In the mid-1950s Olive Pink campaigned to have an area of land in Alice Springs set aside as a flora reserve. In 1956 the area was gazetted as the Australian Arid Regions Flora Reserve, with Pink appointed as honorary curator. Although Pink was not a professional horticulturalist or botanist, she established a garden that marked itself out from contemporary gardens, such as Maranoa Gardens and the Australian National Botanic Gardens, which were similarly committed to showcasing indigenous Australian plants. Pink's approach was pioneering in that she aimed to create a collection of plants selected by a delineated ‘climatic zone' and geographic area rather than drawn from all parts of the continent. This article argues that Pink developed a distinctive form of horticultural work informed by her passion for and close artistic observation of desert flora; her long experience establishing and maintaining gardens under central Australian ecological conditions; along with her anthropological insight into Indigenous knowledge of flora gained through her studies with Arrernte and Warlpiri people. Today we might recognize the principles that informed Pink's garden through the concepts of ‘water-wise gardens' and environmental sustainability practices.

One year I deliberately chose to spend time in Alice Springs during early summer.Until then I had only visited in winter, the peak tourist season. This time I flew in rather than drove and met the first wave of heat through the parting glass doors at the airport.I stayed at the usual place but was surprised to discover that it had come to life.At nightfall, the walls and windows hosted numbers of small pale geckoes lying in wait for insects, and chirruping loudly through the night. There were two that hunted from the outside glass panes of the window next to the kitchen table, and as I ate dinner I had an intimate view of their pale fawn underbellies and the sticky discs at their fingertips with which they clung to the sheer surface of glass. Their dark bulging eyes glistened as they lay in wait for the moths attracted by my kitchen light.At dusk, when I went walking through the ironwoods and hakeas, a sacred kingfisher darted through a low submerged greenish light that lingered beyond sunset. In the heat of the day a wasp came and went outside the door, building a nest against the side of the stone steps. Its nest was composed, so far, of three small mud cups joined together in a cellular pattern. In the undergrowth, lizards rustled when I passed; along the gravel driveway was a resident goanna about a metre long, and out on the road a large brown snake sunned itself on the bitumen. The first couple of nights were quite cool; but then, in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m., I was Saskia Beudel-Buffel Grass 335 woken by the sound of distant wind approaching across the landscape-that particular sound wind has when it is imminent, a roil of motion approaching a pocket of stillness. I was sleeping with the door open and when the wind struck it was hot. A hot wind in the middle of the night was completely counter--intuitive to me, when one associates nights with cooling. A wave of heat was crossing the desert in the darkness.

When the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) was established in 1969, poet Judith Wright was elected as a founding fellow. Scholar and fellow poet A. D. Hope saw her inclusion as boding well for the Academy’s purpose to foster and promote the humanities. Six years later, Wright complained about a lack of opportunities for creative practitioners and claimed that she was being excluded from Academy life. While some fellows supported Wright, the majority disagreed that creative practitioners belonged in the fellowship. This incident is representative of a broader “unclear connection” between the “living humanities” – as H. C. Coombs described the creative arts – and what Simon During terms the “academic humanities”. Focusing on the AAH’s first three decades, this article traces different ideas held by leading humanities scholars towards the creative arts and shows how the AAH maintained boundaries and created exclusions. A major shift occurred with the John Dawkins reforms to higher education. Key figures at the AAH played leading roles in seeking solutions to alarmingly low levels of Australian Research Council (ARC) funding for “creative arts research”. Despite such efforts, the AAH continued to elect very few creative arts practitioners into its core fellowship throughout the 1990s and ARC data shows that funding inequities for creative arts research remain an intractable problem.

www.textjournal.com.au/april18/hecq_rev.htm 2/4 collection and in their cogent introduction. Each chapter, elicited from new and experienced teachers, presents a case study and, as a bonus, provides an appendix, a set of exercises, an interview or an experiment, whereby readers might extend their understanding of the possibilities of curricula development.This collection, focused on 'breaking boundaries in the creative writing classroom', contains some provocative essays that interrogate the uses and misuses of pedagogical tools. It also draws together disparate threads in testimonies and homages, suggesting the creative entwinements at work in the writing process. My only reservation about this book is its insularity. International scholarship as deployed in journals such as TEXT:

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