This paper presents findings from a 2010 evaluation of Victoria University's Student Rover program, an on-campus work-based learning program in which mobile student mentors are employed and deployed within the university's Learning Commons to provide 'just-in-time' and 'just-in-place' learning support to other students. Student Rovers are paid not to perform a quasi-staff role, but to be students who help other students learn and, in this process, to model both learning to learn and collaborative learning behaviours. Drawing on specific findings from a large-scale student survey, a small-scale staff survey and focus groups conducted with Student Rovers themselves relating to perceptions of the socio-institutional status of Student Rovers, the paper is concerned with exploring the anomalous nature of the Student Rover role and speculating as to the potential for change inherent within this situation. Reworking Billett's conceptualisation of co-participatory workplace practices, we propose that by framing the work of Student Rovers as 'learningful' workers operating within the liminal institutional contact zone between staff and students, the program may prove to be not simply a successful strategy for helping new students engage in campus life -while simultaneously preparing Student Rovers themselves for negotiating contemporary organisational circumstances of change, complexity and contingency -but also a precursor to an emergent, institutionally recognised, educational role of students paid to support the learning of other students. IntroductionThe Victoria University (VU) Student Rover program is an on-campus workplacelearning program in which mobile peer mentors are employed to provide 'just-intime' and 'just-in-place' learning support to other students within the university's Learning Commons. As part of the broader shift in higher education 'away from a teaching culture and towards a culture of learning' (Bennett, 2005, p. 10), many academic libraries have been progressively reframed firstly as 'information commons' and later 'Learning Commons'. One of the key elements in this second transitionfrom information to learning commons -has been an increasing focus on learners and learning rather than simply the successful provision of information or resources. This shift has also occurred in line with a global trend aimed at repositioning university libraries in an era of ubiquitous access to online information and materials, so that they

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The 1930s in Australia was a period marked by rising awareness of and attention to Australia’s ‘half-caste problem’. Released and promoted in tandem with the 1938 sesquicentenary of Australia’s settler colonisation, Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia appeared as a searing protest against the exclusion of so-called ‘half-castes’ from white Australia. The novel itself was published by the Publicist Publishing Company, platform for rationalist and businessman W.J. Miles and editor and polemicist P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, both strict advocates of a racially pure white Australia. Yet together, Herbert and his patrons capitalised on the sesquicentenary, and the Day of Mourning protests they helped organise, to promote what they proclaimed the ‘Great Australian Novel’. This article reads Herbert’s racial understandings in relation to those of Stephensen, and reads them both in relation to the prevailing circumstances of 1930s Australia, as well as the underlying dynamics of settler colonialism. Whereas Stephensen subscribed to the ‘Aryan Aborigines’ hypothesis and emphasised Australia’s supposed racial purity, Herbert celebrated instead the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity. While these approaches are ostensibly at odds, this article argues instead that they share a common drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their ultimate aims.

The standard story of Australian national cultural development revolves around a fundamental conflict between the forces of empire loyalism or universalism on the one hand and Australian nationalism on the other. Yet this narrative structure neglects the complexities of the settlercolonial, as distinct from the colonial, situation. This article is premised on the proposition that the settler-colonial situation is conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement of pre-existing Indigenous populations. While at certain historical moments, exclusive emphasis on the settler-metropole relation may be maintained, at others the disavowal of the settler-indigene relation common to both sides of the "two Australias" divide is rendered untenable by changing circumstances. It is into such a moment this article aims to situate its subjects-Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks-and it does so with reference to the correspondences between Jindyworobak indigenism and the indigenising settler nationalism evident in the "salvage linguistics" of Ted Strehlow. In doing so, the article aims to reveal the complexities and persistence of what it terms the settler predicament.

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