Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper demonstrates the historical importance of a notorious Australian child murder to developing research on cultural factors influencing public understanding of family violence. It shows how the 1997 disappearance of 13-month-old Jaidyn Leskie from his babysitter's house in a downcast regional Australian town still matters in media and cultural explanations of child murder as an extreme end point of such violence. The scene set is of a haunted postcolonial imaginary moving subjects through media cultural space as failures of class and gender performance. Its tableau of "freaks" forms when the child murder story is written and read from a late-twentieth-century aspirational vista, and its key subjects underperform, in neoliberal terms, their class and gender roles. I observe them as prototypes for more likely subjects in contemporary media attempts to explain violence against children, and family violence more broadly, as a problem of role performance in Australia's haunted media culture. I suggest deconstructive engagement with texts that capture this process, but also invoke particular ghosts as they strive to explain a tragic crime.'  (Publication abstract)

'In early 2005 Chloe Hooper arrived at the Aboriginal community of Palm Island in Far North Queensland as a white writer from Melbourne. By 'walking the talk' - being with the Doomadgee family and their community through two coronial inquests into Mulrunji Doomadgee's death in custody - Hooper was given extraordinary access to a community, its history and the cultural nuance little understood by non-Indigenous readers, and not often shared with them. Focusing on Hooper's experience, particularly with her Aboriginal sources in Queensland, this paper will consider the comparative roles of journalism and creative non-fiction in conveying more of the complexities and realities of the Palm Island "riot" that ensued when Mulrunji died. It will suggest that Hooper's way of working helped subvert some dominant ideological news media representations of Australian Indigenous peoples because it privileged strong source relationships set in an extended narrative structure. The usefulness of creative non-fiction as a teaching device within journalism education is also considered through some reflection on a specific pedagogical experience.'

Source: Abstract.