Ungerer and Martin Jones create a fictitious student roaming the bookstores of Australia's universities. Their student gains impressions of the portrayal of government policy relating to terrorism via readings of fiction and non-fiction works.
The authors decide that the student might conclude 'that either the literary and academic world inhabited a paranoid delusion or that the fascist Australian state was incompetent. For despite the apparently totalitarian controls of the anti-terror laws, government, police, bureaucracy and media all seem to tolerate, and even encourage with generous funding grants, the academic and literary exposure of their authoritarian ambitions.'
