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This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Air Transport Management, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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This paper uses industry wide survey data to assess employees' perceptions of safety management and safety culture in the aviation industry. Results show that organisations, in ensuring safety, considered employees' safety responsibilities to be more important than implementing effective safety management systems and encouraging positive safety culture. Aircraft maintenance engineers appeared to be committed to standards and operating procedures and effective organisational processes in making the maintenance system work. Interestingly, pilots regarded luck to be a significant contributing factor in safety. Overall, the findings suggest the various sectors of the aviation industry need to do much more to improve the prevailing safety culture. ... Read more

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A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette in Australia

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Customer Reviews (13)

Amusing but not much else
I read this only to find myself laughing at the content. The author seems to have completely missed out on the variety of people living in Australia. The kind of 'Customs and Etiquette' mentioned would leave most Australians quite unsure of how to deal with the one using them.
Also, the author failed to mention the contributions of the ANZAC soldiers during both World Wars as well as peacekeeping missions throughout the world, instead belittling their involvement.
Overall far too generalised.

Stick with it, and you will become more familiar with this phenomenon called "Australia"...
Australia is not England.

It's also not the US or New Zealand.

It's also not Sydney, or Perth, or Tasmania.

Australia is a big, complex country.Author Ilsa Sharp, herself an immigrant to Western Australia, uses this book to introduce the interested reader to the way "Australia" works.She is somewhat successful, because she covers a really wide range of issues, from food, to the Aussie mindset regarding formality (or a lack thereof), to the art scene, to history, and much, much more.

It is a fair attempt at "a guide to customs and etiquette," as the subtitle states.

But the 1992 edition (there are newer editions) often reads like a collection of tidbits and factoids written down on 3 x 5 cards following discovery; then the cards are sorted into themes, and there's the book.Facts are mixed with observation mixed with personal experiences mixed with speculation.Then why 4 stars?Well, Sharp does produce something that, ultimately, I found useful.And that is the bottom line!

Here are a few examples of things that made me want to pull out my hair:

"But take my tip:never get in the queue for a woman immigration or Customs officer's desk.I would like to be more sisterly, but for some reason, they are much nastier than the men" (p. 74).Excuse me?

"I got a burglar alarm and paid a monthly fee to connect it to a monitoring station which would call the police if it went off.I would recommend a dog too of you have the time to maintain one, as well as metal grille-reinforcements to as many windows and doors as possible" (p. 83).There are probably millions of Australians that would beg to disagree.

"The barbie party is the Australian's safe route to nostalgia about life in the bush, brewing tea in a billy over a campfire.The same macho psychology pushes suburban Australians to wear cattle-driver 'cowboy' hats, display huge 'roo bars' on the front of the cars )for fending offkangaroos crossing the roads) or to purchase impressive four-wheel drive ('4WD') vehicles, meant for heavy bush-driving, when in fact they hardly ever go bush" (p. 162).

And Sharp seems to be able to expand her area of expertise as needed:

"Termites, or white ants as they are more commonly called in Australia, are a problem, but so are the chemicals used to spray against them.Spraying once may be necessary, particularly if your home is weatherboard and has wooden floors, as many of the older homes do.But do not listen to the pest-control companies who want to persuade you to treat your home every year - chemicals usually have an effective life of at least three or four years, and could be toxic if they leech into your garden soils, where you might have a vegetable patch (a 'vegie' patch as the Aussies call it), for example" (p. 164).

"There is enormous romance, of course, in a flickering log fire of a cold winter night.But you should consider what you are burning: Australia's native forests... are precious environmental resources, which should not really be allowed to go up in smoke" (p. 170).

As I said, facts are mixed with observation mixed with personal experiences mixed with speculation.This degrades from the "reference quality" of the book.However, there was a lot that I liked, and I was pleased to see that there is an updated version.

In this volume, the chapters are:

1.The Typical Australian
2.Speaking Strine
3.ASense of Nation
4.Being A Migrant
5.Dreamtime Australia: The Aboriginals
6.The Leisure Ethic
7.Mateship and Machismo
8.You're On Your Own, Mate
9.The Great Australian Dream
10.Tucker
11.Earning A Crust
12.The Earth Mother
13.The Philistine Slander
14.D. I. Y. Australia

There's also a "cultural quiz" and a useful list of references for further reading.Newer editions, obviously, will have the newer references, such as Bill Bryson's In A Sunburned Country.

So... take many of the commentaries with a grain of salt from the tucker box, but this book does give a person a broader and deeper perspective on the culture of Australia than any travel guide.

Did not recieve the book
I have not recieved the book at all

regards
Bhaskar Poojary

Outdated info, more interesting from historical perspective
First off, it's difficult writing any book that generalizes about a country and culture so hats off to the author for trying. The info is probably more relevant to someone going to Western Australia 5-10yrs ago. I moved from Vancouver, Canada to Sydney, Australia to live and find the info mostly outdated. Some of the cultural conflicts such as misunderstanding what it means to be invited for tea are more applicable to the older generation. Sydney is a fast paced city of 4million. The younger generation, under 40, are very similar to people in Canada/US/UK. If you're coming from a Western english speaking nation, I don't believe this book is going to be your assimilation bible. If you're coming from a non-Western culture, I think you'll be better off reading Australian newspapers and watching Hollywood movies. You'll get along fine in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - never been to Westcoast but I assume Perth or any other modern Australian city will be the same.

A Guide To The People And Culture Of Australia
"Culture Shock! Australia: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette" by Ilsa Sharp is a guidebook to living in Australia.This book is not a travel guide, but rather a guide to the people and culture of the country.The main audience for this would be someone who intends to spend a lot of time in Australia, but it can also help business travelers, and even tourists.

I know someone who just moved to Australia from Asia, and from what I have been able to determine, this guide appears to be fairly accurate.I am looking forward to my visit there, which should also give me a better idea on just how accurate it is.Be sure to get the latest edition, as it was updated in 2005 and it is clear from my reading that there were substantial updates.

The author, Ilsa Sharp, migrated to Western Australia, and that personal experience clearly was a big asset to her in putting this book together.I did sense a bit of a bias towards Western Australia in her examples.To be fair, I was more interested in Eastern Australia, and so the bias may have been in my reading as well.In either case, she certainly does try to cover most of the country, and if I were to pick the one area where there was the least amount of information it would be Tasmania.

The book is broken down into 10 sections.These include a quick introduction, followed by basic information.Next is a discussion of the people, the society, and moving there.It then gets to some more specific areas such as food, entertainment, slang, and business.It then finishes with an A to Z section covering many basic facts about the country, some key figures both historical and modern, and it even has a short culture quiz.

As someone from the United States, this book is probably not as useful to me as it would be to someone coming from a much different culture.Not to say that Australia is just like the United States, but clearly the two are much closer than people from other countries from Asia and the Middle East.Even so, I think the book was fairly useful in understanding some of the societal differences between the two countries.This is one book that is easy to recommend.
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Including Yes, The Lord of the Rings, Whale Rider, Kaikohe Demolition, and Tonjan Ninja, this film reference provides a brilliant and unusual selection of the best New Zealand movies that encompasses feature films, short films, digifilms, and documentaries. From epic titles to unknown masterpieces, this comprehensive work provides personal reactions as well as tips for finding these screen gems along with an overall perspective concerning New Zealand's contributions to the global film industry.

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This collection is the first to break into the unexplored field of cultural studies in New Zealand. Ranging from such disciplines as sociology, film, television, and fine arts, the contributors provide slices of everyday life in New Zealand using both contemporary and historical examples. ... Read more

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This volume contains twenty in-depth studies of prominent New Zealand directors, producers, actors, and cinematographers. New Zealand Filmmakers outlines and examines three major constituent groups who are responsible for the industry as it appears today: those involved in pioneering film in New Zealand, those associated with the New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s, and those post mid-1980s visionaries and fantasists who have produced striking individual productions. A comprehensive introduction situates the New Zealand film industry in cultural, historical, and ideological contexts.

The book displays the diversity of filmmaking in New Zealand and highlights the specific industrial, aesthetic, and cultural concerns that have created a film culture of international significance. With the majority of the contributions in the book containing analysis developed through dialogue with the filmmakers, New Zealand Filmmakers is an authoritative study of the film industry in New Zealand. Each essay also includes a thorough and definitive filmography, detailing the full nature of the work produced by each individual, with key titles highlighted.

Filmmakers covered in this volume include Barry Barclay, David Blyth, Jane Campion, Roger Donaldson, Rudall Hayward, Peter Jackson, John Laing, Bruno Lawrence, Len Lye, Alison Maclean, Merata Mita, Ian Mune, Geoff Murphy, Leon Narbey, John O Shea, Gaylene Preston, John Reid, Vincent Ward, Jennifer Ward-Lealand, and Peter Wells. This collection is illustrated with 50 film prints, many of which have never before been published. With the New Zealand film industry poised to become a center of film production and already a major topic of critical interest, this volume will find many interested readers among film scholars and educators. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A little disappointed
It's very nice pictures and everything but I thought it would contain Maori tattoos. There were only 5-6 of those. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (18)

Tasty
What a joy this book is... a great melding of historical analysis and modern cultural insight.

Christina Thompson, a scholar and the editor of the Harvard Review, was on vacation in New Zealand where she met Seven, a Maori man that soon became her husband and the father of her children. But more than a family came out of this encounter as Thompson delves deep into the marriage of cultures and the historical collision of Westerners and Maoris (and other Polynesians). Through it all, Seven, Thompson's husband and the central figure of her book, satisfyingly remains an enigma, which personifies his people well.

Thompson deftly balances the story of her family's life as they cross the globe between New England and New Zealand and the cultural melding of their families, and the historical imbalances that Western exploration of the South Pacific wrought over much of the globe.

New Zealand Primer
I ordered this book as a possible introduction to the history and culture of New Zealand even though it is fiction, as we were going to make the trip.There are so few books about NZ.I was pleased and informed, I received good insight into the people.By the way, luckily they won't "kill or eat you anymore" as the title indicates. The history of the Maori people is interesting.Too bad the indigenous peoples of the U.S. didn't use the same ploy to fend off intruders.

A know-nothing writes a nothing book
This American person trades on the fact she has a Maori husband. Her knowledge of Maoridom - past or present- is infinitesimal.
Her writing is stiff, wooden - o let's settle on cementish.
Her story-telling ability is zilch.
The 'novel' was uniformly panned in Aotearoa-New Zealand, and received 3 'worst book of the year' endorsements.

great factual historical read!
Less of a personal memoir, although there were elements of the author's personal history, this book was more of a history of New Zealand, and the elements and shape that takes place upon the influence of "western civilization".I found the book fascinating and enlightening. I commend the author for her ability to observe the New Zealand culture and to appreciate the Maori people for who they are, beautiful warriors who do not (and SHOULD not) align themselves with Western philosophy.I am looking forward to reading more from this author.

South Pacific Love Story
I began looking for books about New Zealand after a visit from a half-Maori, half-white relative, and an invitation to visit them in New Zealand. This book is the best I found so far for understandingthe culture and life of the South Pacific. This bright, adventurous,American woman's story is engaging and romantic, and along with her personal narrative I learned a great deal of well-researched New Zealand and Pacific Islander history. I would recommend it to anyone who's been to Hawaii as well, as part of the book takes place there. Nowadays mixed-race relationships and their offspring are becoming the norm rather than the exception, and this book offers excellent real-life insight into the challenges of falling in love with someone from another culture.And the message here too is to understand another's culture you have to first make sure you understand your own.Really well done, and at heart a love story, with chops. ... Read more