Tamworth, Australia's ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rurality, and resident reactions

Since the 1970s, Tamworth has become well known as Australia's ‘country music capital’. Its annual Country and Western Music Festival has become the leading event of its type in Australia, attracting over 60,000 visitors every year. The festival, and country music more generally, have become central to the town's identity and tourism marketing strategies. This article discusses the social constructions that have surrounded Tamworth's transition to ‘country music capital’—of the ‘rural’, and of ‘country’—within the context of debates about the politics of place marketing. Textual analysis of promotional material and built landscapes reveals representations of rurality (or ‘senses of the rural’). In their most commercial form, representations of rurality converge on a dominant notion of ‘country’, quite different from the ‘countryside’ and ‘rural idyll’ in England. This dominant, or normative ‘country’ forms the basis of imagery for the festival, the Town's marketing strategy, and associated advertising campaigns by major sponsors. It is predominantly masculine, white, working class and nationalist. But links between musical style and discourses of place are complex. Colonial British histories, Celtic musical traditions and North American popular culture all inform ‘country’ in Tamworth, dissipating nationalist interpretations. Normative constructions also contrast with other, heterogeneous ruralities in Australia, that include the lived experiences of rural Australians, and on stage—in country music—where multiple ‘ruralised’ identities are performed. Even those who stand to benefit from place promotion have been uncertain about country music and ‘the country’, because of associated discourses of Tamworth as ‘hick’ and ‘redneck’. In the final section of the paper, reactions of residents to constructions of Tamworth as country music capital are discussed, via the results of a simple resident survey. In contrast to previous studies of the disempowering politics of place marketing, Tamworth residents were on the whole supportive of the new associations and images for the town, despite ‘hick’ connotations, as it has become a centre for ‘country’, and for country music. Reasons for this are explored, and resistances discussed. The result is a complex and entangled politics of national identity, gender, race and class, where meanings for place are variously interpreted and negotiated.     

Preenrollment Immunization Policies of American Colleges: An Assessment of the Need for Policy Implementation

Abstract

Alcohol abuse among college students is prevalent, yet few instruments with sound reliability and validity are available to assess these problems in this population. As part of a large, baseline assessment battery for a prospective study of offspring of alcoholics, the 27-item Young Adult Alcohol Problems Screening Test (YAAPST) was given to 490 freshmen at a large mid western university; approximately 9 months later, 482 subjects completed the scale again. In addition to asking about such traditional problems as experiencing blackouts and driving while intoxicated, the YAAPST included specific items relating to college experiences (eg, getting into sexual situations that were later regretted, missing classes, and receiving lower grades than usual). The YAAPST was designed to assess these drinking consequences over two different time frames, lifetime and past year, and also to indicate the frequency of occurrence during the past year. Results indicated that the YAAPST is a unidimensional scale with good psychometric properties (good internal consistency and test-retest reliability). Three different approaches were used to demonstrate the validity of the YAAPST. Findings supported criterion validity (with interview-based alcohol abuse/dependence diagnoses as the criterion), concurrent validity (comparing the YAAPST with other drinking measures), and construct validity (correlating the YAAPST with etiologically relevant personality, motivational, and peer influence variables). The YAAPST is a promising screening instrument for alcohol problems in college students. It has excellent psychometric properties and the potential to provide a range of useful information to the clinician or researcher.     

Framing microfinance in Australia – gender neutral or gender blind?

In Australia, microfinance is gaining visibility as a distinct poverty alleviation strategy. Within the Australian microfinance policy and program discourses, the microfinance sector is framed as targeting both men and women equally. Yet at the practice level, the majority of loan recipients are women. Such a gender neutral framing is in stark contrast to microfinance policy and practices developed elsewhere. This paper explores how gender is represented in microfinance policy and practice in Australia, drawing on an analysis of the policy and practice statements of Australian microfinance programs. It is argued that the robust feminist assessments of the relationship between microfinance and gender equality that have emerged in developing countries could usefully inform Australian developments in this area of social policy, but that this shift requires acknowledging gender in the framing of the problem Australian microfinance seeks to address.     

Small orthogonal main effect plans with four factors

In this paper we study orthogonal main effect plans with four factors, A table of such designs, where each factor has at most 10 levels, and there are at most 40 runs, is generated. We determine the spectrum of the degrees of freedom of pure error for these designs.     

Business-Cycle Analysis With a Markov-Switching Model

This article explores the Hamilton Markov-switching model through an analysis of the business cycles of eight developed market economies. Forecasting and specification tests suggest only marginal improvements over linear autoregressive models. Yet filtered and smoothed conditional probabilities indicate turning points in business cycles that closely correlate with turning points from traditional methods. Tests regarding the asymmetry of business cycles reject the null of symmetry for most countries.     

Voyaging on the seas of spirit: an ongoing journey towards understanding disability and humanity

In an important article in Disability & Society Hughes argued that ontology is becoming a ‘live issue’ in disability studies. Different sources, including non‐western and aboriginal conceptions of disability and cosmology and the literature on philosophy, religion, palliative and healthcare, suggest that we are missing a critical aspect of humanity in our discussions – the spirit. Drawing upon collectively defined or interpreted experiences of disability identified in non‐Western and aboriginal communities we identify gaps in our ontological discussions which result from taken for granted assumptions that there is only individual experience. When we incorporate spirit in our thinking we become open to emerging ways of understanding disability and humanity. Spirit is a critical, although often intangible, aspect of being alive. Drawing on these sources, ontological discussions around disability leads us to explore how experiences of disability teach us about the multiple dimensions of being human.     

Nonlinear voxel-based modelling of the haemodynamic response in fMRI

A common assumption for data analysis in functional magnetic resonance imaging is that the response signal can be modelled as the convolution of a haemodynamic response (HDR) kernel with a stimulus reference function. Early approaches modelled spatially constant HDR kernels, but more recently spatially varying models have been proposed. However, convolution limits the flexibility of these models and their ability to capture spatial variation. Here, a range of (nonlinear) parametric curves are fitted by least squares minimisation directly to individual voxel HDRs (i.e., without using convolution). A ‘constrained gamma curve’ is proposed as an efficient form for fitting the HDR at each individual voxel. This curve allows for spatial variation in the delay of the HDR, but places a global constraint on the temporal spread. The approach of directly fitting individual parameters of HDR shape is demonstrated to lead to an improved fit of response estimates.     

Disagreement in Australian partners’ reports of financial difficulty

We use unique data in which both partners report about household finances to demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. Four alternative explanations for this disagreement are tested using the data. The results indicate that disagreement may be related to the severity of the underlying material hardship rather than to gender differences or individual (as opposed to household) views of financial difficulty. We find limited evidence that for some couples information asymmetries contribute to explaining disagreement about financial difficulty. This implies that standard surveys which collect information about the household’s financial position from a representative individual may fail to completely characterize the nature of material hardship.      

The impact of wives’ earnings on income inequality: Issues and estimates

We estimate the extent to which rising family income inequality can be explained by changes in the earnings of married women. We develop a decomposition equation that separates single persons from married couples (decomposition by population group) and, for married couples, distinguishes the impact of wives' earnings from other sources of income (decomposition by income source). Despite the rising correlation between husbands' and wives' earnings, changes in wives' earnings do not explain a substantial portion of the increase in family income inequality. Our results contradict those of some previous analyses. The inconsistency of recent estimates can be traced to the use of a variety of conceptually different approaches in the previous literature. We clarify these approaches by explicitly distinguishing the conceptual issues, analyzing the empirical components, and providing comprehensive estimates.