Search

An editorial is presented on symposium of the Popular Culture Research Centre held in July 2020. Topics include performatively in both writing about environmental history and in shaping debates around the human impact on waterways; and film being a complex reflection on the ‘hollow life' created by hyper-capitalism and related issues including gender and class.

Working the night shift can be fraught and experienced as demanding and, yet, is often dismissed as babysitting. Few researchers have explored the social and cultural meanings of night nursing, including storytelling rituals. In 2019, a narrative study was undertaken. The aim was to explore the stories recalled by nurses about working night shifts. Thirteen Australian nurses participated. Data were gathered using the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, and narrative analysis produced forty stories and three themes: strange and challenging experiences; colleagues can be mentors (or not); and textbook knowledge is only part of what is needed on night shift. Nursing students who engage with these stories may come to understand the challenges of the night shift, and the valuable work that nurses engage in throughout a 24‐hr period, work that involves adept psychosocial and interpersonal skills alongside technical and physical competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While biographies are generally understood to narrate the lives of people, the biographical form can also be used to write the life histories of objects of material culture. This article investigates the object biography (sometimes referred to as the 'artefact biography') and proposes that this is a form with rich potential for creative writing practitioners and researchers. As well as defining the object biography and its use in various disciplinary contexts, the article also profiles how this form of life writing has been utilised by creative writers, in order to consider its capacity to contribute to practice and research in the discipline of creative writing. Contemporary writers discussed include Edmund de Waal, Bambi Ward and Marele Day, with reference also made to the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliza Cook, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anna Sewell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on issues over the superhero narratives given to nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the dangers they face due to poor working conditions and lack of personal protective equipment. Topics include the flaws of some nurses like ignoring or transgressing rules, the lack of appreciation of the role of mental health nurses, and the need for systemic change to address the flaws in the healthcare system that were revealed by the pandemic.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including COVID-19 virus, physical distancing, and social isolation.

Learning from the lived experience of disordered eating is vital for contemporary mental health practitioners. While mental health practitioners need to understand the psycho-biological issues that impact the person and family with an eating disorder, there is much about this complex condition that eludes and escapes a bio-medical perspective. Use of an aesthetic lens on the issue can illuminate various challenges, tensions and insights that people with disordered eating experience along the journey of their ill-health and on to their recovery, but which often remain unstated in the clinical context. Scholars within the creative arts discipline are experts in making judgements about the quality of artworks they encounter and have highly developed aesthetic knowing. Yet, the central skills and knowledges embodied in creative arts activity are not widely utilized outside that sphere. This article reports on how aesthetics can be applied to sensitize mental health practitioners to appreciate the lived experience of a mental health challenge such as an eating disorder. Such mental health practitioners play an important role in the health service, yet the widespread diffusion of the bio-medical model into mental health, once characterized for its equal emphasis on the psycho-social-cultural, has led to criticisms of an over-focus on illness identification, at the expense of accommodating the meanings of subjective and unique experiences of mental health, struggle and recovery. Using Kate Grenville's typology of the elements of effective creative writing, we show how these elements contribute to the aesthetic power and impact of particular eating disorder memoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the contribution of women to culinary practice in Australia in the post-war era. Focusing on Melbourne and Sydney, it begins with a brief history of the influence of the French on restaurants and ideas of haute cuisine in those cities, before profiling a number of prominent women cookery teachers and food writers. We explore the part women played in promoting French cookery in Australia in the post-war period by considering the role of women as instructors in cookery demonstrations and classes as well as their contribution to food writing. Although researchers have 'reclaimed' the working lives of many forgotten creative women artists and fiction writers, women as teachers, food writers, chefs and cooks have received much less attention. Yet, many women in the postwar period maintained viable, lengthy and influential careers in the culinary field in Australia, and thereby influenced Australian foodways, both inside and outside of the home. This preliminary survey is intended to form part of what Rosemary Ferguson Webb has called 'the ongoing feminist historical project of understanding the feminine contribution to the idea of Australia'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world prepares to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, it is timely to discuss meaningful learning activities that students of nursing could be engaged in to encourage them to reflect on the nurse's role then and now. Several films and television series about the war and featuring nursing have already been aired. No doubt there will be many more stories to come. Such stories have the potential to do more than eulogise nursing for students and practitioners. Stories, such as The crimson field, have potential to stimulate serious contemplation about values and cultural practices that have remained constant or have changed and to assist students to develop and articulate values that will be fitting for contemporary practice. Recently, excerpts from the series were examined with a group of nursing students and key learnings were found. These are shared in this paper for the benefit of educators planning to utilise public discourse as triggers to engage nursing students in discussions about nursing values, nursing history and representations of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the thinking and planning involved in Indigenizing the curriculum of a postgraduate research and writing workshop delivered by Central Queensland University on the Sunshine Coast in 2013. In this paper, the authors adopt an action research approach to developing and Indigenizing the curriculum and the workshop processes. The authors explore ways to create a learning environment that is welcoming for Indigenous students, rather than one which can exclude and thus minimize participation and learning outcomes. They specifically focus on the learning environment, the workshop's framework, the food and drink available to participants, and time for quiet reflection in seeking to improve the research writing and outputs of postgraduates and researchers. The authors describe a workshop process that explicitly recognizes the Indigenous concept of Country and reflects the Indigenous practices of community, spirituality and reciprocity. The result was a two-day writing workshop that developed participants' research, writing and publication outputs, within an Indigenized curriculum and learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the role of peer-to-peer mentoring approach in the Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) program at Central Queensland University, Australia. The program offers a blended learning environment, with internal students also likely to engage with online materials. All the students in the program's courses utilize, and contribute to, a single online Moodle site each term.