Acknowledgments

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by any other person, nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at the University of Western Sydney, or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception is acknowledged