Rope dancer : a novel and accompanying essay

The thesis combines a novel and a critical essay. The novel tells of a group of people in Melbourne, some of whom write, party, have sex, take drugs, go climbing and die. The essay discusses four aspects of the novel: climbing fiction, Nietzsche in literature, place and fiction and character as hero.

Nowhere : novel and exegesis

The thesis is a work of original creative fiction, in which an agoraphobic writer liberates himself from his prison using his writing. The novel employs metafictional techniques and a bifocal narrative. The exegesis explores creativity and originality in modern literature, using both the thesis and contemporary criticism.

Madonna of the eucalypt : novel and exegesis

The thesis comprises a novel and exegesis. The novel explores migration and spirituality in a family saga that moves from the islands of Sicily to the Australian Mallee desert. The exegesis concentrates on the "unknowability" of the creative process, which is explored through the journey motif.

Owl song : a study in tragedy

The thesis is a creative work with exegesis. The creative component is a playscript exploring European tragic form within a mythologised Australian context. The exegesis examines the research material that informed the playwriting process; including tragic theory, dramatic character, place and landscape, and the use of landscape in theatre.

Welcome to the real world

The novel 'Welcome to the real world' and its exegesis 'Gaps in reality' explore the changing ideas of what it means to be a parent and the member of an extended family in Australia today. Through fiction and critical theory the thesis reflects on the evolving values within contemporary society.

Bye, bye the Appler

This thesis, which consists of a novel and an exegesis comprising two related essays on the themes of motherhood and autism, explores the importance and relevance of fiction in representing the anguish, its causes and the unknowability of a mother and her (possibly) autistic child. The problems of language discovered in this relationship were found to intersect with parallel issues in the realm of creative writing.

Masculinity and young adult fiction

The thesis 'Masculinity and young adult fiction' analyses the forces that shape the construction of masculinity within young adult texts. The core of the thesis is a creative novel 'Broken glass' which deals with the consequences of masculine mythology within the context of a small town.

Look who's morphing

This project's creative component is "Look who's morphing", a fiction collection that explores the theme of personal identity. The exegesis analyses an issue pertaining to the writer's creative process: what degree of directness was employed in the authorial identity in his creative work and how was this level of directness realised?

Leavings : a novel and exegesis

In the novel, Billie, a painter living on the Hawkesbury River, remembers her life in Italy and England in a search for family and identity. The exegesis investigates the prophetic figure of the Sibyl from a writer's perspective, exploring notions of writing, research, creativity, authority and textual longevity.

Blank page : the location of creativity

Whether one writes in the field of literary studies or that of creative writing, one begins with the 'blank page'. The field of interest I am calling the 'blank page' has implications for the discipline of creative writing, and can be useful to theorising creativity, writing practice, and pedagogy. One creates out of, or into, the 'blank page '; one's practice is partly determined by how one theorises, however subconsciously, this blank page (how does one start? how blank is the page? how have others figured the blank page); and one teaches students who have to face literal blank pages. ln this paper I will consider how the theorisation of the blank page in literary studies addresses such creative-writing issues. I will then engage D.W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory on 'the location of play' to consider the implications of conceptualising the blank page as 'the location of writing'. A Winnicottian approach to the blank page, as a space akin to the potential space of play, allows various insights into the process of writing, especially as a proccss involving paradox.

Teaching journalism students and regional reporters how to work with cultural diversity

This paper examines the effectiveness of a set of curriculum materials developed for a Reporting Diversity and Integration Project tailored for Australian journalists and journalism students. The materials take a problem-based learning (PBL) approach to a hypothetical case study that involves Muslim netballers being banned from competition because they want to wear headscarves during play. Deferring to ideas developed by Russian psychologist, Leo Vygotsky, we proposed a few ‘scaffolding’ strategies to support student learning. The material was trialed with 30 first-year Deakin University journalism students and 30 regional journalists. The responses showed that both groups felt the materials we added to the curriculum resources, which provided information on Muslim women and the headscarf, affected how they would write the story. They also thought it was important to provide this kind of information for readers. This paper argues that providing cultural information in an accessible format for students and journalists in newsrooms should be integral to education and training materials designed to improve media coverage of cultural diversity issues.

Inventing (a) life: deconstruction and the praxis and poiesis of narrative

Deconstruction often sits awkwardly between the realm of literary studies and criticism, and philosophy proper. This paper explores the contribution that a deconstructive literacy might have for those engaged in writing narrative, as a practice and a product. Taking up Kristeva's reading of Arendt, and the Aristotelian categories of praxis and poiesis, it will be argued that the act of narrating life amounts to both the actual generation of the life it purports to describe, while also being a praxis in itself, one that need not produce anything, since the very act of engaging in/with it, leaves atraceless trace that itself is 'full of meaning'. Narrative, however, will not rest in either pole of Aristotle's binary structure. For Arendt, Kristeva will remind us, narrative is an activity that is very 'human', where we engender not just zoe, mere physiological life, but bios, a living that is not colonised by ends alone, and instead finding in itself a value, a fulfilment in its own process. Applied to the activity of story-making (autobiographical or otherwise), and also to pedagogical practice in the academy, this dual potential of narrative (at once to produce and to be an end unto itself) reframes the Beruf (calling) of creative writing. Deconstruction, in other words, assists us in appreciating the very ethical consequences of the labour of deciding where and when the story begins and ends, and who the protagonist is. Recalling us to the ontological implications of the thought of différance, this paper will attempt to demonstrate how the action of articulating the edges of story can be read as akin to that which turns the
featureless flux of time into bios, or human life that, according to Arendt, is what goes missing under totalitarianism.

Intention and unintention or the hyperconscious in contemporary lyric impulse

The creative component, a collection of poetry of eighty pages written mostly in the process described in the critical component. The critical component is a fresh examination of the role of the unconscious drive in the impulse to write Western lyric poetry, particularly contemporary lyric poetry.