This thesis, comprising an exegesis and two creative non-fiction stories, sets out to produce an autoethnography informed loosely by grounded theory. Its primary purpose here has been to explore, in depth, aspects of the author’s close and continuing engagement with Aboriginal Australia in remote, rural, and urban locations. The thesis aims to arrive at a clearer understanding of the nature of a series of ‘anomalous’ experiences and the way that they, and ongoing responses to them, have deepened the author’s relationships with Aboriginal people. In turn, these developing relationships have further conditioned his attitudes – social, spiritual, epistemological and political -- to the sharing of being on the Australian continent.

The study also investigates the potential these experiences have had for the transformation of personal and political identity. A persistent theme examines the way in which ‘fatal’ events and individual agency might operate in a recursive relationship to moderate these aspects of one’s life. This relational experience has also had a transformative effect over the author’s ontological and epistemological understandings. Autoethnography eschews rigid definitions of what constitutes allowable, meaningful and useful research, and seeks to open the field to non-traditional subject-matter, such as the inclusion of ‘more-thanhuman’ agency in social research. Insofar as anomalous experience comprises an important focus of this study, autoethnography provides a suitable locus for its analysis.

The question of the nature of ‘more-than-human’ agency inevitably raises issues of interpretation, including political issues. Several fields of such agency appear in stories contained in the thesis: spiritualism; the Land and Dreaming; the Christian Godhead and lesser Christian ‘deities’ such as the Blessed Virgin, goddess spirituality, and - representing an objective, scientific approach -- C.G. Jung’s hypothesis of a unus mundus. The loose interpretation of these powers and potentialities – viewed as metaphors for a universally recognised underlying unitary Force or World Soul -- has received considerable analytical attention in the stories.

The methodological/analytic side of the two stories canvasses literatures of anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, history, cultural studies, Jungian philosophy, social theory, Aboriginal (particularly Arrernte) spiritual philosophy, and Irish spirituality. The creative side of the project examines literatures relating to Australian and Irish poetry and story-telling. The kernel of the exegesis comprises a survey of the recent literature canvassing the nature of autoethnography with a view to placing the stories within its methodological purview.

Whilst animals suffer abuse meted out within the confines of industries, industry campaigns deliver glossy, cheerful, and emotionless messages about their utilisation of animals. Such a delivery serves to professionalize industry operations, which in turn provides patrons with customised defence mechanisms if reproached by critics such as animal rights advocates. This phenomenon remains consistent for the meat industry, animal experimentation industry, and animal entertainment industry. Within this context, ideology and propaganda foundational to animal industries suggest an exaggerated degree of unconcern for the experiences of industry animals. Findings indicate that most ideological and propagandist elements fall within the parameters of the thesis definition of human beings’ intentional violations against animals.

This study addresses the question: how did social and political divisions influence the economic and environmental development of Kempsey during the colonial period up to 1865? Primary documents including personal letters, journals, memoirs, political and governmental papers, along with a range of colonial newspapers have been studied and interpreted to form a social historical solution to the question. Due to the range of sources available for this investigation, a variation of methodologies has been employed, with particular emphasis on an empirical qualitative analysis. In addition to considering existing non-scholarly thematic histories of the Macleay Valley, this thesis draws existing scholarly investigations together and builds upon them, looking into the interdependence between society and environment, politics and geographical developments, culture and social movements to piece together the story of Kempsey and uncover the key events which have led to long lasting impacts on the town. No other scholarly study of this kind has been undertaken to bring the entire complex and multifaceted story of Kempsey’s early years into one scholarly investigation. Implications for this study highlight the important factor that powerful social and political divisions in a community have when important decisions about town planning, environmental protection, and issues of social justice need to be addressed. These divisions can lead to catastrophic outcomes that could impact generations to follow, as shown in the tumultuous history of Kempsey, New South Wales.