Catharine Lumby

Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’

During the early 1980s, in a series of attacks on the Family Court in Sydney, a judge was shot dead outside his home, while bombs killed another judge’s wife and injured a third judge and his children as they slept. The man behind these and other attacks, Leonard Warwick, was involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife over the care of their young daughter, but it would be thirty-five years before the crimes were solved and he was convicted of three murders and the bombings. Media commentators, meanwhile, wondered what had driven the culprit to such violence. Elizabeth Evatt, the court’s then chief justice, described the media’s response: ‘They said, “The Court has been bombed, what’s wrong with the Court?”’

Much talk around the abuse of children centres on the desire (or demand) for justice. Unfortunately, justice is not easy to attain. To begin with, it tends to require a justice system. This introduces all manner of creaking bureaucracy and complicated, sometimes outmoded laws. Justice outcomes are also hugely influenced by race, gender, and inequality ...

Pornification, The Porn Report and Princesses and Pornstars are three recent entries into the burgeoning academic field known as ‘porn studies’. All three books aim to move beyond the simplistic ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments that have traditionally surrounded pornography. Instead, each text explores the challenges and complexities of living in a world where sexually explicit material is more prevalent than ever before.