There is a trait of strength, of fierceness even, that often seems to mark the antipodean. Such, at least, was the case with Penny—that is, Penelope Jane—Pether. She had an unflinching if sometimes bemused eye, strong views, great generosity, and political commitment. She joined the Board of Law and Critique early on and both contributed and pushed radical legal analyses of all sorts to the Board. Strength is also the ability to express vulnerability. I had not heard from Penny for a long time when I got a call out of the blue. ‘‘Peter, I have got cancer ... but I am going to beat the bloody thing’’. That was the first of many long and painful conversations. She died on the evening of Wednesday September 10, 2013. A good while later than the doctors predicted and all the same ridiculously soon. What I want to say, in introduction and support of her demise, is that all who have lived and lived well, who have lived even half as well as Penny, have beaten death. She didn’t want to die, she said it was too soon, that she wasn’t ready and she persisted, in what I viewed as an Australian fashion of the femme forte, living her life to the very end. She did not allow death to compromise or diminish her commitments or beliefs. She continued her classes in the local prisons, she reviewed the work of scholars that she admired, whose support she thought they merited, she flew to Paris for ‘‘some decent food’’ only a few weeks before the end, and equally found time to fall out with her mother, to see friends, to correspond, encourage, hope and then, ineluctably, without remorse, in the wake of intolerable pain, to let go, to die. Trained in English literature as well as law, Penny was a force for interdisciplinary conjunctions, for the embrace of theory and practice, scholarship and the