The research for this chapter was undertaken on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. As is customary in the country in which I live and work, or so-called ‘Australia’ (see Watego, 2021), I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of country, as well as elders past and present. I acknowledge that sovereignty over these lands was never ceded, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain strong in their enduring connections to land, sky, water and culture.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

‘What is an e-cigarette?’ This ostensibly simple question is central to the classification and regulation of these popular and contested devices. From their first development, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via vaporisation of a liquid solution, were marketed and presented as like conventional cigarettes in crucial ways. Not only were they called electronic cigarettes, that is, a type of cigarette, but early models were designed to look like conventional cigarettes, including a tip which lit up when inhaled (Ozga et al., 2022). Moreover, the clouds of vapour they produced resembled smoke. Public health and tobacco control organisations quickly identified e-cigarettes as a threat to individual and population health. They emphasised the devices’ capacity to produce nicotine addiction (just like cigarettes), to undermine the denormalisation of smoking and to enable tobacco industry expansion (Bell & Keane, 2012; Berridge et al., 2023). The rapid rise of e-cigarette use (or vaping as it is now known) among young people has solidified and intensified this emphasis on harm. In contrast, supporters of their harm reduction potential highlight the fundamental difference of e-cigarettes from cigarettes: there is no combustion of tobacco involved in their use.

Located across a large swath of land in the north of Australia, the Gulf Country has a history encompassing lives where race has featured predominantly. In the context of European colonization from around the mid nineteenth century, relations between people who have become known colloquially as Whitefellas and Blackfellas have been central to the region’s society, cultural mix, and economy. As understood in everyday language, Whitefellas are known to have no Aboriginal ancestry, while Blackfellas are descended from forebears belonging to one or more of the Indigenous language groups connected to traditional lands.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

This article reviews the development of mental health and psychiatric services in Australia for the international reader. The development of relevant legislation, health-care systems, and the effectiveness of treatment for people with schizophrenia is reviewed. Gaps in service delivery and future directions are considered.

This chapter argues that the relationship between the online world and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Popular culture, and the increasing use of social media by young people and children has seen many traditionalists lament how our culture has declined, and worry about how educationally corrupted our schools have become. Its absence has been used to suggest that our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency – children and young people. The keen-eyed among you might note that this chapter is full of false binaries... perhaps this tells us something about the nature of the topic. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement. This is not even a simple chapter to write; the references will likely be outdated by the time I finish writing this sentence. So read on with a little grace, and a little humor.

This chapter addresses one of the most important areas of philosophy – ethics – and uses it to examine aspects of the role of the law in education. Of all the areas of philosophy, more has probably been written about ethics, and over a longer period, than any other. In addition, all cultures are structured around a fundamental ethical system: the law. However, irrespective of their importance, both subjects are currently notable for their lowly status within the teacher education curriculum.

This chapter argues that even though we all have a pretty good idea of what is meant by the term ‘social class’, it is far from being a straightforward matter. After all, there is only tenuous agreement about exactly what it is, how prevalent it is, how it organises the life opportunities of our citizens and how best to study it. To make it more difficult still, this is a subject that many feel uncomfortable discussing, let alone applying to themselves or anyone else.

It is likely that you have experienced the impact of place on your education without even thinking about it. Maybe you’ve had a class on a boiling hot day, with bad lighting and no aircon. Maybe you’ve had to sit in traffic on the way to class, and thought ‘Wow, I wish I didn’t have to be at school by 8 am!’. Maybe you’ve accessed your education online, and felt the differences (good and bad), between in-person and online learning. Or perhaps you’ve sat under a lovely tree after class and chatted with your friends. Maybe you’ve experienced traditional ways of learning on Country, and connectedness to the environment around you. Whatever it may be, you get the drift – if you’ve had an education, it’s happened somewhere.

It is argued here that the modern school isn’t just about ‘education’ in some abstract, humanist sort of way; rather, schools have an essential role to play in how we govern our society. It is tempting to think that the process of teaching children has always been pretty much the same, and that mass schooling emerged as a result of greater concern for the wellbeing of the young. The evidence paints a somewhat different picture, wherein mass schooling formed a crucial component of a new form of social regulation based upon an increasing focus on individuality, where the school subtly conforms to the requirements of the state and where the disciplinary management of the population is made possible through continual surveillance and the close regulation of space, time and conduct.

This chapter unpacks the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, it links each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse – not ‘the economy’ again, but rather patriarchy, a unified system of male domination – are outdated. Similarly, it is argued that the view of gender as a binary of man/woman based on anatomy at birth has had its day.

This chapter argues that educators need to have a good grasp of all the various forms of pre-adulthood that we take for granted, such as ‘the child’ and ‘the youth’. These categories are the focus of a range of different disciplines, most of which found their explanatory models in nature itself. As such, the behaviour of children and youth may be deemed to require explanation, but not the very existence of the categories themselves. The issues raised in this chapter concern the degree to which childhood and youth are actually socially constructed categories that serve particular social functions. Of greatest interest here are the ways in which childhood and youth are both artefacts of, and vehicles for, social governance.

We are living in a time when many teachers say they are feeling burnt out, and many others have left the profession altogether. Even new teachers who might start out feeling enthusiastic are likely to leave the profession after a few years. Teachers say the pressures they feel don’t match their view of what teaching is supposed to be all about – caring for, and teaching, children and young people. So, what do teachers do? What does the public (and, for that matter, Hollywood movie producers) think teachers do? This chapter argues that we have a bit of a mismatch between what people outside the profession think, and the experiences of teachers themselves. It also argues that broader changes in education, such as the use of data to govern teachers’ work has created extra pressure on teachers.

There are all sorts of dilemmas when it comes to technology and education. How much should be allowed in schools? Do teachers have to worry about students’ data security and privacy? Is it ok for you to ask a computer to write your essay for you? Are we ruining the eyesight and attention spans of an entire generation thanks to excessive screen time? This chapter looks at the debates that exist when it comes to digital technology and education. It will be argued here that the interplay between technology and education is highly complex – and changing – at a pace that is almost unimaginable.

This chapter makes the case for the importance of philosophy as a discipline in its own right, as a subject area vital to the better understanding of education and as a set of self-reflective practices that can make us better teachers. Philosophy is concerned largely with those areas of study and speculation beyond the reach of empirical analysis, addressing problems about how we construct knowledge, how we produce a just society and how we determine ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Its central research methodology is simply to think with clarity. The significance of this discipline has not been limited to answering abstract questions about the human condition; philosophy has been instrumental in both making us into rational and reflective citizens and framing the ideas behind our entire system of mass schooling.

This chapter argues that our subjective experiences – how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it – are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in Chapter 5. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept – a linguistic mirage – most would argue there’s something of importance there, but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth – as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 14 – at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.