Clare Archer-Lean

It is well established that literary work can promote insights that result in future change, whether on a personal or an institutional level. As Umberto Eco (1989) notes, the act of reading does not stop with the artist but continues into the work of communities. The papers delivered in this panel consider the regenerative role of literature within culture, arguing that the special properties of literature can convey an important sense of nature (Bateson 1973, Zapf 2008). These concepts are discussed in relation to writing about Australian flora and fauna. Using an ecocritical focus based on ideas about the relationship between literature and the environment the paper considers Australian works and the way in which literature enlivens this complex intersection between humans, animals and the environment. This engagement is investigated through three modes: the philosophical, the literary, and the practical. The novels discussed include Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Richard Flanagan's Wanting, and Sonya Hartnett's Forest, as well as a range of fictional and non-fictional works that describe the Blue Mountains region in New South Wales. The paper closes with a discussion of the role of story-telling as a way of introducing the public to specific environmental locations and issues.

David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon did not, like Athena, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. It is equally doubtful that the novel was inspired by some mystic muse (Nelson 2009). It is the initial intention of this two part paper to demonstrate that Malouf employed the scholarly methodology of Practice Led Research to write Remembering Babylon, gathering information from historical and literary sources, selecting and rejecting specific elements of these sources then subjecting what he had chosen to his creative imagination. In the afterword, Malouf acknowledges the historical Gemmy Morrell's name and actual words as the 'seed of this fiction' but 'otherwise this novel has no origin in fact'. This paper will investigate specific citations included by the author and reflect on his significant exclusions from the original 'history'. The selections will be taken from the opening chapters of the text, and chosen because of their particular resonance with the novel entire. Based on this initial precept, eco-critical textual analysis illuminates emergent research outcomes in the findings of the initial methodology of Practise Led Research. While the post-colonial implications of the novel are well established (see Ashcroft 1993) the exploration of the unusual citation inclusions and exclusions (noted above) reveals another preoccupation within the work's creative construction: an explicit focus on human relationships with the natural world. The attitude to nature in Remembering Babylon establishes the impossibility of eco-poesis, enacting Kate Rigby's notion that the literary text can 'save the earth by disclosing the non-equation of the word and thing, poem and place' (Rigby 2004, 437). In this sense, Remembering Babylon is a transcendent act of eco-critical world-making, not because it reflects the natural world in mimetic veracity, but because it is celebrating the more than human natural world through the human imperative to make and re-make that world in the imagination. This trope of self-reflective creation appears to be intrinsic to both method of construction and the final novel's position on the human /non-human relationship.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems standardise and streamline all functional areas of business in order to improve communication and thereby increase efficiency. They require a large technical architecture that has huge storage needs, networking requirements and specific hardware/software requirements. This paper explores the impact of ERP implementation on a different type of organisation, the Government Owned Corporation (GOC). This research-in-progress paper seeks to begin discussion of ERP implementation issues in GOC by changing the way we perceive such organisations. The authors seek to begin explanation for GOC end users' failure to comply with or fully exploit the potential of the ERP. This paper builds on Hobson et al's (2005) statement that past ERP research has been primarily technologically determinist and that the research has largely ignored what these authors term the social system . A GOC case study is presented and explored in terms of the ERP and GOC literature. Exploring existing cultural studies approaches, this paper examines why end users in a GOC are neither complying with nor fully exploiting the potential of ERP. The contention is that discourses of operational level staff is significantly different to that of managerial staff and also ERP implementation processes and that effective IT systems require the input of the end users.