Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

I was reminded, just the other day, of the extent to which our culture is saturated with crime when I saw, parked in a quiet suburban street near where I write this, a hoon car with an array of stick-on imitation bullet holes dotted across its rear flank. The paradoxical nature of this form of decoration is perhaps analogous to that of so-called ‘crazy paving’ on suburban driveways in the 1970s. The scattering of those fake bullet holes had been arranged to look both random and just right.