ABOUT THE PROJECT
This project developed from a conversation between Gallacher and Cole while judging Australian literary awards. Gallacher, a program producer of long standing with ABC Radio National was struck by how often ABC Radio listeners contacted the ABC to thank them for more in-depth programs about writing. While listeners were happy to hear short, chatty interviews with writers with a new book out, it was the more complex analytical material to which they responded most avidly - especially those listeners who loved reading and rethinking their relationships with books and poems and academics for whom in-class materials needed to involve multi-media resources such as podcasts, images and transcripts.
In view of these needs and the project partners’ unique standing in the academic, writing and broadcasting communities, the project has been tailored to offer a multi-media resource to its wide constituents – from lay readers and listeners to academic experts. The interest in writing as creative practice and Australian identity, region and writing also will be extensively addressed to build resources based on ideas and cultural practice. Rather than just offering the ‘promotion-based’ interviews which follow a writer’s latest publication, the project’s interviewed writers will discuss writing practices, Australian writing and contemporary life, ethics, national identity, genre and form, research and other topics of interest to researchers and educational programs.
The project team will also endeavour to put much loved Australian writing and stories into context, offering new insights into writing from “I love a sunburnt country” to “Mulga Bill's Bicycle.” There will be no attempt at literary snobbery in our choice of material – but everything the project team approaches will be done with academic seriousness and depth, taking the reader/listener/viewer/podcaster further into the material than he or she had ventured before.
The project’s on-line, refereed journal will be the site where writers and writing are examined more critically and theoretically and will offer an e-site where reader feedback/involvement will take place. As well as offering writers and academics a place in which to widely engage with literary and academic debates about writing, this e-journal will offer some quite playful moments – setting up writing exercises about Australian writers and writing, examining writing about Australia from other countries’ writers. Blogs will offer ABC/ journal listeners/readers an opportunity to engage with ideas in a host of ways including in direct discourse with experts in a particular field.
The first series of Radio programs - first broadcast in May 2008 and repeated in late 2008 - offers insights into 5 of Australia's classic poems. The next in the series will ask contemporary Australian writers to discuss their own work in relationship with other Australian cantral novels, examining how these works shaped their identity as writers and their creative practices. And the e-journal - to be posted in November 2008 - will explore those issues which Australian and international writer/academics see as most significant in contemporary Australian fiction.
The project co-ordinators hope the material will offer new ways to promote Australian writers to the wider reading and writing public, to publishers and journalists, to festivals, to writing and Australian Studies programs in Australian and international universities.
