Horror in the Halls of Law: Pluralising Legal Stories in Once Upon a Time in Australia

ABSTRACT

In 2021, the Me Too movement took prominence in Australia following incidents which exposed gendered violence in the nation’s chief political, and legal institutions. The authors, teachers and students at one of the leading law schools in Australia took a range of actions, culminating in writing a graphic novel called Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too movement exposed the troubles of Truth in Law (Counterpress, 2014). In this article, the authors write about their methodology and offer auto-critiques of their work, in a process they describe as critical performative iterations. This method facilitates speaking out thoughts and lived perspectives into knowledge which aligns with feminist standpoint theory, while also resisting their voices from asserting new essentialised truths. These critiques consider the limitations of the authors’ standpoints. They also consider the genre of horror, the insider/outside trope, and the politics of citation in Law.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• metoo
• feminism
• climate change
• settler-colonial studies
• graphic novels
• comics studies
• critical legal studies
• abolition

1. Introduction

If there has been one ongoing thread in humanities research in the past three decades, it is that culture cannot be understood without reference to the politics of representation. Symbolic forms, societal contexts, and representational meanings are intimately tied to relations of power. The rich and messy nexus formed by political representation and the politics of representation that is at the center of human rights issues demands attention not only to the intersections between culture and law, but also to the ways that these discourses make and unmake meaning.

Sophie A McLennan and Joseph R Slaughter, “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms: Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights”.¹

The year 2021 was challenging in many ways. While our lives were still reeling from COVID and its impacts, other events highlighted the ongoing failure for Law’s instruments to address gendered violence in Australia. In particular, an historical rape allegation against the nation’s Attorney-General, the alleged rape of a staffer inside Parliament House, and the sexual harassment of staff by a High Court Justice. Whilst these events were not unusual, their temporal proximity and the wide media attention they attracted created a sufficient degree of outrage and horror to allow social momentum for gender justice in a way that had not been felt for some time. The March for Justice protests, held all over Australia were an outpouring of that outrage and horror.

In response to these events, one of the writers of this article (Anne) reached out to the Australian National University (‘ANU’) College of Law for a response from the faculty, and another writer (Sarouche) took up the call. At first, the result was an email conversation which explored these events and related issues. Then, Sarouche and Anne approached an artist and law student (Kirsten) who became not only the illustrator of that conversation, but a co-contributor to what evolved into a three-way dialogue. Together we (Sarouche, Anne and Kirsten) created the graphic novel Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too movement exposed the troubles with truth in law (Once Upon a Time in Australia).

In this article we offer a reflective analysis of the graphic novel and its creative process. In particular, we explore the critical potential of different modes of legal knowledge production and political engagement that emerged through the techniques of dialogic conversation and cultural representation. We consider that the conversational engagement and its graphic form (the graphic novel) has potential to expose the epistemological challenges of singularity in the law and the limits of legal understandings of truth in a way that (ironically) an academic article might not. This piece articulates how we worked together from our differences to explore the liminalities of truth/law, victim/offender, knower/writer, text/image to not only create legal knowledge but also a political engagement designed to open up new possibilities for legal justice.

Broadly, the structure of this article follows that process, starting from describing the event, to the response, to theorising the experience and outcome as part of a cultural politics of communication.² In the first part of this article, we tell the story of how we created the graphic novel. Once Upon a Time in Australia is a subversive work. The original kernel of the graphic novel was borne from the email conversation between Anne and Sarouche. As we turned that conversation into a graphic novel, we introduced Kirsten as the narrator and Kirsten extended our gaze to the law’s failure to offer truth or justice in response to climate change. As the barrage of these oppressive forces unfold in layers of dialogic encounters throughout the graphic novel, in both the text and graphic form, we felt surrounded until all we had to hold onto were our friendships to survive to fight another day. Like many other activist works, relationality sustained the struggle. The graphic novel blends our emails, with images, origin stories, breaks in the fourth wall, multiple epilogues, and a glossary. The graphic novel became the perfect vehicle because of its flexible and genre-defying nature.

In the second and third parts of this article, each of us in turn reflect on the process of creating the graphic novel and our unique and different standpoints. Each of us also draw on different themes in critical legal studies and cultural legal studies to self-reflectively analyse the text with regards to its content, its techniques, and its aesthetics. Together in this article, we consider how the literature in the fields of comics studies and legal storytelling situates our work.

In both the graphic novel and in this article, our aim is to challenge central tenets of the law which do violence to people on the margins: the neutrality of the law, the objectivity of the law, the legal tradition, the possibility of reason and reasoning, and the balanced dispassion of the advocate. Further, our intention in critically reflecting on our own work is to challenge a form of academic genre and practice, through adopting an alternative method we are describing as a process of critical performative iterations.³ This method facilitates speaking out our thoughts and lived perspectives into knowledge, whilst resisting our voices from asserting another truth. Indeed, this method has been applied beyond the conversation, the graphic novel and even this article, to many related acts that form part of a broader political and activist project which have included conference papers,⁴ and an art exhibition in November 2023.⁵

2. How We Created Once Upon a Time in Australia

2.1. Australia’s Me Too⁶ Moment

While gendered violence has a long history in Australia (as it does everywhere), the impetus for the conversation and the graphic novel was generated following a series of recent events. In February 2021, Brittany Higgins stated that she had been raped in 2019 by a male colleague inside a ministerial office in Australia’s Federal Parliament.⁷ Various members of the government knew about the complaint.⁸

Just over a week later, the national broadcaster published a story detailing an historic sexual assault complaint about a present member of Cabinet.⁹ The complainant had suicided some time after sending the complaint to the police in 2020.¹⁰ The person on the front cover of our project represents the blurred image that the news agencies used to represent that person (Figure 1). The member of Cabinet was revealed to be the chief legal officer of the country at the time, the Commonwealth Attorney-General Christian Porter.¹¹ The government and the Attorney-General resisted both calls to investigate the complaint and to step down once the issues became public. The Attorney-General denied the allegation and in his own defence, used protecting the rule of law and due process as a shield. He stated:

Having myself run trial after trial after trial about serious matters, helping victims, women and children, every absolute effort has to be made to take allegations seriously, to pursue them through the court process and it is an arduous, gruelling process and I did that on their behalf, but equally the other side of that process is there is rights and there are circumstances where someone might absolutely believe something, but it might not be a reliable account. That is actually why we have a justice system. It is why we have courts and the presumption of innocence and burdens of proof. That is why we do these things in that process and not like this.¹²

Both of these events implicated the government and occurred shortly after the news of another high-profile incident of sexual harassment in the legal profession. In June 2020 the High Court of Australia (HCA) found that former High Court Justice Dyson Heydon had sexually assaulted six woman associates while he was a member of the court.¹³ The HCA formally apologised and announced measures to improve complaints processes and protect staff.¹⁴

Figure 1. Once Upon a Time in Australia Front Cover.¹¹¹

The meaning and significance of these events ought to be understood against the background of the findings (and recommendations) of a report by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner published in March 2020, ‘Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report’ (the Report).¹⁵ Initiated in 2018, the Inquiry leading to the report was prompted by the Me Too movement. The Report investigated sexual harassment in Australian workplaces and made 55 recommendations which were released into a public sphere of impatience and agitation.¹⁶ While the government accepted or noted all the recommendations,¹⁷ implementation only really commenced upon a change in government.¹⁸

These events led to the organisation of the ‘March4Justice’, where in March 2021 over 100,000 people protested around the country, including outside of Parliament House in Canberra.

The protesters made the following four official demands:

• Full independent investigations into all cases of gendered violence and timely referrals to appropriate authorities. Full public accountability for findings.

• Fully implement the 55 recommendations in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work Report of the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces 2020.

• Lift public funding for gendered violence prevention to world’s best practice.

• The enactment of a federal Gender Equality Act to promote gender equality.

• A commitment to a gender equity audit of Parliamentary practices.¹⁹

The Prime Minister met with the protesters, but the response was defensive, brusque and performative.²⁰

2.2. ANU College of Law Response – What is the Responsibility of a Law Faculty?

This article takes what we did, as a local, specific response to these events, and from it, theorises what we did (and didn’t) do. The conversation that became the graphic novel was a particular political intervention, something that Sarouche and Anne initially felt was needed in that moment: work designed to interrupt a universal truth without replacing it with another universal truth. Burbules theorises a discursive space which ‘requires a tolerance for a certain kind of friction, risk, and uncertainty’ in order to ‘become a potential framework in which to recognize and discuss those conflicts with fresh terms and perspectives, and in that possibly to understand them better’.²¹ In the final form of the graphic novel, together we have attempted to hold open a liminal space of the ‘knowledge of law’, to create what Burbules calls a ‘third space’ one which ‘offers no solutions to such situations of potential conflict and misunderstanding; at most, it provides a different framework for thinking about what communicative engagement in such situations ought to be aiming for’.²²

A number of ANU staff, including academics and students at the ANU College of Law, attended the March4Justice rally on the lawns of Australia’s Parliament House, including the three of us. While being there felt important, the message given the crowd and its purpose was, by necessity, blunt and general. There was a sense of something significant being discussed in public in an area in which the law (and therefore legal academics) had a direct stake. Moreover, there was also a sense of responsibility to have those conversations, and explicitly articulate a position in response to these events. As a part of the legal profession, which these events clearly implicated, silence was potentially the same as complicity. It was time for legal academics to speak up and speak out: to use their legal expertise and skills to create a way for those entering the legal profession to create change, which was clearly needed.

2.3. March 2021 Gendering the Rule of Law? An Informal Discussion

The response at the ANU College of Law was diverse and largely informal. In addition to student groups, on 12 March 2021, one of the authors issued an invitation to the ANU College of Law staff to come together and begin to share those perspectives and insights in conversation, with a view to developing a response. The invitation went:

The events of the past few weeks have been shocking, but sadly for many, unsurprising. Serious allegations have emerged about a culture of sexual harassment and assault at Parliament House. More concerning still, the allegations have implicated the nation’s highest legal office holder, the Commonwealth Attorney- General. The hue and cry has been loud. The public has been very critical of the way the government has handled the issue and made demands for various investigations and inquiries.

Interestingly, the government has largely rejected these demands in the name of the ‘rule of law’. Yet legal scholars have long noted that the rule of law and appeals to it operate unevenly and intersect with inequalities based on sex, gender, sexuality, race and class (among others). Today, we are witnessing how recourse to the rule of law is being used to silence sexual assault accusers and undermine attempts to challenge sexual assault cultures.²³

An informal discussion/workshop was held on 16 March 2021. For a discussion, there was a good turnout amongst legal academics, with diverse genders, ages and legal interests. The conversation was wide ranging, drawing on different substantive areas of legal expertise (defamation, equity, criminal law, discrimination law, civil procedure, legal ethics and evidence), raising different legal issues such as legal education, the legal profession, as well as theoretical insights including feminism, post-colonialism and neo-liberalism. The workshop prompted a further invitation but momentum soon petered out.

2.4. An Encounter

Anne and Sarouche, both members of the law faculty, started to explore the issues they were interested in, through a conversation. On 1 June 2021 Sarouche wrote to Anne and stated:

A theme I’m fixated on is the burden of proof – it’s incongruent that we’re told to believe victims but make the burden beyond reasonable doubt. I think that goes into the A stream you’ve described below. But in discussion with my brother (who is a practicing criminal lawyer for an Aboriginal legal service) – his clear view is that shifting the burden would disproportionately incarcerate more Aboriginal people. It leads to the uncomfortable issues around carcerality – as long as the system finds more pathways for criminalisation (of men and women), then oppression will continue to bear a gendered lens. That seems common sense in a way – prison is literally state sanctioned violence – so lateral violence is an inherent response. It seems like it’s a lose-lose situation where the system will always marginalise Aboriginal people. Perhaps the argument here that I’m interested in – is that both decarceration and abolition movements may have a stronger impact on reducing gendered violence than throwing more people into prison. What many victims want is to be believed, perhaps more than they want punishment – while interestingly, the system is offering more punishment, but not much belief.²⁴

The email, as with so much of workplace correspondence, fell away until eight months later when Anne revisited it and responded by suggesting they co-write something. When Anne and Sarouche met online to think about how to respond, they decided on a series of dialectic pieces/engagements where each posed a question of the other. Over the next two months they wrote a series of exchanges with each other critically exploring the relationship between truth and law.

Anne was propelled by questioning (and exposing) the appeal to the rule of law. The very ambiguity of the rule of law meant that it could be appealed to as a concept capturing a range of values that ensured that the legal system could achieve justice for everyone. As a cluster of ideas, the rule of law was often associated with objectivity and neutrality. It was also associated with equality, in the sense that all individuals must abide by the law, including those is positions of power and influence. Indeed, some conceptualisations of the rule of law took these ideas further, and implied certain values or ideals into the substance of the law, not only its processes and coverage. Finally, there were a range of ways that the rule of law was implemented in various contexts, including (but not limited to), the right to a fair trial, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right to be deprived of property and liberty only through the due process of the law and not ‘arbitrary’ government fiat.

Yet, the Attorney-General’s appeal to the rule of law was more as an individual shield or defence from the operation of the law. The irony that it was the Attorney-General, the highest law officer in the nation, using this concept in this way, was not lost. Instead, it was an instance where the rule of law was being used by an individual in the highest position of legal power to mask and deflect allegations of sexual violence. When these high-ranking legal officers and politicians silenced the questions from the media in the name of the rule of law, the complicity of the concept in silencing gendered violence became clearly visible. This is not the same thing as assuming that the allegations were true just because they were made or spoken. Nor is it the case that the Attorney-General (or any other person) should not be allowed to deny allegations. Rather, what Anne was committed to exploring was how the personal and political wrangling over what is the truth according to ‘the law’ is equated with what ‘is true’ as a matter of reality. This is a dangerous conflation because as a practical matter, it means that the Attorney-General, or Judge, or any person with the authority to pronounce the law, controls ‘the truth’. Also, as a theoretical matter it makes a concept such as the rule of law complicit with achieving its very opposite.

Sarouche was focused on the truth-making function of the legal system and how fraught that was. In particular, he considered how fraught the legal system was when it was founded on the illegal basis of Terra Nullius.²⁵ He imagined it was impossible for the legal system to be an arbiter of justice when it bears witness to ongoing colonial violence and for which it continues to shirk responsibility.

Through the email conversation, Sarouche and Anne explored their experiences and knowledge of the law and questioned its power to speak truth with singularity. The knowledge spoken during this conversation was designed to interrupt the assumption of the connection between law and truth, and challenge the role that the assumption plays in maintaining gendered, racist, and colonial power structures that cause harm. They were aware that in critiquing the truth, they did not want to assert a new overarching truth. Instead, they viewed their engagement as producing only a partial truth which was a product of their standpoints and experiences. Anne and Sarouche wanted to acknowledge the partial standpoints from which they both wrote and generated this particular, localised engagement.

That led Anne and Sarouche to a decision point about how to format and present their dialogue. They considered restructuring the conversation so that it would fulfil the expectations of an academic paper and comply with a sense of rationality and order. But this format suggested that they were motivated to present a singular argument to the reader or had settled on a singular point of view themselves. This was not the case. They decided to leave the points in the order that they made them in the email engagement, without a pre-determined rational and analytical order. Once they had made the decision to keep the conversational element, they asked in what other ways might they depart from the academic article as the representation of authoritative (singular) truth/ knowledge?

2.5. The Making of a Graphic Novel

The decision to accompany the conversation with a series of images seemed to be consistent with the style, flow, and rhythm of a conversation, rather than an argument, or claim plus evidence style of an academic article. The decision to invite Kirsten became more than just seeking an illustrator: it became another standpoint, another conversation, another (partial) knower through which each layer of ideas took shape and came into being and were ultimately communicated.

Anne met Kirsten as a student in a tutorial at law school. Through activities which were designed to help students and the tutor to get to know each other, Kirsten (they/she) had mentioned that they like to draw and had an earlier degree in animation. Anne approached Kirsten to see if they were interested in creating a graphic novel to communicate the ideas that Anne and Sarouche had explored. Kirsten agreed and a new dimension of the project began.

In the next period Kirsten created a series of images that stood alongside the conversation between Anne and Sarouche. These images were fascinating for the depth and breadth they offered. At times they were haunting and elegant, at other times they were crude-like caricatures, and they always seemed to carry the fury inherent in the injustices being explored. Importantly, Kirsten’s images came to be in conversation with Anne and Sarouche’s dialogue and it soon became clear that Kirsten had become an integral part of the process. Together, we²⁶ devised a new version where Kirsten would become the protagonist of the dialogue between Anne and Sarouche, and where we would break the fourth wall and speak to the audience to break down the rigidity of the academic dialogue, but also to add more to the critical interventions that we all felt needed to be made. If Anne’s first concern was the complicity of the rule of law to silence gendered violence, and Sarouche’s first concern was the inability of the legal system to be an arbiter of truth given its ongoing colonial violence, Kirsten’s first concern was the how the legal system’s complicity in the climate catastrophe tied in with gendered and colonial violence.

The final substantive section of the graphic novel came together when we discussed how to engage with the question of references and citations. It was clear that our graphic novel was grounded in the fields of critical legal studies and cultural legal studies but we were also producing what is curiously described by the university as a ‘non-traditional research output’.²⁷ We say it is curious because if key ideas in critical legal studies and cultural legal studies are to be embraced, non-traditional research outputs should be driving developments in critical legal theory and not disparaged for their inability to meet the disciplinary requirements of legal writing. Our challenge then became how to engage in a politics of citation, a key aspect of the academic genre, both in good faith and critically. We decided to write short plain language summaries of the people and ideas we were referencing, and Kirsten accompanied each entry with simple images.

Together, this gives a brief overview of how we wrote the graphic novel.

3. Critical Reflections on Once Upon a Time in Australia

In this section we offer three accounts of standpoint to engage in what we see as a process of critical performative iterations. We have produced a creative work that straddles the fields of law and the visual arts. While we can imagine this article as a form of exegesis, we are also imagining it as something more. In the period of the production of the graphic novel we have engaged in an ongoing and circling process of critical reflection and we believe this process has potential for those who work, write and practice in law.

Our graphic novel and this article are part of a project of critical reflexivity which asks questions about how we think about justice and how we do justice. Scholars such as Sedgwick and Felski have made a turn away from critique, and suggest that critique employs modes of suspicion and paranoia which create limitations on how we engage with texts and cultural artefacts.²⁸ These modes make us dig down and stand back, as Felski puts it.²⁹ In both our graphic novel and this article, we intentionally engage with modes of critique and reflexivity, and we see the possibilities of this process as being able to eschew the tropes that malign critique with negativity, paranoia, and suspicion. For us critique continues to offer curiosity, generosity, new possibility, and solidarity.

We also see something deeply important in grounding our process of critical reflection in standpoint. This, however, makes a collective writing project both inter-subjective and tricky. Moreton-Robinson posits:

An Indigenous women’s standpoint is ascribed through inheritance and achieved through struggle. It is constituted by our sovereignty and constitutive of the interconnectedness of our ontology (our way of being); our epistemology (our way of knowing) and our axiology (our way of doing). It generates its problematics through Indigenous women’s knowledges and experiences acknowledging that intersecting oppressions will situate us in different power relations and affect our different individual experiences under social, political, historical and material conditions that we share either consciously or unconsciously … . Our lives are always shaped by the omnipresence of patriarchal white sovereignty and its continual denial of our sovereignty.³⁰

Indigenous standpoint theory stands apart from feminist standpoint theory and as settlers we can attempt to respectfully engage with Indigenous standpoints and interrogate our own standpoints and knowledge disciplines.³¹

For Butler:

performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject.³²

What we see is the possibility of a different series of iterations in the graphic novel, and in this article. Not those kinds of shortcuts that affirm normativities of violence or self-applause, but instead, as Haraway would ask of us,³³ a sitting in discomfort as an invitation to curiosity, ambivalence, and social action. Elsewhere, Sarouche has explored this in adopting Biomythography³⁴ as both method and methodology in his writing practice. Biomythography, a form created by poet and activist Audre Lorde ‘is a form of writing which grounds subjective individual and collective experience, and its interrelationship with history and myth to centre experiences of justice and injustice’.³⁵ What is interesting in the graphic novel, the article and indeed the larger project, are the ways that subjectivities flow into one another through the creative processes of thinking together, conversing, writing, drawing, editing, and curating. Both the article and the graphic novel demarcate individual subjectivities in the writing and drawing, but during the creative process, those lines were often blurred. Each of us now turn to outline and explore aspects of our own subjectivities which both informed the insights which we brought to the graphic novel, as well as highlighting some of the moments of discomfort which we felt when reflecting on what we created.

3.1. Anne

From parents with working class English and New Zealand backgrounds, I am the first generation to be born on the stolen land of what is now called Australia. I am a white cis-woman who has lived five decades of gendered harms in Australia, both large and small. The cultural, historical and social context in which I have lived has shaped not only who I am, but also my understanding of gendered harms and how I respond to them. My university degrees led to other insights about gender violence as well as other forms of harms and violence.

While I now work at a colonial Australian law school, both my research and my experiences as a legal practitioner in the community legal sector has led me to be increasingly disappointed with our legal system’s capacity to prevent violence and address injustice. More and more, alongside the promises that law holds for those who have experienced injustice, I also see the violence done by the law and how law protects the power and privilege of those who yield violence.

Having that knowledge, of both the legal system and the ways that it practically touches lives, generates a responsibility that I find difficult to turn into academic and political action. There is a tension between feeling that I should call out the harms that I experience and observe, and being aware that what I call out can only ever be a partial and flawed knowledge. My knowledge is most certainly limited in ways that I am unaware of, and so my voice is as likely to address harm as to enact further forms of it. This makes working in academia, an environment where one is directed to either publish or perish, a fraught and uneasy existence. Yet, to be silent is a limitation and can be read as one that means complicity with the way things are. This is unacceptable too.

And so, like many others, I struggle with the responsibility of voice and of speaking out, against and for who? Even in this piece, I am troubled by my act of writing. Why did I act then, and not before? At the time, I thought that I was speaking out against the white man of legal power and privilege – trying to open a critical space in which to explore the gendered harms and violence committed in and through the law. But in doing so, the surrounding events become part of the way that the graphic novel is and will be read. In speaking out when I did, my actions add impetus to the well-educated and resourced white young women who were at the centre of the political stage. My position does not explicitly call out other harms that are just as egregious and occurring at the same time. For example, in the same week as the March4Justice rallies were held, a transgendered woman of colour Mhelody Bruno was killed.³⁶ Yet in all the criticism of gendered violence and harm that was playing out on the national stage, Mhelody’s harms were not mourned, not addressed, and were therefore silenced. And now looking back at the words that I have written, my words as a cis white woman have become fixed in a time and place, and my words will take their meaning in relation to events that become relevant to others, in ways beyond my control and in spite of my concerns. And while the modes of making knowledge more partial and limited through exploring the techniques of conversation, dialogue, and reflection in the piece were one attempt to resist the easy foreclosure of a singular understanding of ‘knowing’, it can only ever be partially successful at best, and at worst it becomes as harmful as any other act or speech.

3.2. Sarouche

I am a Muslim, and I am an Afghan and Iranian man. I bring those standpoints into my work. I am living on unceded First Nations lands in Australia. My professional training is through the schools of law – I am an officer of the court and I have practiced for more than a decade. In that time, I have worked predominantly in social justice lawyering. In that context I have worked with First Nations communities on questions of justice – in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, in Far North Queensland, throughout Western Australia, but particularly in the Kimberley. I too am the product of colonial interventions but in Australia I am a landowner in the Torrens title system. My presence as a settler holds me in tension.³⁷ I mostly write in the Latin alphabet and the English language, which is foreign terrain for me, as a second language. The possibilities of empiricism, positivism, and objectivity are foreclosed in my work because of who I am.

There is a critical tension about writing about First Nations peoples. Kwaymullina notes the epistemic violence that can occur:

Historically, the question of whether Eurocentric scholars should research Indigenous peoples is one that was rarely, if ever, asked – at least, not with reference to the views of Indigenous peoples or the boundaries on “knowing” within Indigenous knowledge systems.³⁸

Much of the decolonial literature frames these parameters around whiteness, and the literature makes clear that whiteness is most importantly understood around structures and processes rather than corporeality.³⁹ I state this because as an ‘officer of the court’, doing law must be understood through the lens of power. However, I do have a corporeality, and it is not white. My worldview can best be understood through faith and language. I am a Muslim and a Farsi speaker, and I am otherised in many forms of whiteness.

One reason that producing a work of creative and intellectual expression is interesting to me is because it created fixed contours and the instinct I have, along with my fellow writers, is to orient knowledge in a more uncertain way. This is a tension inherent toexploring standpoint theoretically. To unsettle norms of objectivity and neutrality, I offer my subjectivity forward, but my subjectivity is also something that is changing, shifting, and requires ongoing reflection. Yet once I’ve committed to an identity on paper, a fixity sets in to who I am.

In the period since we created the graphic novel, I’ve thought a lot about the silences I am complicit in. I suggested the following image (Figure 2) to Kirsten as a rallying moment that connected the authors. While we did not meet there, all three of us were at the March4Justice in 2021, which in some clear ways, inspired the graphic novel.

Figure 2. Klein, Razi, and Klein-Razi at March4Justice.¹¹²

For some time media scholar McQuire has directed her scholarship to the violence in narrative and media, and specifically, the institutional silence that contributes to the deaths of First Nations’ women across the country.⁴⁰ Her work dares to ask the question of why Blak⁴¹ womens’ lives are worth less than others to settler societies.⁴²

Some uncomfortable questions emerge in the graphic novel that make me feel like I have been sitting with them in a quiet acquiescence. As a practicing lawyer, for example, I understand that I behave in ways that limits how much I put on the line for my protest for racial and gender violence. The solicitor’s conduct rules require duties such as a duty (or loyalty) to the (colonial) court, being ‘a fit a proper person’,⁴³ not acting in a way that will reduce confidence in the legal system or bringing the system into disrepute. To become a lawyer, you must meet the nebulous test of having ‘good fame of character’.⁴⁴ Invariably, being involved in protest movements will bring these obligations and duties into question. In policing nebulous concepts like ‘good fame’, and ‘fit and proper’ the law’s officers require and model behaviours of passive conservativism and obedience to law’s form over its essence and politics. Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil emerges in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem,⁴⁵ which reports on the trial of Eichmann, a Nazi officer complicit in the Holocaust. Arendt frames Eichmann’s ambivalence towards his actions as a banal form of malevolence, as the efficient bureaucrat co-ordinating trains of people being led to their killing.⁴⁶ Arendt’s concept is an important way to think about a society where unethical decisions happen through mundane tasks. If Eichmann’s evil is banal, how do we characterise the complicity of the even more mundane, the train drivers themselves, for example? In this way I see something sinister in the regime of the professional identity of the lawyer – outwardly about proper process and good order but with far more sinister consequences.

What makes me most uncomfortable are the questions around punishment. In prison abolition discussions, even many strident supporters of abolitionism struggle with these questions.⁴⁷ Abolition is a mode of theory and practice that I have been engaged with for several years, and it takes seriously the project of abolishing prison for its centrality in the harms of modern society.⁴⁸ The denial of liberty and prison conditions can both be seen as forms of violence. The evidence shows us that people become increasingly criminalised inside prison, that the majority of criminal offending is determinant on socio-economic and historic reasons, and that prison has limited therapeutic benefit.⁴⁹ These factors tell us that prison makes society a more harmful place. Yet much of the legal schema around gender-based violence suggests the violence of the police and the prison as a necessary tool to combat gendered violence. This more than anything seems like the problem of the ‘Master’s tools’.⁵⁰ We continue to seek out the law’s weapons as the shields to gendered harms and then we are surprised when they do not work. The organising effect of law creates binaries around victim and offender, innocence and guilt, good and bad, right and wrong – which does very little to heal. We need to find ways to hammer out the binaries in law, and if we cannot, then I do not believe law is a very useful space to address gender-based harm. This is the ongoing question that underpins this graphic novel from my perspective. To put it more philosophically, is anyone beyond redemption? Having experienced the effects of serious violence in my extended family during my childhood, it is not a question that is flippant for me – yet I can see how tricky this is given my privileges as a cis-gendered male. Ultimately, I do not think punishment makes our world a better place. Sometimes Once Upon a Time addresses these questions, but looking back I also see the limitations of our (settler) standpoints. This paper is a process of ongoing readings of our project – one we’ve described as critical performative iterations. It opens up our graphic novel beyond a closed commodifiable product and a process that we hope evades hagiography and self-congratulation. So I circle back to the law being unable to deal with the chief questions of the graphic novel while it has a monopoly over violence- and uses it liberally.

3.3. Kirsten

My main writing role in Once Upon a Time in Australia has been to add the reality check of the climate crisis and the role of disruptive activist praxis. In the final draft stage of the graphic novel in mid-to-late 2023, The Guardian broke news that global warming might cause the Gulf Stream to collapse as early as 2025,⁵¹ which would cause the United Kingdom to become as cold as Canada at the same latitude. The increasing odds of simultaneous crop region failures means famines and the cost-of-living crisis will continue to skyrocket.⁵² This would be a disaster, particularly for women, LGBTQIA + people, First Nations’ communities, and people in the Global South, amongst others.

I missed an opportunity in the graphic novel to do much Me Too advocacy for LGBTQIA + people, but I want it more widely known that half of all bisexual women and half of all transgender people report being raped.⁵³ I did not know about the death of Filipina trans woman Mhelody Bruno in Wagga Wagga during the 2021 March4Justice protest week, until Anne wrote about Mhelody Bruno in this article.

While I have risked not attaining a law practicing certificate due to engaging in civil disobedience climate protests, I am privileged to have a criminal record out of choice: taking a moral stance and expressing my political autonomy. Far more people are arrested for committing crimes due to poverty, addiction and/or mental illness, from being racially profiled, or from over-policing in low socio-economic areas. Privileged white women often get to ‘choose’ whether to engage in activism, because we usually do not need to be activists for our survival. My mother is a primary school teacher and my father's job is to recruit nuclear submarine operators for the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) treaty. My family home displays three colonial charts by the Dutch, the English and the French. I am an illustrator, law graduate, paralegal and hopeful lawyer trying to ensure the harms done by my ancestors are not repeated. I’ve supported Blockade Australia in actions because they have taken environmental activism to its logical conclusion, disrupting fossil fuel and colonial infrastructure.⁵⁴ This has to be done out of necessity and self-defence until the law and/or the majority takes as much responsibility. Anarchists in my circles have a ‘rule of law’ that we call ‘community care’⁵⁵ and they have been good friends to me.

4. Three Aesthetic Reads of Once Upon a Time in Australia

As a piece of culture, text, image, and law, our graphic novel draws on traditions in comics and comic studies. Comics have a long tradition of metafiction and comic studies constructs and deconstructs representations of image and text and considers the potential political and epistemic questions that emerge.⁵⁶ Groensteen develops a theory of narratology to the comic – which considers temporality, perspective and position.⁵⁷ In our graphic novel, our narrator sits both within the graphic novel and outside of it – this was both by design and by happenstance given the turn of events that brought the graphic novel to life. Miodrag’s work explores the interplay between text and image with a view of the language that emerges in the intersection between them.⁵⁸ In our graphic novel, the images followed the initial dialogue between two of the authors which enlivened our critical dialogue. Davies considers framing as a device, and how it borders comics as part of narrative structure.⁵⁹ In our graphic novel, we decided to frame the beginning of the graphic novel with three origin stories, a classic comic device – and it was doing other critical work, demonstrating standpoint, subjectivity, and vulnerability. Within the genre of the comic, our graphic novel sits as a critical legal work, and this is an emerging field.

Our graphic novel also draws on traditions in law. Cultural legal studies seek to make visible those social relations where a doctrinal read of law imagines a law devoid of its cultural context.⁶⁰ We situate our paper in the traditions of cultural legal studies which examine the power dynamics of legal texts and academic texts. We are not only agents in producing legal knowledge outside of its traditional forms, we are also seeking to use methods in cultural legal studies to offer auto-critiques of our project. In particular, within the law and literature movement, storytelling, narrative, rhetoric, and tone are explored to question the relationships of power that are implicit within the law. Giddens and Peters,⁶¹ who write at the intersection of the law and literature field and comic studies field, argue that the comic is a way of ‘seeing’ law.⁶² Indeed, for our graphic novel, we found the juxtaposition between the dialogue and image as the best legal vehicle to foreground the intersection between gender, settler-colonial relations, and the environmental destruction of our planet.

What follows in the next sections are three reads of Once Upon a Time in Australia within each of these traditions: Kirsten considers questions of genre and horror in the graphic novel and good/bad aesthetics and the power relations they reproduce; Anne considers the insider/outsider trope that is used in the graphic novel; while Sarouche looks at the politics of citation and how it reproduces neoliberal property norms. At what point can the genre of horror, the trope of the insider/outsider, and the use of a glossary be separated from the substance those devices are using? One purpose here is to offer auto-critique as part of our methodology.⁶³

4.1. Kirsten: Horror as a Genre and the Politics of Good and Bad Aesthetics in Drawing

Horror is a genre that is particularly relevant to law,⁶⁴ and is present through our graphic novel. Crofts has been working with the genre of horror to understand law, with recent regard to the corporation and institutional violence.⁶⁵ Crofts argues that ‘horror is a response to harm so extreme or abnormal that it cannot be easily assimilated into one’s understanding of the world’.⁶⁶ A common element in works of horror is a particular duality of something sinister underlying something normatively ‘perfect’. The archetypal example are the iterations of The Stepford Wives⁶⁷ which offer an important critique of gender roles. More recently Jordan Peele’s Get Out⁶⁸ is set against a perfect suburban American white picket-fence community, which reveals the reality of the horrors of post-racialism. Our graphic novel speaks to the horrors of law – aesthetically embodying a form akin to Corporate Memphis as subterfuge for the horror of harming the communities the law purports to protect.

Corporate Memphis⁶⁹ is the current prevailing art style in the education, branding and presentation of the law – illustrations and animations that have a flattened, geometric and simple aesthetic and are ‘incessantly joyful’, ‘always in motion, dancing, painting, running, or hugging one another with the expanse of their oversized limbs arching away from their bodies like giant wet noodles’.⁷⁰ The example below (Figure 3) will familiarise a contemporary audience with the aesthetic and its affect instantly, although you might not have heard the name before.

Figure 3. Macduff, Hoffman, and Razi in Corporate Memphis takeover.¹¹³

These aesthetics are used by tech companies, fintech, landlords and law firms in an attempt to appear human, with rainbow skin tones symbolising diversity: ‘The style appears to serve as the illustrative arm of an intentional deployment of cheerful minimalism to mask the insidiousness of multinational tech corporations with friendliness and approachability’.⁷¹ In law Corporate Memphis is frequently combined with stock footage of smiling office professionals.⁷² They do not show stains inside the cells the law sends people to. Nor do they show the glow of comradery between climate activists. Insiders think the corporate boardrooms deploying Corporate Memphis know the world is a complex place,⁷³ but this is an illusion they make for their consumers. Our graphic novel does not use Corporate Memphis. It is set in a dusty post-2019-2020 Australian bushfire-season world. Horror in rural and city Australia is the smoke of approaching fire. It deals with rape, aggravated assault, suicide, ghosts, creepy children, psychopathic students who grow up to be doctors, and betrayals by the High Court, Parliament and education institutions.⁷⁴ It aims to be paranoid, without disrespecting survivors. I want a future without police and where fossil fuel executives are recognised as criminals.

Though I initially took inspiration from dissenting Australian comic artists like First Dog on the Moon,⁷⁵ who has depicted climate activists I know and have shared a cell with,⁷⁶ I read Persepolis⁷⁷ by Marjane Satrapi during the project, and I kept Safdar Ahmed’s refugee activism graphic novel Still Alive⁷⁸ near my desk as a reminder that it is more important to take a stand in difficult spaces making art for justice than to draw perfectly.⁷⁹ A Tasmanian climate activist, Colette Harmsen, was in jail as I wrote this article’s first draft.⁸⁰ Some images in Once Upon a Time in Australia are ugly, but I kept them, inspired by analysis of Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan,⁸¹ as it was noted by reviewers that his manga would not be as scary without the eerie tone of his imperfect drawings.⁸² Isayama’s drawings are not rushed: they are dark and earnest, the hand learning to keep up with what haunts the creator. The paper bag worn by my narrator character can be interpreted how readers like. Perhaps it is a cool mask, anonymity, insecurity or a combination- they all harken back to horror. To feel dangerous in dangerous times I have fun drawing myself like a vampire (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Self-Portrait, Kirsten Hoffman.¹¹⁴

4.2. Anne: Origin Stories and the Insider/Outsider

Reminiscent of Kirsten’s description above, works of horror and popular culture from E.T.⁸³ to Stranger Things⁸⁴ repeat the image of the child doing a paper run in suburbia against the backdrop of a greater menace. The menace is often an external force and yet the real menace is often the normativities of being stuck inside suburbia – which is how I chose to tell my origin story. Here the menace is the reality of everyday experiences of structural violence we were exploring in the graphic novel: gender and colonial violence and its intersections with the climate crisis (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Young Anne on Bicycle, Once Upon A Time in Australia.¹¹⁵

Yet, in speaking out against the structures of violence of legal truths, whose experiences are we drawing on, whose truths? An aesthetic engagement with the inside/outside dichotomy was a key theme of our graphic novel which had political and theoretical consequences. The inside/outside dichotomy has been well theorised.⁸⁵ Sociologists have theorised the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ as a definitional structure which helps to explain social structures, specifically the degree to which individuals belong or identify with a particular group, or not. The border, or the definitional boundary where an individual might cross from an outsider to an insider, varies depending on the sociological and cultural context. It is both a research methodology and theory that has been applied to generate knowledge from diverse perspectives in a range of fields,⁸⁶ including fields as diverse as disability,⁸⁷ nationalism,⁸⁸ to international law.⁸⁹

Yet the frequency and ease with which the inside/ outside dichotomy reinforces the boundary or border between the two ideas helps to hide the contingent nature of that dichotomy. It can hide the fact that these borders are constructed in relation to the historical, social and political contexts of those applying the inside/outside binaries in particular ways. And, as Derrida has theorised,⁹⁰ subverting binaries through understanding the necessary relationship of the binary terms can help reveal that the border is not fixed, certain or impermeable.⁹¹

In the graphic novel, we attempt to subvert and disrupt a number of different inside/outside dichotomies. In the first instance, there is an articulation and negotiation of different positions in relation to being inside or outside the law, but also both at the same time. This is important, as it generates the position of responsibility from which we write the critique. In other words, the structural violence of law is not just a problem, it is a problem of a system within which each of us participates. While studying and now researching the law, I am both an insider and producer of legal knowledge, while at the same time an outsider: my ‘legal relevance relevance-o-meter’ is out of whack.⁹² Sarouche can walk the walk, but writes that he feels as if it is a performance, and one day he will be tapped on the shoulder and ‘sprung’.⁹³ Kirsten too, is both a student of law and at the same time an outlaw, challenging and breaking a legal system which has failed to enact climate justice.⁹⁴ She both benefits from it, while being punished by it.

While each of us makes clear that we have knowledge of the colonial law of Australia, we also articulate in the graphic novel the extent to which our identities and experiences make us feel outside the law and its values. They do not sit naturally with us, and yet, the law is also a part of us as we use its language and engage with both its narratives and its myths. We sought to challenge the assumption that law, and the legal system, was the singular benchmark for measuring truth.

There is also an attempt to make visible and disrupt the truths of the knowledge from which we ourselves speak, being those generated by experiences of our embodied identities.⁹⁵ Throughout the graphic novel the different boundaries of our identities are articulated, yet the fact that they are partial and are exposed as limited in different ways is also left visible. The graphic novel captures our uncertainties and revisions, our openness to learning from each other and having our limits and blind spots identified for the reader. We have stayed honest to those moments as they occurred, rather than edit them out. While this means the reading is less smooth and polished, the constant shifting and reiteration of our identities in relation to the politics of the moment becomes more visible. This attempt honours the importance of knowledge being expressed from a standpoint, yet also being open to the fact that standpoints are not fixed and emerge differently in relation to the discussion and also over time. It shows that the truth of the law is an experience, yet experienced differently from multiple, different and partial standpoints.

Part of our limitations, and our partiality, was highlighted by the recognition that these issues were influenced by the social and contextual history of our conversation – that it took place on the land of First Nations people, and whose sovereignty whilst continuing and never ceded, has not been officially recognised by the Australian government. This issue, and its implications, is yet to be properly acknowledged by legal academics, lawyers and law students trained in colonial Australian law.⁹⁶

We also attempted to disrupt the boundary between knower and reader. English text is read left to right, and front to back, and the experiences gives us a temporality that seems to parallel the (apparent) march of history.⁹⁷ In contrast, our thoughts as captured in the text attempts to be more honest about how our ideas changed over the course of time, frequently circling back, more conversational and dialogic, and less temporally fixed. We did this to represent the flow of experience of learning from each other, rather than having already pre-formed knowledge that was merely shared or captured in the project. It attempted to show how the conversation and its art shaped and reshaped our learning – rather than how we already had that knowledge and sought to deliver it.

We also felt that the conversational text through which this message was conveyed should also communicate the multiple perspectives that we take to these issues and questions. In addition to making our different standpoint and experiences clear, the fact that the writing was not designed to reach a singular agreement or viewpoint was important to us. We thought that this might better allow us to reflexively recognise the limitations of our strategy and its (partial) knowledge.

4.3. Sarouche: The Glossary and the Politics of Citation

Citation practice seems to be the academic sister to precedent in Common Law. In many ways, it weaves itself into method, methodology, and theory. How we justify and who we use to justify reveals much about what sources we believe legitimise our knowledge claims, and what sources we believe our reader believes legitimise our knowledge claims (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Christian Porter – Once Upon A Time in Australia Glossary.¹¹⁶

Tuhiwai Smith offers a powerful account on the problems in methodology and how it reasserts dominant power relations in settler colonial relations.⁹⁸ She tells us that ‘[l]anguage and the citing of texts are often the clearest markers of the theoretical traditions of a writer’, but that ‘[m]uch of that alternative reading course is now collected in anthologies labelled as cultural studies’.⁹⁹ Kwaymullina tells us that ‘the task of the non- Indigenous scholar is not necessarily to add to the commentary but to highlight and support Indigenous voices’.¹⁰⁰ Interestingly, the humility of Indigenous knowledge protocols: the respect integral in it, the place-based situatedness of it, renders it in the realm of site-based study within First Nations’ studies, geography, anthropology, and cultural studies, while the totalising, abstracting, and universalising of European/Western scholarship affords it the potential to be theory.

Te Punga Somerville uses the bookshelf both literally and metaphorically to discuss this question. She tells us that the bookshelf sits before the politics of citation:

By its design, a bookshelf recognizes the public implications of which books are stacked and how (even if many bookshelves are viewed only by very limited publics). A bookshelf makes possible – even demands – that attention be paid to the order of the books and prompts us to ask about other possible logics of arrangement.¹⁰¹

These scholars each tell us that citation practice has the effect of rendering some voices visible, and others invisible. Therefore, citation and their aesthetics, tell us a lot about power. In their project, Lussier and Strechly consider the possibilities of decolonising the Canadian Uniform Guide to Legal Citation.¹⁰² They say that ‘[c]itation politics become more problematized when scholars in the legal profession must ‘fit’ Indigenous Knowledge into one of the pre-existing Western sources of law included in the Guide’.¹⁰³

We see it as enormously important to be thoughtful and intentional about the questions of citation to disrupt normative frameworks of knowledge production. There are still questions about the limits of doing this – and here also we continue to adhere to the basic parameters of citation that have been set out for us in order for this paper to be accepted for publication in this journal.

Most powerfully, citation practice re-asserts Western conceptions of property and ownership and how it manifests in the realm of ideas. When one writer cites another writer, it arguably re-asserts inherent individualism, while Lussier and Stretchly argue that relationality (the inter-subjective aspect of knowledge) is a common thread through many First Nations’ resurgent approaches.¹⁰⁴ Citation is one of the main legitimators for Western academic scholarship: it is the hallmark of rigour and legitimates the claim of ‘knowledge production’ that is what gives the University its place in civil society. Much of the schema around citation is about the transgression of plagiarism, which holds as a neat parallel to the notion of theft and property ownership in the Western episteme. Alongside the liberal notions of ownership is the schema of disciplining around transgressions of the liberal order. Ahmed tells us citation works as a ‘rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies’.¹⁰⁵ In this instance, Turnitin,¹⁰⁶ and the University apparatus (including teaching staff) creates the mechanisms to surveil the system of intellectual ownership. As with real property, intellectual property must be examined with regard to not just the liberal/neoliberal orders that manifest capitalism, but the racial dynamics of that order. Just as property law continues to protect Western conceptions of property in spite of Native Title,¹⁰⁷ so too intellectual property continues to preference Western knowledge systems despite the attempts to protect non-Western epistemologies.¹⁰⁸

This property order manifests through all elements of Western academic knowledge production. Our graphic novel will be classed as a ‘non-traditional research output’ (NTRO) which makes it less commodifiable for the University, and at the same time its categorisation as an NTRO is an attempt by the University to give it a category to allow it to attract value – in grant applications, job applications, performance reviews, and so on.

Against this backdrop, the notion of decolonising these practices with any measure of seriousness runs risk of constant failures, fault-lines, and co-option- which is the conversation we kept circling around. Despite seeming relatively inconsequential, citation practice goes to fundamental questions of power. And I also wanted to draw on citation practice’s seeming inconsequence as having an organising effect for us. I expressed in conversation the sentiment that ‘most people don’t read footnotes’ and so, our primary motivation became concerned with how we would get people to read our notes in an engaged way. Accordingly, we drew out some principles to actively think about the idea of citation. I wanted to be able to refer our readers to the various ideas and people we had mentioned in the graphic novel – to encourage their readings of our graphic novel in conversation with ideas that had influenced us. I also wanted the references to be a bridge between academic readers who I expected wanted to see the influences in our graphic novel, and other readers, by using plain language and imagery to explain some of the legal concepts Anne and I had as presumed knowledge in the conversation. These acts all attempt to address some of the harms in citation practice. However, I can see our glossary has limitations: for example, I believe we continue to use more complex language than necessary, and I have doubts about putting the glossary at the end of the graphic novel, and alphabetising the glossary. Moreover, the glossary reveals that we are speaking to a particular audience who can see, read, and use English to a particular level, and so it also shows the continued inaccessibility of the graphic novel.

The final issue of particular significance is how we engaged with the graphic novel and the issues surrounding the academic Boaventura De Sousa Santos. After the first draft I came across the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and the alleged enabling behaviour of some of his colleagues and his University.¹⁰⁹ How was I to live my values here? Undoubtedly his work had influenced my ideas and yet the allegations mirrored misuse of power and violence in the University and the field of education. In the end we decided to problematise the situation iteratively: by continuing to note his influence on our graphic novel, while drawing attention to the allegations, being clear about the complicity of the institutions of power, and by writing about it here. I continue to think about these questions with uncertainty: but I see uncertainty as one of the more useful epistemic tools we have.

5. Conclusion

In this article we have taken a meta approach¹¹⁰ to analysing the graphic novel we produced over the last few years that became Once Upon a Time in Australia. We have told this story in this article and sought to go further and unpack some of our own assumptions about law and justice in the graphic novel. We have offered different critical approaches to our own text – by using the methodologies in critical legal studies and cultural legal studies to consider the substantive and aesthetic ideas that underpin our graphic novel but also the wider project. We believe this process of critical performative iterations offer possibilities for other people asking questions about law and justice. We explored the graphic novel as falling into the genre of horror and also the justice possibilities of adopting a method of imperfection. We considered the trope of the insider/outsider but we also collapsed our binaries (and their boundaries) in offering our three standpoint reflections. Finally, in discussing the politics of citation, we hope you see this whole article as a citation itself that considers with some depth the questions of standpoint and power that weave through our graphic novel.

Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too Movement Exposed the Troubles with Truth in Law is out now through Counterpress.

Acknowledgements

The writers wish to thank the editors of this collection who have provided enormous support and wisdom. They wish to thank the peer reviewers who provided important feedback. Thanks also to Amy Hamilton for providing feedback and support at various stages of the creative process.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarouche Razi

Sarouche Razi is a legal scholar, writer, and legal practitioner with expertise in the legal assistance sector, creative arts practice in law, critical legal and pedagogical theories, police and state accountability, and decolonising the law. He has worked primarily in legal service delivery in the community controlled and Aboriginal community controlled sector, and has been involved in significant court representation relating to historical injustices, and deaths in custody for First Nations Australians. Sarouche convenes a prison legal course at the Australian National University where he teaches on abolition, decarceration, and critical pedagogy. He is completing his Doctoral Thesis exploring biomythography as a method for legal writing, and mnemocratic power to describe (settler) state control over memory and process in the Coroner’s court. He also works with the NSW Legal Assistance Forum, and Tangata Restorative Justice, an Oceanic led approach to restorative justice in Melbourne.

Anne Macduff

Dr Anne Macduff is an Honorary Senior Lecturer and researcher at the ANU College of Law. Drawing upon a range of critical theories, Anne Macduff has a particular interest in exploring issues of law and identity, including race, gender and sexuality. Anne's PhD thesis traced how contemporary Australian citizenship laws construct a particular racialized and gendered citizen subject. Her current research critically examines the way law excludes various identities and engages with a wide range of social issues including: belonging, social cohesion, sexual harassment, and family violence.

Kirsten Hoffman

Kirsten Hoffman (they/she) is an illustrator, story writer, and Juris Doctor law graduate from the Australian National University, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Animation) from the Victorian College of the Arts at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on prison abolition and using the necessity defence for climate protests.

Notes

1 Sophia McClennen and Joseph Slaughter, ‘“Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms”; or, “The Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights”’ (2009) 46(1) Comparative Literature Studies 1.

2 Nicholas Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice (Teachers College Press 1993).

3 This is a response to Butler’s work on subject identity constitution. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge 1990).

4 Sarouche Razi, ‘Truth and Law in Australia’s Me Too Moment: A Graphic Novel and Dialectic Encounter’ Critical Legal Conference (UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø, August 2022); Sarouche Razi and Anne Macduff, ‘The Art of Conversation: Interrupting the Gendered Structural Violence in Law and Truth’ in The Women, Listening and Law Symposium (University of Wollongong, November 2022); Sarouche Razi, Anne Macduff and Kirsten Hoffman, ‘Once Upon a Time in Australia: Critical Dialogics in Between Truth and Law’ in Romancing the Tomes 2.0 (Melbourne University, May 2023).

5 Sarouche Razi, Graphic Novels as a Medium of Justice (ANU College of Law, 26 October–3 November 2023).

6 Tarana Burke, ‘#MeToo was Started for Black and Brown Women and girls. They are Still Being Ignored’ Washington Post (Washington DC, 9 November 2017) <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/09/the-waitress-who-works-in-the-diner-needs-to-know-that-the-issue-of-sexual-harassment-is-about-her-too/> accessed 25 March 2024.

7 Bruce Lehrmann was tried for the rape of Ms Higgins, but the matter ended in a mistrial due to jury misconduct. The prosecution decided not to retry the case due to the adverse effects on Ms Higgins' health. Mr Lehrmann has denied all wrongdoing: Nikki Burnside and Elizabeth Byrne, ‘Rape charge dropped against Bruce Lehrmann, who was accused of sexually assaulting Brittany Higgins’ ABC News (Canberra, 2 December 2022) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-02/bruce-lehrmann-rape-charge-to-be-dropped-brittany-higgins/101725242> accessed 8 April 2024.

8 Angus Thompson, James Massola and Michaela Whitbourn, ‘Reynolds Claims Gallagher Confirmed Early Knowledge of Rape Claim’ The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, 9 June 2023) <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/reynolds-claims-gallagher-confirmed-early-knowledge-of-rape-claim-20230609-p5dfgt.html> accessed 21 February 2024..

9 Louise Milligan, ‘Scott Morrison, Senators and AFP Told of Historical Rape Allegation Against Cabinet Minister’ ABC News (Canberra, 26 February 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-26/pm-senators-afp-told-historical-rape-allegation-cabinet-minister/13197248> accessed 22 August 2023.

10 ibid.

11 Brett Worthington, ‘Christian Porter Identifies Himself as Unnamed Cabinet Minister and Strenuously Denies Historical Rape Allegation’ ABC News (Canberra, 3 March 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-03/christian-porter-denies-historical-rape-allegation/13206972> accessed 22 August 2023.

12 ABC News, ‘Read the Full Press Conference Transcript, Christian Porter Denies Historical Rape Allegation’ ABC News (Canberra, 3 March 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-03/christian-porter-press-conference-transcript/13212054> accessed 22 August 2023.

13 Chambers of the Chief Justice, ‘Statement by the Hon Susan Kiefel AC Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia’ High Court of Australia <https://cdn.hcourt.gov.au/assets/news/Statement%20by%20Chief%20Justice%20Susan%20Kiefel%20AC.pdf> accessed 22 August 2023.

14 Ibid.

111 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too movement exposed the troubles of Truth in Law (OUATIA) (Counterpress 2024), Front Cover.

15 Kate Jenkins, ‘Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report (2020)’ Australian Human Rights Commission <https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/sex-discrimination/publications/respectwork-sexual-harassment-national-inquiry-report-2020> accessed 22 August 2023.

16 Stephanie Borys, ‘Australia to Launch National Inquiry into Workplace Sexual Harassment’ ABC News (Australia, 20 June 2018) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-20/ahrc-to-launch-inquiry-into-sexual-harassment/9887268> accessed 22 August 2023.

17 Attorney-General’s Department, ‘Respect@Work – Consultation on Remaining Legislative Recommendations’ <https://consultations.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/respect-at-work/> accessed 22 August 2023.

18 Georgia Hitch, ‘Laws to Implement Respect@Work Recommendations Have Passed Parliament. What are They?’ ABC News (28 November 2022) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-28/respect-at-work-sexual-arassment-rules-pass-parliament/101706978> accessed 22 August 2023.

19 Women’s Electoral Lobby Website, ‘WEL Declaration on the March 4 Justice’ <https://www.wel.org.au/wel> accessed 22 August 2023.

20 Tom Lowrey and Jack Snape, ‘Scott Morrison’s “Bullets” for Protestors Comment Stuns Australian UN Representative’ ABC News (Canberra, 16 March 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-16/bullets-women-march-4-justice-scott-morrison/13251804> accessed 22 August 2022.

21 Nicholas Burbules, ‘Rethinking Dialogue in Networked Spaces’ (2006) 6(1) Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 107, 115.

22 ibid 115–16.

23 Email from Anne Macduff to ANU College of Law Staff (12 March 2021).

24 Email from Sarouche Razi to Anne Macduff (1 June 2021).

25 Terra Nullius – of ‘land belonging to no one’ – a juridic principle historically used illegally in international law to justify occupation and which underpinned British claims of legitimacy to the invasion and colonisation of Australia. See for example, , Robert J Miller and others, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery in Australia’ Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford, 2010; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 September 2010), <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579815.003.0006> accessed 25 Mar. 2024.

26 Note the decision to move back to the 2nd person pronoun as Kirsten becomes a co-writer as a mirroring of the collective identity of the authors.

27 See for example ‘Non-Traditional Research Outputs’ State of Australian UniversityResearch 2018–2019, Australian Research Council <https://dataportal.arc.gov.au/ERA/NationalReport/2018/pages/section1/non-traditional-research-outputs-ntros/> accessed 25 March 2013.

28 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (The University of Chicago Press 2015); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press 2003)

29 Felski, ibid 52.

30 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’ (2013) 28(78) Australian Feminist Studies 331–47, 340 <https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2013.876664> accessed 24 August 2023.

31 Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Indigenous Standpoints, Indigenous Stories, Indigenous Futures: Narrative from an Indigenous Standpoint in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond’ (Doctoral Thesis, The University of Western Australia 2017) 15; see also Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savage, Savaging the Disciplines (Aboriginal Studies Press 2007) 215.

32 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge 1993) 95.

33 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press 2016).

34 Sarouche Razi, ‘“Speaking for the Dead to Protect the Living”: On Audre Lorde’s Biomythography, Law, Love, and Epistemic Violence in the Coronial Jurisdiction in the Kimberley’ (2023) Law & Literature <https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2023.2209445> accessed 24 August 2023.

35 ibid 3.

36 Elise Kinsella and Andy Burns, ‘Mhelody Bruno’s Killer was Jailed for 22 Months. This is the Information the Court Never Heard’ ABC News (Wagga Wagga, 2 July 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-02/background-briefing-mhelody-bruno-investigation/100256330> accessed 22 August 2023.

37 Clare Land, Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles (Zedbooks 2015).

38 Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Research, Ethics and Indigenous Peoples: An Australian Indigenous Perspective on Three Threshold Considerations for Respectful Engagement’ (2016) 12(4) AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 437, 439 <https://doi.org/10.20507/AlterNative.2016.12.4.8> accessed 24 August 2023.

39 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso 2016).

112 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA, 21.

40 Amy McQuire, Disappearing Aboriginal Women: Speaking Back to Silences (PhD Thesis, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland 2023) <https://doi.org/10.14264/39f5c9c>.

41 ‘Blak’ is a term re-asserting linguistic authority away from a white lens and over the broader notion of ‘Blackness’ and was first used in Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson, Blakness: Blak City Culture (Exhibition) (Australian Centre Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia 1994). <https://content.acca.melbourne/legacy/files/1994_Blakness%20Blak%20City%20Culture_catalogue.pdf>.

42 ibid.

43 Legal Profession Uniform Law (NSW & Vic) s 17 (1)(c).

44 Uniform Admission Rules 2015 (NSW & Vic) r 10 (1)(f).

45 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking Press 1963).

46 ibid.

47 Ti Lamusse, ‘Feminist Prison Abolitionism’ in Women, Crime and Justice in Context (1st edn, Routledge 2022) 239–52 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429316975-17>

48 See for example the iconic work by Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press 2003).

49 See for example, Robyn Lewis, ‘Prison Abolition and Reform in Australia: A Case for Campaigners to Take Abolition Seriously’ (2022) 47(4) Alternative Law Journal 279.

50 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin Classics 2018).

51 Damian Carrington, ‘Gulf Stream Could Collapse as Early as 2025, Study Suggests: A Collapse Would Bring Catastrophic Climate Impacts but Scientists Disagree Over the New Analysis’ The Guardian (Australia, 26 July 2023) <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests> accessed 22 August 2023.

52 Kai Kornhuber and others, ‘Risks of Synchronized Low Yields are Underestimated in Climate and Crop Model Projections’ (2023) 14 Nature Communication 3528 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38906-7> accessed 25 February 2024.

53 Human Rights Campaign, ‘Sexual Assault and the LGBTQ Community’ (4 November 2022) <https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-assault-and-the-lgbt-community> accessed 24 August 2023.

54 Blockade Australia, ‘Blockade Australia Homepage’ <https://www.blockadeaustralia.com/> accessed 26 March 2024.

55 See for example Banu Bargu, ‘The Politics of Commensality’ in Jacob Blumenfeld, Chiara Bottici and Simon Critchley (eds), The Anarchist Turn (Pluto Press 2013).

56 Paul Atkinson, ‘The Graphic Novel as Metafiction’ (2010) 1 Studies in Comics 107

57 Thierry Groensteen, Comics and Narration (University Press of Mississippi 2013).

58 Hannah Miodrag, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form (University Press of Mississippi 2013) 3–14.

59 Paul Fisher Davis, ‘Goffman’s Frame Analysis, Modality, and Comics’ (2018) 9(2) Studies in Comics 279.

60 Andreas Fischer-Lescano, ‘Sociological Aesthetics of Law’ (2020) 16(2) Law, Culture and the Humanities 268 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872116656777> accessed 25 February 2024.

61 Timothy D Peters and Thomas Giddens, ‘Theological “Seeing” of Law: Daredevil, Christian Iconography, and Legal Aesthetics’ in Thomas Giddens (ed), Critical Directions in Comics Studies (University Press of Mississippi 2020)

62 ibid 83–89.

63 As an example of auto-critique as method, see Ivan Szelenyi, ‘An Outline of the Social History of Socialism or an Auto-Critique of an Auto-Critique (2002) 19 Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 41–67 <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0276-5624(02)80036-1>.

64 See Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk’s article ‘Final Fatal Girls – Horror and the Legal Subject’ also published in this Special Issue for a detailed treatment of this theme.

65 Penny Crofts, ‘The Horror of Corporate Harms’ (2022) 38(1) Australian Journal of Corporate Law 23; and Penny Crofts, ‘Monsters and Horror in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse’ (2018) 30(1) Law and Literature 123 <https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2017.1346959> accessed 25 February 2024.

66 Penny Crofts, ‘The Horror of Corporate Harms’ (2022) 38(1) Australian Journal of Corporate Law 23, 25.

67 Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (Random House 1972).

68 Jordan Peele, Get Out (United States of America, Universal Pictures 2017).

69 The name ‘Corporate Memphis’ emerged from the online platform Are.na, a social media platform for creatives: <https://www.are.na/>. ‘Alegria’ is another term used for the same style.

70 Rachel Hawley, ‘Don’t Worry, These Gangly-Armed Cartoons are Here to Protect You From Big Tech’ (Eye on Design, August 2019) <https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/> accessed 24 August 2022.

113 Kirsten Hoffman, ‘Macduff, Hoffman, and Razi n Corporate Memphis Takeover’ (26 March 2024).

71 ibid.

72 For example, consider the image on the Australian Law Reform Commission website [miniature man standing on desk with gavel] <https://www.alrc.gov.au/> accessed 26 March 2024.

73 ‘When you see the CEO of tech companies talk in private or to one another, the way that they frame their view of the world is fascinatingly opposed to the world depicted in a Corporate Memphis illustration’, [David Rudnick] continues. ‘They brag that they live in a world of difficult ideas, of constant fighting between competitors, of cryptographic threats, of constant social change they fight to be in front of and control. They view the world as extremely aggressive and rapidly moving’. Josh Gabert-Doyon, ‘Why Does Every Advert Look the Same? Blame Corporate Memphis’ Wired (United Kingdom, 24 January 2021) <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech> accessed 24 August 2022.

74 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA.

75 First Dog on the Moon <https://firstdogonthemoon.com.au/> accessed 25 February 2024.

76 First Dog on the Moon, ‘Violet Coco is in Prison Meanwhile the Fossil Fuel People are Really Getting Value for Money’ The Guardian (Australia, 7 December 2022) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/07/violet-coco-is-in-prison-meanwhile-the-fossil-fuel-people-are-really-getting-value-for-money> accessed 24 August 2023.

77 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Random House UK 2007).

78 Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive (Twelve Panels Press 2022).

79 ibid.

80 Isabella Podwinski and Jano Gibson, ‘Bob Brown Foundation Activist Colette Harmsen Sentenced to Three Months’ Jail Over Mining Protest in Tasmania’ ABC News (Australia, 14 July 2023) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-14/activist-jailed-over-mining-protest-in-tasmania/102603244> accessed 24 August 2023.

81 Hajime Isayama, Attack on Titan 1 (Kodansha 2012).

82 ‘This is a manga that strongly evokes the primitive fears of humans in the form of gigantic things that are approaching’, critic Tomofusa Kure pointed out. ‘If (the manga was) presented with refined illustrations, this eeriness wouldn’t have been possible’. Atsuhi Ohara and Yukiko Yamane, ‘Boosted by Anime Version, “Attack on Titan” Manga Sales Top 22 Million’ The Asahi Shimbun (Place, August 2023) <https://web.archive.org/web/20130822093832/http://ajw.asahi.com/article/cool_japan/culture/AJ201308170034> accessed 24 August 2023.

114 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA, 71.

83 E.T: the Extra Terrestrial (Directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1982).

84 Stranger Things (Directed by Duffer Brothers, Netflix TV Series, 2016).

115 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA, 7.

85 A good starting point is the seminal work by Merton: Robert Merton, ‘Insiders/Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge’ (1972) 78 American Journal of Sociology 9.

86 Robert Merton ‘Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in Sociology of Knowledge’ (1972) 78(1) American Journal of Sociology 9; Signe Bruskin, ‘Insider or Outsider? Exploring the Fluidity of the Roles Through Social Identity Theory’ (2019) 8(2) Journal of Organizational Ethnography 159.

87 Elizabeth C. Mohler and Debbie Laliberte Rudman, ‘Negotiating the Insider/Outsider Researcher Position Within Qualitative Disability Studies Research’ (2022) 76(2) The Qualitative Report 1511.

88 Tharaileth Koshy Oommen, ‘Insiders and Outsiders in India: Primordial Collectivism and Cultural Pluralism in Nation-Building’ (1986) 1(1) International Sociology 53.

89 Makau Mutua, ‘Critical Race Theory and International Law: The View of an Insider-Outsider’ (2000) 45 Vill L Rev 841.

90 Jacques Derrida, Positions (The Athlone Press 1981) 41.

91 ibid.

92 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA, 8.

93 ibid 12.

94 ibid 25–26.

95 For a discussion on embodiment see Sarouche Razi, ‘“Speaking for the Dead to Protect the Living”: On Audre Lorde’s Biomythography, Law, Love, and Epistemic Violence in the Coronial Jurisdiction in the Kimberley’ (2023) Law & Literature <https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2023.2209445> accessed 25 February 2024.

96 For a fuller discussion, see James Aird and Allan Ardill, ‘A “Kind of Sovereignty”: Toward a Framework for the Recognition of First Nations Sovereignties at Common Law’ (2023) 46(2) Melbourne University Law Review 330.

97 See the seminal work, Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Tundra 1993). For a counterpoint on the ‘March of Time’ see Marlene Tromp, ‘Marriage, the March of Time and Middlemarch’ in Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw (eds), For Better, For Worse (1st edn, Routledge 2017) 191–203.

116 Anne Macduff, Sarouche Razi and Kirsten Hoffman, OUATIA, 74.

98 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed Books 2012).

99 ibid 14.

100 Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Research, Ethics and Indigenous Peoples: An Australian Indigenous Perspective on Three Threshold Considerations for Respectful Engagement’ (2016) 12(4) AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 437 <https://doi.org/10.20507/AlterNative.2016.12.4.8> accessed 25 February 2024, 440.

101 Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘Unpacking Our Libraries: Landlocked, Waterlogged, and Expansive Bookshelves’ (2015) 67(3) American Quarterly 645, 647.

102 Danielle Lussier and Steven Stechly, ‘“Other Materials” – Traitorous Love and Decolonizing the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation’ (2022) 53(2) Ottawa Law Review 301 <https://canlii.ca/t/7lnqv> accessed 21 August 2024.

103 ibid 309.

104 ibid 313.

105 Sara Ahmed, ‘Making Feminist Points’ (Feministkilljoys, 2013)<http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/> accessed 22 April 2023.

106 Turnitin is a software company that is used by most Australian universities as a submission portal to detect plagiarism.

107 Irene Watson, ‘The Future is Our Past: We Once Were Sovereign and We Still Are’ (2012) 8(3) Indigenous Law Bulletin 12; Irene Watson, ‘Buried Alive’ (2002) 13 Law and Critique 253 <https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021248403613> accessed 25 February 2024.

108 Kwaymullina (n 95); Terri Janke, ‘Minding Culture: Case Studies on Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions’ (World Intellectual Property Organization 2003).

109 Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro and Miye Tom, ‘The Walls Spoke When No One Else Would: Autoethnographic Notes on Sexual-Power Gatekeeping Within Avant-Garde Academia’ (2023) SAPO <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003289944-17> accessed 25 February 2024; ‘Exclusivo Agência Pública: Deputada brasileira denuncia assédio sexual de Boaventura Sousa Santos durante doutoramento’. Polígrafo accessed 25 February 2024.

110 Paul Atkinson, ‘The Graphic Novel as Metafiction’ (2010) 1 Studies in Comics 107