The aim of my thesis is to document the cultural history and heritage of the ancient Australian canine, the dingo. An analysis of the complex symbiotic relationship between the dingo and human society for over 4,600 years reveals an animal uniquely positioned as both a human companion and top-order predator - fulfilling important ecosystem services across the Australian mainland, complementary to their role in traditional Aboriginal society. The thesis collates ethnographic, scientific and social representations of the dingo, and interrogates the legacy of 200 years of dingo control across the south-eastern third of the continent. I use a writing technique called a prosopography to explore areas of knowledge about dingoes, and the culture and heritage surrounding them. This involves recording human-animal encounters in the form of the stories of individual animals within a contextual history, revealing themes, patterns, inconsistencies and anomalies in dingo-human history. The listing of the species as endangered on the IUCN Red List (2004) and as a threatened species in the State of Victoria (2008) underscores the importance of critical analysis, revealing processes underlying the construction and dissemination of dingo knowledge that reinforce their cultural and physical marginalization. The study reveals a complex human-dingo history, and strives to present this information in a comprehensible format as a basis for discussion - allowing new insights into the unique history of the dingo's survival at the heart of traditional Aboriginal society and at the limits and borderlands of contemporary environmental management.

'Nassella trichotoma' (Nees) Hack. ex Arechav. (common name, serrated tussock) occupies large areas of south-eastern Australia and has considerable scope for expansion in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. This highly invasive grass reduces pasture productivity and has the potential to severely affect the region's economy by decreasing the livestock carrying capacity of grazing land. Other potential consequences of this invasion include increased fuel loads and displacement of native plants, thereby threatening biodiversity. Rural property owners in the Northern Tablelands were sent a mail questionnaire that examined use of measures to prevent new outbreaks of the weed. The questionnaire was sent to professional farmers as well as lifestyle farmers (owners of rural residential blocks and hobby farms) and 271 responses were obtained (a response rate of 18%). Key findings were respondents' limited capacity to detect 'N. trichotoma', and low adoption of precautions to control seed spread by livestock, vehicles and machinery. This was particularly the case among lifestyle farmers. There have been considerable recent changes to biosecurity governance arrangements in New South Wales, and now is an ideal time for regulators and information providers to consider how to foster regional communities' engagement in biosecurity, including the adoption of measures that have the capacity to curtail the spread of 'N. trichotoma'.

Domestic space heating in many cold regions of Australia is usually supplied by heaters running on solid wood, gas or electricity. All three fuel sources usually emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. Firewood collection for wood heaters has serious impacts on biodiversity. Wood heaters emit smoke and other gases which cause serious health problems. This research looked at pellet heaters as an alternative home heating option, to see if they could reduce wood smoke pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity impacts, using the Northern Tablelands of NSW as a case study. The research looked at existing literature and conducted social surveys to find that pellet heaters are a suitable home heating option with lower emissions and lower impacts on biodiversity than other options. Pellet heaters will be slightly more expensive to purchase and operate, so options for providing incentives for their uptake were examined. There are public benefits from pellet heaters (public health, biodiversity and climate), and so there may be a case for policy intervention to encourage their uptake. Pellet supply was identified as a disincentive to the uptake of the heaters. The research found that there are suitable local sources of waste wood or silvicultural by-products to support pellet manufacture in the region. An efficient pellet plant would need to produce in the vicinity of 50,000 tonnes per year to be viable. Such a plant would over-supply the Northern Tablelands under the most optimistic scenario, so a market would need to be created for pellets outside the region.

Natural hazard management policy directions in Australia – and indeed internationally – are increasingly being aligned to ideas of resilience. However, the definition and conceptualization of resilience in relation to natural hazards is keenly contested within academic literature (Klein et al., 2003; Wisner et al., 2004; Boin et al., 2010; Tierney, 2014). Broadly speaking, resilience to natural hazards is the ability of individuals and communities to cope with disturbances or changes and to maintain adaptive behaviour (Maguire and Cartwright, 2008). Building resilience to natural hazards requires the capacity to cope with the event and its aftermath, as well as the capacity to learn about hazard risks, change behaviour, transform institutions and adapt to a changing environment (Maguire and Cartwright, 2008).
The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index is a tool for assessing the resilience of communities to natural hazards at a large scale. Using a top down approach, the assessment will provide input to macro-level policy, strategic planning, community planning and community engagement activities at National, State and local government levels. First, it is a snapshot of the current state of natural hazard resilience at a national scale. Second, it is a layer of information for use in strategic policy development and planning. Third, it provides a benchmark against which to assess future change in resilience to natural hazards. Understanding resilience strengths and weaknesses will help communities, governments and organizations to build the capacities needed for living with natural hazards.
Design of the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index
The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index will assess resilience based on two sets of capacities – coping capacity and adaptive capacity. We have used a hierarchical structure for the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index. Indicators provide the data for a theme – together the indicators measure the status of the theme. We collected approximately 90 indicators across the eight coping and adaptive capacity themes. Indicators were collected at Statistical Area 2 (SA2) resolution where possible.
Results of the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index
The results and initial trends in the eight themes of the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index are presented below. It should be noted that these interpretations and maps are subject to further change as the State of Disaster Resilience Report is developed. What is presented here is an overview of the pattern of index values. In all maps, lower index values in brown represent lower disaster resilience and higher index values in green represent higher disaster resilience. Each of the sections is an SA2 division of the ABS.

What is the Problem?
In 2010, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) adopted resilience as one of the key guiding principles for making the nation safer. The National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (Australian Government 2011) outlines how Australia should aim to improve social and community resilience with the view that resilient communities are in a much better position to withstand adversity and to recover more quickly from extreme events. The recent Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 also uses resilience as a key concept and calls for a people centred, multi-hazard, multi-sectoral approach to disaster risk reduction. As such each tier of government, emergency services and related NGOs have a distinct need to be able assess and monitor the ability to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters as well as a clear baseline condition from which to measure progress.
Why is it Important?
Society has always been susceptible to extreme events. While the occurrence of these events generally cannot be prevented; the risks can often be minimised and the impacts on affected populations and property reduced. For people and communities, the capacity to cope with, adapt to, learn from, and where needed transform behaviour and social structures in response to an event and its aftermath all reduce the impact of the disaster (Maguire and Cartwright, 2008) and can broadly be considered resilience. Improving resilience at various scales and thereby reducing the effects of natural hazards has increasingly become a key goal of governments, organisations and communities within Australia and internationally.
How are we going to solve it?
The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index project intends to produce a spatial representation of the current state of disaster resilience across Australia. The index will be composed of multiple levels of information that can be reported separately and represented as colour-coded maps where each point will have a corresponding set of information about natural hazard resilience. Spatially explicit capture of data (i.e. in a Geographical Information System) will facilitate seamless integration with other types of information and mapping and allow the use of the project outcomes in the preparation, prevention and recovery spheres. Additionally, the index and indicators will be drawn together as a State of Disaster Resilience Report which will interpret resilience at multiple levels and highlight hotspots of high and low elements of natural hazard resilience.

Australia faces increasing losses from natural hazard events. Resilient communities will be better able to anticipate hazards, withstand adversity, reduce losses and adapt and learn in a changing environment. The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index is a system to assess and report the resilience of Australian communities to natural hazards.

Mandated weed control has a long history as a tool to restrict the spread and impact of serious agricultural and environmental weed species. For mandated control to be effective, control requirements must be strictly enforced for both private and public landholders, and landholders themselves must be supportive of legal enforcement requirements. Using data from a 2011 landholder survey of fireweed ('Senecio madagascariensis') impact and management in south-eastern Australia, we explored the factors influencing attitudes to mandated weed control. Factors associated with support for mandated fireweed weed control included compelling poorly performing neighbours to manage their weeds more effectively,optimism regarding the potential to restrict a weed's impact, current control activity, and the potential for mandated control to restrict or slow the spread of fireweed. Factors associated with opposition to mandated fireweed control included the burden it places on landholders, pessimism about the potential to restrict a weed's spread or reduce its impact, the view that bad fireweed problems result from certain land management practices, and a belief that declaration had not worked for other weed species. Mandated fireweed control is most likely to be of benefit in regions where the weed has not established fully, and there is a greater chance of successfully restricting its spread and establishment. It is critical to focus on lifestyle farmers and absentee farmers who are less likely to have an economic incentive to manage fireweed. In regions where fireweed is already established, the goal is to reduce its impacton farm productivity, rather than attempting containment or eradication. In this case, non mandated control approaches are more appropriate, including education, control support, and encouragement of cross boundary control activities.

Though shaped by past elements, history demonstrates that future landscapes will be very different from those of the present. This is particularly so in coastal areas of rapid urban growth. The effects of climate change in the future will therefore be impacting on these quite different landscapes, not on those we see today. To gauge the severity of these impacts we must understand the future settlement patterns likely to emerge. This project examines the past and present drivers of landscape change in the Northern Rivers region of north-eastern New South Wales, and then models several scenarios for the future, based on land use planning decisions that might be taken. For example, the two extremes are a scenario of 'deregulated' growth, and one which takes a high degree of precaution, a 'high climate adapted' scenario. The effects of these 'alternative futures' can be visualised, and the area of land, and number of people affected by climate change impacts, quantified. The approach enables important elements of the landscape to be integrated. Also, by enabling alternative futures to be visualised, the method may also be used to engage the community to have a say in their preferred pathway.

Although wood smoke pollution has been linked to health problems, wood burning remains a popular form of domestic heating in many countries across the world. In this paper, we describe the rhetoric of resistance to wood heater regulation amongst citizens in the regional Australian town of Armidale, where wood smoke levels regularly exceed national health advisory limits. We discuss how this is related to particular sources of resistance, such as affective attachment to wood heating and socio-cultural norms. The research draws on six focus groups with participants from households with and without wood heating. With reference to practice theory, we argue that citizen discourses favouring wood burning draw upon a rich suite of justifications and present this activity as a natural and traditional activity promoting comfort and cohesion. Such discourses also emphasise the identity of the town as a rural community and the supposed gemeinschaft qualities of such places. We show that, in this domain of energy policy, it is not enough to present 'facts' which have little emotional association or meaning for the populace. Rather, we need understand how social scripts, often localised, inform identity and practice.

This paper reports on research into the learning aspects of adopting integrated parasite management practices for sheep (IPM-s) applying a workplace learning framework. An analysis of four primary data sources was conducted; a postal survey of Australian wool producers, a Delphi process with IPM-s researchers, focus groups and interviews with wool producers. Researchers had a high expectation of conceptual and high level procedural knowledge for IPM-s, while wool producers had a tendency to rely on low- and high-level procedural knowledge for parasite management. Researchers also showed concern for disposition as it related to parasite management. Practices identified as potentially problematic for extension, included worm egg count testing (according to best practice), supplementary feed (specifically for worm management), selecting estimated breeding value-tested rams, weighing and monitoring body condition scores, and keeping written paddock histories. This research provides significant empirical insights into the knowledge differences between researchers and producers that can affect how research is developed and communicated for the IPM-s project to facilitate behaviour change. The identification of some IPM practices as problematic for producers will also allow targeted extension for these practices.