Cirrus@Austlit

'It is a tricky business, creative non-fiction. I have been writing a memoir investigating the life and death of my father, and the impact of that death upon my family. The memoir explores the silence surrounding the death within the particular cultural circumstances of conservative isolated Western Australia in the 1960s; how the horror and violence of the suicide and the shame of the years of mental illness that preceded it overwhelmed the capacity of those most directly affected to bring them into language. In writing the book, I have been forced to negotiate the ethical dilemmas faced when other peoples' stories intersect with one's own. Moreover I have tried to reveal rather than obscure within the fabric of the text, what I see as the inevitable intrusions of the narrator's desire; elements of invention within and on the edges of the testimony. Such a narrative strategy can only hope to engage transparently with the ethical dilemmas involved, since these cannot be neatly resolved, not even when institutional structures such as university Human Ethics Committee processes are deployed.' (Author's abstract)