‘You Can Interview Me, But I Don’t Have a Story’: Local Accounts of Queensland Women, Rewondering Queensland Landscapes

This paper investigates how contemporary works of women’s travel writing are reworking canonical formations of environmental literature by presenting imaginative accounts of travel writing that are both literal and metaphorical. In this context, the paper considers how women who travel/write may intersect the spatial hybridities of travel writing and nature writing, and in doing so, create a new genre of environmental literature that is not only ecologically sensitive but gendered. As the role of female travel writers in generating this knowledge is immense but largely unexamined, this paper will investigate how a feminist geography can be applied, both critically and creatively, to local accounts of travel. It will draw on my own travels around Queensland in an attempt to explore how many female storytellers situate themselves, in and against, various discourses of mobility and morality

Talk Underwater

Short story published by Voiceworks

Isaac's Numbers

Short story published in Isaac’s Numbers and Other Stories

No Safety in Numbers: Review of Sally Piper's The Geography of Friendship

In 1993, Mary Morris, in her compilation of women’s travel writing, Maiden Voyages, observed that women, while travelling, are always vulnerable to sexual violence: ‘the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara, or just crossing a city street at night’ (Morris 1993: xvii). Twenty-five years later, the reality remains. In June 2018, three weeks before Sally Piper launched her new novel, The Geography of Friendship, Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Carlton North while walking home from a Melbourne bar

#MeToo: Sexual Harassment by Students Can No Longer Be Ignored

Sexual harassment of female lecturers by their students is one of the less discussed aspects of the interplay between gender and power in academia

That’s Driving Me Up the Wall! Academics’ Pet Peeves

It’s Monday morning, and you arrive in the office in a high fever after another parking nightmare. The photocopier is broken, so instead of preparing handouts for your 10am class, you decide to make a head start on the thousand or so emails in your inbox. The faculty is going through a restructure (yes, another one!) and the interim dean has called for a new slogan: something bold and 'cutting edge'. You need coffee. Curiously, your mug is missing, so you search out the miscellaneous cup that no one uses: the one with the chipped handle and a painted rose. You sit down at your desk. An hour later, you’ve almost cleared your emails when a new notification arrives. The subject is: 're: The Future Begins Now!' Cathy, your colleague in design, has pitched her slogan to the dean and accidentally copied in the entire faculty. It’s an easy mistake, you think. You like Cathy. She was probably in a rush. You reason that it’s the end of semester and everyone needs a break. Especially Cathy. You delete the email

How to Avoid Being Sucked into the Black Hole of Administration

I’ll admit that my knowledge of physics is largely confined to the theme song of The Big Bang Theory. Increasingly, however, I find myself staring into the electronic time suck that is my email inbox and thinking about Einstein’s theory of general relativity. I wonder, in particular, if he was thinking of academia when he proposed that while the universe is finite, it has no limits. Certainly, time seems to warp into something akin to jelly when 349 emails spring up overnight. Some of these requests are easily resolved: a seating disruption in the refec (no action required); a book contract from a scam publisher (delete); an invite to the annual Turnitin Conference (delete and block). Other emails, however, are not straightforward. This morning, for example, I received five “urgent” requests before my first class (which, by the way, is a 9am tutorial)

Wandering with Wi-Fi: The Wandering Trend in Women’s Travel Blogs

Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs, there is a lack of contemporary criticism concerning the literal and figurative meanings of ‘wandering’ in the genre of online travel writing. One only has to trawl through the blogosphere to notice the number of female travellers who refer to themselves as ‘wandering’ women. However, female wandering has received little to no study in travel writing scholarship. In other words, what a ‘wandering woman’ is exactly – for example, why she wanders and how, as well as what constitutes an act of wandering – is yet to be widely theorised. Furthermore, the subversive tendency of female wandering to disrupt not only circular journeys but also stable conceptualisations of home has not been deeply explored. This paper argues that female wandering is a complex mode of travel that is characterised by the coupling of literal and figurative movement, and therefore it cannot be conceptualised through canonical understandings of departure and return