Edition 65
Crimes and Punishments
- Published 6th August, 2019
- ISBN: 9781925773798
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
What is it about crime stories that make people hunger for them? The volume of content produced in these genres – from the pages of mysteries and thrillers to audio and visual dramas and reconstructions – hints at a primal and deeply ingrained fascination with the darker side of human nature. While crime fiction has long held appeal for the reading public, the ways that crimes play out in the real world are often more complex, compelling and shocking than the most complicated imagined plots.
Griffith Review 65: Crimes and Punishments tells stories of reform and possibility from inside our institutions, from the greatest to the smallest of their participants. It tells stories of state-sanctioned violence, of justice after decades of systematic failures and betrayals, of truths, lies and assumptions, and of the ones that get away.
Edited by Ashley Hay, this edition features writers including Matthew Condon, Gideon Haigh, Kristina Olsson, Behrouz Boochani & Omid Tofighian, Amy McQuire, Ross Homel, Sally Piper, Bill Wilkie and Paul Mazerolle.
In this Edition
Enduring change
PUBLIC INQUIRIES AND their subsequent reports suffer chequered histories in Australia. Some disappear with nary a trace, while others go on to effect real and lasting change. Why some inquiries succeed and others fail largely depends on the political context and public mood at an...
Unmasking a culture of corruption
WITH THE PASSING of thirty years since Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and its seminal report, an opportunity arises to sit back and review the era in which it was conducted and to reflect upon any changes or differences that may have flowed from it. I do...
Looking at the big picture
THEY WRITE MUSICALS about it in the US; swear by it in Canada; swear about it in Australia; and use as it as a weapon in Sri Lanka. Constitutions matter. But right now they seem troublingly fragile. Governments impose states of exception at will....
As if children mattered…
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in...
Bringing in the bystander
LIKE MOST FORMS of cancer, violence and abuse are preventable. But why is preventing them so hard? They leave pervasive stains on communities at local, national and global levels. In a family context, they have enduring intergenerational consequences that lead to significant harms with...
Lost for words
I GREW UP believing that I would be murdered by a stranger. I was eight years old when Sian Kingi was murdered. I was thirteen when Ebony Simpson was killed. I knew too many facts about Sharron Phillips’ death and had an age-inappropriate understanding...
Keeping it together
HAVE YOU EVER thought about what it would be like to have a loved one in prison? Would you stay in contact with them to support them, or would you sever all ties? What if that person was the mother or father of your...
Mountain ashed
I’M STANDING IN the shifting forest in the muted light of dusk. Above me, a tall tree with a vast tapering trunk stretches its antlered branches into the sky. Mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans: the tallest flowering plant in the world. Fern fronds wave in...
Revisiting the Dark Man
ONE RECENT SATURDAY morning, I once again drove my children to the street in Brisbane’s west where I grew up as a boy. They had been on this journey too many times to remember: the pleasant drive through The Gap in the Taylor Range, past...
On the record
A YEAR AGO, feeling hopeless about my work as a freelance writer, I began to look for other ways to bring in money – something steadier to tide me over, with possibly even fair pay. One night, I saw a fiftysomething scientist talking on TV about...
The how matters
This story contains descriptions of violence. ON SATURDAY 15 March 2014, my stepmother Genee was shot twice in her bed in Johannesburg. No. That’s misleading: ‘was shot’ suggests she might still be alive. Genee died on 15 March 2014. No. That’s misleading too. Without the other...
The trauma of discipline
THE TILES IN the kitchen were white, with a grey diamond pattern. The grout was a light greying brown – I’m sure it had been white at some point, but we didn’t mop the tiles as much as we should have. They were cold on...
Paradise lost
IT’S MAY, THE end of the wet season in Far North Queensland, and storm clouds brew ominously to the north. We’ve already driven for three hours from Mossman, including an hour along the four-wheel-drive-only Bloomfield Track, to Home Rule, south of Cooktown, where we...
Courting injustice
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, colonial criminal law applied to Indigenous people in the bush was rough justice, if it was any sort of justice at all. Historical surveys describe police officers and judges visiting remote communities in a whirlwind of terrifyingly swift and often...
‘This is how I will strangle you’
This story contains descriptions of violence and abuse. NATASA CHRISTIDOU’S EARLIEST memory is of her father Peter masturbating over her as she lay in bed. It was December 1971. She was not quite three years old. Her mother Ruby was in hospital, having given birth...
White justice, black suffering
Dad began this job in 1989 in the days of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. He was not the only black prison guard on staff – in fact, at one point, Rockhampton’s jail had the highest percentage of Indigenous employees in the state. And yet, there were even more Murris locked up. The first thing that shocked Dad was just how many were inside, and over the next two decades he would see many of his own relatives coming through the gates.
From little things
DEBBIE KILROY WAS sitting quietly at home in Brisbane on the afternoon of 6 January 2019, scrolling through social media posts on her phone. That was unusual enough: the criminal lawyer and fierce advocate for women rarely sits, unless it’s in a courtroom. And...
Gun
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep. Anton Chekov in a letter to AS Gruzinsky, 1 November 1889 OUTSIDE THE CHICKEN shop, a policeman shows me...
The sin room
When they left, carrying Will on a stretcher, I closed the shop for the day. My thoughts were all a swirl, and the most important was that Will would be all right, despite concussion and a broken jaw – and the source of the blood, a shallow flesh wound in his back. I saw it when an ambo pulled up Will’s black shirt tail and thought: that’s not road trauma. I know a knife wound when I see it.
Memorial park
DANIEL SAT ON the damp earth between two buttress roots of the massive fig tree. They rose up beside him like the walls of a confessional, obscuring parts of him, but not all. He imagined these stanchions closing around him in a wooden embrace –...
Visiting day
ONCE A MONTH, Mrs Murphy took him on a trip to the other side of town. For these journeys she always made sure Geordie’s shirt and shorts were ironed, and that his face and fingernails were scrubbed clean. She herself was always dressed in...
Prepping
YOUR LAWYER – A woman, for Chrissakes, young and Australian – is making you do some last-minute prep-prep-prepping. That’s really what she calls it: ‘prep-prep-prepping’. But you do not want to prep-prep-prep. You want to lie down, rest your eyes and turn your muddled brain off...
Adjudged
William Spalyng, who, for selling putrid beef…was put upon the pillory, and the carcasses were burnt beneath. Arthur Griffiths, The Chronicles of Newgate Justin R Haymaker, financial adviser, shall be tied to a filing cabinet and forced to consume Trippet’s Guide to Ethics for Accounting Professionals, vols 1–7. Pamela M...
Pirate mailbox
In Cincinnati, just south of the Hamilton County Zoo, on a south-east corner where Erkenbrecher Avenue intersects Vine Street, stands a blue, street-side, totally official-looking pirate mailbox. It has been there for decades. Every five years, usually around 8 am on a Monday morning,...
Pablo Escobar’s hippopotamus
He had four hippos in his private zoo and would visit them each dawn in his silk kimono to explain survival of the fittest, greedy bankers, why the poor in his old street called him Robin Hood, why he had to have 600 policía shot. Sometimes they listened, sometimes...
Featured Contributors
Amy McQuire
Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman who has been working in Aboriginal media for the...
Behrouz Boochani
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. He is associate professor in social sciences...
Kristina Olsson
Kristina Olsson is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Her most recent novel, Shell, was published by...
Matthew Condon
Matthew Condon is the author of ten novels and story collections, including A Night at the Pink Poodle, winner...
