‘The New South Wales government will allow rural landholders to clear up to 25m of land from their property's fence line without an environmental approval, a move it says will “empower” property owners to reduce bushfire risk’ —(Cox 2020).

These are dilations that happen before eyes are upon a scene, the edge of forest as obscene to certain land owners as fire because fire takes space and yet space remains.

But such space is seen as emptiness to fill with production— in the name of safety a boundary stretches out further and further— these are dilations that happen before viewing the scene.

And safety is not the space inside a fence line? And there's no difference between forests and pasture? because fire takes space and yet space remains.

The anger over having to conserve koala habitat brings a reaction— the sop to Cerberus, the land deed rewritings of traditional borders— because fire takes space and yet space remains.

So many types of burning, so many fuels to the fire, so many reasons to play Squatter and thrive on ‘tucker bags’, ‘sheep tokens’ and ‘improved pasture’— these are dilations that happen before eyes are upon a scene.

Each shifting of fence beyond fence line is a shift of reason— safety should be inside an existing fence line if safety is a force majeure— but these are dilations that happen as eyes consume a scene, because fire takes space and yet space remains.

—JK

‘defence’ = death

it will always be wrong and it has NO PLACE in the humanities.

a disgrace and not to celebrate.

stakeholders? the dead? the to-be-killed?

i object. this is wrong. wrong. wrong.

every week we get more of this death industry stuff. it is not knowledge, it is anti-knowledge.

The above was sent as an email. As it happened, it went out to a broader academic community, which I have agreed was not appropriate. I consequently apologized for this happening, but not for its content. It was taken personally by people associated with ‘defence’, though was a generic statement. As one aggrieved party pointed out, given it was sent out after a school weekly newsletter highlighted the ‘achievements’ of a particular party in terms of ‘defence’, it should be understood why it was interpreted as being a personal slight. I understood this, and acknowledged it. However. However. However.

I feel under siege and I feel the humanities in some places are under siege from militarization of campuses. ‘Defence’ under various guises had embedded itself in humanities. Defence is a conduit of ‘science’ in which ‘discoveries’ in military technology, psychology and the spatiality of strategy and tactics, as well as many proliferating and appropriating offshoots, are seen as having broader purpose by application to other non-military areas of existence.

When I was living in Lille, a post-industrial metropolis in Flanders boasting an extensive but utterly dilapidated Baroque old town, Le Vieux Lille, I used to hang out in a bar called ‘La Pirogue’. Situated in the narrow Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, just off the bottom end of the imposing Rue Royale, ‘La Pirogue’ was a tiny, crowded, smoke-filled dive, so loud that it was virtually impossible to talk. It took its name from the almost full-scale model of a painted dugout boat that hung over the bar. Amazingly, ‘La Pirogue’ has stood the test of time. It continues to welcome patrons today, a relic from the mid-1980s when I first worked with a homeless people's project in the partly ruined old town. During the subzero winter of 1986–7, we drove the cobbled streets of a what felt like a film-set from the ‘époque classique’ of the pages of the early Foucault whom I was then discovering: we delivered portable gas heaters to squatters roughing it in the ruins of Renaissance palaces. In subsequent years, the old town was renovated into a Baroque Disneyland with bars selling boutique Flanders monks’ beer (beware the incautious!) and shops peddling the foul-smelling local cheese. Modernization came with the construction of the driverless metro that took you out to the law and humanities campus at Pont de Bois, and then with the arrival of the TGV Eurostar route bifurcating towards London and Brussels. Koolhaas’ and Nouvel's postmodern Euralille complex around the TGV terminal suddenly dwarfed the old nineteenth-century railway station in front of which I had helped to man a double-decker-bus hosting a soup kitchen for the homeless.

It is after one in the morning when we pass through our local town, after the night of its Christmas party. The lights are still lit—nothing flashy, really, but the streets are empty, maybe more empty than we’ve ever seen them. It’s as if all that was has entered a vacuum, and the river, low and still, can no longer follow the moon. But we also know the main street, closed off from traffic until a few hours ago, was intense with activity, burgeoning with hope almost brazen. We know this because we have attended in past times, though in more recent years it was the Christmas market in Geneva with its lights suspended in spheres and the Christmas below Mount Gabriel where the Celtic Sea meets old red sandstone, and light churns in the froth. We might say those past Christmases were ‘better’, with more scope for hope, but that’d be denying the intricacy of the festive, the complexity of geography, the depth of stories.

—JK

Ethel Turner is well-known to Australians as a children's writer, and more especially as the author of the immensely popular Seven Little Australians, which sold 5,000 copies in its first year of publication (1894) and immediately established her reputation. Turner's debt to Louisa Alcott's Little Women is often noted, although there is no evidence in her diary or her commonplace books that she had read Alcott (possibly she did so before she was 17, the age at which she started to record her reading on a daily basis). In spite of the book's derivative aspects, Turner's fictional children were distinctively Australian in their wild and rebellious behaviour.

Turner maintained her diary regularly between April 1889 and 1900, after which the entries became sparser and more intermittent. By 1900, Turner was a married mother and a well-established author. Her reading, as detailed in her diary, changed over time and in some ways was extremely conventional. Surprisingly, however, it reveals her to be a regular reader of romances. I use the term romances not to signify sugar-sweet love stories, but rather the novels of suspense, melodrama, love and barely disguised desire of which the Victorians were fond.

On one level, Ethel Turner began her diary as a self-improving reader. She was keen to improve her French and Latin and raise her level of proficiency in algebra. She sometimes wrote that she ‘idled’, suggesting a negative judgement of her own use of leisure time. She was probably being unfair to herself, because she continued to edit and write for her literary magazine Parthenon as well as producing short pieces for newspapers. She was busy and hardworking and no doubt the algebra suffered as a consequence.

As a child I was intrigued by those glass bottles in which small ships could be found, vessels whose seafaring days following ceremonial launches had come to symbolic ends. I did not share this curiosity with anyone, nor do I remember ever soliciting explanations to the obvious question of how they had actually ended up in there. This reluctance to seek answers came with the full knowledge that the mental speculation provided by the mystery would be ruined by a dryly technical response. Today, a simple internet search reveals that these are categorized as impossible bottles, a traditional craft with roots in the eighteenth century, that there are several ways of placing a model ship inside a bottle, and that they can be found on display in maritime museums around the world. Of course, there are other childhood tales and unsolved enigmas, many of which have continued to shape my life. One of the earliest I pondered was whether the ubiquitous concrete wall that surrounded the family home in West Berlin was designed to keep people in or out. The watchtowers were less ambiguous, as were the armed border guards. Yet, somehow, the hidden promises to be found on the other sidecaptivated my interest, promises that countered the dominant narrative.

The nightingale has ‘melancholy’ imposed on it by the egoist (‘And many a poet echoes the conceit’) who, exposed to the nightingale's song at night, projects ‘his’ own solipsisms onto the song of the bird. It grabs, it becomes discourse. Attempts to reconcile the contradictions of myth and daily conversation are enacted over and over through repetition and association with something even more ‘immortal’, the mating song of the male nightingale. And writ in this are the love songs the poet cannot utter in the way he would ideally utter them (though he might impose them). And writ in this is Coleridge love-longing and forelorness that wrestles with ode-longing. The males (poets) compete in the beauty of their songs (‘They answer and provoke each other's song’), even if the narrativized lyric distances from the unified self. In this is the fracturing of self and a passionate, even vehement exposure of self. In the listening (or hearing?) human female (maid), the song competition induces dysphoria: ‘Like tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head.’ The disjunction between the birth the poem comes to celebrate (denying the melancholy) and the rape story the poem references embodies an irreconciliable violence of affect. The poem is almost a foretelling.

Coleridge doesn't contest the issue as much as plunge headlong into it. Aware, complicit and needing relief via the separateness of nature. A paradox of immersion and difference. Romanticism isn't immersion, it's a pantheistic fusing of ontology onto the natural world that for all its evasions privileges the aesthetic (and sublime).

Along with my younger sister, Janelle, one Saturday morning sometime in the morning of 20 May 1966 in their charcoal grey 1963 Vauxhall Cresta, Hilary and Harry drove me from Oberon to Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport to catch a fight to Launceston via Melbourne's Essendon Airport. This was my frst experience of interstate air travel. I’d been to Oberon's Howell Bros General Store to purchase my tickets – Trans Australian Airways (TAA), I think, and Phil Howell, the co-proprietor, had taken me into his confdence and shared with me his Tasmanian tourist experiences. In my own private manner, I was elated about this. At last, some people in Oberon were thinking about me in terms other than my being a timber worker and a troublemaker about town, ruining the reputation of good folk with falsehoods about their attending Jack's two-up den.

Although I did notice the other Howell brother, Jack, continuing to never take his eyes of me through the glass of the store's suspended observation point, where he continually stood alert for local teenage delinquents who might be in his shop for the wrong reason. For him, my notorious escapade with the 21st Division and my mistruth with Dr Robey's name lived on. I swear, even after what I had been able to achieve in the feld of public education, I would forever remain a target for his suspicion.

Architecturally, Kingsford Smith Airport in 1966 was still something like that out of the famous flm Casablanca: no separate international and domestic terminals, then; no jet aircraft. Moreover, just as is portrayed in that famous movie and in other airport/airliner movies of the 1950s and 1960s such as The high and the mighty, people were dressed ‘up to the nines’: suits, ties and so on.

E. W. Hornung was the frst writer of fction to explicitly connect cricket with crime. His collection of stories, The Amateur Cracksman (1899), featured the public school gentleman, cricketer and criminal, A. J. Rafes, a character suggested to him by his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle. After reading Hornung's Australian novel Irralie's Bushranger (1895), about a monocled bushranger, Doyle remarked that ‘a public-school villain would be a new fgure for a series’. He wasn't altogether happy with the result, however, writing to Hornung that although ‘there are few fner examples of short-story writing […] I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion […] You must not make a criminal a hero’. What a pity that Doyle never included cricket in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories.

In any of the public school cricket stories I’ve discussed, Rafes would have been the school cad, a bounder, not a hero. He is a jewel thief who uses his public school education and particularly his cricketing prowess as the cover he needs to forage among the gemstones of Mayfair society. As he remarks to his companion in crime, his former fag at Uppingham, Bunny: ‘I’d chuck up cricket tomorrow […] if it wasn't for the glorious protection it afords a person of my proclivities’, adding ‘it's the one and only reason why I don't burn my bats for frewood’.

Despite my patently failed attempt at building my education through formal schooling at Bathurst High, in a broader sense my education proceeded with an upward trajectory in the pine forests, timber mills and farms of the Oberon District. I had just turned 16 years of age and had a lot of learning in front of me. While Hilary more than played her part, my need for a strong father fgure, somebody who could ofer me advice and love, left a dreadful void in my life. But I shouldn't be too critical of my father. Because from his own childhood experiences, he simply didn't know any better.

Since my youth, I have been in many classrooms, but none as precious to me as the ones Laurie Evans provided for me during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Laurie was the younger brother of Irwin (Dibs) Evans who had married my mother's sister, Grace. Out of school and now working as a farm labourer and timber industry unskilled worker, my education now took a sharp turn. Laurie had a great impact on my life as a young person. He was a staunchly independent man, a man for all seasons – his own man – the like of which did much to bring the rural ideal a reality for me.

For me, Laurie's ‘classrooms’ came in many settings and forms – pea paddocks, potato paddocks, shearing sheds, sheep and cattle yards, harvesting hay, fencing, clearing scrub at his father-in-law's Black Springs property for peas, spotlighting foxes and rabbits, tickling brown trout and a thousand other tasks and activities, and most importantly, the rugby league paddock and the proud wearing of the Oberon colours of the black and gold in the Country Rugby League Group 10 competition.

My father had a small shelf of cricket books. Most of them were ‘books of the tour’, a common form of cricket writing in the days of sea voyages and long tours when teams visiting England would play every single county, the MCC, Oxford and Cambridge, an invitation team such as H. D. G. Leveson-Gower's XI and even sometimes Minor Counties or Combined Services. My favourite among his books was Alan W. Mitchell's Cricket Companions: The Story of the 1949 New Zealand Tour, with a foreword by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. Walter Hadlee's team of 15 amateur cricketers arrived in April and sailed home in September, having played 33 frst-class matches and a couple more of the Leveson-Gower sort. I also read and re-read the tour books of the Australian cricket writer and broadcaster Johnny Moyes, which were grouped together on my father's bookshelf and appeared with the regularity of a chiming clock. I loved the uniform pattern of these books: match-by-match accounts, scorecards of each game, summaries of how each player had performed on the tour and the camaraderie I could imagine developing over these prolonged tours.

The really odd one in my father's collection was E. W. Swanton's Best Cricket Stories (1953), an anthology of cricket fction. Why make up a cricket story, I wondered, when there were so many real-life matches to be described? The stories were strange, the characters odd and the settings quaint to a lad growing up on the outskirts of a New Zealand dairy town in the 1950s. Mike Brearley describes coming across Hugh De Sélincourt's classic The Cricket Match (1924) at the age of 10 or 11 as a ‘revelation’.

At the most general level, my aim in this book has been to trace the many diferent fctional scenarios into which cricket has been drawn, and to suggest how its imaginative possibilities might continue to be put to work. Paradoxically perhaps, I shall fnish with the end of the world.

Robert Graves's short story, ‘The Shout’ (1924), is now much better known for the stylish and disturbing flm version of 1978 by the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. Its cinematography, similar in look and feel to Robin Hardy's slightly earlier The Wicker Man (1973), brilliantly captures Graves's apocalyptic story of dark magic, madness and death, and makes rather more of the cricket match, set in an asylum cricket ground, that opens the story.

The Current Defnition of Rape

The Sexual Ofences Act 2003 is now 22 years old and in desperate need of reform. The Act sets out the defnition of rape in Section 1(1):

A person (A) commits an ofence if –

• (a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis;

• (b) B does not consent to the penetration; and

• (c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.

At the heart of this defnition is that the prosecution must prove B (the victim) did not consent to the act. There is much that could be written about this defnition of rape, including its focus on penile penetrations and its gendered nature. In this book, our focus is on the place of consent in the ofence.

The Confusing Law on Consent

Consent is defned in Section 74 in this way:

capacity to make that choice.

The difculty with this defnition is that without more being said, it begs as many questions as it answers. How much pressure must be experienced before a person is not ‘free’? What level of understanding is required if a person is to have capacity? If someone is intoxicated, does this mean they lack the ability to make a choice? How must the ‘agreement’ be expressed? As the statute gives little answer to these questions, much can be made of the fact the concept of consent is unclear, and therefore the jury cannot be sure beyond reasonable doubt that the victim did not consent.