Eaten Fish is the pen name of 25-year-old Iranian Ali, who has been imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for three years. He documents the conditions of his incarceration through intricate artworks that tell the story of a place created by Australian law, surveilled by Australian law and yet full of trauma, abuse and violence.

Comedian Louis CK has a piece of standup where he says, for women, the greatest risk to their health and safety is men. He likens going home with a man as potentially dangerous as going home with a wild bear: ‘I hope this one’s nice,’ he says wryly, as he mimes hopping into a cab. It remains a wearing truth that women are expected to exercise constant vigilance against the potential threat some men pose. It is almost laughable how ridiculous the vigilance required is. Almost.

The narrative that trigger warnings pose a threat to freedom of speech, driven by a rabid identity politics, a resurgence of ‘political correctness’, or simply infatalised, maladjusted students is not just banal and intellectually lazy, but positions students themselves as the antagonists who pose a threat to education.

But, she points out, it can also be those minority groups who are of the greatest interest to the Australian Government for purposes of surveillance. ‘It’s mostly Muslim people who are inflicted with increased surveillance in our post-September 11 world’, says Edney-Browne. The Australian public is frequently divided over whether or not this is okay.

The recent killing of UK MP Jo Cox is one such example. In no major news outlet in the anglophone world was her death labelled an assassination, despite substantial evidence suggesting the attack was ideologically motivated. Cox was allegedly murdered by Thomas Mair, who gave his name in court as ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain’ and was reported to have shouted ‘Britain first!’ repeatedly when he stabbed and shot the West Yorkshire politician after a meeting with her constituents. Considering her involvement in the campaign for Britain to remain in the EU, it is no great leap to conclude that her killing was indeed an act of violent political antagonism.

Australia, like much of the world, is experiencing a renaissance of violence, both direct and structural, against minorities, and the reception of Cleverman’s critique is important. The show’s ratings are modest and steadily declining in spite of good reviews: this might be symptomatic of a nation’s refusal to talk about its own racism and xenophobia, but it also reflects the need for real talk.

But Australia has a long history of ugly racism – against Indigenous Australians, against Chinese, Afghans, Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Sudanese – it’s something the political class has fed and bred for many decades. Richard Marles may claim that ‘offshore processing has been the single most important policy that any Australian government has made’, but Labor was very proud of the White Australia policy as well.

Let me tell you what it is like to write about domestic violence as an academic.

It was in the canteen car of the late-night service that the Vietnam veteran finally told me his story. We’d been friends for months, regulars at a Louisiana-themed bar off Saigon’s Bùi Viện backpacker strip, but his time in-country was, if not exactly taboo, not really a go-to topic, either. The story that unfolded was right out of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, an un-filmed sequence of Apocalypse Now conveyed orally, in equal parts surreal and evil. What surprised me was how unsurprised I was by it all.

Much has been said before now about Australia’s – and Western media in general’s – assumption that if the victim of an atrocity is not white (and Australian) then it is not news; we are not interested in hearing about it. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel that such selective attention is coupled with an innate and somewhat perverse fear of missing out. Something big is happening in the world, no matter how horrific: how can we be part of it?

This rush to reclaim and reposition national ‘values’ and ‘culture’ is peculiarly context free. Such statements create the strategic impression of action and leadership, but also conveniently skate over deeper cultural and political issues of how vulnerability to violence is compounded by intersections of social class, race and ethnicity. By invoking the often-repeated claim that domestic violence transcends all social class boundaries, neoliberal politicians effectively avoid responsibility for creating a ‘lean and mean’ policy environment that makes some women more vulnerable to abuse.

Here’s why I panic: maybe there aren't any lines. Maybe all misogyny is violent, all sexism holds at its core a kind of brutality – be it emotional, physical or psychological.  I cannot talk about what happened in Santa Barbara and quarantine it from my own life, and this makes me ashamed for reasons I struggle to admit: is this disrespectful to those who died so needlesslessly and so horribly?

On 23 January 1924, a man opened fire with a .44 repeating rifle on the families picnicking in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens. He shot five people, seemingly targeted at random, before the gun failed. Three died. The murderer, later identified as Norman List, ran from the scene. On 2 February, his body was found in the bush in Pakenham, where he’d killed himself.

Those are the facts. Justice Martin then had the task of interpreting them. He concluded that this ‘crime is toward the lower end of the scale of seriousness for crimes of manslaughter’.