The Elephant's Tooth
Between August 2020 and January 2023, independent research into the root causes of crime in rural Australia was undertaken by Sustainable Justice Australia. Hundreds of people from all walks of life were consulted informally through conversation and story. From these conversations, a way forward emerged. An open model, the lychee model, is presented as one way toward sustainable justice.
Alice Springs was taken as an example of a rural town.
The study examines how we think about crime, problems within the law, and trauma in the community and lists the hurdles we have to overcome to solve this highly complex problem.
The reader is invited to participate in several thought experiments that use stories about animals, trees and inanimate things in nature.
Animals and lifeless things were brought before courts of law on criminal charges in the distant and not-too-distant past. In ancient Greece, waves of the sea were punished with whip lashings after a storm had sunk a ship. Rocks and trees that had killed people appeared before a court of law and were trialled, convicted and stricken with hammers or axes as punishments. As recently as 1916, circus elephant Mary was publicly hanged from a railroad crane in Tennessee as a punishment for murder. She had killed her handler after he had prodded her on the left cheek. The coroner who examined Mary after her death found that she had a severely infected tooth in the spot where her minder had prodded her. We no longer put waves, rocks, trees, or animals on trial for reasons that are clear to all of us. We have come a long way. We have become so much more enlightened, but
have we, really?
This is the questions this book tries to answer. A just justice system should be crystal clear about the origins of human behaviour. Punishing people, especially young people, because they deserve it makes as little sense as punishing a wave, a rock, a tree, or an elephant.
Prisoner Diaries
Elizabeth Schulz
J.F.W Schulz was an Australian of German heritage who was born north of the Barossa Valley in Robertstown. He was the owner of Auricht's Printing Office, he had a keen interest in film, and was an aspiring politician. He was also a prisoner...
On 13 December 1940, Schulz was arrested and transported to the Wayville Army Barracks. No accusations were made at that time, but Schulz knew what the arrest meant; someone, somewhere, considered him a threat.
Despite an absence of evidence of his disloyalty to Australia, his country of birth, and without a fair trial, Schulz was detained for more than three years. Prisoner Diaries is a record of Schulz's internment during World War II and his relentless search for answers.
Prisoner Diaries Testimonial – Donald A. Ross
The history of the internment of J F W Schulz during World War II is a story that needs to be told; it is an example of how misguided patriotism caused Australians of German descent to be treated as “enemy aliens” during two World Wars despite the fact that they were responsible citizens who had through their industry contributed a lot to the development of their Australian home. The comment has been made that only a small portion of these people were interned; however, those who were not interned also suffered discrimination in various ways, including losing the right to vote during the First World War.
Elizabeth (Liz) Schulz was fortunate to have available diaries and correspondence kept by her grandfather, J F W Schulz, documenting his internment during World War II, thus making this publication possible.
I have pleasant memories as a schoolboy in the late 1940s attending movie film shows of various scenes filmed by Mr. Schulz. These film shows were fundraisers for useful purposes. At the time of World War I, Mr Schulz was the head teacher of the bilingual German/English Langmeil Lutheran School at Tanunda, S A, (one of his pupils was my late father Laurence Ross). By Government decree, all Lutheran primary schools in South Australia were closed in 1917, and thus he lost his job.
Donald A. Ross, Secretary, Barossa Valley Archives & Historical Trust Inc.