There’s a gentle yearning in her voice, as it floats above the barest guitar. She launches into a loving tribute to womanly stoicism, devotion to home and family, building a portrait of the kind of woman who ‘didn’t mind just staying home’. As the list of unremarkable sacrifices grows, we’re reassured she doesn’t mind: ‘If she did, she never did say so to Daddy.’ After a few repetitions, a sentimental ache takes hold. It will take a while, a few plays, to hear that uneasy qualification hiding easily in the opening words, as if just slipped in to help it scan.

The fact is, we teachers are teetering on faultlines characteristic of today’s universities: between university traditions, and government funding and strategy; between knowledge and skill, theory and practice, education and training; between students as learners and as ‘paying customers’.

Into the void of the last AFL off-season leapt a young woman who called herself ‘The small girl, with a big voice’.1 The echoes of that voice – its Facebook- , Blogger- , Twitter- and ultimately 60 Minutes-fuelled reverberations – dominated the off-season and continue to be felt. This was, in the words of Richmond director Peggy Haines, ‘a crisis of a proportion that hadn’t been contemplated’.2