What's On at UWA

Robert Humphries1, Tom Long1, Katrina Walton2 and David Allen3 Water Corporation of Western Australia1, Chemistry Centre of Western Australia2, MBS Environmental3

Most Australian water utilities strive to direct stabilized wastewater sludges, or biosolids, to beneficial uses. However, the “solutions” to the problems of biosolids utilization are often expensive, inefficient in terms of transport distances, and unstable because of constantly changing perceptions regarding the health risks and environmental safety of biosolids.

This Water Corporation project has determined the social, environmental, technical and economic feasibility of converting annual pastures on grey acid sands in the nutrient-enriched Ellen Brook catchment into perennial-plant based farming systems by using a combined soil conditioner /slow-release fertiliser based on a blend of lime-amended biosolids, or LAB with clay. The new product is called Lime-amended BioClay®, or LaBC®.

LaBC® corrects soil acidity, soil water repellence and significantly improves soil water holding capacity. It also provides a valuable source of organic matter, slow release nutrients and trace elements to improve soil biology and reduce leaching losses of nutrients – a major issue with conventional soluble fertilisers.

There are many benefits from using LaBC® on acid sands. These include reducing excessive nutrient loads to groundwater and surface waters, facilitating economically and environmentally beneficial land use change, and converting a business problem into a valuable resource.

The research phase of the work is complete, and community acceptance of LaBC® is growing, with farmers impatient to use the product.



PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

Our free information sessions will give you a head-start on making your child's Year 10 or 11 experience a positive one.

You'll hear about UWA's new course structure, how you can help your child choose their upper-school subjects and important dates to keep in mind.

UWA Admissions staff will be available to answer any queries following the presentation.

A public lecture by Dr Ron Kikinis, Director, Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

For the last decade, Professor Kikinis has focused on creating a software platform to make it easier to translate engineering prototypes for image post-processing into diagnostics and surgical treatment. In his talk, Professor Kikinis will discuss current state-of-the-art tools and recent progress from a personal perspective.

Cost: Free, no RSVP required.

Join the Winthrop Singers bright and early to celebrate the Feast of The Ascension.

William Byrd: Mass for Four Voices

Reading: Matthew 5: 38-48

Motet: Philips, Ascendit Deus

2011 Flora Bunning Memorial prize winners Riley Skevington, Elena Phatak, Eunise Cheng and Jeremy Huynh present and exciting program for string quartet, featuring Schubert's "Death and the Maiden"

Visiting Scholar Professor Emeritus Timothy Earle, from Northwestern University, Illinois, and supported by the Society of Antiquaries of London presents a seminar bringing together case studies from his many years of research in the Pacific.

The development of chiefdoms was a political act, concerning the elemental powers derived from the political economy, from warrior might, and from religious ideology. Three prehistoric cases from the Pacific (the Lapita, Vanuatu, and Hawai’i) are used to construct a model of how chiefs come to power. The necessary conditions for their emergence rested on an ability to control specific economic bottlenecks, such as a long-distance trade, complicated technologies, or highly productive lands. Resources, including both subsistence foods and prestige goods, could then be mobilized to support the chiefly strategies that involved their power specialists, who included land managers, captains, warriors, and priests.

Our free information sessions will give you a head-start on making your child's Year 10 or 11 experience a positive one.

You'll hear about UWA's new course structure, how you can help your child choose their upper-school subjects and important dates to keep in mind.

UWA Admissions staff will be available to answer any queries following the presentation.

Ms Alexandra Debowski will give a talk on "The development of a tetracycline-based gene regulation system to study H. pylori pathogenesis and persistence" in the Microbiology & Immunology Seminar room, Friday, 18 May 2012 at 09.00am. A limited number of genetic tools are available to study Helicobacter pylori pathogenesis. In particular, gene expression systems, that allow the regulation of bacterial genes during an infection are lacking. Such a genetic tool is of particular importance to study the functional role and temporal requirements of H. pylori virulence determinants as infection is persistent and clinical diseases develop after many years of chronic inflammation and epithelial damage. This study describes the development of a chromosomal H. pylori gene regulation system based on tetracyclines for the control of gene expression, both in vitro and in vivo.

This talk,will highlight recent efforts from our lab to increase the translational potential of cognitive bias modification by improving understanding of how it works, and determining how it compares to other established treatments.

The immune system can be seen as the metaphorical factor of applied performance, which makes the latter artistic practice more than simply social work. Transposed into a functional nomenclature, the immune system makes a larger body stay healthy by encountering visitors (pathogens) by way of recollection, accommodation, identification, discrimination, protection, and aggression. But it may also learn to live with strangers, ad interim, even if it doesn’t quite know who they are. This captures the current challenges of contemporary applied performance very well.

Applied performance is used when social crises require extraordinary management beyond simple solutions. Such conflicts often subsist on deep structural and implicit behavioural attitudes between two parties in situations of, i.e., racism, bullying, gender discord, postcolonial disputes, ecological predicaments, and so forth. Applied performance is often initiated by a third party, e.g., extension workers in non-governmental organizations, who approach conflicts with an equally cooperative and critical mind towards the host culture, but also those who choose to participate in projects.

Amanda Newall is Senior Lecturer in sculpture at Royal Institute of Arts (Kungliga Konsthögskolan) in Stockholm, Sweden. She is also conducting a doctoral project at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London. She has taught sculpture, socially engaged art, curatorship, professional practice and new media at Auckland University, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts (UK), and has exhibited numerous international shows.

Ola Johansson is Guest Professor in artistic research at Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts (Stockholms dramatiska högskola). His books on community theatre and performance art are paralleled by creative work in intercultural performance, documentary film, devising, and applied performance. He has taught devising and applied performance in the UK, Sweden and India. Johansson’s have published two books, Community Theatre and AIDS (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Performance and Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Performing Arts (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008).

The flourishing vocal program at UWA's School of Music presents an exciting program of music by UWA Senior vocal students.

What happens when you have a show needing a chorus of men and five major male leads, but only five men and not a tenor in sight, too many women who are all suitable to sing the two major women leads, no budget, no sets, no props, a bare music auditorium and a grand piano?

Answer. UWA Vocal Students condensed version of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. Arguably the most popular Gilbert & Sullivan opera of all time, this is a Mikado with a difference. Watch as the Mikado never appears. Be stunned at the multi-personalities of Yum Yum, Nanki Poo, as you've never seen him before, Pooh Bah from Glasgow, and Katisha "the cougar". Be amazed at how great the men's chorus sounds ... with women. Look out for the next Lord High Executioner - will it be you? Witty dialogue, new narration, stunning music, and fresh and eager young voices. Why haven't you booked your seat already? A Mikado not to be missed.

Artistic Director Andrew Foote Accompanist and Coach Caroline Badnall

Price - Unreserved Tickets at door Standard: $15 Concession: 10 Students: Free

RSVP by Monday 14 May 2012 (by phone only - 9384 6166) Cost: UWAHS members Free, non-members $5.00

FOUR FOUNDATION PROFESSORS Panel presentation of ‘thumb-nail’ profiles: 1. Professor A. D. Ross - Dr. John Robins 2. Professor H. E. Whitfeld - Winthrop Professor John Melville-Jones 3. Professor E. O. G. Shann - Dr. Pamela Statham Drew (read by Dr. Joan Pope) 4. Professor W. J. Dakin - Dr. Brenton Knott

Eight professorial staff were appointed during 1912 and arrived at the new University of Western Australia at Irwin Street in Perth ready to commence classes in March 1913. The UWA Historical Society is delighted to take this opportunity to re-introduce these pioneering figures, and plans another panel later in the year to acknowledge Professors N. T. Wilsmore, W. G. Woolnough, J. W. Paterson and W. L. Murdoch.

Their disciplines were shared between three Faculties and in addition to their teaching duties most served, on a rotational basis, as Vice-Chancellor.

You may care to bring your own picnic afternoon tea to enjoy in the grounds or on the verandah. The Reid Library café is open until 4pm, or the UWA Club café is open until 5pm.

A public lecture by Ann Hunter, Lecturer/Law Coordinator, School of Indigenous Studies, UWA.

The lecture will examine the approach taken by British and colonial governments towards Aboriginal people in the formative years of the Swan River Colony. The colonial and British government pronounced that Aboriginal people were to be regarded as British subjects with similar rights to those of the colonists under British law. Dr Hunter’s lecture will demonstrate that this was not the case. She will examine how legalistic style devices, policies and actions such as outlawry were employed to deny Aboriginal people their rights, particularly Noongar people on whose land the colonial invasion first occurred.

Cost: Free, no RSVP required.

Five nights only. From Tuesday May 22 through to Saturday May 26, at 8pm. $20 full; $15 concession. Tickets at door. Theatre students in English and Cultural Studies present contemporary English playwright Howard Barker’s revisioning of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean revenge tragedy Women Beware Women. Directed by Assoc. Prof. Steve Chinna. Middleton’s play was last performed at UWA in the Octagon Theatre in 1982, directed by then director-in-residence Timothy West with a cast comprising English Department staff and members of the UWA GRADS and UDS theatre communities.

Barker utilises most of the first four acts and the language of Middleton’s play in its first half, with a second half comprised of Barker’s mixture of vividly poetic and robust vernacular language. While Middleton saw fit to end his play with a conventional revenge tragedy massacre of his troublesome protagonists, Barker takes the trajectories of the protagonists towards a denouement which leaves all but one of the characters surviving, but which shatters the ducal state of greed, misogyny, and moral corruption. Some coarse language.

Honourable Aburizal Bakrie is visiting The University of Western Australia as a distinguished guest and speaker of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies. Mr Bakrie is the Golkar Party's nominee for the Indonesian Presidential elections in 2014. Given that Indonesia is the largest Muslim state in the world and our immediate neighbour in the Indian Ocean Region, his views on the implications of Indonesian politics for Australia-Indonesia relations would be of great value to our country.

"Of Mice and Men" Speaker: Orkan Telhan

Life sciences made a recent return to the design scene. Day after day, we witness design evangelists promoting witty products, materials, and architecture that make use of living matter in unprecedented ways: Genetically-crafted mosquitoes fight against their own species to prevent Malaria; synthetic bacteria, when not making fuel, are put to work as low-cost cosmetics for the elderly; bricks made of synthetic fungi lay the walls of post-bio-mimicry architecture.

The Nature of Design is changing. It is becoming an interdisciplinary enterprise beyond form and function; a field of synthetic opportunism to serve up the last bit of molecules for grooming human needs and desires.

The Design of Nature is also changing. Apart from the sentimentalism towards pastoral days, nature, after its “synthetic turn,” is returning back as a molecular battlefield, where each species is trying to take back control from each other.

In this talk, I reflect on the changes that are fundamentally transforming our perception of design and nature today. I discuss a series of work in relation to recent advances in biological sciences and engineering. From living to semi-living, to the non-living, and, synthetically death, I will present new frontiers of design where new ways of composing, assembling, regulating, programming and tinkering life can be seen beyond cheap medicine, better-yielding crops, sustainable building materials or renewable energy, and offer a different logic of life.

Orkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility. Telhan is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts - Emerging Design Practices at University of Pennsylvania, School of Design.

The film demonstrates how villagers living in the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, transformed the game of cricket into their own form of ritual and fun. Methodist missionaries introduced cricket to the Trobriand Islands in 1903, the residents then altered the game to represent their own culture. Through the creation of their own version of the sport, the Trobriand Islanders did not lose sight of the competitive nature of cricket – they just extended the game to include dancing, chanting, ritual warfare and feasting!

Come along and see how the Trobriand Islanders changed a game that we all thought we knew so well.

FREE EVENT

RSVP: Bookings essential to Alexandra Tough on [email protected] or (08) 6488 3079

A public lecture by Professor Shaun P. Collin, WA Premier’s Research Fellow, and Winthrop Professor, The UWA Oceans Institute.

The eye, and ultimately the brain, mediates the detection of light by all organisms on earth. However, eyes are all different and the levels of light available for vision vary enormously in different environments.

This lecture will examine what constitutes an “eye” and the range of functions it has in image formation and setting circadian rhythms in animals that inhabit the ocean and compare these to the eyes of terrestrial animals, including humans.

The oceans are filled with exquisite examples about how light is used for survival and many of these models are informing us of new light detection mechanisms that can be useful for understanding not only the evolution of the eye but also how important it is in maintaining optimal human health.

Cost: Free, no RSVP required.

The UWA Winthrop Singers perform a choral Evensong on Thursdays at 6pm during semester. These currently take place at St Thomas More College chapel.

Responses: Tomkins

Psalm 101

Old Testament Reading: Genesis 47:13-19

New Testament Reading: Hebrews 8:1-7

Canticles: Walmisley in d minor

Anthem: Brumel, "Agnus Dei"