In contemporary Australian public discourse, it is difficult to avoid the spectre of religion. In particular, the post-ANZAC Day outrage about comments by an ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, have honed in on her statement on Q&A that she is ‘first and foremost a Muslim’. Ketan Joshi has articulated the racist…

Not long after the birth of my first child, I started practising part time in the Cairns law firm Bottoms English. John Bottoms and Anne English set me up at home with a fax machine, I got a computer and an exorbitantly expensive printer, and set to work. …

A couple of months ago I travelled again to Singapore. I first visited in 2011, and spent some time there researching the idea of the tropics, and land tenure systems in Singapore and Malaysia. Because of my interest in and work on the tropics, I am in the habit of…

I love flying into Brisbane. After 22 years living away from my home town, I still get a thrill returning, as I did again late last week. It’s not that Brisbane is better than Sydney or Melbourne — or Cairns, my ‘new’ home of over 20 years. It’s not better…

In 1975, Lord Denning in the Court of Appeal decision Eves v Eves, opined that Equity is not past the age of child bearing. One of her latest progeny is a constructive trust of a new model. This prompted Samuels JA in the 1977 decision Allen v Snyder in the…

As we learn of a landmark report into the scale of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia, the Western Australian government has commenced a program of closing down about half of the state’s 274 remote communities. The program will, the Premier acknowledges, ‘cause distress’ to the more than 12,000 Aboriginal people who…

Opening up land for development* There is perhaps a tension within the way we understand these communities as both an expression of Indigenous autonomy but also with a more oppressive colonial past. This tension is implicit in the complicated relationship between ideas of being treated the same — having a…

Terror: Abstract and Embodied In the face of the wall-to-wall coverage of police raids on Australian ‘terror suspects’, I am left unable to assess either the nature or the extent of the risk of the types of crimes described by authorities. That is principally, random acts of violence. I realise that these possible crimes are truly awful, and that the police and authorities must take action to protect the community. I cannot, however, seem to stem a skepticism about the reality of the so-called ‘threat’. I think my skepticism is borne out of seeing how police so frequently fail to respond to actual and reported threats of violence against women.