This thesis seeks to examine, define and categorise if possible, the major prose texts, 'Greenvoe', 'Magnus', 'Time in a Red Coat', 'Vinland' and 'Beside the Ocean of Time' and to canvas the short stories and tales written by the Scottish (Orcadian) author, George Mackay Brown. To date, little careful scholarship would seem to have been published about him in the mainstream, international recognition and praise occurring only recently, from 1994 when 'Beside the Ocean of Time' was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His seemingly very limited material and preoccupation with religious themes had set him far outside the literary norm for most of his productive life, so that any widespread appreciation of his literary talents only came late. The sources which I have used, however, are fully acknowledged in the footnotes and bibliography. This thesis will use those assessments to explore the conflicting attitudes towards Brown's work and to show that much of the appraisal of him to date is slightly patronising, rather shallow, bland but only narrowly focused. Also, occasionally, the criticism is unnecessarily bitter, Brown's anti-Presbyterianism and essential Catholicism offending some reviewers to such an extent that they lose objectivity. ... This thesis is also a product of my previous studies for a Master of Letters (Medieval Background) in English, in the course of which I explored the movement forward in time in medieval perceptions and values, in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien's major prose. History, historiography, Catholic Christianity and folk, legend and fairy-tale were also relevant to that study, and have all provided further valuable insights into an understanding and appreciation of Brown's work.

Despite his fairly consistent policy of covering up his private affairs, apart from the books read or travels chronicled, there is some considerable evidence of Graham Greene's family and career to be gleaned from official sources and the following account aims to bring together a number of these items. Quite clearly 'The Lost Childhood and other essays' (1951) and 'A Sort of Life' (1971) tell us a great deal about his life, but the public man's career is valuable for the further light which it sheds on situations and themes in the fiction.

In her early poem 'Remittance Man' (included in her first collection, 'The Moving Image', 1946), Judith Wright causes her hero to recall one aspect of the life left behind in England, his formal and respectable relatives-- "The spendthrift, disinherited and graceless, accepted his pittance with an easy air, only surprised he could escape so simply from the pheasant-shooting and the aunts in the close;" (11.1-4). From there on the poem is largely concerned with Australia, apart from glances back to 'the country ball' (1.16), 'the nursery window' (1.19) and 'the squire his brother' (1.22), who vaguely regrets the reported passing of his younger brother. Most readers of the poem have felt the phrase 'the aunts in the close' to be vaguely felicitous, but have left the association there. Students of idiom in the language have found the phrase euphonic, either formal and Trollopean, or analagous to such allocations as 'bats in the belfry' or the more recent Australian title 'Aunts up the Cross' (1965), used by Robin Eakin to refer to her aunts and uncles of two earlier generations, whose splendid eccentricities enlightened both the writer's growing-up and the general scene, as Sydney's bohemian quarter, King's Cross, endeavoured to adapt to World War II and to its social aftermath. However, the actual phrase used by Judith Wright may be shown to not merely sound appropriate to somnolent respectability in some English Cathedral city, but to have for her both a legendary ring and a place in the 19th-Century history of her family and in its surviving documents? These last were long familiar to the young girl before she became the writer chronicling in verse and prose the uneasy change from the sensibility of the Old World to that of the New for various of her forebears, and particularly her great-great-grandfather, George Wyndham (1801-1870).

The central theme of the 1999 publication from the ongoing English Dialect Lexicon project at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT) at the University of Sheffield, 'Lexical Erosion in English Regional Dialects', exemplifies a concern to record particular cases of the general and observable trend that "many regional dialect words and expressions familiar to the older generations were not being taken up in the everyday speech of younger people."

In early December, 2011, there died in Melbourne quite the most remarkable of the several Vice-Chancellors of the University of New England: Sir Zelman Cowen, a practising Jew, born and nurtured in Melbourne, and of modest Russian migrant stock whose members were much engaged in commerce during his childhood. He would serve as our Vice-Chancellor from later 1966 until 1970, when he would be appointed the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland. Initially educated at a modest state school, then at Scots College in Melbourne and the University of Melbourne - where he would graduate while in his teens - he would be a distinguished Rhodes Scholar, but only taking up that period of overseas study after significant war service in the Royal Australian Navy. In his last years he would head an Oxford College, and serve, in rotation, as the Vice-Chancellor there too.

This book, originally issued in briefer form in 1964, has enjoyed much reader popularity and has had several reprintings, despite its scholarly focus and considerable linguistic content. It was prepared at a time when there were no secondary or tertiary Aboriginal educational courses taught between Sydney and Brisbane, and it endeavoured both to assist the field work of the University of New England, and to reinforce Aboriginal self-respect, as well as assist the work of the regional historical societies of the area. Since the rewriting and integration of more recently available research into the text were largely completed, the writer has discovered that 'The Bawden Lectures' of 1886, subtitled 'The First Years of Settlement on the Clarence' had been reissued (third edition, 1979), together with a separate slim (undated) volume by Mr. R.C. Law, 'Index to the Bawden Lectures'. No apology is made for the use of the older bound editions of these Lectures in their Clarence River Historical Society Library format. In both cases, their narrower focus was largely on settlers and on their taking up of Aboriginal lands, rather than on the Aborigines themselves. The 1964 edition of 'The Land of Ulitarra' included somewhat more of these settler-biased accounts than is the case now.

This thesis is an exploration of the Folklore of Awe, and the way in which human cultures, - particularly in recent centuries, - have created representations of strange creatures and phenomena as the Other or as 'monsters' in their stories, and still continue to do so. The first part of this study looks at the idea of the 'monster' or the 'Other' in human culture, and at ways that ideas of separation have contributed to the creation of such 'monsters', examining briefly some well known examples. The second part of the study turns explicitly to Australian lore, examining the cases of: the Bunyip with its possible connection to the ancient Megafauna; the ways in which the Tasmanian Tiger has been constructed by various interested parties; the Alien Big Cats and their appreciable effect in our modem society; and the matter of Yowies, and some ideas of their possible origin. In Chapters 4 - 7, charts of sightings are included, in order to clarify the elements of the various 'creature' stories. The study then proceeds to phenomena considerably less physical in nature: Indigenous nature spirits and ghosts, Min Min Lights and Crop Circles, and the Environment itself and certain phenomena which include an immanent sense of almost magic realism in their occurrences. The human ability to have a sense of the numinous combined with the tendency to project some contents of the unconscious onto the surrounding people and environmental elements seems to have contributed greatly to the essence of tales of myth and folklore, and to be still as capable as ever of creating new and fascinating stories. ... Although this subject area could provide more than enough scope for several more theses, I have tried to accumulate and distinguish the various strands in this field of Awe, especially as it relates to Australia.

In recent years, users of the internet will have seen various references to Brigitte Boenisch-Brednich and her publications, and the folklorists among them may well recall that she and her husband, both then New Zealand-domiciled, were present at the Melbourne meeting of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Unfortunately its papers were not published in hard copy in India-as had been hoped. However, in the electronic journal, Folklore, they have long been available as articles in English, namely the full form of their Melbourne illuminating contributions.

It needs to be said, at the outset, of this selective biographical sketch, that it's subject deserves to be remembered as a courageous visionary who: changed the face of both further and tertiary education in this country, particularly for those who were not recent school-leavers; and was personally the great shaper of Australia's unique and amazingly innovative eighth founded university. His institution, as moulded by him, has not as yet been sufficiently recognized to have transformed, right across the world, the hitherto prevailing orthodoxies as to how to provide and deliver tertiary education. Further, and, more immediately, he altered the prevailing notion of 'New England's wealth' from its being based on primary produce for export to a range of 'products' generated by and for the mind, and to be ultimately delivered throughout the nation and beyond by a range of technologies that are still barely understood by many of its beneficiaries.

This thesis intends to identify and position two differing, yet interacting, narratives of socio-cultural meaning that surrounded certain formative and influential Nordic jazz music. In the latter part of the twentieth century, a small number of jazz musicians from Nordic countries gradually became well known throughout the world for playing in a highly individual manner. Their music was one of confluence, in which the established traditions of jazz music melded with a deep empathy for Western art music, and also folk music of both local and distant sources. The resultant melting pot of influences was an art that was at once extraordinarily globalised yet simultaneously retained a strong regional identity. ... The aim of this work is to establish the enduring relevance of this music in relation to the dual narratives of both a specific, localised Nordic identity, and also the greater diaspora of jazz music as it metamorphosed into a globalised improvisational language capable of assimilating and existing within a variety of music traditions, often simultaneously. This thesis will address the historic conditions surrounding the introduction of jazz music into the Nordic lands, the way in which these narratives of identity and change are expressed in the various subjects' art, and show points of intersection with relevant scholarship and theoretical frameworks. In conclusion it will be shown how the interaction of the two narratives, those of the regional and global sociology, have interacted to form an enduring aesthetic in the making of jazz music, which is rendered poignant and cultural significant both domestically in the Nordic countries and also within the aesthetic consciousness of jazz music as an art form.