Kathryn Trees

During the Second World War (1939–1945), Western Australian author Rix Weaver published her New Holland trilogy comprising Behold, New Holland! (1940), New Holland Heritage (1941) and Beyond Cooralong (1945). These novels were highly popular at the time of publication, serialised in magazines and on radio and reportedly taught in local high schools. Though published in the 1940s, these novels are of significant cultural importance because they provide a relatively rare historical depiction of the establishment and development of the Swan River colony (later known as Perth) from 1830. Even more unusual is the emphasis on the lives of women in these works. Arguably Weaver’s trilogy contains a dual narrative, one devoted to the early colonisation of Western Australia between 1830 and the 1880s while the other personalises the settlement stories through her heroines Jane Mabie and her daughter Jennifer in conjunction with their families. Through the historically grounded romantic stories of Jane and Jennifer, the experiences of women are depicted within early settler history. In this article, we read Weaver’s trilogy as “romantic historical fiction” (Teo & Fresno-Calleja, 2025) where the trilogy format calls into question the kinds of endings and closures given to their heroines. Overall, we argue that Weaver’s context while writing, the trilogy format and historical setting contribute to the individual and collective, not always happy, ending(s) of these novels.

This article explores Anthropoiesis, the authors’ eco-performance installation presented as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time, Space, Existence  exhibition at the Venice Biennial during the Venice Biennale Architettura 2023. Drawing on David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019), the project investigated how ecocritical texts might be reconceived as multisensory artworks, advancing the concept of slow listening to engage with the Anthropocene’s scalar extremes. By integrating spoken word performance, soundscapes and visual poetry, Anthropoiesis sought to disrupt anthropocentric narratives, compelling audiences to confront the disorienting temporal and spatial dynamics of ecological crises. Foregrounding the urgency of improving attunement to landscapes, the article situates Anthropoiesis within the broader challenge of anthropogenic planetary destabilisation. Its multidisciplinary design reimagines Farrier’s ecocritical text as a sonic and visual assemblage, layered with living, organic and technologically generated soundscapes. Positioned within a nested exhibition alongside Ainslie Murray’s Registry of Itinerant Architectures and Joshua Zeunert’s Shallow Roots, Deep Incisions, offered a multisensory exploration of fluctuating scales and temporal horizons, creating an immersive experience to transcend traditional narrative structures. The article argues that sonic ecologies can help to reorient audiences within fractured Anthropocenic landscapes. Through the lens of slow listening, it analyses how the installation provokes reflection, destabilises linear perceptions of time and space and facilitates poiesis as a threshold moment of ecological revelation. Discussion moves from the project’s interdisciplinary approach to examine the transformative possibilities of careful listening as a critical and creative intervention. In doing so, it seeks to foster heightened attentiveness to more-than-human presences and advance collaborative performance-making to address the sublime tensions of the Anthropocenic moment.

Following increased awareness that the economic impacts alone do not justify support for tourism, studies on residents' perceptions have gained importance. Most early studies of tourism that used social exchange theory (SET) to study residents' perceptions were in advanced countries rather than African countries. This paper provides an empirical discussion of how SET can be used to explore residents’ perceptions of tourism in Southeastern Nigeria to contribute to research on the topic. In-depth interviews were conducted with 208 residents. Results of this study indicated that residents' perceptions of tourism could be influenced by creating opportunities for gender equity, community development and cultural preservation, fear of copying new behaviour from tourists, and local perceptions of foreign white tourists. The study concluded that a theoretical understanding of residents' perceptions of tourism requires identifying and addressing issues that influence such perceptions, which is essential for developing the industry in the area.

There is a shortage of literature on the nature of tourism development and the socio-cultural impacts in Nigeria, making it challenging to identify and discuss strategies for building on positive aspects. Unplanned tourism leaves local people aggrieved, whilst planned tourism may provide economic benefits and help to revive their culture. Although tourism development in Nigeria is affected by terrorism and insecurity, the government is willing to develop the industry. Therefore, research is needed to understand tourism development and socio-cultural consequences. This paper reports on a study conducted in Southeastern Nigeria, which confirmed that tourism is in the early development stage, and the local people noted that significant adverse impacts are not observable. The paper proposes strategies for addressing potential negative socio-cultural impacts, including being realistic, working together, creating equal opportunities and education/awareness. This paper provides valuable information for planners and developers on possible ways of developing resident-friendly tourism destination.

Advocacy for the responsible development of tourism continues to attract attention from scholars. The emergence of responsible tourism in the 1990s was a call to action, and for a move from setting agendas (sustainable tourism) to stakeholder accountability. As tourism is still developing in Nigeria, this paper discusses strategies for supporting responsible tourism development in the Southeastern region of the country. Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were organized with 166 stakeholders, including staff of tourism parastatals, traditional rulers, the representatives of men, women and youth and local security agencies. Findings identified possible strategies for determining if, when and how responsible tourism development might occur. These strategies include stakeholder empowerment, funding for tourism supporting facilities, boosting security and capacity for implementing tourism policies. The findings suggest that if well implemented, the tourism strategies are central to achieving future resident and tourist friendly development.

Collaboration and community participation are crucial for securing sustainable tourism and highlight the need to listen and respond to the broad range of stakeholders’ voices, opinions, and concerns. These concepts dominated the discourse of sustainable-responsible tourism and gave rise to collaboration theory as well as various types of community participation. Many scholars in both Western and emerging economies have employed these concepts; however, there is limited research on how they apply in the Nigerian tourism industry. Therefore, this exploratory research discusses collaboration and community participation in tourism development in Nigeria, using the Southeastern region as a case study. In this area, tourism is in the early phase of growth. The paper reports on interviews and focus group discussions used to interact with tourism stakeholders in the region (traditional rulers, men, women, and youth representatives, chief priests, security agents, and tourism officials). Results showed that while the stakeholders are willing to collaborate, challenges affecting their efforts include autocratic governance structures leading to mistrust, clash of responsibilities, inadequate funding for security, lack of tourism awareness and little respect for local culture. The paper concludes that to develop a resident-friendly tourism destination and sustain collaboration and community participation, stakeholders require education about tourism and opportunities to participate in planning.

Popular fiction for women has been variously criticised and derided for a focus on romance plots and superficial themes. Marian Keyes, a prolific author of contemporary women’s popular fiction, however, utilises romance to explore serious contemporary issues. This paper examines the representation of one of these serious issues, domestic violence, in Keyes’ novel This Charming Man (2008). The novel’s multi-story plot gradually weaves together the histories and experiences of four female protagonists from their individual points of view. Each protagonist has had a romantic involvement with one ‘charming man’, the rich and powerful Irish politician Paddy de Courcy. Chapters devoted to each woman are interspersed with short vignettes that recount moments of Paddy’s violent behaviour. The narrative organisation of This Charming Man represents domestic violence in a way that prioritises healing, physically, mentally and emotionally, for the protagonists through telling their stories and sharing those stories with other characters and readers. This form of creative writing prompts reader engagement and reflection. Such readerly engagement may increase awareness of this issue and potentially lead readers to actively seek change in their own lives.

This article discusses response and response-ability to shocking real-world events and images that influence our daily interactions with vulnerable others who we do not know. It argues that response-ability includes an ethical obligation to respond, and to facilitate response-ability for self and others. It takes the witnessing of a young man who died while train-surfing as an example of an event that demands response. The description of this tragic circumstance may be disturbing. The article identifies writing as an ethical response.

In The Art of Living and Dying, Osho writes that the West attempts to hide death. This is in spite of the increase in representations of death and dying in non-fiction and fiction writing, film and television entertainment, documentaries, news, sociology and psychology this century. There is however, limited writing about everyday, personal experiences of dying and death, perhaps because we find the personal too close to disclose, or language and grammar inadequate. This paper discusses aspects of what it means to be with, or alongside, someone who is dying from a personal perspective. It follows Kübler-Ross in suggesting that we need to speak and listen meaningfully about experiences of those who are dying and those with, or alongside, them. It draws on the experience of being with a friend and an uncle in the final weeks of their lives to suggest that society would benefit from confronting death productively, accepting that we all die and engaging positively in the process of dying with the person who is dying, those alongside them, family, friends and community. Writing and talking about death, requires taking account of bodies – those of the person who is dying, as well as those who are alongside them.

This paper argues for the use of mobile media technology and youth engagement in creating health promotion messages aimed at young people. It also provides an account of researchers and Indigenous people and organisations working together to build skills beyond the specific research. It does this by drawing on an evaluation of an alcohol awareness campaign carried out by Goolarri Media via television and radio. The author and her collaborator carried out this evaluation with assistance from organisations and individuals in Broome, Western Australia, during the period May to August 2010. The three core objectives were to assess audience awareness of the campaign, to assess audience opinion of the campaign, and to gauge any change in audience behaviours and attitudes towards alcohol consumption. The target audience for the media campaign, and hence the main target population for data collection and analysis, was Indigenous youth in Broome and the wider Kimberley region (the broadcast area of Goolarri TV and Radio). This paper discusses the effectiveness of the television and radio advertisements and reports general findings, including that inclusion of local youth in the advertisements and in the design and production of the campaign was a positive factor, and that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth use telephones and other aspects of mobile media for social networking and entertainment, displacing television viewing and radio listening to a significant extent. The findings indicated that future advertising campaigns aimed at Indigenous youth in cities or regional centres should concentrate on mobile software technology and social media opportunities. The paper explores in detail two of the most interesting findings: disengagement of youth and the rise of mobile media use. Analysis of the synergistic qualitative and quantitative data from the study also leads to the conclusion that youth involvement in creating, accessing and sharing knowledge facilitates health promotion.