The death of Mhelody Bruno and the court’s acceptance of Mr Toyer’s evidence regarding the manner of her death are further evidence of the racism and transphobia at the heart of Australia’s justice system.

To bear witness is to enter a pact with the dead, not to repair the injuries of the world by which they were forsaken, but to bring about a new one in which theirs might have been, and could still be, a life held sacrosanct.'

Is it really any wonder that so many people don’t trust the police? That they see them simply as a state-sanctioned gang in uniform? To suggest therefore that slogans such as Fuck the Police are used because we hate the police is to reverse the order of events that lead us to those statements in the first place.

Their status as apex predator, coupled with humanity’s inability to tame or truly understand the ocean, inspires in us a kind of primal terror, an obsession well reflected in reportage and documentary. Every time they resurface in the news, the media are whipped into a frenzy, circling the story like, well, sharks.

I first heard about Marielle Franco in April this year. While visiting Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as a tourist with my family, I found myself in a bar late one night with an expat who had lived in the country for more than thirty years.

No-one should pretend such behaviour was anything other than vile. At the same time, it’s important to recognise just how much of the conceptual apparatus we now possess to understand sexual abuse owes to the liberation struggles that Devine, Power and co so loathe. Most obviously, the modern notion of consent emerged from a women’s movement that fought bitterly against male entitlement to female sexuality.

The outpouring of anger, fear and collective grief from women has been steady and predictable. So too has the steady and predictable stream of advice for women to ‘keep safe’, be vigilant and ‘take responsibility’ for their safety. It is not the first time that police, and politicians, have offered this kind of advice. In 2015, after the killing of Melbourne teenager Masa Vukotic, Homicide squad chief Detective Inspector Mick Hughes said on national radio that ‘particularly females […] shouldn't be alone in parks’.

Maybe I can’t blame Stalin for my disordered eating, but I think we must allow for unexpected ways that trauma persists – the cycles and resonances following the wandering migrant; the lost community, incoherent and unpredictable.

But the most fantastical, fairytale aspect of the show isn’t the nature or degree of heinousness of the crimes committed, or the fact that only 10% of victims are black on SVU when FBI figures tell us that number is actually 50%. It’s the fact that it portrays the police as a stalwart moral force: always on the side of the vulnerable, always anguished when the legal system fails them, always compassionate and concerned.

It’s difficult to believe that Australia used to be such a country – a place where, in 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised against a Labor proposal for temporary camps for boat arrivals on the basis that such camps would discriminate between refugees who only managed to reach South-East Asia, and those who had the ‘perseverance and courage’ to make it all the way here.

When published in 1995, Justine Ettler’s debut novel The River Ophelia received a lively critical reception. For some, the book exemplified a genre of gritty, in-ya-face writing then known as ‘grunge lit’, named after the contemporaneous music movement from Seattle (think Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam).

In the centre, I was confronted by Australia’s past and current crimes. Viewing Australia’s designed cruelty first-hand left me both sorrowful and angry. Manus is a festering wound. Australians can ignore the sickness, but slowly, surely, it is poisoning our country. This is a sickness that was contracted during our violent invasion of Aboriginal land and it surfaces every time we condone state cruelty against a person.

Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless.

These literary essays circle tightly around postpartum depression, but also explore themes including violence against women, art, writing and death. The strongest pieces are those that cut closest to the bone, making the reader witness to the author’s frankness.

It was, in the words of far-right parliamentarian and former minister of youth policy Giorgia Meloni, ‘intimidation at worst’, and nothing compared to the actual violence of far-left demonstrators ‘who destroy entire cities and burn down our cars’.

Earlier this year I was part of a process that detailed three incidents of sexual harassment perpetrated by a fellow poet. The incidents involved three women writers who all experienced similar harassment on the same night by the same man at a literary event. Had these incidents occurred in isolation and the four of us not spoken and mobilised, these incidents would not have been reported.