The aim of this study was to determine whether a revised heat warning threshold provides an enhanced predictive tool for increases in Emergency Department heat-related presentations in Canberra, Australia. All Emergency Department triage records containing the word “heat”, as well as those diagnosing a heat related illness for the summer periods 2013/2014, 2014/2015, and 2015/2016 were searched. Then a medical record review was conducted to confirm that the patient’s presentation was related to environmental heat, which was defined by the final clinical diagnosis, presentation complaint and details of the patient’s treatment. Researchers then compared this presentation data, to a mean threshold formula. The mean threshold formula included the past three consecutive daily mean temperatures and the last measured temperature upon presentation. This formula was designed to take into account the variance of night-time lows, with concurrent daily ambient temperatures, and was used to determine whether there was a correlation between heat-related presentations and increasing mean temperatures. Heat-related presentations appeared to occur when the mean threshold temperature reached 25 °C (77 °F), with significant increases when the mean threshold reached 30 °C (86 °F). These results confirm that a mean temperature of 30 °C corresponds to a relevant local public health heat-related threat.

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This article uses complexity theory's concept of ‘shadow systems’ to explore innovative ways of teaching Shakespeare, particularly The Merchant of Venice. Using data drawn from observations at a secondary school in Sydney, Australia, and interviews with two secondary teachers, this article aims to consider how embracing ideas which emerge from the unauthorised and often subversive ‘shadow network’ of a classroom environment can result in creative, independent, engaged learning. I use Ralph D. Stacey's theoretical framework and Bourdieu and Passeron's work on the legitimate to suggest that the tension between the legitimate and the shadow networks can create a space of ‘impotential’, as defined by Tyson Edward Lewis.

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This article revives the agency of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus through a blended ecocritical and complexivist approach. A ‘blue’ ecocritical lens identifies Lavinia’s alignment with aquatic imagery, and tracks the development of this imagery across four main phases in the play: human tears, a river, a flood, and a freeze. These phases broadly map onto different modes of ecological relations as the play explores alternative patterns of human–environmental interactions. Lavinia is reinterpreted as an active and independent complex ecosystem, and one capable of communicating through the same aquatic imagery which is utilised in the narrative to attempt to contain and commodify her. Titus’s aquatic discourse finds parallels in our own climate crises, in ongoing problematic associations between women and nature, and in our need to generate new models of agency and ecological relations.