Brien, Donna Lee
Professor Donna Lee Brien, BEd (Deakin), MA (UTS), PhD (QUT), Grad Cert in Higher Ed (UNE), is Professor of Creative Industries at Central Queensland University, where she supervises doctoral and masters students in creative writing and other creative art forms. She has designed and taught programs in the creative arts in Australia and internationally, including in the UK and Hong Kong, and has won national university teaching awards. Brien’s biography John Power 1881-1943 is the standard biography of this creative expatriate Australian. She is also the co-author of the bestselling trade self-help ‘Girls Guide’ series for Allen & Unwin, and author of more than 20 sole-authored books and exhibition catalogues, and more than 150 refereed journal articles and book chapters.
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ArticlesEdith and John Power were a wealthy expatriate Australian couple who lived in England and Europe from the early years of the 20th century until their deaths. In 1915 John Power married Edith Lee in London before serving as a surgeon on the Western Front in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war Edith and John left Britain to live in Paris and Brussels in...Read more
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Editorial“Smack habit, love habit – what's the difference? They both can kill you.” (Helen Garner, Monkey Grip, 1976) From tennis scores to computer viruses, love is all around us, but do we live in an age where “Love is all you need”? In the post-AIDS, post-September 11, post-Bali globalised...Read more
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Articles“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies In a world where nothing is certain… and even the objectivity of...Read more
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EditorialCollaboration is a highly desirable and, increasingly, often a mandated element in many modes of research, creative and business practice—and a factor on which successful and innovative outcomes, as well as funding, often depend. While there is a growing literature on collaboration (and especially teamwork) in business settings, there is little material...Read more
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Feature1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction It has frequently been noted that ICTs and social networking applications have blurred the once-clear boundary between work, leisure and entertainment, just as they have collapsed the distinction between public and private space. While each individual has a sense of what “home” means, both in terms of personal experience and...Read more
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ArticlesOver the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction On Saturday 6 February 1954, on the third day of the Australian leg of their tour of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The specially-staged Royal Surf Carnival they witnessed—comprising a spectacular parade, surf boat races, mock resuscitations and even unscheduled surf...Read more
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ArticlesAs the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations...Read more
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ArticlesThis article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a...Read more
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EditorialIn George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs infamously changed the law to read: “some animals are more equal than others” (108). From Charlotte’s Web to Babe, there are a plethora of contemporary cultural references, as well as expressions of their intelligence and worth, which would seem to support the pigs’ cause. However, simultaneously, the term “pig” is also synonymous with...Read more
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EditorialBy the 12th century, coffee was extensively cultivated in Yemen, and qawha and cahveh, hot beverages made from roast and ground coffee beans, became popular in the Islamic world over the next 300 years. Commercial production of coffee outside Yemen started in Sri Lanka in the 1660s, Java in the 1700s, and Latin America in 1715, and this production has associations with...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction Special occasion cookery has been a staple of the cookbook writing in the English speaking Western world for decades. This includes providing catering for personal milestones as well as religious and secular festivals. Yet, in an era when the culinary publishing sector is undergoing considerable expansion and market segmentation, narratives of foods marking of one of...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar...Read more
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ArticlesIntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection...Read more
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FeatureWhere can creative people find models of creativity and possible creative selves? How do they find examples of how others have imaged and imagined the creative identity that they dream of inhabiting? This discussion focuses on book-length memoirs written by creative writers, surveying these texts as a sub-genre of popular memoir and seeking to contribute to understanding of both the creative...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in...Read more
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ArticlesIntroductionAs the teaching staff working in a university postgraduate program—the Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) at Central Queensland University, Australia—an ongoing concern has been to ensure our students engage with the digital course content (delivered via the Moodle learning management system). This is an issue shared across the sector (La...Read more
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ArticlesIntroduction The exhibition of an artist’s work is traditionally accepted as representing the final stage of the creative process (Staniszewski). This article asks, however, whether this traditional view can be reassessed so that the curatorial practice of mounting...Read more
