Panel #9 Session 1
Friday 1 November - 9:00
Building 25, Room 1
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Let them speak: scripting the letters of Xavier Herbert and Beatrice Davis
- Melanie Myers
University of Queensland
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‘Xavier & Beatrice’ is a full-length stage play based on the relationship between author Xavier Herbert and his editor, Beatrice Davis. The play spans twelve years from 1949–1961: the time it took to write, edit and publish Soldiers’ Women, Herbert’s next major work after his acclaimed bestselling novel Capricornia (1938). Scenes and dialogue have been reimagined from the many letters between Herbert and Davis held in various archives around Australia. The rationale for transforming these letters into a performance medium is not merely to tell the story of an intimate and often fraught author-editor relationship from the annuals of Australia’s literature history, but to shed light on what it means to pursue writing, or any art, as a vocation, and the people who support writers and artists from behind the scenes to make art happen. This hybrid paper-performance discusses the process of ‘reconstituting’ and dramatising, through various theatrical devices, these archived letters into a ‘living dialogue’ between Herbert and Davis for the stage. It also explores the tension of creating a ‘well-made play’ – that is, the need for a conflict-motivated structure with a definitive dramatic arc, driven by pacy, rhythmic stage dialogue – while allowing Herbert, Davis, and other real-life figures to speak, as they expressed themselves on the page, with as little inference as possible.
Melanie has a Doctorate in Creative Writing and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in creative and professional writing at UQ. She is the winner of the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award for an Emerging Writing. Her winning manuscript was published as Meet Me at Lennon’s (2019, UQP), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance. She is a winner of the 2022 Griffith Review Emerging Voices competition, and her work has been published in Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Arena Magazine, Overland, Hecate and TEXT.
Surf Speak: The men in grey suits are out the back.
- Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan
Western Sydney University
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The Inuit people may have around 100 different words for snow but surfers can match them with the number of words they have for waves. Surf culture has developed its own language, its own signs and its own sound. It’s predominantly a spoken language where fluency comes from culture immersion while you’re out the back hoping the men in grey suits don’t appear. This oral groupspeak is unlike many other sporting jargons e.g. a layperson can tell if a golfer has hit a birdie or if a cricketer has hit a six to cow corner but unless you surf you really cannot tell if that barrel on the big gun is smoking or not. Language extends to semiotics as seen in the rituals of the culture such as the birth of a surfer being given their surfing nick name through to the death of a surfer with a ritual paddle out. It’s a language that’s filtered down from Hawaiian Kings. It has its own insults and its own compliments. It even has its own cluster of linguistic features. People can sound like surfers but linguistically people aren’t usually described as sounding like a golfer or a tennis player. How has the language of this culture developed and why is it spreading inland?
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Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan is an award-winning short story writer, journalist, columnist, and editor. Her work has appeared in Australia’s most widely read newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sun-Herald, The Australian, and the Sunday Telegraph. She has been a travel editor for Elle Cuisine Magazine, Australian Table Magazine, and Ocean Magazine. Her academic credentials include a BA (Communications) from WSU, an MA (Creative Writing) from UTS, Masters of Teaching from UNSW and she is a PhD scholar in Creative Writing under Dr Felicity Castagna and Dr Rachel Morley at WSU. Her exegesis is Green room Gidgets: deconstructing the female surf protagonist in Australian Young Adult fiction. Nicole is also a casual academic at Western Sydney University.
Research adventures: From the archive to the forest
- Melanie Ross
Flinders University
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Research involves stepping into the unknown, the adventure of not knowing if you’ll find the answers to your questions, the inevitable challenges, and the discoveries that might change the entire journey. This paper explores case studies of two very different research destinations – a history archive environment, and the forest environment. I will discuss the theory that informs the research process in these areas, the similarities and differences in research involving records related to human activity and the territory of the non-human, and personal reflections on being in the grit and dust of historical records and wet shoes from walking, photographing and making acoustic recordings in the forests of south-eastern Australia. This paper is useful to all writers in reflecting on their own research methodologies, considering new perspectives, and connecting with the joy that comes with stepping into the research adventure.
Melanie Ross is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University. Her works of fiction and non-fiction are driven by an endless curiosity about human connection to nature and place.
Putting Words in their Mouth: Dialogue in Autobiography
- Allan Ewing
University of Canberra
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Dialogue is an important aspect of autobiographical writing. Amongst a variety of uses, dialogue serves to give the characters of an autobiography their own voices, creates tension within the narrative, shows emotional aspects of the narrative, and illuminates how certain decisions came to be made. As a fictive element of autobiographical writing, a reader is aware that all dialogue is re-created by the writer; after all, autobiographies are neither chronicles nor 'Hansard'-like verbatim accounts. However, dialogue in autobiography is usually read as though it were a recounting of actual conversations. This presentation considers the value of the use of dialogue in autobiographical writing, and the implicit rules and limits of such dialogue. The value of including dialogue is presented with the inclusion of examples from published Australian works and the presenter's own creative nonfiction writing. The second part of the presentation considers the limits of representation, asking what makes a dialogue ethically acceptable and 'faithful' to the characters of the peoples portrayed. The final part of the presentation examines the role of the author in the creation of dialogue, exploring the relationship between the narrator and other characters within the text. Ultimately the presentation asks, 'Whose voice do we really 'hear'?'
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Allan Ewing is currently a PhD Research Student within the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. His thesis, 'Being Unmoored', is an examination of the significance of place in the lives of Australian migrants. Taking his own experience of migrating to Australia from England, and his father's experience of migrating from Scotland to England, he is engaging with a creative non-fiction approach in the form of biography and memoir. He writes about the nature of belonging, having lived in different countries and in more than twenty different houses.