Publisher's Synopsis
Once Upon a Time in Australia explores the intersections between gender, colonisation, and climate change and how they are necessarily interconnected in any transformative movement for justice. The novel challenges ideas about voice and solidarity, and questions the relationship that the law holds over truth. On 15 March 2021, protesters from around Australia marched in response to government inaction following allegations of sexual violence in parliament and against members of parliament. The authors each attended the protests separately, but came together to consider the responses of three key institutions of law in Australia towards gender-based violence: the Parliament, the High Court, and the University. Where Macduff explores the complicity of the rule of law to silence gendered violence, Razi considers the inability of the legal system to be an arbiter of truth given its ongoing colonial violence, and Hoffman focuses on the legal system's complicity in the climate catastrophe and how to relate to gendered and colonial violence. The result is a different kind of writing: part horror story, part graphic-novel, part narrative, part academic intervention, Once Upon a Time in Australia animates the political and philosophical conversations between three insider-outsiders in the halls of Australia's national law school during Australia's MeToo movement.
