AustLit

'Justin Kurzel’s 2011 film Snowtown opens with a shot of the flat, South Australian countryside from a moving car window. A pulse-like soundtrack scores the scene. After a moment a monotone voice-over begins: a character based on convicted serial killer James Vlassakis narrates a dream he had, which climaxes with the sparse description of a Chihuahua yapping out of a gash from a man’s neck that looks like a ‘big fucking mouth’. This chilling opening sets the tone for the rest of the film: a relentless, suffocating, deeply unsettling fictionalisation of the infamous ‘bodies in the barrels’ serial murders that took place in the northern suburbs of Adelaide between 1992 and 1999, and which culminated in the discovery of eight dismembered bodies submerged in drums of hydrochloric acid, concealed in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, a small town 145 kilometres north of Adelaide.' (Introduction)

'Sometime I’d like to write a book

but today I’ll begin by telling a story—I may not have time

to tell the whole story

but at least I can make a beginning

There are many ways to begin, all involve digging.

(Introduction)

'There’s a story I’ve often told over the years, about a cross roads I came to at a difficult point in my life many years ago. In this story I describe how, as a young single mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, I made some important changes in my life. I’d tell this story during orientation week at Southern Cross University (SCU) where I have taught creative writing for more than two decades. As part of a pitch to expectant groups of new students I’d describe how, after a being a musician in a rock band, I needed to get a proper job and how I’d applied to come to university so as to do just that. My juxtaposition of rock musician and proper job was designed to make the students laugh, and to put them at ease. Then I’d tell them about my second career, – the trajectory from undergraduate student to teacher of creative writing – hoping that I might inspire some of the new students to take up a writing life of one sort or other. Over the last two decades, I’ve taught creative writing to thousands of students. Not all have become published writers, but the majority, I would hope, have learnt a set of writing skills, from the team of teachers in the writing department at SCU, that have assisted them greatly in articulating their chosen worlds through the written word.' (Introduction)

'Existence as a freelance writer in 2017 has been a patchy, stop-start, fragmented affair punctuated by glimmers of hope, crushing defeats and, as ever, the grimly deafening silence that is an inherent part of the pitches-and-submissions world of media and publishing – a "silence with edges" as Omar Sakr put it in an essay on writing culture for Going Down Swinging. One ten-day period in August offers a snapshot of this writer's experience. It is by no means representative of the average Australian freelance writer, but it is representative of one Australian freelance writer who is very average.' (Introduction)