Australia is witnessing a political, social and cultural renaissance of public debate regarding violence against women, particularly in relation to domestic and family violence (DFV), sexual assault and sexual harassment. Women's voices calling for law reform are central to that renaissance, as they have been to feminist law reform dating back to nineteenth-century campaigns for property and suffrage rights. Although feminist research has explored women’s voices, speaking out and storytelling to highlight the exclusions and limitations of the legal and criminal justice systems in responding to women’s experience, less attention has been paid to how women's voices are elicited, received and listened to, and the forms of response they have received. We argue that three recent public inquiries in Australia reveal an urgent need for a victim-survivor-centred theory of listening to women’s voices in law reform seeking to address violence against women. We offer a nascent theory of a victim-survivor-centred approach grounded in openness, receptivity, attentiveness and responsiveness, and argue that in each of our case studies, law reform actors failed to adequately listen to women by silencing and refusing to listen to them; by hearing them but failing to be open, receptive and attentive; and by selectively hearing and resisting transformation. We argue that these inquiries signal an acute need for attention to the dynamics of listening in law reform processes, and conclude that a victim-survivor-centred theory of listening is a critical foundation for meaningful change to address violence against women.

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This article traces the application, operation and development of copyright law regarding literary works in colonial Australia. It examines the reception of the Literary Copyright Act 1842 (UK) and the Foreign Reprints Act 1847 (UK), exploring early (unsuccessful) attempts to liberalize the Australian book trade by allowing foreign imports of UK-copyright works. It also analyzes the development of colonial copyright legislation from the 1860s, using parliamentary debates and media commentary to explore contemporary attitudes to copyright policy. These inquiries reveal that the Australian colonies were unique throughout the empire in their insistence on toeing the imperial copyright line, in ways that were frequently contrary to the interests of colonial authors and readers.That the provisions of the various acts of the Imperial Parliament for securing to British authors and artists the copyright of their works should only be strictly enforced in these colonies is only consonant with justice and equity. In this, as in the ordinary business of our daily lives, honesty is the best policy. Our kindred in the United States have unwisely pursued an opposite course, and have paid the penalty accordingly … We are far from disparaging the literary genius of the American people … but the number is inconsiderable by comparison with the number of those who have acquired a distinguished reputation in the literary and scientific world of Great Britain. And one of the principle reasons for the discrepancy is the repressive and discouraging

This article explores relationships between Katherine Mansfield's 'Prelude' (1918) and Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher (1934). Mansfield's presence in Australian literary culture of the interwar period, together with Dark's knowledge of her writing, indicates that Dark was influenced, perhaps directly, by 'Prelude' when she wrote Prelude to Christopher. Both texts use modernist literary techniques to explore relationships between mental and physical illness and reproduction in the context of emerging feminist politics. The colonial contexts of 'Prelude' and Prelude to Christopher impact the treatment of modernist themes by interrogating the socially-prescribed role of woman as childbearer in the nation-building politics of the new colonial nation and its cultural, economic and scientific ideologies. Investigating links between Mansfield and Australian modernist women writers points to the possibility of a regional response to modernism.

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