![handle is hein.journals/crmlsc48 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime Law Soc Change (2007) 48:1-7
DOI 10.1007/s10611-007-9080-6
Editors' introduction: on social harm
and a twenty-first century criminology
David O. Friedrichs - Martin D. Schwartz
Published online: 25 October 2007
© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007
An epiphany: the fatal shore and port Arthur
The editors of this issue have each spent extensive time in Australia. David Friedrichs spent
his sabbatical in Spring, 2006 principally as Visiting Professor of Law at Flinders
University in Adelaide. Martin Schwartz spent a term as a visiting research scholar in
Criminology at the University of Melbourne. During those trips, both became even more
aware of a part of Australia's past that reinforces yet again the inherent limitations of
conventional criminological conceptual frameworks and ways of thinking about crime.
Here David discusses his trip to Port Arthur in Tasmania:
I began my trip to Australia by pulling out my copy of Robert Hughes' [7] classic The
Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding, and commenced reading it on the plane
heading West. Hughes explores in great depth, and with formidable erudition, a topic that
for much of Australia's history has been treated as a matter of shame: That the earliest
European settlers in Australia were for the most part convicts involuntarily transported
there, primarily from Great Britain. This is an intrinsically fascinating story, but also one
that should in particular captivate students of criminology. What does this history tell us
about how crime was conceived of in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century?
On April 27, 2006, I made a visit to Port Arthur, on the island state of Tasmania. I was to
give a talk at the University of Tasmania the following day. This happened to be the tenth
anniversary of the Port Arthur Massacre, when Martin Bryant, a young man known for
somewhat odd behavior, shot and killed 35 people, and wounded many others. The dead
included two very young children whom Bryant specifically chased down before killing.
This terrible event has been identified as the worst such case of mass murder by a single
individual, although the massacre carried out at Virginia Tech in April, 2007, came close to
matching this record. A different type of massacre has taken place over and over again in
D. O. Friedrichs (E)
Department of Sociology / Criminal Justice, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510, USA
e-mail: friedrichsdl@scranton.edu
M. D. Schwartz
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA
' Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/crmlsc48&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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