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View Online: Seizing Justice
The formal criminal justice system doesn’t always deliver for women, so what can happen when women decide to exact justice themselves? According to three debut crime authors, the results can be deadly. Jane Caro, Debra Oswald, and Nina D. Campbell explored the moral dilemmas that inform their fiction, and much more, with award-winning short story writer (and autopsy expert), Philomena Horsley, on 25 March.
Click on the image below to watch the illuminating exchange (runs for 50 minutes):
In response to escalating and almost daily media reports of incidents of horrifying family violence, feminist icon, and commentator, Jane Caro AM, has written The Mother (out March, Allen & Unwin), which asks what any of us might do when faced with a threat to the people we hold most dear. In the case of Miriam Duffy, a respectable North Shore real estate agent, and devoted mother and grandmother, it is what’s happening to her daughter and children, cut-off in the country, and at the mercy of her husband.
Jane is a Sydney-based Walkley Award-winning Australian columnist, author, novelist, broadcaster, advertising writer, documentary maker, feminist and social commentator. She appears frequently on Q&A, The Drum, and Sunrise. The Mother is her first novel for adults.
The Family Doctor (Allen & Unwin, 2021), by Sydney-based writer and performer, Debra Oswald, sprang from her anguish about violence against women and the impotent rage many of us feel when we hear that yet another woman and her children have been murdered. Paula, a dedicated suburban GP, is devastated by the murder of her friend Stacey and her children by their estranged husband and father. How had she missed the warning signs? So when a patient with a young son admits her husband is violent but, already defeated by the failures of the law, is afraid to leave him, Paula wonders if she can go against everything she believes to make sure one woman is saved, one child spared?
Debra, winner of two NSW Premier’s literary awards, is the author of Useful (2015) and The Whole Bright Year (2018). She was creator/head writer of Offspring (series 1–5). Her stage plays have been performed internationally and she has also written four plays and a swag of novels for young audiences. She presented Sisters in Crime 21st Davitt Awards in 2021.
In Daughters of Eve (out April, Allen & Unwin) by Nina D. Campbell Detective Emilia Hart takes on a high-profile murder case that varies her work beyond her usual endless succession of domestic violence cases..
The investigation gets complicated when more bodies turn up – all men, all shot and all, it seems, having escaped conviction for offending against women or children. Emilia’s suspicions about what links the victims are confirmed when an anonymous group called the Daughters of Eve publish a manifesto taking credit for the murders. But as fear grips the streets, Emilia sees something else that everyone else has missed. And what that is, she cannot believe.
Nina studied theatre and literature at university before stumbling into the world of work in the midst of the recession that we had to have. She cobbled together a respectable career as a professional writer, working across the community and public sectors, before a midlife health challenge changed her priorities. Nina now writes fiction full-time in Adelaide, with a focus on stories about strong women.
Philomena Horsley won the Scarlet Stiletto Award in 2018, was runner-up in 2019, and is working on her first novel. She is a medical anthropologist who provides consultancy in the fields of health research and ethics. Her research areas include autopsies – their history and their role in understanding death – as well as family violence, sexual violence, and cancer. She also coordinates judging for Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards.
The three $150 crime gift packs were won by Caroline de Costa, Celia Jelbart, and Claire Varley.
Supported by the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.