Law, Lawyers and Justice
Through Australian Lenses

This book engages with the place of law and legality within Australia?s distinctive contribution to global televisual culture.

Australian popular culture has created a lasting legacy ? for good or bad ? of representations of law, lawyers and justice ?down under?. Within films and television of striking landscapes, peopled with heroes, antiheroes, survivors and jokers, there is a fixation on law, conflicts between legal orders, brutal violence and survival. Deeply compromised by the ongoing violence against the lives and laws of First Nation Australians, Australian film and television has sharply illuminated what it means to live with a ?rule of law? that rules with a legacy, and a reality, of deep injustice. This book is the first to bring together scholars to reflect on, and critically engage with, the representations and global implications of law, lawyers and justice captured through the lenses of Australian film, television and social media.

Exploring how distinctively Australian lenses capture uniquely Australian images and narratives, the book nevertheless engages these in order to provide broader insights into the contemporary translations and transmogrifications of law and justice.

Preface

List of Contributors

Part I The unsettled law and justice of Australia

Chapter 1 Australian lenses on law, lawyers and justice

Kim D. Weinert, Karen Crawley and Kieran Tranter

Chapter 2 Crime drama and national identity on Australian television, 1960–2019

Cassandra Sharp

Chapter 3 Whose country? Colonialism and the rule of law in Sweet Country and Charlie’s Country

Jack Quirk and Julian R. Murphy

Chapter 4 Taking a lens to the chase in Australian settler state colonialism

Thalia Anthony and Kieran Tranter

Chapter 5 Vilification, vigilantism and violence: troubling social media in Australia

Chris Cunneen and Sophie Russell

Chapter 6 Picnic at Hanging Rock: Coming of age as a girl in the Gothic colonial institution

Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk

Chapter 7 Haunted colonialism: space, place and colonialism in The Babadook

Pauline Klippmark

Chapter 8 Being engaged in colonial critique by Mojo Juju's 'Native Tongue'

Kirsty Duncanson

Part II Australian gendered identities and law

Chapter Nine Rake and Rumpole – mavericks for justice: purity and impurity in legal professionalism

John Flood

Chapter 10 Cleaver Greene: the legal larrikin on Australian screens

Lili Pâquet

Chapter 11 Eyes wide shut: homosociality, justice and male rape through an Australian lens

Bruce Baer Arnold

Chapter 12 Romper Stomper: a critique of neoliberalism in Australia

Kim D. Weinert

Chapter 13 Justice at the end of Fury Road

Kieran Tranter

Chapter 14 Going bunta on Western law: violent jurisdictions, melodrama and the Australian carceral imaginary in Wentworth

Laura Joseph and Honni van Rijswijk

Kim D. Weinert is a PhD candidate at Griffith Law School, Griffith University.

Karen Crawley is a senior lecturer at Griffith Law School, Griffith University.

Kieran Tranter is Chair of Law, Technology and Future in the School of Law, Queensland University of Technology.