Cirrus@Austlit

'In the 1990s I was spending a lot of time right smack in the middle of notorious Razorhurst, the area of Darlinghurst and East Sydney where, in the 1920s and 1930s, the razor gangs waged war, as the vice queens Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine vied for their share of the working man's earnings through sly grog, cocaine and prostitution. It was more of a triumvirate of crime bosses - Leigh, Devine and Phil "the Jew" Jeffs - but the women were the ones who ruled the Sydney underworld roost. The Melbourne upstart Norman Bruhn who took on the triumvirate in 1927 didn't last long. At the time, I had no idea just how close I was to the history of the birth of organized crime in Australia. Larry Writer's book, Razor, about "this wild, romantic, dreadful period in Sydney's history" wasn't published until 2001 and Screentime's television adaptation of Writer's book, Underbelly Razor, aired in 2011...' (Soure: Introduction)

'What we might call, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the settlement "assemblage" of ploughing, requires a horse or bullock, a farmer, and a plough (and land): an assemblage that is undone by Ned Kelly and his gang. In the following article I read The Jerilderie Letter for the agricultural milieu that Kelly emerged from, a milieu that Kelly both mourned and rejected, or perhaps reinvented: his rejection expressed primarily by his misuse of the plough as armour and numerous metaphorical references in the text to anti-settlement style farming operations, including such extremes as manuring the land with those who helped the police.' (Source: Introduction)