Eleanor Hogan: Writing Into the Loneliness: The situation and the story

This workshop will address the challenges of researching and writing Into the Loneliness: The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates. I will discuss why, in telling this story of an amateur ethnologist and a journalist who wrote about First Nations people during the early-to-mid 20th century, I foregrounded my own position as a biographer. Related to this is my ‘optical research’ in a campervan and the incorporation of contemporary Anangu stories about Bates into the narrative. I will also reflect on my choice of a braided narrative as a vehicle for conveying a women’s partnership and my use of scriptwriting techniques to structure the narrative, rather than employing a conventional biographical structure.

Eleanor Hogan is a literary non-fiction writer and independent researcher with a PhD in Australian literature from Melbourne University, whose writing draws on her experience of Central Australia. She is the author of NewSouth Publishing’s Alice Springs (2012) and Into the Loneliness: The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates (2021). Into the Loneliness received several shortlistings, including for the Magarey Medal for Biography (2022) and the National Biography Award (2022).

Zoom only seminar:
Meeting ID: 849 0058 9945
Password: 630803
Join Zoom Meeting: bit.ly/BioWorkshop2022