Institute of Australian Geographers

LTAS Project: Geography -
http://www.altcexchange.edu.au/group/ltas-project-geography
This site provides access to background information, news and resources for those interested in the development of
threshold learning outcomes (‘standards’) for university-level Geography that is being undertaken during 2010 as part of the Australian Government’s Education Revolution.

A Discipline Reference Group (Geography) has been established to suport this work. It comprises:

Professor Iain Hay Chair and Discipline Scholar
Professor Lesley Head President IAG
Dr Stephen Legg DASSH Nominee
Dr Robyn Bartel Discipline Expert
Professor Kevin Dunn Discipline Expert
Professor Nigel Tapper Discipline Expert
Mr Brad Ruting Recent graduate
Dr Lorraine Craig Discipline Expert - jurisdiction outside Australia
Dr Donna Ferretti Relevant employer representative

More details - including how you can become involved - are provided at the website.

Indigenous Geographies Marae-based Workshop 3-5 July 2010 @ Taumutu, NZ.

The Indigenous Issues Group of the Institute of Australian Geographers and The Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge and Rights Commission of the International Geographical Union will join forces with Ngai Tahu and with New Zealand geographers to convene a pre-conference workshop and Indigenous Geography sessions at the Conference.

This will be held during the weekend prior to the Conference itself,[Saturday morning, 3rd July to Monday lunchtime, Monday 5th July 2010 @ Taumutu].

More Details are available at: http://www.nzgs2010.org.nz/nzgs2010_wksh.htm

Professor Iain Hay had conferred upon him by the Council of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS/IBG), the Taylor and Francis Award 2009. This award is for excellence in the promotion and practice of teaching and learning in Geography in Higher Education and was presented by RGS/IBG President Sir Gordon Conway in London on 1st June.

Emeritus-Professor Harold Brookfield, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, ANU, was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy at its 2009 annual meeting on 16 July. In this year, he is the only new Fellow with an Australian address. The British Academy writes the following about the Corresponding Fellowship:

“Corresponding Fellows are scholars living outside the UK who have attained high international standing in any of the branches of study which it is the object of the Academy to promote [i.e. across the humanities and the social sciences]. This is taken to mean even greater distinction that that required for Ordinary Fellowships. Up to ten elections are made in each year to the Corresponding Fellowship. There are currently 307 Corresponding Fellows”.

Lesley Head awarded a Laureate Fellowship

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, announced on 22 June 2009, in a ceremony at Parliament House, that 15 world-leading scholars will be awarded Australian Laureate Fellowships worth around $2.7 million each.

One of the scholars awarded a Fellowship is the President of the Institute of Australian Geographers, Professor Lesley Head.

In announcing the awards Senator Carr said that the Australian Laureate Fellowship scheme takes the best elements of the previous Federation Fellowships scheme and adds a focus on team work, career paths and leadership. ‘As part of the Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme, successful fellows will lead and mentor the next generation of research leaders, helping to build Australia’s international competitive research capacity. The work will focus on areas of national economic, environmental, cultural and social benefit …’

The 15 successful Australian Laureate Fellows were selected from a highly competitive field of 148 researchers, and the Fellowships are worth around $2.7 million each.

Professor Head was awarded her Fellowship for work in the area of cultural environmental research: the missing link in multidisciplinary approaches to sustainability. The announcement of her award provided the following biographical information.

Professor Head is Professor and Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong. Her research has focused on long-term changes in the Australian landscape and the material and conceptual interactions that both prehistoric and contemporary peoples have had with these environments.

Professor Head’s project will bring together two main intellectual currents; geographical and archaeological understandings of long term environmental change, including anthropogenic contributions, combined with a critical social sciences perspective on relations between human and non-human worlds. This research will contribute to building Australia’s international research presence in the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, with particular strengths in ethnographic and related social science methods.

Professor Head was awarded her PhD in Geography from Monash University. She was appointed the King Carl XVI Gustaf Visiting Professor of Environmental Science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. She is the only Australian to have received this award. Professor Head was Director of the GeoQuEST Research Centre and has been elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and is currently the President of the Institute Australian Geographers.

Professor Head has been involved in a number of committees, and has been the Chair (2006-08) of the Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Geography.

Geographical Research goes to ‘Early View’

We are very pleased to announce that, in cooperation with our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, Geographical Research will now be available electronically, online, in ‘Early View’ (previously termed ‘Online Early’ but changed following the merger of Blackwell Synergy into Wiley InterScience).

Early View papers are produced individually or in small batches. Papers are dealt with in the usual way: submitted to editors, refereed, returned to authors for revision, revised papers are copy-edited by the editors and returned to authors for approval, often with further queries, and then forwarded to the publisher once authors and editors are satisfied. Proofs will be sent from the publisher to authors and the relevant editor as they are prepared individually or in small batches, and the editor will incorporate all the changes into the proof and send the corrections back to the publisher. Authors are asked to note that only errors may be corrected at the proof stage: this is not the time to rewrite the paper. Once the paper is finalised it is published online, and at that point the article is considered fully published and no further changes can be made. When it is time to collate the issue, papers will be paginated and published in print and in the issue table of contents online. If there is an error in a paper published in Early View it would need to be corrected with an erratum, just as if it had been published in a hard copy issue.

There are two main benefits for authors, as we see it. First, most papers will be published more quickly than at present. There will no longer be a lag between final acceptance and copy-editing, and publication; whereas at present this lag may extend over several months.

Second, authors’ papers receive two exposures: once when the article is placed in Early View, and second when it appears in the printed version. Early View papers are cited by their digital object identifier (doi) number: at that stage they will not have volume, issue or page numbers. In all other respects they are full publications.

Geographical Research Articles on Early View:

Commentary
 An Inconvenient Truth (2006) (Directed by Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore, Paramount Pictures, USA): Review Symposium (p)
JON BARNETT, PETER CHRISTOFF, HARIPRIYA RANGAN, ELISSA SUTHERLAND
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:54AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00560.x

Papers
 Imizamo Yethu: a Case Study of Community Resilience to Fire Hazard in an Informal Settlement Cape Town, South Africa (p))
E. WENDY HARTE, IRAPHNE R.W. CHILDS, PETER A. HASTINGS
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:53AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00561.x

 Factors Affecting Late Twentieth Century Land Use Patterns in Kamakura City, Japan (p)
OH IWATA, TAKASHI OGUCHI
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:52AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00559.x

 The Role of Fire Disturbance on Runoff and Erosion Processes – a Long-Term Approach, Mt. Carmel Case Study, Israel (p)
LEA WITTENBERG, MOSHE INBAR
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:18AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00554.x

 The Role of Land Management in Shaping Arid/Semi-arid Landscapes: the Case of the Catholic Church (CICM) in Western Inner Mongolia from the 1870s (Late Qing Dynasty) to the 1940s (Republic of China) (p)
XIAOHONG ZHANG, TAO SUN, JINGSHU ZHANG
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:17AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00558.x

 Planning to Reduce Risk: The Wildfire Management Overlay in Victoria, Australia (p)
RACHEL HUGHES, DAVID MERCER
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:15AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00556.x

 Human Adaptive Responses to Catastrophic Landscape Disruptions During the Holocene at Numundo, PNG (p)
J.F. PARR, W.E. BOYD, V. HARRIOTT, R. TORRENCE
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:14AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00553.x

 MODIS-derived NDVI Characterisation of Drought-Induced Evergreen Dieoff in Western North America (p )
ANDREW N. YUHAS, LOUIS A. SCUDERI
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:14AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00557.x

 The Design and Development of a Closed Chamber for the in-situ Quantification of Dryland Soil Carbon Dioxide Fluxes (p)
STEPHEN R. HOON, ANDREW D. THOMAS, PATRICIA E LINTON
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:13AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00551.x

 A Strategic Framework for Monitoring Coastal Change in Australia’s Wet-dry Tropics – Concepts and Progress (p )
C. MAX FINLAYSON, IAN ELIOT, MATTHEW ELIOT
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:13AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00549.x

 Chemical Weathering of Detrital Sediments in the Taklamakan Desert, Northwestern China (p)
BINGQI ZHU, XIAOPING YANG
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:29PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00555.x

 History of Deforestation and Reforestation in the Dinaric Karst (p)
ANDREJ KRANJC
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:28PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00552.x

 Drivers of Unsustainable Land Use in the Semi-Arid Khabur River Basin, Syria (p)
FRANK HOLE
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:28PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00550.x

Arthur Conacher, George Curry and Roy Jones (editors)

Council has made a response to the questions asked by the Towards a National Geography Curriculum Project.  The response can be found under About IAG, Submissions of the IAG.  For more information on the Project, see their website at http://www.ngc.org.au.

The new website of the IAG was launched today. It has been completely redesigned by Electronic Productivity Solutions (www.eps.com.au), a Melbourne web development and design company. Much of the content will be familiar to members as it has been imported from the old site, but we have taken the opportunity of a redesign to add new material. There is much more information on the Institute itself, including items on the establishment of the IAG (appropriate in our 50th year), a page on the awards conferred by the Institute, and a list of all recipients of an award. The section headed About Geography is intended to provide information for non-members on Geography as a field of study, and may eventually contain material for school and university students. The role played by postgraduate students in the activities of the Institute has been recognised by giving them a separate heading on the Home Page. The site is fully searchable.A members-only section is still being developed. This will contain minutes of General Meetings, reports from Council, submissions by the IAG, news on research projects, and a searchable membership directory. The directory will be part of a new membership database with the following features:

• online membership application and renewal
• automatic generation of receipts
• automatic notification of study group interests to convenors
• the facility for members to update the information in their entry
• the facility to send emails to all members

This will make it much easier to communicate with members. In the past we have used the IAG-List as a medium of electronic communication, but only one-third of members subscribe to the List, while two-thirds of the people on the List are not members. We now hope to be able to send members items of news and information each month.

Membership renewal for 2009 will be done online, with members filling in their personal details and areas of interest to add to the database. You will be sent an email late this year explaining how to register to login to the membership system and enter your details.

The photos on the main pages of the new site were taken by the following members of the IAG: Clive Forster, Arthur Conacher, Richard Baker, Jim Walmsley, Amity James, George Curry, Iain Hay and Alaric Maude.

Some areas of the new site are still under development, and more material will be added over the next few months. If you have suggestions for additions or corrections to the content please contact either the Secretary, Alaric Maude, or the Web Secretary, Julie Kesby, whose contact details are on the Contact Us page.

The URL remains the same: http://www.iag.org.au

At the General Meeting of the IAG in Hobart, awards were conferred on two members for their achievements and service. The Griffith Taylor Medal was awarded to Professor Joe Powell, and a Distinguished Fellowship to Dr Peter Smailes. The citiations for these awards will be added to the Awards page, under About IAG, as soon as possible.

The results of the elections for membership of Council for 2008-2010 were announced by the President, Professor Jim Walmsley, at the General Meeting of the IAG held on 1st July 2008.

Iain Hay was elected Vice-President (President Elect)
Stewart Williams was elected Treasurer/Membership Secretary
Alaric Maude was elected Secretary

As there were no nominations for the three positions of Councillor, the Council nominated the following as new Council members:

David Gillieson
Rachel Hughes
Miriam Williams (Postgraduate Representative)