Tamara Walsh; The Federation Press, 2011; 291pp; $49.95 (paperback)

What is the impact of the law on homelessness? Or more bluntly, why worry about the law at all when people are sleeping in cars or begging on the street? Surely we should be far more concerned about pressing questions such as access to housing and services.

Tamara Walsh answers these questions unequivocally in her book Homelessness and the Law. The law has an integral role to play in the lives of people who are homeless. Walsh addresses the way in which the law can have a disproportionate impact on this group of people who are often extremely disadvantaged. She pays particular attention to failures to sustain tenancies and prevent evictions, punitive social security systems and public space offences which unfairly affect people with nowhere else to go.

Written and performed by Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussain
2011; 75 minutes, PG; available on DVD; $24.95 - www.brownplanet.com.au

The Cronulla riots, the White Australia Policy, the Northern Territory Intervention, recent violent attacks on Indian students and taxi drivers, mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Who could deny the strong currents of racism and xenophobia in Australian society and politics? Stand up comedians Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussain, collectively known as Fear of a Brown Planet (‘FoaBP’), courageously explore these issues in this performance recorded in Melbourne in April 2011.

Happy endings are not guaranteed

On 25 November 2010, Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film¹ was classified RC in Australia by the Classification Board after being submitted for a sale/hire classification by its prospective Australian distributor Accent Films. RC stands for ‘Refused Classification’ and the sale, hire and public exhibition of RC films is prohibited by legislation in each Australian state and territory. These films are effectively banned. The Classification Board has no power to modify or ‘cut’ films, nor can it request that this be done. It does, however, supply those who submitted the film with a report detailing the reasons for the Board’s decision and the scenes it found particularly problematic. This essentially provides an acceptable stencil around which to cut. On 23 February 2011, a modified version of A Serbian Film was refused classification. However, on 5 April 2011, a further modified version was classified R18+, meaning this version could be legally sold and hired to adults throughout Australia.

Produced by Screentime for ABC1 TV, Series 1 (22 episodes) screened July-December 2011;
starring Andrea Demetriades, Indiana Evans, Todd Lasance, Hamish Michael, Ella Scott Lynch.

Former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery AM QC, exclaims ‘OH DEAR!’ in his review of the first episodes of ABC legal drama Crownies screened last year.¹ Yet, his is not a damning assessment of the series; he simply refers to factual errors in this fictional representation of the lawyers and workings of the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (‘DPP’). He points out that the series actually draws its title from a Victorian expression for a prosecutor (in NSW, a ‘crownie’ is a drink) and that it refers to a charge document as a ‘presentment’ (rather than an ‘indictment’, as it is called in NSW). Are these serious criticisms or simply a finicky lawyer finding fault with a drama? Perhaps it is both, and therein lays the difficulty, as well as the appeal, of the series.

Ferdinand von Schirach; Text Publishing, 2012;
208pp; $22.95 (paperback)

Ferdinand von Schirach is a prominent German criminal defence lawyer whose first collection of cameo accounts of the inner workings of the German legal system, Crime (see review in Alternative Law Journal 36(1)) was published in 2011 to great acclaim.

Von Schirach’s latest collection, Guilt, will no doubt be snapped up by fans of the author’s cool, pellucid style. These are more stories of clients with a difference: a boarding-school boy, victim of an Aleister Crowley-like gang of dark fantasists (‘The Illuminati’); a respectable bourgeois whose life, like that of a hero in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is torn apart by the capricious accusation of a child (‘Children’); hints of anonymous mass murder in Eastern Europe (‘The Briefcase’); and perhaps the best story in the collection, the backflips and connivances of a bunch of drug dealers who turn out to be just that little bit smarter than they look (‘The Key’).