Enrolment in Bachelor of Criminology – University of Adelaide (Karl Jenkins)

In the still heat of the first days of February, before the academic year had properly begun, Karl Jenkins came in from the southern suburbs to enrol at the University of Adelaide. He was seventeen, lately finished with school, and he made the journey to North Terrace with the same seriousness he brought to everything — early, prepared, his papers in order, having read in advance exactly what the day would ask of him.

He came from a weatherboard cottage in Panorama, kept with a fierce and houseproud discipline, where the cornerstones of life had been honesty, self-sufficiency and the doing of things properly. His father, a mechanic, had taught him in the garage that every problem had a solution that could be found by method, if a person was patient and exact enough to follow it through; his mother, a teacher, had taught him to think hard, to argue clearly, and to take seriously his obligations to other people. It was a household in which competence was the proof of worth and feeling was kept under restraint, and Karl had absorbed all of it young and without resistance, the eldest child of a family that expected a great deal and said little about love.

He had been, from very early, a serious boy — drawn to rules and to fairness, the one who settled the disputes in the playground and watched the conduct of those around him with a gravity the adults found unusual in a child. He had read detective stories not for the danger in them but for the order: for the way a wrong, once done, could be patiently traced and named and set right. He had done well enough at school without ever being brilliant, strongest in the subjects that had definite answers and least at ease with those that asked him to invent or to feel his way. By the time he left Unley High he knew, with the quiet certainty that governed him, what he wanted to do next.

The Bachelor of Criminology was a deliberate choice. It was a comparatively new and unglamorous course, neither the law degree the ambitious took nor the medicine the gifted were pushed toward, but it gave a formal shape to things Karl had felt his way toward since boyhood — the study of why people broke the rules, of how a society answered them, of the machinery by which justice was meant to be done. To a young man for whom order was nearly a moral category, it was less a career decision than a recognition of what he already was.

Enrolment itself was an unceremonious business. The campus stood half empty in the summer heat, the lawns hard and yellow, the students who had come in to enrol moving in slow queues through the halls with their forms and their handbooks and their lists of subjects. Karl moved through it methodically — the choosing of courses, the signing of papers, the small administrative rites by which the university took him onto its books — and where others around him were uncertain or careless or merely hot and impatient, he was exact. He had decided already which subjects he would take and in what order, and he did not need to be told twice what was required of him.

He gave little sign of the feeling underneath it, but the day mattered to him more than his manner let on. He carried into the university the discipline of the Panorama household and the long private seriousness of his childhood, and in enrolling in the study of crime and order he was, in his contained way, laying claim to the thing he had always meant to do. When it was finished and his place was secured, he walked back out onto North Terrace into the white heat with the course handbook under his arm — a thin, upright, methodical young man with the whole of the degree in front of him.