Introduction

In the introduction to this exegesis, I noted my major theme of personal struggle with the subthemes. The purpose of this chapter is to explore more fully the literary merit of the major theme of personal struggle and the aforementioned subthemes.

Some people are born and raised in a small country community. Under the recently much-heralded banner of ‘tree change’, others move to a small community for work, work at home, family or other reasons. These days there are a plethora of TV programmes highlighting those who choose to live in small country towns appreciating the connection to nature and the freedom from city life, the beauty and quiet of it all. Looming large is the omnipresent and appealing sense of community. You know your neighbour and, indeed, along with most other folks in town, their parents and grandparents. The folk at the store know your name, people know your dog and, for the most part, everyone helps each other out. Or at least, that is the way the script proceeds. Of course, all this goes with a massive amount of backbiting and gossiping, along with ‘in groups’ and ‘The Other’.

But life in a small town can also be challenging: for example, even in the third decade of the twenty-frst century, mental health challenges in the country are very diferent from those in the cities. Everyone experiences these challenges diferently, but for me, growing up in a small New South Wales country town seemed to throw a thousand challenges in my path: perhaps some were of my own making.

For a game that has produced such a large number of suicides, there's surprisingly little tragic cricket fction. War, yes, but the tragic war deaths in the public school stories I’ve discussed are only indirectly connected with cricket, and the cricket murder novel is primarily a form of entertainment. Bruce Hamilton's Pro: An English Tragedy (1946) stands out not only as a tragedy but also as one of the very few novels about county cricket and the professional game.

Bruce Hamilton, godson of Conan Doyle, was the older brother of Patrick Hamilton, author of the play Gas Light (1938), which became a celebrated 1944 flm noir, and the critically admired 1940 novel Hangover Square. The brothers, whose father was an alcoholic and whose mother committed suicide, were both socialists with a fondness for cricket nurtured at the Sussex county ground at Hove. Bruce completed writing Pro in 1942 while living and teaching in Barbados, but its publication was delayed until after the Second World War.

Pro tells the story of a father and son – Albert and Teddy Lamb – professional cricketers with the fctional county team of Midhampton. Albert's career stretched from the beginning of the 1890s into the early years of the twentieth century, Teddy's either side of the First World War. Both were medium-fast bowlers and useful batters, county cricketers ‘of the very frst rank’ but never quite of consistent test match quality.

In recent years, museums and other mnemonic sites not only assist in readjusting public history and pushing back on the doomed-race protective myth refecting changing points of popular views. This, however, wasn't always the case. Any single visitor to Australian museums over a 60- or 70-year period can only be struck by the vast changes in the form and intent of presentations.

In 1951, Hilary took Ray and me on a visit to Sydney's Australian Museum, and for me it was a memorable event. I was seven years old and remember being only mildly interested in the displays. That is despite my mother's best eforts to enliven the occasion with lively historical narratives. I remember the displays being chiefy about megafauna, and the remnants of a doomed race of Stone Age people who once occupied these lands. I remember the majority of displays were given over to the topic of the marvels and achievements of European colonization.

More recently, I visited the museum for the second time during 2021, 70 years following my frst visit. Here, I immediately was struck by the eforts the curators of the exhibition titled Unsettled gave over to acknowledging the contribution and their respects, dedicating the exhibition ‘to the people and other Beings who keep the law of this land; to the Elders and Traditional Owners of all the knowledges, places, and stories in this exhibition; and to the Ancestors and Old People for their resilience and guidance’.

The renowned Sri Lankan novelist Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, praised Shehan Karunatilaka's novel Chinaman (2011) for the way in which it refreshed ‘the great fctional possibilities of cricket’. In earlier chapters, I have been solely concerned with English cricket fction, emphasising that for all its comedy, sentimentality and nostalgia it also engaged with momentous events: how public schoolboys exchanged their cricket bats for rifes in the First World War; the aftermath and social consequences of that war; shifting ideas of class, gender and sexuality as the twentieth century wore on; the tragedy inherent in the game. By the fnal quarter of the century, however, the traditional narratives and settings of cricket fction were exhausted and the new directions the game was taking were ignored. Cricket fction needed to expand its territory and explore new worlds, to address the hitherto unspoken issue of race, for example, and turn its gaze on cricket's relation to a post-colonial, multicultural and global world, in short, to create new stories.

The frst novel to do this was Mike Marqusee's Slow Turn (1988).Mike Marqusee was a polymath: a journalist, political activist and prolifc writer whose many books ranged from politics, popular culture, music (two books on Bob Dylan), art and literature to the Indian subcontinent, health and cricket.

Sexual Penetration as a Prima Facie Wrong

A foundational claim for this book is this: when a man sexually penetrates a woman, he commits a prima facie legal wrong. That sounds a very surprising claim to many. We will justify it below, but before doing that it is worth clarifying two points about what we are saying. The frst is that our claim is that a penile penetration is a prima facie wrong. That means it is a wrong that calls for a justifcation. Where there is a justifcation, the act may be all things considered permissible, even good and excellent. Where there is no adequate justifcation, the act will be all things considered wrong. Explaining this with an example elsewhere may help. If Alfred were to push Barbara over, that would be prima facie wrong. Alfred could be appropriately called to account and explain why he acted as he did. Alfred may have a good explanation: ‘Barbara was about to be hit by a car and I was saving her from an accident’. In that case, we may conclude that ‘all things considered’ his act was justifed. Indeed, we might well say positively good. On the other hand, Alfred may not have a good explanation: ‘I enjoy pushing people over and that is why I did it’. That would not be a good justifcation, and so ‘all things considered’ that would be a wrong. Similarly, if Alfred had no explanation for what he did (‘I don't know why I did that’), the conclusion would be that all things considered he had committed a wrong.

Introduction

Furthering this book's core mission to establish the use of the memoir as a pedagogical tool in school education, teacher preparation and teachers’ ongoing professional development, this chapter begins with a section on how, internationally, the study of memoirs in a general sense in schools and colleges has become increasingly popular in use and their efectiveness as a pedagogical tool with younger students is well-researched by academics. It is one small step towards the use of the memoir pedagogy in school education, pre-service, postgraduate and teachers’ professional development.

Particularly looking at the general appeal of the memoir to the general population because of its appeal to our often-suppressed desires as secret voyeurs, this chapter then focuses on how this might be captured in the interests of memoir pedagogy in pre-service, postgraduate and teachers’ professional development: ‘We’re all secret voyeurs’, claimed one commentator.

This chapter closes with a brief examination of the special role of the bildungsroman literary subgenre, or more generally, the coming-of-age memoir subgenre as a pedagogical tool. This section also reminds readers of the advice provided by Marion Roach (n.d., n.p.) in her online article: ‘frst of, memoir is not about you. It is about something, and you are its illustration.’

The study of memoirs as pedagogical tools has become increasingly popular in schools and colleges: the universality and uniqueness of experiences of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, culture, and capitalism […]

Few lawyers are happy with the way rape trials work. They are, as they usually are in criminal cases, adversarial. The lawyer for the prosecution tries to pin blame on the defendant and the lawyer for the defence trying to persuade the jury that the victim has lied or misremembered. The defence lawyer's task is to do their very best to introduce doubt about the victim's version of events, because if the jury are not sure beyond reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt they must acquit. It is not surprising that victims who have been subjected to cross-examination describe it as ‘judicial rape’ (Lees 2002,

36) and ‘rape of the second kind’ (Matoesian 1995, 676). Having sufered the indignity of a rape, it is now claimed by a person in an ofcial setting that in fact they wanted the intercourse to occur or they have misremembered what has happened. This, in other contexts, would be regarded as gaslighting (Sweet 2019).

Difculties for Victims Pre-Trial

The challenges faced by victims of rape begin long before the trial. As we noted in Chapter 1, very few cases of alleged rape reach trial, with many victims deciding not to report the ofence or not to continue supporting the prosecution. There are many reasons for this. Some refect the impact of rape myths on the victim themselves, others refect the attitudes of investigators and prosecutors. The frst stage may see victims blaming themselves, questioning their own actions, what they did or didn't do to avoid the assault and potentially trivialising or disregarding their own experience. Later, if a victim accepts they were assaulted, they may fear they will be judged, preventing them from reporting or confding in another person.

During the frst 22 years or so of my life at least the major factor shaping my early life in my coming-of-age quest was one of personal struggle, the major theme of my memoirs. There were, however, four related factors, the sub-themes of the memoirs:

• • social class and government-provided school education;

• • the efect of adolescent sexual abuse on an individual's life chances;

• • the lifelong disadvantages and benefts of correspondence/distance education; and

• • untangling the insidious long tentacles of racism.

I spent several years considering how I should present these in written format to an audience of paraprofessionals, student teachers, postgraduate students and practising teachers participating in professional development courses – and maybe just community-based and interested folk. Slowly, the idea of writing my memoirs formed. Somehow, over the decades working frst as a teacher and school principal and later as an academic, the idea had formed in the back of my mind that a memoir was not so much about the memoirist per se, but rather larger issues, issues shared by many folk. And quite pleasingly, my research for this exegesis confrmed this.

Perhaps, it is a necessary condition for any octogenarian to refect on how he/she came to be what he/she is in a personal and professional sense, where he/she came from at their birth – the vagaries of life's chances – what some have called ‘the examined life’. I reckon, now, that for me at least these determining factors come down to the weight and nature of one's childhood and adolescent social/cultural/economic conditions during the frst 22 or so years of one life.

Maybe […] just maybe, I had escaped life on the razor's edge. I could never, however, escape being born on the wrong side of the fence – a working-class kid, with working-class country mannerisms which were hard to shake of. But although I was unaware of it at the time, that escape from the razor's edge remained a few months away; and it concerned my meeting with a very special person. It would come from the most unexpected direction and would have little to do with academic excellence. Indeed, some boys are born twice, but my full birth was a few months away, yet. Often, during these frst weeks at college, I had to stop and pinch myself. I had made it […] fnally? Hilary Rodwell and Dr Robey, I’ll be forever grateful to you. But I knew I couldn't fool myself: I had been forever psychologically, or even emotionally, scarred

– indeed, riddled with self-doubt and at times, a terribly persistent low self-esteem. The efects of adolescent sexual abuse, I’m sure now, stays with you, all your life – as does the working-class ‘boy-from-the-country’ syndrome. Headmaster McKinnon's liberally dispersed sixers? Maybe it was a combination of all these factors which knotted my mind to undertaking such a smorgasbord of doctorates later in my life.

I remember the frst morning of college – a fog-enshrouded, typical winter's Launceston morning – when we gathered outside a college room waiting to be addressed by College Principal Mr Cliford. As we moved into the room, I looked about at the other 35 students in the group.

Teaching several generations of trainee teachers in fve diferent Australian universities and before that with 20 years’ experience in Tasmanian schools and six as a principal, at some time or other I would impress upon the students an old truism about not confusing poverty with a perceived lack of intelligence. Generally, New South Wales public schools were tough places for working-class kids from relatively impoverished homes. Through most of my years at Oberon Central, according to my school reports, I was way down the list of academic achievement, caused in part through the handiwork of teachers who continued confusing poverty with stupidity and whom I suspected harboured a disdain for working-class kids.

‘Don't worry, Grant things will work out’, Hilary encouraged me.

I threw my head back in agreement. I had other things to worry about.

Thanks, Mum. One day, I’ll do you proud.

As an adolescent, I sat squarely on the razor's edge and terribly and, for me, apparently irrevocably positioned on the wrong side of the fence. Although much of this mindset started during my schooling, there was much more to come.

Throughout my school days at least, working-class kids attracted low expectations from teachers, which in turn resulted in low self-esteem for these kids. My school reports refected old class-conscious attitudes by middle-class teachers.

At Easter 1966, I was playing at the University Oval in Dunedin, now a test venue, in the national inter-university cricket tournament. My stumps had just been demolished by a tall, gangling, long-haired bowler, all knees and elbows, who’d let fre the quickest delivery I’d ever failed to see. My replacement had immediately gone the same way, and there was panic in the grandstand as the next batter, our wicketkeeper Don Cook, scrambled for his pads, box and gloves, stubbed out his cigarette and stumbled down the wooden steps of the pavilion where our team was sitting. I paused unbuckling my pads to watch him face the hat-trick ball, another thunderbolt that exploded into his thigh like an Exocet. None of us wore thigh pads, of course, but rather than nursing his injured limb, Don started to leap around as if he’d been attacked by a swarm of wasps, beating at his thigh and then struggling to pull down his trousers as a faint cloud of smoke gathered around him. The ball had thundered into his pocket and ignited the box of matches he’d left there in his haste to get to the wicket. As we fell about laughing, one of our team had the wit to gather the fre extinguisher from the back of the old wooden stand and rush with it out onto the ground.

Rape Law is failing victims. Fewer and fewer are willing to report what they have gone through. Their experience of criminal trials is traumatic. While it is an exaggeration to say rape has been efectively decriminalised (Rape Crisis 2024), it's not much of an exaggeration (Equality Now 2017). Rape Law is in crisis.

According to the Ofce for National Statistics, there has been an increase in reported rape to the police. Where it is reported though only 2.6 per cent of cases result in prosecutions, with around two-thirds of those cases leading to a conviction. That suggests that between two and three out of every 1,000 rapes lead to a conviction. Even where there is a prosecution, as we shall see in Chapter 3, many rape trials appear to be more efective at re-traumatising victims than producing justice for them. In a damning indictment of the current legal response, a report by the Victim's Commissioner found that when survivors of sexual assault were asked if they thought victims could obtain justice by reporting to the police, just 5 per cent strongly agreed, and a further 9 per cent agreed (Molina and Poppleton, 2020, 4).