited by light, cold treatment, or a leacheable inhibitor. Temperature and water potential (and perhaps depth inhibition) are the principal environmental factors that limit germination. Although 100 % of seeds will germinate under optimal conditions, these conditions are rarely met in the field, and the percentage of seeds that germinate at sub-optimal conditions changes seasonally and between Australian populations. This is the principal mechanism of dormancy in the species, ensuring that seeds do not germinate when conditions are unfavourable for continued growth and that in the field, germination of a seed population is fractional, spreading risk temporally. Germination of seeds of common heliotrope does not conform to the assumptions of the hydrothermal time model frequently used to predict field emergence of weed species. / Field observations and simulated rainfall experiments on a consistent soil type (Calcarosol with a clay loam surface texture and clay subsoil) indicated that approximately 20 mm of rainfall is the minimum amount required for germination and emergence of common heliotrope. Field experiments using lysimeters indicated that this is also the amount required for minimal reproduction on the same soil type. Although common heliotrope can successfully reproduce upon the rainfall event which causes its germination, its growth is indeterminate, and further access to moisture will result in massively increased reproductive output. Plants will continue to grow and produce seed over summer until they are killed by drought or senesce in autumn. Laboratory and field studies showed that root growth in common heliotrope is relatively slow, and is opportunistic in areas where moisture becomes available. / Simulation of soil water and temperature fluxes showed that soil type has a large impact on the amount and duration of water potential that seeds and plants are exposed to. In the case of common heliotrope, this is critical in determining regional prevalence and distribution in the north-west of Victoria. It is recommended that studies of arid species reliant on isolated rainfall events for emergence should consider absolute water availability and not in terms of rainfall amount alone. / Analysis of long term summer rainfall data from the Victorian Mallee indicates that there is potential for reducing the cost of controlling common heliotrope by using residual pre-emergent sulfonylurea or triazine herbicides, instead of the traditional post-emergent herbicides or cultivation. More information is needed on the efficacy of such residual herbicides on common heliotrope and other summer weeds, and their impact on subsequent crops before the full potential of this management option is known. Reduced cost of control could also be achieved by economic analysis of the likely benefits of controlling each emerging cohort of common heliotrope, and a framework for decision making is suggested.

Minority protection mechanisms in international law aim to guarantee certain individual rights to persons belonging to ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities, such as freedom of culture, religion and language. These rights can be considered to be of collective interest for minority group identity and therefore often require the possibility of collective enjoyment. In addition to general human rights and principles of non-discrimination, minority protection can alternately be ensured through minority specific rights. However, minority specific rights would not operate effectively without evolving a concept of collective (or group) rights in international law. Hence, while this kind of approach can provide legal methods for balancing the interests of individuals, groups and the state, it creates the possibility of conflicts with the international framework of individual rights. The ottoman millet system sets a historical example of minority protection instruments based on a collective concept of human rights. Furthermore, the ottoman history offers an illustration of what could go terribly wrong with a collective rights model. By analyzing the millet system and the ottoman legal reforms in the nineteenth century I will discuss reoccurring issues with collective rights. I will argue that incorporating collective rights within a structure founded on individual rights is a problematic way of protecting individuals belonging to minorities and other vulnerably ethnic groups. Looking through the historical development of universal human rights some important aspects of its main principles will be brought up in this paper.

Working at the intersection of narrative studies and political theory, this thesis performs an original critical intervention in Gulliver’s Travels studies to establish the work as an intertextual response to the hegemonic articulations of European travel writing produced between the 15th and 18th centuries under the discourse of Discovery. My argument proceeds through two movements. First, an archeology of studies on Gulliver’s Travels that identifies key developments and points of significance in analyses of the satire’s intertextual relationship with travel writing. Second, a discursive analysis of the role of Discovery generally, and travel writing specifically, in constructing European hegemony within a newly global context. Together these movements allow me to locate Gulliver’s Travels firmly within the discourse of Discovery and to specify the politics of the text and the poetics of its operations. For this analysis I adopt a conceptualization of hegemony elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which defines discourse as a structured totality of elements of signification, wherein the meaning and identify of each element is constituted by articulatory practices competing to fix the differences and equivalences between it and others within the discourse. An hegemonic discourse is one that successfully limits the possibility of novel articulations according to a particular governing logic. In the Age of Discovery, this governing logic, I argue, is a socio-spatial logic that constructed the “European” subject through its difference from the “Non-European,” the “civilized” subject through its difference from the “savage,” and the “free land” of the “savage” peoples through its difference from the occupied lands of the “civilized.” To conduct the concomitant critical analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible,” which refers both to the partitions determined in sensory experience that anticipate the distributions of parts and wholes, the orders of visibility and invisibility, and the relationships of address or comportment beneath every community; and to the specific practices that partake of these distributions to establish the “common sense” about the objects that make up the common world, the ways in which it is organized, and the capacities of the people within it. This enables me to establish travel writing as an articulatory practice that utilized a narrative modality to “reveal” the globe in a Eurocentric image dependent upon the logic of Discovery: a discursively constructed paradigm that I identify as what others have labeled “travel realism,” which organized the globe into a single field of discursivity predicated upon the “civilizational” and “rational” superiority of Europeans over their non-European Others. Gulliver’s Travels, I conclude, intervenes in this distribution of the sensible by utilizing the satirical form as a recomposing logic to upend the paradigm of travel realism and break away from the “sense” that it makes of the bodies, beings, and lands it re-presents. / Graduate