Written by Queensland barrister Cathy McLennan, Saltwater has received almost universal acclaim among readers, reviewers and indeed the Queensland Literary Awards (QLAs), which declared it ‘Best Non-Fiction Book’ in 2017. Its author, appointed a magistrate shortly before the book’s publication, has since accepted invitations to speak on matters of law and policy affecting Aboriginal people and communities.

What Brock Turner did was horrific, abominable, almost unthinkable. But we must not allow our natural and appropriate disgust at his act blind us to the evidence about what works and what doesn’t work, if we want to prevent him and others from doing it again, and if we want to afford victims the best opportunity to heal.

Within this environment, the more traditional ideals of the university – as a community of scholars working and thinking independently of government, business and organised labour sectors – can easily be lost. As Richard Hil demonstrates in his book Whackademia, the experience of being an academic in a humanities department is increasingly alienating. Much humanities research has very little saleable value in the marketplace, which is in part why the British government now requires undergraduates enrolled in humanities degrees to pay their own way.

The Australian fights its culture wars in a particular – and now well-documented – way. It plays the man, or the woman, instead of the ball. It goes in hard, and it targets individuals who aren’t necessarily prepared for a fight (or at least one that’s very public, very national, and very much on The Australian’s own terms).

There’s a hopelessness about child sexual abuse. We’ve criminalised it. We prosecute it. But we can’t seem to stop it. The terrible stories that tumble out of every inquiry, every institution when it’s shaken upside-down, are too similar to the stories that keep rolling into news reports. This stuff is still going on.

Jim Shepherd recently passed away at the age of 80. It is appropriate to consider his contribution to Australian popular culture. For the past 25 years, Shepherd had been sole owner of Frew, the company which published The Phantom comic book in Australia.