Panel #10 Session 1
Friday 1 December - 11:00
Building 25, Room 1
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​Chair: Gemma Nisbet
The Hard Yards – Face to Face with Detectives
- Sally Breen
Griffith University
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This paper will examine and reflect on research I am currently undertaking to produce The Cop Shop – Detectives Real and Imagined a major work of creative non-fiction in the true crime genre. In late 2022 I was approved by the Queensland Police Service Research Council (QPSRC) to undertake interviews and field work with detectives working in Homicide and Child Protection on the Gold Coast. To date I have interviewed 14 detectives, conducted field work on major incidents and been approved to join the DPP team on two homicide cases due in the Brisbane Magistrates Court in September 2023. The Cop Shop draws on my twenty plus years teaching crime fiction, film and popular culture and my own writing in this arena and compares that creative, pedagogical and theoretical knowledge with my experiences with detectives in the real world. I will analyse the symbiotic connections and the marked diversions between popular culture visions and reality. The central premise being to generate a less mediated understanding of the trauma associated with police work. This paper will draw on my own processes and the analysis of writers and scholars in the field including author and LA Times reporter Jill Levoy, whose work Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America documents her time embedded with the LAPD and has been crucial to my findings. I will focus specifically on the intricate and illuminating experience of interviewing highly trained interviewers, the flow on effects of reputational damage and corruption, the connection between the process of detection and writing and the challenge of generating human, personal and intimate stories about police in the high glare of negative media coverage and overloaded popular culture representations.
Dr Sally Breen is an Australian writer, editor, and academic. Author of The Casuals and Atomic City both Harper Collins. Sally’s short form creative and non-fiction work has been published widely nationally and internationally. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation. Sally is Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators and Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing at Griffith University, Australia.
www.sallybreen.com.au @breensally
I STAND HERE IRONING (and Writing): A One Act (Conversation) About Creativity, Laundry and Why I Do My Best Work in the Kitchen
- Laura Fulton
RMIT University
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A November 2020 article in The Conversation reported two-thirds of Australia’s authors are women. While these (overwhelmingly educated white) women earn far below the national average from their creative work, it’s worth considering why so many people charged with domestic responsibilities excel at the craft. Every writer knows that much of the ‘work’ of writing happens away from the writing desk, when we’re doing the kind of mundane, repetitive tasks Antonia Pont says have the power to become a “philosophy of practising”.
My performative essay I STAND HERE IRONING (and Writing) – inspired by Tilly Olsen’s short story of the same name and her subsequent essay ‘Silences’ – considers the ways in which the work of caring in the home (either that of children or the elderly or disabled) is often ignored, undervalued and overwhelmingly performed by women. It also considers Julia Prendergast’s research on the ways in which the resting brain engages creativity and my own endless search for meaning in the Sisyphean task of laundry.
Part spoken word performance, part interactive dialogue, part critical exegesis, I STAND HERE IRONING (and Writing) seeks to demonstrate how one creative practitioner has made the work of caring in the home work for them.
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Australian/American Laura Fulton writes from Wurundjeri land. Her 2020 PhD explores how the adopted person may address issues of identity, origin and belonging through creative writing experimentation. Her creative and critical work has appeared in Swamp Writing, TEXT, Qualitative Inquiry, Antithesis, The Watershed Review, The Incompleteness Book I and II and ACE III: Arresting Contemporary Stories by Emerging Writers. Her interests include travel, watching stand-up comedy and live theatre, reading, writing and walking her little dog. Her work often considers themes of hope, strength, resilience, beauty within the mundane and the triumph of tiny heroes. www.laurafulton.org