In a region brimming with novel geoheritage, how do we prioritise the geoconservation of one dynamic landform in a series of interconnected geomorphological oddities? Challenges in applying inventory-based geoheritage assessment tools to diverse and dynamic environments arise when:
(a) tools are focused on preserving single phenomena only
(b) tools do not meaningfully rank unique features at a site for priority conservation.
We explored many geoheritage assessment tools when confronted with a complex, high-energy coastline and novel dune-bluff combination in Tasmania. Featuring unconformities, a calcified forest, aquifers, a basaltic pavement, and inter-basaltic sediments, the site provides opportunities for geotourism, and geodiscovery. Yet conserving the site is complex given challenges in geodating, transient emergence of some of the unique features (calcified forest and spheroidal clay mounds) and the possibility of having to prioritise the maintenance of some features and processes over others, without comparative national and/or international decision support tools.
This Tasmanian example illustrates how knowledge of other sites can help to prioritise geological phenomena in conservation efforts, and highlights opportunities for future national geoconservation support tools. We recommend that a full assessment of current and future threatening processes at listed geoheritage sites as an inclusion in national protocols.

The legacy of European Romanticism, expressed in cultural artefacts as emotion and attachment to place, and lament for loss, continue to frame understandings of the nature of childhood and proper children’s places. Casting childhood as nature, from the universal to individual child, with affective responses to ideas of past/future or the rural/urban, ensure that both ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ are kept secure in a place of adults’ historical and spatial imagination, marking a dwelling place that is both fixed and continuous. This research draws on debates within cultural and literary geographies, with an urban focus, to explore discourse and representations of loss and landscape in suburban places. As childhoods and the past are storied, reading nature/culture talk in memoirs and storybooks books suggests an approach for exploring how childhood is conceived, remembered and imagined, in relation to ideas of good, or natural, places for children. If there is always a scent of sadness about inauthentic childhood places, or if children’s bodies are thought to be formed and contained by capital, how can childhood and justice meet in this place?

Across the discursive terrain of cosmetic surgery, this presentation will trace the emergence of a cultural politics of ‘older’. Older people are not readily identifiable as engaged with identity politics through body modification and so this work offers a new direction for cultural geography. Media and interview texts provide the empirical resources and evidence that older people are using surgery to reflexively stylize subjectivity in ways that transgress discourses of ‘ageing’ and ‘anti-ageing’. The presentation attends to the ways in which normative discourses are being wilfully reformed and put to work to navigate a cultural politics of ‘older’. Nested within the contemporary ethico-political terrain of self-care, the presentation suggests that cosmetic surgery is being engaged as a practice to design ‘older’ rather than deny ageing.

Between July and August 2015, and in November 2016, the Challenging Racism Project team (WSU) conducted an online survey to measure the extent and variation of racist attitudes and experiences in Australia (Face Up to Racism: 2015-16 National Survey). The survey comprised a sample of 6001 Australian residents, which is largely representative of the Australian population. The survey included a variety of questions regarding experiences of racism, including forms of racism experienced, the settings and spheres of life in which incidents of racism occur, and the frequency of incidents. In addition, the survey gauged Australians’ attitudes toward cultural diversity, intolerance of specific groups, immigration, perceptions of Anglo-Celtic cultural privilege, and belief in racialism, racial separatism and racial hierarchy. In this paper we report findings on respondents’ views on cultural and religious diversity, nation and migration to suggest that the majority of Australians are pro-diversity. However, we also acknowledge conflicting findings such as strong support for assimilation and high rates of racism experienced by a significant proportion of respondents. Together, these findings paint a complex picture of cultural diversity in Australia.