Panel #4 Session 1
Wednesday 29 November - 16:30
Building 25, Room 1
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​Chair: Pauline Griffiths
Channelling collective voices against domestic abuse in fiction: Why we need women talking
- Samantha Bowers
University of Sydney
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Domestic abuse has been called a crisis, a national emergency, even a terrorist act. In Australia, one woman is murdered by a current or former partner every week. It is insidious because it is imperceptible, concealed behind closed doors. Little wonder that despite the publicity afforded victims like Hannah Clarke, a 2021 National Community Attitudes Survey found that although 91 per cent of participants believed violence against women was a problem, more than half believed it was not happening where they lived. Arguably, even law reforms protecting victims from having to give evidence in open court unintentionally contribute to the invisibility of domestic abuse.
In this context, artistic forms can extend the political discourse by bringing experiences of violence into the open in uniquely affective ways, disrupting accepted paradigms and provoking fresh perspectives. We need to talk about domestic abuse, and we need fiction to support us.
In particular, in this paper I suggest this dialogue is facilitated by innovative ‘acts of talking’ within fiction, examining texts which employ forms of chorality to counter the traditional silencing of domestic abuse and its victims. Through investigating the choric features of contemporary works, including the textual echoes of multiple narrators in Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, the vengeful Medean chorus in Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace, and the act of discourse itself in Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, I argue the need to channel collective female voices in literature to witness and resist male violence and control, and advance this crucial national conversation.
Samantha Bowers is a writer, teacher, and former lawyer. She holds a Master of Creative Writing, and is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, where she is writing a novel exploring domestic abuse and female trauma through fiction.
Dialoguing the dead: reflections on the loss of the father
- Emily Rytmeister & Jane Scerri
Western Sydney University
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The loss of one’s father is, or at least ought to be, one of life’s few certainties. While every loss is unique, for most daughters, the father represents the archetype of the opposite sex, and his death incites reflection on conceptions of intimacy, his role as our carer, and our own concept of self. In the aftermath of the father’s death, we are often plagued by guilt, questioning decisions we made as his guardian, and are left struggling to ignore the relief we feel at our release from this burden. This cycle of relief and guilt is soon replaced by, or runs concurrent with, a bigger, philosophical dilemma: we are forced to confront our own mortality and unwittingly thrust into the senior generation of the family. The death of the father also impacts us on another significant level. It instigates ‘a new relationship to [our] family narrative’ (Popkin 2015, p. 129).
This paper features combined musings on the death of the father, as influenced by the presenters’ respective fields of research [grief, patriography, documentary film (Rytmeister); feminism, equality, contemporary Australian literature (Scerri)]. At its heart are four interwoven stories. Two of these are of fathers, one of whom died at 51, the other at 94. The other two stories are daughters’ reckonings with their fathers’ lives, their father-daughter relationships, and their individual journeys through grief. Journeys aided by talking and writing, and in one case, biographical filmmaking.
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Emily Rytmeister graduated with her PhD from WSU in 2022 and teaches across Arts, Media, Communications, and Design programmes. Her doctorate comprised a documentary film about her musician father and a dissertation that explored grief, patriography (‘writing the father’), and documentary film. It was nominated for the Dean’s Prize for Best Practice-Based PhD. She also holds an MRes from WSU, an MA in Creative Writing and a Grad Dip in Writing from UTS, and a BA in Television Production from CSU. She has worked behind-the-scenes in the film, television, music, and live entertainment industries.
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Jane Scerri teaches philosophy, literary studies, and Australian Indigenous history, has presented at literature and gender conferences, and published short stories, poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and academic papers. Her main interests are equality, feminism and contemporary literature.
Narratives of stillbirth – redefining silences through personal and historical perspectives
- Megan Warren, Karen Le Rossignol & Patrick West
Deakin University
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The intimate narratives of women experiencing stillbirth may be discovered historically through oral traditions, or in diaries or letters. These contrast with historical public records that seem to silence, or not acknowledge, public narratives related to stillbirth and pregnancy loss. This paper seeks to define how stillbirth narratives demonstrate different historical forms of silencing across the personal and the historical. There is a particular focus on personal responses to stillbirth through the letters and diaries of Georgiana Molloy (an early settler of the south west of Western Australia); a brief survey of collected oral histories of women from Western Australian settler societies across the twentieth century; and the author’s personal family history and narrative exploration incorporating the public records that have reflected a form of silencing. The review and analysis of personal and historical records of stillbirth and pregnancy loss indicates the need to give voice to the potential silencing of these narratives.
Megan Warren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Deakin University. She is currently working on a creative non-fiction artefact and exegesis of her experience of stillbirth and pregnancy loss. Megan’s research interests include life writing and personal narratives. Her writing focuses on silenced voices, memory, loss and grief.
Karen Le Rossignol is a Senior Lecturer in creative writing, editing, publishing and freelancing skills in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Her interdisciplinary applied research across narrative and digital storytelling focuses on creative nonfiction perspectives and perceptions in the development of empathy.
Dr Patrick West is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature in Deakin University’s School of Communication and Creative Arts. He was the Higher Degree Research Coordinator in the school from 2016 to 2019. A recent creative-arts publication is the short story ‘An Aura Nothing Out of the Ordinary,’ published in Prosopisia (Vol. XIII, No. 2, 2019). With Eleni Bastéa he co-edited a Special Issue of TEXT on Writing | Architecture in 2019 (No. 55) available at http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue55/content.htm