Journalist or novelist : How do readers receive works of literary journalism

and what impact does that have on the genre’s claims to truth-telling and
inclusion in the genre of non-fiction?
AUTHOR(S)

Felicity Biggins

PUBLICATION DATE

18-02-2022

HANDLE

10779/DRO/DU:21350589.v1

Downloaded from Deakin University’s Figshare repository

Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B

“Journalism should be bathed in the light of the Imagination and the idea that journalism
can be and often is one of our highest arts.” (G Stuart Adam)

JOURNALIST OR NOVELIST

How do readers receive works of literary journalism and what impact does that have on the
genre’s claims to truth-telling and inclusion in the genre of non-fiction?

Felicity Biggins, BA Drama (Hons), Master of Arts (Theatre Studies)

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Journalism,

Deakin University, Australia

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Signature Redacted by Library
Signature Redacted by Library
Dedication

To my parents, Dennis and Marjorie Biggins, for instilling their love of reading in all of us
and being the best sounding boards a mature-aged PhD student has the right to expect.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my chief supervisor, Matthew Ricketson, for sticking with me on this
rather long project, which has had more than a few setbacks and delays, not least a pandemic
that sent Melbourne into lockdown on the eve of a planned visit from me in NSW to spend a
week at Deakin to finalise the thesis for submission. I am grateful for his expertise but also
for his patience, good humour, kindness, toughness, knowledge and skill. Thanks to my then
co-supervisor, Jordan Williams, who handled my work-in-progress seminar at Canberra
University when Matthew was on study leave. She told me she believed this thesis would fill
a gap in the knowledge and have a useful application to journalism studies, which gave me
faith there was more to this than a fascinating intellectual exercise. Jen Martin came on board
as second supervisor in 2018, when Matthew moved from Canberra University to Deakin,
and has been an absolute rock. Her feedback has been what every doctoral student most
needs: detailed, informed, tough when necessary and seemingly as invested in the joy of the
discoveries as I was. I want to thank all of the Communication discipline in the School of
Creative Industries for their friendship and collegiate spirit, especially Michael Meany, our
team leader, and Head of School Paul Egglestone, for their patience and support when times
got tough. Special mentions to the McMullin gang – Janet Fulton, Christina Koutsoukos,
Judith Sandner and Paul Scott – for being amazing in every way, and also to our mentor,
Phillip McIntyre, who sets a very high research bar for all of us. I’d also like to mention
Anne Llewellyn, the head of the then School of Design, Communication and IT, who
suggested at the very start that I undertake my research at another university to expand my
horizons – good advice as it led me to Matthew. And my colleague and friend Alysson
Watson for her meticulous copy edit. To my friends who have been stoic and despite the
elephantine gestation period of this thesis have never stopped asking how it’s going – in
particular my beloved book group, who inspired this project and still meets every month to
drink wine and talk about writing. To my sister Penny and brother Jonathan, for their
unwavering, piss-taking, non-judgemental support, and all my delightful nieces and nephew.
A very special thank you to my husband, Dr Carl Caulfield, my partner in life and soul mate,
himself a PhD survivor, who commiserated when the going got tough (every day), and kicked
me up the bum when necessary, and to our daughters, Caitlin and Siobhan, for being such
wonderful distractions and egging me on always. A sincere thank-you to all the readers in the
book groups and those who were interviewed, for their generosity of spirit and fascinating
comments. Their insights have been the most rewarding part of this process. And finally, to
writers who labour in solitude to make reality more bearable – we who love to read cannot
thank you enough.

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Abstract

Literary journalism, also known as narrative journalism, creative non-fiction and book-length
journalism, is a powerful and popular literary form. But deploying literary devices to tell
stories about real people and events runs the risk of blurring the boundary between reportage
and the imagination, throwing into contention literary journalism’s inclusion in the genre of
non-fiction and challenging its claims to truth-telling. Much of the critical debate around
literary journalism has focussed on this fact or fiction conundrum, but less – if any – research
has been done on whether understanding how readers process works of literary journalism
might ameliorate those concerns. Do readers comprehend its blurred genre status and, if so,
how? What are some of the trigger points by which readers might care about the factual
status of a work? Do readers accept the author’s version of the story as the version of the
story and, if so, what are the implications for the genre’s truth-telling claims? I will use case
studies of four book groups reading four prescribed, resonant Australian examples of this
genre, analysing unmediated book-group discussions using a grounded theory approach, and
analyse 21 semi-structured interviews with engaged readers. I will set out to contribute to
practice and knowledge by answering the question in my thesis title: Journalist or novelist –
how do readers receive works of literary journalism and what impact does that have on the
genre’s claims to truth-telling and inclusion in the genre of non-fiction? I will argue that
engaged readers not only comprehend the blurred boundaries of literary journalism but have
strategies to navigate their way across them; that they do care about the factual status of these
works and have strategies to mitigate those concerns; and that they recognise when they are
being manipulated by a writer’s version of the story, but if they are engaged in the story, they
are willing to either overlook it, or find a way around it, to settle on their version of the truth
of the matter.

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Table of contents

Chapter One: Introduction …………………………………………………... 5

Contribution to knowledge and/or practice …………………... 13

Chapter Two: Literature Review …………………………………………….. 16

Border skirmishes in the theory wars ………………………… 17
Defining the form …………………………………………….. 27
Characteristics of the form …………………………………… 29
Reader response and reader reception theory ………………… 38
Genre ………………………………………………………… 41
The underprivileged reader …………………………………... 43

Chapter Three: Methodology …………………………………………………. 46

Research design (and me in the research) ……………………. 46
Methods for data collection …………………………………... 49
Books and Book Groups ……………………………………… 51
The focus group ………………………………………………. 55
The semi-structured interview ………………………………... 56
Analysing the data ……………………………………………. 58

Chapter Four: The First Stone, by Helen Garner, and the Friends of the
University of Newcastle book group …………………………. 60

Chapter Five: Broken Lives, by Estelle Blackburn, and the Annandale book
group ………………………………………………………….. 94

Chapter Six: Joe Cinque’s Consolation, by Helen Garner, and the all-male
Merewether book group ……………………………………… 124

Chapter Seven: The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper, and the Newcastle book
group ………………………………………………………….. 148

Chapter Eight: Talking to readers about literary journalism …………………. 166

Chapter Nine: Conclusion – Situating the underprivileged reader in the

discourse of literary journalism ……………………………….. 190
Future research ……………………………………………….. 195

References …………………………………………………………………. 196

Appendices Appendix 1: Participant Information Statement ………………. 215

Appendix 2: Participant Consent Form ………………………. 217
Appendix 3: Timetable of book group recordings …………… 218
Appendix 4: Timetable of reader interview recordings ……… 219
Appendix 5: Questions for semi-structured reader interviews ... 220

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 Chapter One: Introduction

“Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real events the form of the story.
It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativisation is so
difficult.” (Hayden White, 1980)

How shall I put it gently? Perhaps this way: the most striking phenomenon in western
journalism in both praxis and theory, is the obstinate, the diehard metaphysical faith that
language is transparent. Or, put somewhat differently: the fault lies in the refusal of
journalists, but also of students of journalism, to put the profession where it belongs, that is,
within the context of human expression, of expressive activity. It is the refusal to deal with
and judge newswriting for what it is in essence – storytelling. (Itzhak Roeh, 1989)

The idea for this doctorate came from a meeting of my book group one chilly winter’s night
in Newcastle in 2010. The Cooks Hill Book Group was fairly new and had undergone a rapid
expansion from six friends and acquaintances who gathered at the first meeting to a group of
about 12, all women of a similar age (over 50) and all professionals, mainly school teachers
and university lecturers, but also a town planner and a lawyer. On this particular night we had
nine attendees and a visitor – a friend of a member who was interested in joining us. The
book up for discussion was Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, subtitled A True Story
of Death, Grief and the Law, published in 2004. The discussion lasted three hours and was
animated and loud. This was not a typical night for the book club; most discussions about the
nominated book, nearly always a novel, lasted about 10 minutes before the conversation
drifted to more personal topics. But Joe Cinque’s Consolation captured their imaginations
and their intellects.

As the member of the group who’d chosen the book, I wondered why it had resonated so
strongly. It could have been the proximity of the story. Joe Cinque, a law student, was born
and raised in Newcastle. Or was it the sensational way he died – injected with heroin and
given coffee laced with Rohypnol by his disturbed and beautiful girlfriend after a dinner
party with friends? Or perhaps it was Helen Garner’s confession at the start of the book that
when it was suggested she write the Cinque story she was a “woman at the end of her tether”,
55, coming out of her third marriage, jobless, and still bruised from The First Stone
controversy four years earlier (Garner, 2004, p. 13). As women in our fifties, most of us with
children of a similar age to the book’s protagonists and with several divorces among us, it
was possibly a combination of all those things, but I suspect it was mostly the power of the

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writing that ignited my book group that night and sustained such a long discussion. I can’t
recall much of the actual debate, unfortunately. Somewhat ironically it was over-shadowed
later in the evening by the visitor to our group that night declaring she had written a pendant
novel to Perfume which had been optioned by the BBC to be made into a TV series – we
were suitably impressed, but I suspect she was a fabulist and had made it up, which resonates
somewhat with the themes of this thesis. But I do remember that some present took issue with
the way Garner framed the story, finding it manipulative and overly subjective, maybe even a
dangerously distorted work, which got me thinking that this would be a rich field of study for
a PhD. I could look at truth and betrayal in literary journalism, asking questions such as how
does a journalist approach the practice of writing a book about a true story; what is their
obligation to the subjects, given they might still be alive or their families might; how can you
tell if the author is making things up or spinning it a certain way to suit a personal agenda
and, if that matters, why?

In 2009, I had secured an ongoing full-time position as a Level B academic at the University
of Newcastle after a few years on contracts teaching Journalism and Radio into the Bachelor
of Communication. I had been a journalist and broadcaster since leaving school, with 30
years of experience in both print and broadcast journalism, but my contract stipulated I would
need to enrol in a PhD, so with this seed of an idea in mind I began searching for a
supervisor. The head of the then School of Design, Communication and IT, now the School
of Creative Industries, had suggested enrolling at a different university to broaden my
horizons and the school’s research interests. During an internet search I came across
Professor Matthew Ricketson at the University of Canberra (now Professor of
Communication at Deakin) who had an interest in the field of literary journalism (what he
calls book-length journalism). We met at the Australia and New Zealand Communication
Association (ANZCA) Conference of 2009 and, during a stroll around Lake Burley Griffin, I
discovered that his doctoral thesis, “Ethical Issues in the Practice of Book-Length
Journalism” (2010), had considered very similar themes to what I had hoped to explore. For
his thesis, Ricketson interviewed leading Australian practitioners in the field to develop “a
tripartite framework that follows the practitioner from the research phase to the
representation phase to their relationship with readers” (p. iii). He conducted close readings
of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The
Final Days (1976), as well as the work of other American practitioners and six Australian

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practitioners and found that the practice of journalism at book-length brought together an
“interlocking concentration of ethical issues” (2009, p. iii).

First, practitioners need to negotiate and manage close relationships with their principal
sources while maintaining a sense of editorial independence. Second, when writing in a
narrative mode they need to balance the demands of veracity inherent in a form making truth-
telling claims with the desirability of creating a narrative that engages readers emotionally
and intellectually. I argue that it is the taking of a narrative approach to representing people
and events that triggers certain ethical issues, not whether the practitioner is an artist …
Third, practitioners present their work in books, a form which many readers associate with
fiction, especially when presented with a book that reads like a work of fiction and offers
little guidance that it is not fiction but journalism. For this reason, I argue practitioners have
an ethical obligation to make clear what they are offering readers. (Ricketson, 2009, p. iii)

These arguments resonated with my seed of an idea and I knew I had found the ideal
supervisor for my field of study. His work has been invaluable to my research, but I clearly
needed a different approach to ensure I would be uncovering something new, the gap in the
knowledge a PhD seeks to fill. Given the way the book group had responded to Joe Cinque’s
Consolation was what had piqued my interest in this form of journalism, and after many
helpful discussions with my supervisor, I decided to focus on what we came to call the
“underprivileged reader” (Eagleton, 2007, p. 64), because, as the father of New Journalism
Tom Wolfe observed, the form had a special impact on its readers’ emotions.

The most gifted writers are those who manipulate the memory sets of the reader in such a
rich fashion that they create within the mind of the reader an entire world that resonates
with the reader's real emotions. The events are merely taking place on the page, in print, but
the emotions are real. Hence the unique feeling when one is absorbed in a certain book,
‘lost’ in it. (Wolfe, 1973, p. 48)

Wolfe’s landmark work, The New Journalism, with an Anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and
E.W. Johnson, first published in 1973, comprises previously published essays by Wolfe and
an anthology of 23 texts published in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s from a wide range of
writers. Although there was not much about it that was all that new, as will be discussed in
Chapter Two: Literature Review, Wolfe’s bold assertion that this style of writing he labelled
New Journalism was “dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre (1975, p. 15)

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caused quite a stir among literary critics. Ronald Weber observed that the book did not
provoke a neutral response, but that he found Wolfe to be “probably right about most of it”
(1974, p. 306), while Dwight Macdonald had already famously reviewed Wolfe’s article
“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” in The New York Review (1965) and
labelled it “parajournalism”.

Parajournalism seems to be journalism – “the collection and dissemination of current news” –

but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the
factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather
than information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers. (Macdonald,
August 26, 1965, para. 1)

Whether a bastard form or a legitimate one, focussing on how the reader responded to it
threw up many possible research questions: How is this contentious genre of writing received
by readers? How does a reader resolve those creative tensions between art, facts, and truth, if
indeed they do? What effect does the authorial voice and use of literary devices have on the
reader’s understanding of the “truth” of the matter? That readers seek truth, both in fiction
and non-fiction, has been amply demonstrated by numerous literary scandals over the past
few decades from as long ago as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was published in
1966 as a “non-fiction novel” after being first published as a four-part series in The New
Yorker magazine in 1965. An extensively researched account of the gruesome murder of
Herbert Clutter, his wife and their two youngest children in Holcomb, Kansas, In Cold Blood
was widely praised by both critics and scholars. Literary journalism historian Thomas Berner
wrote that Capote succeeded in his artistic quest to elevate the place of non-fiction in the
world of literature (1999, p. 129). But Mark Mass described the book as a seminal example of
the strengths and weaknesses of literary journalism, claiming journalists, scholars and
individuals represented in it took exception to aspects of Capote’s approach, “accusing him
of misrepresenting their part in the story, misreporting actual moments for literary effect and
portraying the killers in an overly sympathetic light” (2015, n.p.). In Cold Blood is discussed
in more detail in Chapter Two: Literature Review.

Other books since purporting to be true stories have later been exposed as entirely false or
partially false. An Australian work Forbidden Love (2003), published as Honor Lost: Love
and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in the United States, ostensibly a first-person account of an

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honour killing, was debunked after an 18-month investigation by The Sydney Morning
Herald that revealed the author had not been in Jordan at the time the events of the book
occurred on July 24, 2004. One of the best-known examples of a partially false work
promoted as non-fiction is James Frey’s Million Little Pieces (2004), which was originally
published as a memoir, but had to be re-marketed as a semi-fictional novel after Frey
admitted to US TV interviewer Oprah Winfrey that he had made up some of his experiences
in his account of his battle with addiction (Winfrey, 2006). Winfrey, who had propelled the
book to the best-seller list with her advocacy of it through her book club, would later tell
fellow US TV interviewer Larry King she had moved on from memoirs “…because a lot of
publishers – I was surprised to find – that the publishers do not vet the stories or vet the
books. And in the case of James Frey, it hadn't been. So, I was trusting the publisher, you
know” (King, 2007).

But Frey was unrepentant, telling The Guardian in 2006 that some people thought memoirs
should be held to a perfect journalistic standard.

Some people don’t. Obviously, I don’t. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect
journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature. I thought in doing that it was
OK to take certain licences. To tell a story effectively you manipulate information ... I think
that if stories were told always exactly as they really happened most of them would be really
boring. (Barton, 2006)

But the outing of Frey as an inventor of the truth did not dent the market’s enthusiasm for the
book, nor stop a movie version being released in 2019. There are also examples where books
marketed as fiction but based on true events have caused controversy when it has been
revealed the author has constructed a persona to lay claim to the right to tell a particular story
based on historic events, or at least add authenticity. In Australia, one of the biggest of these
controversies was when The Hand that Signed the Paper was published in 1994 under the
pseudonym Helen Demidenko, who claimed she was the daughter of a Ukrainian father and
an Irish mother, but was later exposed as Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants
(Vice, 2007). The novel was awarded the Australian Vogel Award and the Miles Franklin
Award in 1995. Alex Byrne, the Chief Librarian of the Northern Territory, described the
literary controversy as astounding writing: “The controversy spawned myriad articles,
extending from the literary journals to the tabloid press, a host of cartoons, current affairs
discussions and several books” (2013, p. 162). Hannah Courtney suggests it could be argued

9
that Demidenko “engaged fictionality in the paratextual space” (2019, p. 83) and the book
was not, then, a deliberate attempt to deceive.

And yet her intent is beside the point: the public interpretation was that she had lied, that this
was unacceptable, and that her fiction was tainted by her deception. Darville’s violation of the
expectation of a certain level of truth in the public sphere was a violation of her relationship
with her readers. In the context of Susan Stewart’s description of such transgressions as
“inversions or negations of cultural rules”, it was a crime of writing … In claiming
authenticity, Darville raised the stakes of her work, heightening the impact when the hoax
was revealed. (2019, p. 83)

Demidenko, as Byrne notes, put an author’s note in the preface of the book, claiming it as a
work of fiction. The deception was in the writer’s persona as someone with a relevant
cultural background to the subject matter. The controversy in this case grew entirely out of
the “paratext”. Literary theorist Gerard Genette defines paratext as the things that surround
the text of a work of literature: the author’s name, the title, illustrations and so on: “For us,
accordingly, the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to
the readers, and, more generally, to the public.” (1987, p. 1). Genette’s recognition of the
transactional nature of the paratext between a book and its reader has been useful for this
thesis and will be referred to in later chapters.

In a more recent example, the Australian writer Heather Morris, who had an unlikely best-
seller with her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), has been criticised for falsifying
aspects of the Holocaust. Morris, an unpublished but aspiring writer in 2003, was introduced
to a Holocaust survivor living in Melbourne, Lali Sokolov, who wanted his story told but by
a non-Jewish person. According to journalist Fiona Harari, author of We Are Here Talking
with Australia's Oldest Holocaust Survivors, published in 2018, Morris had three years of
conversations with the 87-year-old, “lasting until Sokolov’s death in 2006, about his
childhood in Slovakia and his time tattooing other inmates at Auschwitz, where he met and
fell in love with Gita” (Harari, 2019). Morris told Harari her account of Sokolov’s life was
about 85 per cent true. But in November 2020, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and
Museum produced a list of errors “as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and
understatements” that created an inauthentic view of the camp, even though the book came
with a rider that every reasonable attempt to verify the facts against available documentation
has been made.

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In an article “Fact-checking The Tattooist of Auschwitz”, published on the digital platform
Joomag, researcher Wanda Witek-Malicka concludes that the book should be seen as an
“impression devoid of documentary value on the topic of Auschwitz, only inspired (sic) by
authentic events” (2018, n.p.). Witek-Malicka accused Morris of not taking into consideration
documents preserved at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and of failing to verify facts
available in academic literature: “The author is not a researcher, and her lack of substantive
and technical competence to work on personal sources, as well as the lack of general
knowledge on the realities of the maps, is apparent in the book” (ibid.). Harari found Morris
to be sanguine about the furore, accepting some of the criticism but defending herself on the
grounds that she was writing one person’s story, primarily a love story, from their point of
view, not researching a work of non-fiction. The Holocaust is a notoriously difficult subject
to take on, as Adorno famously said: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1983, p.
34). Taking it on comes with responsibilities which Morris seems to both acknowledge and
dismiss, given she has published a sequel, Cilka’s Journey (2019). In her article, Harari
quotes Lisa Phillips, the director of education at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre: “If
you are going to fictionalise or adapt a true story based on a personal testimony, I think it is
really important to ensure that it is built on a foundation of reality. The concern is always,
what becomes the dominant historical knowledge?” (2019). Why this resonates so strongly
with my research project is that these are clearly stated works of fiction, being criticised for
not being based solidly enough on fact, or at least the facts accepted by relevant stakeholders
as being the agreed facts. Imagine the onerous burden then on the literary journalists being
studied here, who must satisfy their gatekeepers (publishers, distributors) and then their
audiences (critics, scholars, readers) that their books are works of non-fiction.

Daniel Lehman (1997) observed, and I agree, that in this media-saturated world it seems safe
to assume an enhanced level of skill among readers when it comes to decoding texts. He
believes our minds are capable of comprehending a blurred genre status as the reader
negotiates texts and that the reader is drawn into a non-fiction because of its contradictions,
“an artificial construction of memory as well as a compelling representation of history that
draws a reader into the life of the text” (p. 24).

Both writer and reader are implicated by their socially constructed memory of events in a
clash of varying stimuli and responses, many of which echo the intertextuality of everyday

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 life and the uneasy feeling that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the narrative
of one’s own memory from what is mediated or constructed by others. (Lehman, 1997, p. 24)

Lehman’s observation prompted me to reflect that, as a print journalist, my version of events

as published in the newspaper I worked for were occasionally challenged by the subjects of
those articles and the readers of the newspaper. A seemingly innocuous story I wrote about a
mature-aged woman doing Open Foundation1 at the University of Newcastle, having not
completed school, resulted in the threat of a defamation case when the woman’s husband
objected to my comparing his wife to the character of Rita from the (1983) film Educating
Rita. In the film, the husband burns Rita’s books. In the real-life story, the husband objected
to his wife going to university. That there was truth to the comparison was a fluke, as she had
not divulged anything to me about her husband. I had taken a literary liberty and it had
backfired. This experience taught me the power of words to hurt, even when not written with
that intent. Even more so than daily journalism practice, I learnt that if you are going to write
a work of narrative journalism – dealing in facts – you need to be very mindful of how you
deploy literary devices such as description, dialogue reconstruction, scene setting, narrative
framing, an authorial voice and composite characters.

One of the challenges in my choice of subject is the number of different areas of academic
theory that could be considered relevant to this study. I do not profess to have included all of
them, but I have taken into account what I consider the most useful to my research. In
Chapter Two: Literature Review, I set these out as sub-sections. Border skirmishes in the
theory wars looks at theories around the practice of literary journalism; Defining the form
covers the various terms used to describe what I choose to call literary journalism;
Characteristics of the form explores the form itself; Reader response and reader reception
theory touches on the various reader response theorists that are pertinent to this project;
Genre justifies my classification of literary journalism as a genre; and The underprivileged
reader looks at the limited research analysing the reader’s response to non-fiction and in
particular, journalism. Chapter Three: Methodology covers the data-gathering methods used
for this research project and why those methods were appropriate for this qualitative study.
Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven present case studies of four book groups and their

1
A pathways course into the university for students who do not have a Higher School Certificate or Australian
Tertiary Admission Rank.

12
discussion of four prescribed Australian works of literary journalism in order of the
publication date of the books chosen: The First Stone, by Helen Garner, in 1995; Broken
Lives, by Estelle Blackburn, in 1998; Joe Cinque’s Consolation, also by Helen Garner, in
2004; and The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper, in 2008. Chapter Eight: Talking to readers about
reading literary journalism is a summary and analysis of the data from 21 semi-structured
interviews with readers, and Chapter Nine: Conclusion, Situating the under-privileged reader
in the discourse of literary journalism considers the implications of my findings, with
recommendations for further study.

Contribution to knowledge and/or practice

“The artistry of nonfiction is the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism.”

(Barbara Lounsberry, 1990)

Most of the scholarly work on literary journalism has come out of the United States, and
tends to focus on textual analysis, theoretical concerns, and disagreements over how best to
categorise the genre (Connery, 1990, 1992; Frus, 1994, Gutkind, 2012; Hartsock, 2000, 2009;
Hellmann, 1981; Heyne, 2001; Hollowell, 1977; Kramer, 1995; Lehman, 1997; Lounsberry,
1990; Sims, 1990, 1995). But activity in the field in Australia is growing, with scholarly
works from Willa McDonald and Susie Eisenhuth, The Writer’s Reader: Understanding
Journalism and Non-fiction (2007), Matthew Ricketson, Telling True Stories (2014) and Sue
Joseph, Behind the Text (2016).

Many Australian universities now offer discrete units of study for the subject in their
Communication or Arts degrees, including Macquarie University, the University of Canberra,
and Griffith University. My supervisor, Professor Matthew Ricketson, wrote his thesis on
“Ethical Issues in the Practice of Book-Length Journalism” for his PhD from Monash
University (2009); David Conley created a model to demonstrate that journalism can enable
fiction, exploring how forms of writing in journalism and fiction relate to and influence each
other in “A Telling Story: Five Journalist-Novelists and Australia’s Writing Culture” (2003);
Christine Boven produced “A Comparison of Australian and German Literary Journalism”
for her doctoral thesis (2013); and Lindsay Jane Morton considered Australian literary
journalism as well as North American works in her thesis “Epistemic Responsibility and the
Literary Journalist” (2013). All four of these research projects focus on the works and the

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writers. Willa McDonald is writing a cultural history of colonial Australian literary
journalism and is co-editing with Robert Alexander an academic collection on social justice
and literary journalism due for publication in 2022.

There is no anthology of Australian works of literary journalism, while several exist in the
United States. Analysing readers’ responses to narrative non-fiction is an even more
neglected area of academic scrutiny in the Australian context, where these works are often
controversial, as they deal with real people and events. The works deserve close critical
attention in themselves, as does the ongoing debate over how best to define the genre, but I
also hope this research will contribute to encouraging the highest standards of journalistic
practice when it comes to this form by shifting the focus from boundary concerns and
nomenclature to readers responding to works of literary journalism, illuminating how their
responses reveal where the obfuscations, distortions and other ethical concerns lie. To date in
my research, I have not found any Australian research into readers’ reception of works of
literary journalism. Indeed, a search of the entire database of the journal Literary Journalism
Studies, which had its inaugural issue in 2009, does not produce a single article considering
the relationship between the reader and works of literary journalism.

But as McDonald (2019) has shown, Australian writers have been producing works of
literary journalism since colonisation. The online portal Auslit has a section called Australian
Narrative Journalism (1788-1901), which identifies early works of long-form journalism
published in the early years of the colonies, ranging from an account of the siege and capture
of Ned Kelly at Glenrowan, written by Francis Thomas Dean Carrington (1843-1918) and
published in The Australasian newspaper on July 3, 1880, to explorer Matthew Flinders’ A
Voyage to Terra Australis (1814). McDonald describes the database as:

an expression of cultural memory in Australia using examples of colonial writers and their
featured works – from the journalists who captured the bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang, to
those who sailed undercover to expose the “blackbirding” trade in northern Australia, to the
women who first wrote and published Australian profiles, including the earliest known
written portraits of Aboriginal Australians. (2019, p. 33)

McDonald welcomes the development as fostering some understanding of the cultural

specifics of the emerging Australian voice but cautions against the dangers of choosing what

14
to include as a demonstration of an archive as an exercise in power (2019, p. 45). Choosing
what contemporary works to cite here is also an exercise in power – mine, as a middle-class
white woman writing this thesis – but also the fact that I only have recourse to the works that
have got past the gatekeepers in publishing.

Sue Joseph (2015) asserts that Australian literary journalism, unlike in the US and the UK,
has neither a discrete nor recognisable community of authors, but she notes there have been
attempts to identify a national canon. “In recent years, two other terms, ‘book-length
journalism’ and ‘long-form journalism’, have been offered but none ever seem to settle”
(Joseph, 2015, p. 101). One of the writers Joseph identifies as a writer of literary journalism,
using Ricketson’s model of identification (2014), is Margaret Simons, who tells Joseph she
prefers the phrase “dirty journalism” (2016, p. 132). Joseph judges Simons’s The Meeting of
the Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair (2003) a work of literary journalism regardless of
how the author herself defines it. Joseph describes it as “an example of the sort of long-form
contemporary writing occurring in Australia that has deep political and cultural impact and
significance” (2015, p. 105).

Other works that have been awarded and lauded include John Bryson’s Evil Angels (1985),
an account of the murder case against Lindy Chamberlain of her baby Azaria; Anna Funder’s
Stasiland (2002), which is a lyrical work based on interviews with four Berliners who refused
to collaborate with the Stasi and ex-Stasi in hiding; David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s
Dark Victory (2003), about the so-called Tampa federal election of 2001, which saw Prime
Minister John Howard and the Liberal/National coalition returned for an unpredicted third
term after a campaign focussing on national security and border control issues; and Adrian
Hyland’s Kinglake-350 (2015), about the Black Saturday bushfires of February 7, 2009, in
rural Victoria. This is just a small sample of what is a rich and varied body of works being
produced in Australia in the literary journalism genre.

15
 Chapter Two: Literature Review

Poets, playwrights and novelists had been writing journalism for centuries before Wolfe
coined the phrase New Journalism to denote a way of producing journalism that drew on the
devices of fiction. The Journalistic Imagination (2007), edited by Keeble and Wheeler, is a
collection of essays focussing on 10 writers from Britain, the United States and France. It
points out the English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834), who wrote The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, also wrote for a variety of journals, including The Morning Post and the
Watchman, texts described by Keeble as “non-political essays, profiles, leading articles,
parliamentary reports” (2007, p. 5); George Orwell produced the novels Animal Farm (1945)
and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and was also a journalist and a war correspondent who
published non-fiction works The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia
(1938); novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) also wrote journalism for magazines and
newspapers (2007, p. 58); and Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a journalist before she wrote
novels (p. 74). Keeble and Wheeler found:

Journalism and literature are too often seen as two separate spheres (one ‘low’, the other
‘high’) … The essays collected here show how these two spheres, in fact, constantly overlap.
Journalistic genres constantly avoid neat categorisations and theorizing, thriving on their
dynamism, contradictions, paradoxes and complexities. (2007, p. 2)

This summarises one of the biggest challenges with this research project. Because it straddles
a range of possible theoretical areas, the question arose: which scholarly literature was
essential to engage with, and which literature was more peripheral? This necessitated making
choices about the depth and breadth of this review and my decision to organise the review
into manageable parts. I decided it was essential to look closely at the literature specifically
focussed on contemporary literary journalism or creative non-fiction, as opposed to
journalism more broadly or historical works of literary journalism, so I begin with a close
look at the main debates in Border skirmishes in the theory wars. The second section,
Defining the form, covers the difficulties the dominant scholars and critics in the field have
had in settling on what this hybrid should even be called, let along agreeing what it actually
is. The most resonant theorical position for this study is Daniel Lehman’s (1997), who
contends readers are engaged “over the edge” when reading works about real people, and that
readers can navigate the “blurred boundaries” of what he calls creative non-fiction (discussed

16
in more detail later in this chapter). By analysing how readers respond to works of literary
journalism, I hope to demonstrate his theory in action by showing that readers are indeed
both engaged and navigating the waters through these boundaries skilfully. Characteristics of
the form pulls together what a wide range of scholars and critics agree constitutes a work of
literary journalism and what they find problematic about those characteristics from an ethical
point of view. The sections, Reader response and reader reception, Genre, and The
underprivileged reader, complete the Literature Review, because while reader response
focusses primarily on fiction, this thesis is investigating how readers respond to, or receive,
works of literary journalism, and a basic understanding of the work of the dominant theorists
in this field has been invaluable in informing how I have approached analysing the data from
the readers.

Border skirmishes in the theory wars

“The practice of various kinds of ‘creative nonfiction’ has proliferated … and surely theory
would follow practice. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened. Not only has there been little
progress in our theoretical understanding of ambitious nonfiction, but there is no more
widespread agreement about the nature of the fiction/nonfiction distinction that there was
twenty years ago.” (Eric Heyne, 2001)

In his pivotal book The New Journalism, with an Anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W.
Johnson (1973), Tom Wolfe claimed that the most important literature being written in
America was in non-fiction, saying fiction writers were busy “running backward and
forward, skipping and screaming, into a begonia patch that I call Neo-Fabulism” (Wolfe,
1975, preface). He wrote that New Journalism had dethroned the novel as the number one
literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century.
According to Wolfe, in the 1950s in America, novelists were the golden boys – Norman
Mailer, William Styron, James Baldwin – with no room for a journalist unless in the role of a
would-be novelist or to pay court to the great writers. Wolfe said there were no literary
journalists working for the popular press.

If a journalist aspired to literary status – then he had better have the sense and the courage to
quit the popular press and try to get into the big league… and yet in the early 1960s a curious
new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of

17
 the feature stratosphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first,
humble in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write
journalism that would…read like a novel. (1975, pp. 21-22)

Early examples of this New Journalism include Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966),
Wolfe’s The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels:
The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966). In Cold Blood is the
story of wealthy farm family in Kansas who are killed by a couple of young men for no
apparent reason. Capote got the idea for the book from a short newspaper item. He researched
it with Harper Lee, who had submitted To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) for publication. After
some resistance on Capote’s part, he immersed himself in the town, getting invited to dinner
and so on, and he befriended the murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. When In Cold
Blood was published, Capote was then a novelist of long standing who became a best-selling
celebrity. Capote didn’t consider In Cold Blood journalism; he claimed he had invented a
new literary genre, the non-fiction novel. Capote told George Plimpton in an interview
published in the New York Times on January 16, 1966, that when writing it he realized he
might have found a solution to what had been his greatest creative quandary. “I wanted to
produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of
fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry”
(Plimpton, 1966). As Wolfe wrote in the essay “Like A Novel”, first published in the New
York magazine in 1972, and reprinted in The New Journalism (1973), it was the discovery
that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to “use any literary device, from the
traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different
kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space … to excite the reader both
intellectually and emotionally” (1975, p. 28). Other writers began immersing themselves in
different worlds, including Hunter S. Thompson, who ran with the Hell’s Angels for 18
months, as a reporter, to write Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw
Motorcycle Gang (1967), naming his style of writing “gonzo journalism” and nearly getting
himself killed in the process. The coup de grace, though, was Norman Mailer’s The Armies of
the Night, with its cover description, “History as a Novel, the Novel as History”, published in
1968. Wolfe described the moment as another novelist turning to “some form of accursed
journalism, no matter what name you gave it”, claiming Mailer had not only revived his
reputation but raised it to a point higher than it had ever been in his life (1975, p. 42). The
book was a memoir about an anti-Vietnam war demonstration Mailer had been part of in

18
1967, when protestors marched to the Pentagon in Washington DC to be met with armed
soldiers. Penguin Classics provides a useful description on its website:

From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary
perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals
and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which
facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.
(Penguin, n.d.)

It was originally published in Harper’s magazine in book-length form, believed to be longest

magazine article ever published (Pulitzer, n.d.) and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for
General Non-Fiction in 1969 as well as the National Book Award. Mailer had published six
novels before The Armies of the Night, so for him to venture into non-fiction reportage was a
strike for the credibility of the evolving genre. Mailer went on to write The Executioner’s
Song, subtitled A True Life Novel, in 1979, about Gary Gilmore, who was executed for
murder. Mailer told Tony Schwartz for an article in The Times that he had a preference for
fiction as a form and was “fascinated by those places where the two forms meet” (Schwartz,
1979). He rather graciously conceded to Schwarz that the “story” of The Executioner’s Song
was better than one he could ever have invented, but nonetheless he considered it a novel and
had it published as one. Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House, is quoted by
Schwartz as saying: “I didn’t think it was a novel, and I was a bit puzzled to see it listed as
fiction, but if Mailer says it’s a novel, it’s a novel. You always give the author the benefit of
the doubt” Epstein, cited in Schwartz, 1969).

In his 1980 essay for The Yale Review “The Legend on the Licence”, John Hersey, who was
primarily a fiction writer but who famously produced a work of non-fiction, Hiroshima, in
1946 for the New Yorker, called Capote’s description of In Cold Blood as a non-fiction novel
an “appallingly harmful phrase”, contending the blurring of fiction and journalism sanctioned
by use of it had not been particularly good for fiction and was potentially mortal for
journalism (Hersey in Goldstein (ed.), 1989, p. 213). Calling himself “one worried grandpa”
after reading The Executioner’s Song, Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Handcarved Coffins by
Truman Capote, Hersey claimed they violated the one sacred rule of journalism. “The writer
must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP”
(sic), (2013, pp. 214-215).

19
Nicholas Lemann was puzzled by the essay, writing in The New Yorker that it was odd,
“partly because the examples don’t really fit the argument”.

Mailer subtitled his book “A True Life Novel,” and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, not
non-fiction. Capote described Handcarved Coffins as “a short novel”. The Right Stuff does
present itself as straight-up non-fiction, but Hersey, despite what appear to have been
strenuous efforts, was unable to find clear evidence that Wolfe had fictionalized anything.
Hersey went to the trouble of interviewing two former astronauts, and finally admitted, “The
Right Stuff has been accepted as fairly accurate by people in the know”. (Lemann, 2019)

Ronald Weber (1974) declared this new form as a literary, rather than journalistic,
development, finding literary non-fiction emerged at a time when critics were questioning the
ability of fiction to compete with film and television and with history and popular sociology
and psychology, even the newspaper. “The new factual fiction returns to the novel’s
fascination with the detailed depiction of social reality and its concern to interest the reader
while offering the added attraction of being true” (Weber, 1974, p. 16). Weber said that by
the mid-1960s, non-fiction had become what Seymour Krim called the de-facto literature of
our time (1974, p. 16), coinciding with a loss of confidence in literary realism as a viable
model for serious writing. But the new form was not without its critics, who came from
literary and journalistic quarters.

Literary figures took it to task for remaining too journalistic, too tied to fact … the work was
often dismissed as “mere reportage”. At the same time journalistic figures faulted it for its
literary aspirations, for appearing to take liberties with the facts or treating them in ways
intended to create artistic or emotional effects. (Weber, 1974, pp. 23-24)

John Hartsock wrote in A History of American Literary Journalism that Wolfe was one of the
first to attempt to theorise his version of literary journalism (2000, p. 254). Hartsock’s history
outlined the antecedents for Wolfe’s so-called “New Journalism”, tracing the earliest
examples to the 1830s, citing Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes”, which were
published in newspapers (2000, p. 23). In his 1981 publication Fables of Fact – The New
Journalism as New Fiction, John Hellmann argued for a theory on the New Journalism that
observed what is occurring in the texts rather than imposing Wolfe’s realism and what he

20
called “Zavarzacheh’s absurdism”, challenging that scholar’s view expressed in The
Mythopoeic Reality (1976) that a non-fiction novel has no “plot” in the traditional sense,
because the author “cannot change or modify it in order to convey a private vision through it
(Hellmann, 1981, p. 31). Hellmann suggested the work of a literary journalist be judged by
how successfully he (sic) shapes his narrative using fictional methods without destroying its
journalistic status (p. 18). He argued that the New Journalism was properly understood as a
genre of fiction, because it points to its own form.

Indeed, one of the most exciting, because so clearly problematic aspects of new journalism
thus becomes apparent – the relation of language and form, of text, of knowledge, or
meaningful construction to the external world, however empirically determined and
exhaustively observed…External facts may be presented in various modes, because the text is
clearly a construct of an individual consciousness; i.e. The ultimate ontological status of the
work is clearly not as an objective representation of the actual world, but as the personal
construct of a shaping, selecting, interpretive mind. Thus two non-fiction novels on one
subject create two worlds, even as they point to a factual one. Through the self-conscious
strategy recognised as central to the fabulator, the new journalist creates his fables of fact.
(Hellmann, 1981, pp. 33-34)

Hellmann found New Journalism pointed to a world that was a journalistic one and that
deviations from observations of that world, such as an author speculating or the use of
fantasy, were immediately obvious to the reader.

This identification of the relation of text to external world as the crux of any distinction
between genres of fiction brings us back to the concept of the author-reader contract
developed in the preceding chapter: an assertion by the author and an acceptance by the
reader of the particular relation of the text to an external world, the direction in which it
points. This contract or agreement between author and reader has a crucial effect on how a
text is experienced. While the final, overall effect of a fictional text is by definition the result
of how the components of the text refer to each other in comprising an aesthetic form, that
final effect is influenced by what direction the reader believes it is pointing out towards. (pp.
27-28)

Hellmann’s argument is crucial to this thesis and my endeavour to understand this form of
writing by analysing it from the perspective of the reader. If we can appreciate how readers

21
experience the “direction” a work of literary journalism is pointing out towards – another
way of putting it is the “subjective” versus “objective” point of view – perhaps we can
determine if this genre is a valid form of journalism or leans more towards fiction, to its
detriment. One of the most contested areas of journalism scholarship is to do with objectivity
and whether it is ever possible for an individual to produce an objective version of events.
Recognising this, the union representing Australian journalists, the Media Entertainment and
Arts Alliance (MEAA) uses the words “honesty and fairness” in its Code of Ethics for
journalists, rather than objectivity (MEAA, n.d.). Journalists, including literary journalists,
can apply this by interviewing all the relevant stakeholders in any given story, reporting
accurately what each has said and being transparent about their part in the process. In the
preface to The Art of Fact: An Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1980), Ben
Yagoda describes this struggle with objectivity elegantly.

The disembodied, measured voice of classic journalism is a kind of flimflam; the pure
objectivity it implies is probably unattainable by humans. By stepping out from the shadows
and laying bare his or her prejudices, anxieties, or thought processes the reporter gives us
something firmer and truer to hold on to as we come to our own conclusions. (p. 16)

Noted theorist Eric Heyne, in his influential contribution “Towards A Theory of Literary
Non-Fiction” (1987), finds authorial intention and audience response are key to situating
literary journalism among literary forms and this, I argue, is the most useful positioning.
Heyne, similarly to Hellmann, argues it is the author who decides whether a book is fact or
fiction, and it is left to the reader to determine whether the book contains good or bad fact (p.
480). Lehman too finds Heyne’s model helpful, saying he “offers a way to recognise the
special power of non-fiction and to make the reader an important partner in the negotiation of
truth, while forcing perhaps too simple a wedge between the actual effects of fiction and non-
fiction” (1997, p. 21).

But Lehman goes on to say it doesn’t account for the sorts of texts that depict “actual
bodies”. He explains that, because the “characters” in non-fiction are real people, they live
outside as well as inside the narrative, and that the reader is engaged “over the edge, by
which I mean both inside and outside the story” (1997, p. 30). Lehman believes readers are
capable of comprehending a “blurred genre status” as they negotiate texts.

22
 The reverberations set in motion by the contradiction of a non-fictional text – an artificial
construction of memory as well as a compelling representation of history that draws a reader
into the life of the text – are what separates non-fiction from many forms of fiction and
explains much of its affective power. (p. 24)

Lehman goes on to recognise the unreliability of memory, arguing that both writer and reader
are implicated by their:

… socially constructed memory of events in a clash of varying stimuli and responses, many
of which echo the inter-textuality of everyday life and the uneasy feeling that it has become
increasingly difficult to distinguish the narrative of one’s own memory from what is mediated
or constructed by others. (1997, p. 24)

In a response to Lehman, in “Where Fiction Meets Nonfiction: Mapping a Rough Terrain”

(2001), Heyne agrees that our minds are capable of comprehending a blurred genre status, but
he accuses Lehman of oversimplifying a complex phenomenon, “the human ability to process
narrative in terms of categories like fiction and non-fiction” (p. 326). “One advantage of
Lehman’s practical criticism is that it illustrates that either author or reader may play a
determinative role in whether a text functions as fiction or non-fiction” (p. 331). Australian
journalism scholar Matthew Ricketson finds the relationship between journalist and reader is
different in non-fiction than in fiction, “because of the overt and claimed relationship
between the book and actual people and events … the decision by an author or the publisher
to label a book non-fiction remains an important key to how it is written and read” (2009, p.
147). Lehman shares this position, finding the decision by an author or a publisher to label a
product non-fiction is an important key to how it is written and read and “is much more
socially constructed and negotiated by both author and reader than derived by some empirical
standard of truth” (1997, p. 7). Lehman suggests both reader and author are implicated in a
work of non-fiction, the author as a creator and character in the text and the reader as a
character and consumer of the text and acknowledges the difficulty of separating what
happened from how it is told or experienced.

If there is no empirical standard, no objective place, from which we can agree on facts, then
there is no way that we can judge narrative to be truthful solely by its adherence to
independently evaluated facts. A clear distinction between narrative that is factual and that
which is fictional has therefore been lost. (1997, p.19)

23
Lehman concludes his book with the statement, “And if you ask if the story is true, and if the
answer matters, you’ve got your answer” (Lehman, 1997, p. 193). Heyne picks up on this,
and while he argues it is not that simple, he concedes Lehman is “onto something in his
assertion that truthfulness is in some sense a matter of caring, of what ‘matters’” (2001, p.
330).

One way to recognise the kind of narrative truth that we associate with nonfiction is by the
presence of a certain kind of caring. If the reader is prepared to assert an alternative version of
events, to engage actively in a certain kind of dialogue, then we are dealing with something
we might all be willing to call nonfiction. (p. 330)

Another useful theoretical framework has been developed by Fiona Giles and William
Roberts (2016), who combined David Eason’s typology of Ethnographic Realism and
Cultural Phenomenology from 1984 (a means of defining works of literary journalism from
the approach taken by the writer) and Joseph Webb’s theory of rationalism and romanticism
in journalism from 1974 (which categorises two differing approaches to reporting: the
rational objective approach; and the romantic emotional approach) to “situate works of
literary journalism along a spectrum from objective to subjective” (p. 101).

We argue that ambiguity, imagination, and creativity are an essential and unavoidable part of
the narrative process, and do not necessarily diminish the reliability, validity, and objectivity
of the story. Instead, by actively drawing attention to these subjective processes, literary
journalism reveals that narrative is always a matter of rhetoric and always subjective because
the writer is required to select and interpret in order to tell the story, irrespective of how
“objective” it appears. (Giles and Roberts, 2016, p. 102)

Just how skilled readers are at determining the quality of the “facts”, the position of the
writer, and the role of the imagination in non-fiction, in four compelling examples of literary
journalism, is what is being examined in this thesis, which is also examining readers’
perceptions of how they receive and process the facts provided by the author when they read
non-fiction. It is useful to frame this analysis against my own hypotheses – supported by
Hellmann (1981), Heyne (2001) and Ricketson (2014) – that it is, in the first instance, the
author who gets to position their work as fact or fiction, along with the publisher, bookseller

24
and librarian, but it is the reader who judges whether or not the author’s intention to produce
a work of non-fiction has succeeded. As Ricketson says, “Where readers have firsthand
knowledge of events and people depicted in a work, they care a great deal about whether a
book is presented as fiction or non-fiction I would suggest” (2014, p. 201).

Hartsock (2016) described what he called narrative literary journalism or narra-descriptive

journalism, as a compelling experience for the reader, one that had more impact on the reader
than the inverted pyramid news story or traditional feature because of the way it engaged the
imagination in the creation of meaning. He argued the purpose of narra-descriptive
journalism was to recover more concretely the illusion of experience (p. 15), and it did this,
in part, by introducing a complication or a narrative mystery for the reader to resolve, making
the reader a participant in the performative act being described (pp. 16-17), which Hartsock
noted, was at the heart of reader-response theory. This, he argued, contrasted sharply with the
objective journalism of news reporting, which presented facts in a structure that disengaged
the subjectivity of the reader (p.17).

The virtue of a narra-descriptive journalism is that it engages the reader in the way the human
mind is constructed to do so, by means of storytelling, starting somewhere with a beginning
complication (albeit tentative given the fluidity of experience), followed by a middle of
progressing actions (again albeit tentative), and concluding with some kind of resolution (and
again tentative given that there are no true conclusions in the world of experience). (Hartsock,
2016, p. 150)

I will be examining the effects of non-fiction on readers with a view to uncovering its
“special power” (Lehman, 1997) and with the acknowledgement that the reader is an
important partner in the negotiation of truth in this form, as Lehman proposes they are. I will
also aim to demonstrate that readers are capable of comprehending Lehman’s “blurred genre
status” and of recognizing they are implicated “over the edge” by their awareness that the
books are depicting the stories of real people and events they may have experienced or have
knowledge of outside of the text itself, and that readers are aware of the untrustworthy nature
of reality constructed from memory.

Phyllis Frus (1994) argues that works that purport to tell the truth about the world can no
longer make truth claims once classified as literature (p. 8). But she decided that the best way

25
to tackle the “truth” question and to move on in the fact/fiction divide was to dispense with
the separation of literature and journalism altogether. “My goal is to break down the hard line
between literature, specifically novels and short stories, which we regard as created fictions,
and non-literary texts – journalism, biography, history, essays – which we think of as records
of actuality” (Frus, 1994, p. 5). Frus then outlines her concept of “reading for the process” or
“reflexive reading”, whereby it’s the reader who produces what we call literature “when we
read to discover how a text, through its style, ‘makes’ reality, that is, when we read its
content through its form” (p. 5). Frus argues that work which starts out as non-fiction,
purporting to tell the truth about the world, can no longer make truth claims once classified as
literature.

It is clear that narrative does give up its nonfictional status when it is enshrined in the canon
of literature, even if this happens within a few decades of publication … because nonfiction is
thought of as the realm of discourse where true and false are important distinctions, and
literature is thought of as the realm where, even when a work represents the world, its truth or
falsity is irrelevant. Not so incidentally, this makes the term “literary nonfiction” logically
contradictory. For under these notions of literature a narrative can either be nonfictional or
literary, but not both. (The term thus joins “true stories” and nonfiction fiction in my list of
most meaningful oxymora). (1994, pp. 8-9)

Frus calls for a reflexive reading, or reading for the process “that this New Journalistic
practice dictates” (1994, p. 139), with its self-conscious techniques of realistic fiction and its
tendency to structure reality rather than represent it. Of course, all forms of writing structure
reality, but whereas news writing strives for a neutral tone, the language of literary
journalism is not neutral. Frus recognises that this “new Journalistic practice” is itself
reflective.

Indeed, in many nonfiction novels various kinds of reflexivity are in evidence, including
dramatized narrators, the exploitation of stylistic effects to call attention to the language,
dominating tropes of production of meaning or text, or making the subject of the novel how
the narrative came to be. (p. 180)

These attributes are identifiable in the texts to be discussed in this thesis: Chloe Hooper’s The
Tall Man, with its Dreaming tropes; Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, with its
narrator framing the story around her; Estelle Blackburn’s Broken Lives, with its stylistic

26
repetition of Cooke’s crimes; and The First Stone, also by Garner, with its authorial
interventions, such as the use of composite characters, where she turns one person into six
people. These four texts have been chosen by applying the following criteria: they have been
recognised as significant by the field; they are examples of literary journalism as I define it in
this thesis; they are Australian works; and they are about prominent events. Through
examining how readers engage with these texts, and demonstrating that they do, indeed, read
reflexively, I will set out to demonstrate the use of these devices, traditionally associated with
fiction, need not compromise the integrity of the journalistic principles of fairness, accuracy
and honesty on which these texts rely.

Defining the form

“…there is a body of work by professional journalists … that can be characterised as a

“literary journalism” … it is a compelling discourse, attempting to speak profoundly to the
human condition as any literature that moves us will attempt to do.” (John Hartsock, 2000)

The fact that there are so many terms apart from literary journalism to describe this form is
reflective of the difficulty critics and scholars have had in defining and categorizing it.
Alternative names for it are narrative journalism, creative non-fiction, book-length journalism
and new journalism, but there are many others. Keeble has added slow journalism and multi-
platform immersive journalism (2018, p. 83). Hartsock cites Weber, in Literature of Fact, as
listing art-journalism, non-fiction novel, essay-fiction, factual fiction, journalit, journalistic
non-fiction and non-fiction reportage … and new journalism (2000, p. 4).

Thomas Connery’s A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism (1992) defines the form
as “non-fiction printed prose”, whose content is verifiable and shaped by use of narrative or
rhetorical devices associated with fiction. He prefers the use of the word journalism over non-
fiction because much of the content comes from traditional news gathering or reporting.
Hartsock concludes that the fact that Connery must look for a justification for his choice
“clearly reflects the extant critical discomfort with the form’s identity” (2000, p. 5). Hartsock
also notes scholars found that whatever the form was called, it was ill-defined, but concludes
that the tide in both the academy and in publishing seems to be turning in favour of literary
journalism.

27
 Still another problem is the way the form is cataloged: generally it isn’t, thus leaving much of
what might be considered narrative literary journalism homeless in library science … It is true
that the Library of Congress has designated a category for the form, labelling it as “reportage
literature”. Here are entered works on a narrative style of literature that features the personal
presence and involvement of a human witness. (p. 7)

Hartsock resists the temptation to admit what he calls “scholarly defeat” and settles on
literary journalism himself, “with the understanding that the texts under consideration are
“narrative in mode” (p. 11). Josh Roiland makes a persuasive case for the term literary
journalism (2015), when he argues against the more in vogue “long-form journalism” as
being too vague.

Simply put, long form is a problematic term because it deemphasizes the elements of
the story – how the facts are reported, how the narrative is told – and instead shifts
and holds attention on the virtues and limitations of length, a shrinking commodity in
print, and near infinite resource on the web … Vagueness sells, and we’re buying …
Literary journalism is a form of non-fiction writing that adheres to all of the
reportorial and truth-telling covenants of conventional journalism, while employing
rhetorical and storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction. In
short, it is journalism as literature. (p. 71)

And Richard Keeble claims too much time has been spent “haggling over definitions and
terminology … when really the blur of the discipline should be celebrated!” (2018, p. 90).

John Tulloch and I argue: … rather than a stable genre or family of genres, literary journalism
defines a field where different traditions and practices of writing intersect, a disputed terrain
within which various overlapping practices of writing – among them the journalistic column,
the memoir, the sketch, the essay, travel narratives, life writing, “true crime” narratives,
“popular” history, cultural reflection and other modes of writing – camp uneasily, disputing
their neighbours’ barricades and patching up temporary alliances. (p. 91)

This celebration of blurred boundaries is all very well, but terms have their place in
scholarship and, while acknowledging there are many useful terms for the form of writing
being considered here, I argue that literary journalism is the most appropriate and useful

28
term. The juxtaposition of the words “literary” and “journalism” most elegantly captures the
qualities that set the form apart. There is no negative to diminish the power of the form –
non-fiction suggesting a lack or inferior status – and there is no ambiguity, unlike placing the
word “creative” alongside “non-fiction”, an apparent contradiction. “Literary” alludes to a
certain standard of writing, one that deploys devices from literature to enhance its storytelling
and “journalism” is the recognised word for the professional production of news stories based
on fact. There is also the International Association of Literary Journalism (established in
France in 2006), which holds an annual conference and produces a peer reviewed journal,
Literary Journalism Studies, the existence of which lends credibility and authority to the use
of the name to describe this form or genre. The term long-form journalism tells the reader the
writer will have the space to tell more of the story than a short form article. It implies depth,
but beyond that tells us nothing about the quality and nature of the storytelling. It is, as
Roiland points out, vague, whereas literary journalism is concrete and explicit. In the words
of American practitioner Mark Kramer when trying to explain to Norman Sims the
differences between literary journalism and the standard forms of non-fiction:

I’m still excited about the form of literary journalism. It’s like a Steinway piano. It’s good
enough for all the art I can put into it. You can put Glenn Gould on a Steinway and the
Steinway is still better than Glenn Gould. It’s good enough to hold all the art I can bring to it.
And then some. (Kramer, cited in Sims, 1984, p. 27)

Characteristics of the form

“The differences we do perceive between a story with historical referents and one with
completely invented situations and characters are largely owing to the frame, that is, the
conventions of the particular genre that it belongs to and that surround its publication in a
particular medium.” (Phyllis Frus, 1994)

According to Wolfe (1975), the power of the style derives from five techniques: scene by
scene construction; extensive use of dialogue; third-person perspective; interior monologues;
and detailed reportage of everyday gesture, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture,
clothing, decoration, styles of travelling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards

29
children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, looks, glances, poses, styles of walking …
symbolic details that might exist within a scene, revealing status (p. 49).

The result is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have
originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the
while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one
almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually
happened. (p. 49)

Matthew Ricketson lists the six main elements of works he categorises as true stories in
book-length form as follows: it is about actual events and people living in the world; it is
based on extensive research; it takes a narrative approach; the writer (journalist) can choose
from a range of authorial voices; it explores the underlying meaning of an event or issue; and
it has impact (2014, pp. 20-24). In The Art of Fact, Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction,
(1990), Barbara Lounsberry lists the four constitutive features of literary or artistic non-
fiction as: documentable subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to “invented”
by the writer; exhaustive research; the construction of scenes in narrative form; and fine
writing, a literary prose style (pp. xi-xiii). John Hollowell, in Fact and Fiction: The New
Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (1977), adds to Wolfe’s four defining techniques two
additional fictional devices he says new journalists frequently deploy: interior monologues,
where what the character thinks or feels is voiced by the author; and composite characters,
where a number of sources are condensed into a “single representative sketch” (p. 24). He
adds to those “flashbacks, foreshadowing, inverted chronology, and a variety of others to
achieve the vivid and colourful writing usually found only in fiction” (ibid.). While an
admirer of the form’s ability to reveal the “story hidden beneath the surface facts” (p. 23),
Hollowell has his reservations about the recreation of dialogue when the urge to fictionalise
leads to fabrication in the hands of “unscrupulous reporters” (p. 31). This is a valid concern.
Unless the writer is present and recording the conversation as it unfolds, it is unlikely to be
recalled with 100 per cent accuracy. If the writer is not present, they will be relying on
interviews with those who were and other secondary sources to reconstruct what transpired.
Print journalists are held to the highest standards when using direct and indirect quotes in
daily reporting, with direct quotes expected to be a verbatim account of what transpired and
indirect quotes a fair and accurate paraphrasing of what was said. It is reasonable to expect
works of literary journalism to adhere to the same codes and ethics that guide reporters, but

30
the form itself cannot be accountable for breaches of these ethics by an individual writer or
sloppy reportage. Truman Capote told George Plimpton he did not take notes or record
interviews when researching In Cold Blood because it “artificialized the atmosphere of an
interview”, explaining that he had trained himself to transcribe conversations without the use
of a tape recorder within “95 per cent of absolute accuracy” (Plimpton, 1966.). But in his
book Telling True Stories (2014), Ricketson notes that, according to the critic Kenneth
Tynan, Capote’s percentage figure for his near perfect accuracy in remembering long
conversations varied between 92 and 97 per cent. Ricketson also provides numerous
instances where Capote’s recall of a piece of information or assertions about his extensive
research, have been wrong (2014, p. 81).

Capote addressed the use of reconstructed dialogue when questioned over the veracity of
accounts of aspects of the story where he was not present, claiming readers can work out how
the author has verified information.

People are so suspicious. They ask, “How can you reconstruct the conversation of a dead girl,
Nancy Clutter, without fictionalizing?” If they read the book carefully, they can see readily
enough how it’s done. It’s a silly question. Each time Nancy appears in the narrative, there
are witnesses to what she is saying and doing – phone calls, conversations, being overheard.
When she walks the horse up from the river in the twilight, the hired man is a witness and
talked to her then. The last time we see her, in her bedroom, Perry and Dick themselves were
the witnesses, and told me what she had said. What is reported of her, even in the narrative
form, is as accurate as many hours of questioning, over and over again, can make it. All of it
is reconstructed from the evidence of witnesses which is implicit in the title of the first section
of the book “The Last to See Them Alive”. (Plimpton, 1966)

Norman Sims (1984) interviewed a number of writers of literary journalism for his book True
Stories, a Century of Literary Journalism, and compiled a list of literary journalism’s shared
characteristics as including immersion, reporting, complicated structures in the prose,
accuracy, voice, responsibility and attention to the symbolic realities of the story. Thirteen
years later he wrote: “Today I would add access, attention to ordinary lives, and the special
quality of a writer’s connection to the subjects” (Sims, 2007, p. 12). Some of these
recognised techniques are more problematic than others. Lee Gutkind, a practitioner known
in the US as the “godfather” of creative non-fiction and author of the book You Can’t Make

31
this Stuff Up (2012), claims inner monologues are acceptable if the writer has done extensive
interviewing and observation of their subjects.

The word creative in creative nonfiction has to do with how the writer conceives ideas,
summarises situations, defines personalities, describes places – and shapes and presents
information. “Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing
what wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that the writer has a licence to lie. The word “nonfiction”
means the material is true. (2012, p. 7)

Matthew Ricketson writes extensively on the “thorny” issue of the use of the interior
monologue in literary journalism (which he prefers to call book-length journalism as
mentioned earlier), finding that while it is not impossible to write them ethically, it is more
common for practitioners to avoid using them. “If sources get upset about being misquoted,
they are even angrier by the presumption that a journalist knows what is going on in their
head” (2009, p. 184). Ricketson acknowledges the difficulty of reconciling narrative form
with real events.

When practitioners sit down to represent their research in a narrative mode, there is an
inherent tension between their commitment to veracity and their desire to engage readers as
fully as possible. In book-length journalism, the ethical issues of representation are all seen
through this prism. The issues are sparked by the initial taking of a narrative approach to
representing people, events and issues rather than by the individual practitioner’s literary
ability. (p. 185)

Weber (1974) notes writers are criticised for interior monologues and charged with forfeiting
any claim to journalism by stepping over this line, but finds they held their ground,
maintaining that:

… the portrayal of interior states, while a dramatic device drawn from fiction, could be
harmonised with the factual basis of journalism since the material was derived from reporting.
The writer simply interviewed the subject about thoughts and emotions as well as everything
else and then reconstructed his response in dramatic form. (p. 29)

Weber says non-fiction writers “simply pointed to what they considered the evident merits of
personal journalism – its lively, engaging quality and its establishment of a more honest
relationship with the reader” (p. 32).

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A famous example of a very early use of the inner monologue was Tom Wolfe’s 1973 profile
of Phil Spector, “The First Tycoon of Teen”, which he began inside Spector’s mind, with
what he called later, “a virtual stream of consciousness” of Spector’s thoughts watching
raindrops rolling down the windows of the taxiing plane he is sitting on.

One of the news magazines apparently regarded my Spector story as an improbable feat,
because they interviewed him and asked him if he didn’t think this passage was merely a
fiction that appropriated his name. Spector said that, in fact, he found it quite accurate. This
should have come as no surprise, since every detail in the passage was taken from a long
interview with Spector about exactly how he had felt at the time. (Wolfe, 1973, p. 20)

Wolfe found the solution to the vexed question of how a journalist can presume to get into
the mind of another person “marvellously simple: interview him about his thoughts and
emotions, along with everything else” (p. 32). But renowned practitioner John McPhee was
unequivocal about where to draw the line.

The nonfiction writer is communicating with the reader about real people in real places. So, if
those people talk, you say what those people said. You don’t say what the writer decides they
said … You don’t make up dialogue. You don’t make a composite character. Where I came
from, a composite character was a fiction. So, when somebody makes a nonfiction character
out of three people who are real, that is a fictional character in my opinion. And you don’t get
inside their heads and think for them. You can’t interview the dead. You could make a list of
the things you don’t do. Where writers abridge that, they hitchhike on the credibility of
writers who don’t. (McPhee, cited in Sims, 2007, p. 4)

Gutkind told Mark Fitzgerald in 2002 that the genre’s ambiguity was part of its charm and its
verisimilitude, and he believed readers have the intelligence to accept exaggeration of the
truth.

There’s a larger, higher, three-dimensional truth, if you will, in books when we stretch the
truth … I encourage writers to push as far as they can. Put in all the exaggeration, stretch the
truth. And then, in the revision, push it back (closer to the facts). (Gutkind, cited in Fitzgerald,
2002, pp. 16-17)

Greater transparency on the author’s part is one means of addressing this dilemma and
helping the reader understand the writer’s methods in obtaining information. In One of Us

33
(2011), Asne Seierstad details the two terrors attacks in Oslo and the island of Utøya in
Norway on July 22, 2011, when lone-wolf Anders Breivik killed 77 of his fellow
Norwegians. In notes at the end of One of Us, she reveals her sources of information for the
portrait she built of Breivik as a loner driven by a hatred of Muslims and of members of the
Young Labour Party who became his targets on the island during his murderous rampage.
These sources included police transcripts of interviews conducted with the perpetrator and
with his mother, interviews Seierstad conducted with professionals who observed Breivik as
a child and psychiatrists associated with his trial, and witness statements. Seierstad said she
drew on police interviews for background information and facts about his life. “In a number
of places in the book, I refer to the perpetrator’s thoughts or judgements. Readers might want
to know: How does the author know this?” (2011, p. 519). She provides an example, taken
from the chapter called “Friday”, where she wrote in detail about Breivik’s thoughts during
the first killings.

In that sequence, various sentences are lifted directly from the trial transcripts. Breivik
described his feelings and thoughts both to the police in the days after the terror act and in
court nine months later, as follows: ‘I don’t feel remotely like doing this’ and ‘Now or never.
It’s now or never’. These sentences are used as direct quotations. In some places his
statements are turned into indirect speech: ‘His body was fighting against it; his muscles were
twitching. He felt he would never be able to go through with it. A hundred voices in his head
were screaming: Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!’ It was Breivik who talked about his
body and his muscles and referred to the hundred voices screaming in his head. I have used
his own words. (Seierstad, 2011, p. 519)

A reasonable person can assume from this that the retelling of Breivik’s actions are as close
to what he actually experienced as possible, without it being a first-person account. But can
even a first-person account be trusted to be 100 per cent accurate? Is anyone a reliable
narrator of their own life and thoughts? Seierstad addresses this by asking, “Can we trust his
account?”, and explains that she evaluates and measures any of his stories that seem far-
fetched and cross checks his claims by reference to other sources that contradict his version
of himself (p. 519). But she goes on to say that the police stated they had not uncovered a
single direct lie or misinformation in his account of what happened on the island, with his
actions and his words corroborated by survivors (p. 520).

34
This level of meticulous investigation and reliance on transcripts protects a journalist from
accusations of distortion, misinformation, and lack of accuracy. But how much licence can a
literary journalist take with this wealth of sources before she crosses the line into fiction?
Seierstad’s “voices in his head” comes close to the controversial inner monologues from
Broken Lives, discussed in Chapter Five. But as Seierstad points out, Breivik himself refers to
the “hundred voices in his head”, so it doesn’t seem a stretch. The fact that Seierstad includes
her information sources and her rationale for certain choices she makes in presenting the
information is reassuring for a reader who may have concerns about some of the material,
providing a helpful layer of transparency. But critics of the use of the inner monologue argue
that extensive research and observation does not grant an author access to a person’s inner
thoughts, so can this device really be justified on any grounds in a text purporting to be a
work of journalism? I suggest if the sources are transparent and provided by the author, it can
be. Given the device will appear in some works of literary journalism, understanding how
readers respond to it will provide a useful means of determining just how problematic is its
use.

Norman Sims found not one of the writers he had ever interviewed about the craft had ever
said it was all right to make up anything (2007, p. 2). In an earlier work, The Literary
Journalists, he quoted one of the leading practitioners of the form, John McPhee, as saying
the use of devices such as composite characters, where one character is an amalgam of
several people, “violate a contract with the reader” (1984, p. 16). But among those who
believe these literary devices can be accommodated is, perhaps surprisingly, Janet Malcolm,
who wrote the seminal journalism text The Journalist and the Murderer, which famously
described the work of journalists as morally indefensible, because it inevitably involves a
betrayal of the subject by the journalist (1990, p. 2). In a keynote address to the International
Association for Literary Journalism Studies in 2015, Nicholas Lemann noted that, in an
article in New York Review of Books (2015), Malcolm had defended Joseph Mitchell’s habit
of introducing fictional elements such as composite characters into his writing for New
Yorker, saying reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. “They depend on the
kindness of strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no
fictional characters lurking in their imaginations” (Malcolm, 2015, p. 62). Malcolm goes on
to suggest that Mitchell’s willingness and ability to create composite characters for his
articles make him a superior writer.

35
 Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His
impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of
unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more
exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition (p. 62).

Lemann argues that Malcolm’s pronouncement poses an interesting challenge for the
association he is addressing. “Is Malcolm right, if you strip out her attention-getting
exaggeration, in asserting that literary journalists, if not all journalists, are people who would
prefer to write fiction but can’t because they lack the imaginative capacity?” (Lemann, 2015,
p. 52). Lemann goes on to call for more emphasis on the journalism aspect of the form of
literary journalism. “I am proposing, in other words, that nonfiction is not fiction for people
who lack imagination. It has another premise. The word denotes a social function, not a mode
of expression. If we start there, perhaps we can understand it better” (pp 54-55).

This notion of journalism having a social function – to inform, to educate, to entertain, to

animate democracy – is a vital aspect of this research project. The subject matter of most
texts of literary journalism deal with matters of social importance, including the four
Australian examples to be explored here: the justice system (Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The
Tall Man, Broken Lives); Indigenous Affairs (The Tall Man); and gender equality (The First
Stone). Hayden White’s theories (1974) on how historians using narrative forms impose
meaning on world events that are not inherent in those events are useful here. White argued
that shaping stories out of events produces an apparatus for the production of meaning, rather
than a means to transmit information.

Historical situations are not inherently tragic, comic or romantic … how a given historical
situation is to be configured depends on the historian’s subtlety in matching up a specific plot
structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a
particular kind. (1974, pp. 282-283)

White said no set of historical events in themselves constituted a story.

The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and
the highlighting of others, by characterisation, motific repetition, variation of tone and point
of view, alternative descriptive strategies and the like – in short all of the techniques that we

36
 would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play. (p. 281, emphasis in
original)

Itzhak Roeh (1989) claimed the assumption that an untold story exists somewhere and can be
discovered is one shared by historians and journalists alike. This is one of the major areas of
concern over this form of writing: that the author, in using fictive devices, is in danger of
doing just that, shaping a narrative around events that don’t have an intrinsic shape. But
Ricketson draws on Lubomir Dolezel’s “Holocaust test” – in which Dolezel asked White if
the Holocaust, like other historical events, can be plotted as a comedy or must be seen as a
tragedy – to argue White’s argument is flawed.

There is a logical hole in the assumptions underlying White’s position; if historians (and
journalists) draw from concepts usually associated with fiction – tragedy, comedy, romance –
presumably these concepts originated in novelists’ experience, and re-imagining of the world.
That is, life preceded fiction … If the belief that historians’ portrayal of events can accurately
reflect objective reality is naïve and simplistic, so too is the belief that there is no reality but
only our representation and “emplotment” of it. (2009, p. 144)

It’s clear that all forms of reportage and journalism involve a writer shaping, framing and
narrativising events. Even the simplest news story has to start somewhere, with the journalist
selecting the angle, and then the order in which the story will be told, and which facts will be
included, and which excluded. A second layer of writerly intervention comes in the journalist
deciding who they will interview for the story and what quotes they will include and what
quotes are discarded. So, while a news story will not deploy literary devices in its storytelling
it is, nonetheless, a mediated form of telling stories. Once you expand a news story into a
feature and then into a long form work of literary journalism, with all the literary devices it
deploys, the shaping, framing and narrativizing grows exponentially. Ricketson cites Pulitzer
Prize winner Tracy Kidder as saying the techniques of fiction writing never belonged to
fiction: “They belong to storytelling” (Kidder, as cited in Ricketson, 2014, p. 127). But
Ricketson argues we can circumvent some of the concerns about the decision to take a
narrative approach to writing about actual people and events through writers taking an ethical
approach to how they portray those people and events (p. 128).

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Reader reception theory and reader response theory

“Reader response theory…is properly an effort to provide a generalised account of what

happens when human beings engage in a process they call ‘reading’.” (Patricia Harkin,
2005)

It is not my intention to test any particular reader response or reception theory against
readings of specific texts. However, as it is my intention to explore how readers interpret
specific works of literary journalism, it is important and useful to consider how scholars and
critical thinkers have positioned the reader in the interpretation of texts. Terry Eagleton
(2007) has described three main stages in the history of modern literary theory: from
Romanticism and the 19th century with its preoccupation with the author; to New Criticism’s
exclusive concern with the text; to a marked shift in attention to the reader with the
development of reception theory. Eagleton describes the reader as the “most underprivileged
of this trio” (2007, p. 64), and calls this strange, as “without him or her there would be no
literary texts at all” (p. 64). Eagleton claims that for literature to happen, the reader is quite as
vital as the author. “Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of
signification materialized only in the practice of reading” (pp. 64-65).

Reader reception and reader response theory considers readers not as passive consumers, but
as “agents and co-creators” (Eagleton, 2007, p. ix), recognising that when we interpret a
book, we bring to it our own frames of cultural reference. Stuart Hall’s The
Encoding/Decoding model of communication (1973) is another useful theory against which
to consider how media messages are decoded and interpreted according to an individual’s
cultural background, prejudices, economic standing and personal beliefs and prejudices. Lois
Tyson has summarised the various theories around reader response in her 2006 book, Critical
Theory Today. Reader response theorists believe that, because so many variables contribute
to our experience of a text, readers will produce different meanings, even the same reader
reading the same text on two different occasions will probably produce different meanings
(Tyson, 2006). Louise Rosenblatt’s Transactional Reader-Response Theory (1978) claimed
that both text and reader were necessary in the production of meaning, while Wolfgang Iser
(1972) found that while readers constructed meaning onto the text, the text itself was
comprised of determinate (facts, events, plot) and indeterminate (gaps that allow a reader to
make their own interpretation) meaning. Thus, Tyson explains, the text itself guides readers

38
through the processes involved in interpreting (projecting meaning onto) it. David Bleich’s
Subjective Reader Response theory (1978) declared the text does not exist beyond the
meanings created by the reader’s interpretation, calling reading “the feelings, associations
and memories that occur when we react subjectively to the printed words of the page” (2006,
p. 178), while Stanley Fish (1976) claimed there was no purely individual, subjective
response, saying, “What we take to be our individual subjective responses to literature are
really products of the interpretive community to which we belong” (p. 185). Fish believed the
true writer was the reader, “dissatisfied with mere Iserian co-partnership in the literary
enterprise, the readers have now overthrown the bosses and installed themselves in power”
(cited in Eagleton, 2007, p. 74). Fish’s influential essay, Literature in the Reader (1970),
posited that the reader is the maker of meaning, that the place where sense is made or not
made is in the reader’s mind as opposed to the printed text.

If the speakers of a language share a system of rules that each of them has somehow
internalised, understanding will, in some sense, be uniform; that is, it will proceed in terms of
the system of rules all speakers share. And insofar as these rules are constraints on production
– establishing boundaries within which utterances are labelled “normal,” “deviant,”
“impossible” and so on – they will also be constraints on the range, and even the direction, of
response, that is, they will make response, to some extent, predictable and normative. (p. 84)

Tomkin explains it in this way: the reader reacts to words on the page according to the same
set of rules the author has used to generate them: “The reader’s experience, then, is the
creation of the author; he enacts the author’s will” (1980, p. xvii). These theories are relevant
to this research project as they privilege the reader and the reader’s response to a text as a
means of exploring the form. Even though Fish is looking at literature, his fashioning of the
reader as the maker of meaning is useful for my analysis of how readers receive works of
literary non-fiction in that it is a form with its own conventions and rules and readers’
understanding of these influences the way they receive the texts.

Rosenblatt tells us that “the reader performs very different activities during the reading event
and the contrast derives primarily from the difference in the reader’s focus of attention during
the reading event” (1978, p. 23). According to her theory, a reader assumes two stances when
they explore a text: an efferent stance and an aesthetic stance. An efferent stance is described
as a reading position that the reader uses to “carry away information”.

39
 As a reader reads efferently, his attention is directed outward – away from himself toward
what information is to be retained or actions to be performed. In aesthetic reading, the reader
is concerned with what happens during the actual reading event. The aesthetic stance
heightens awareness of the words as signs with particular visual and auditory characteristics
and as symbols. What is lived through is felt constantly to be linked with the stimulus of the
words …The aesthetic stance is the fusion of both reader and text at that initial reading.
(Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 29)

Aleta J. Crockett (1998) set out to determine if genre could affect the way readers responded
to a text as part of a doctoral thesis examining Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading,
focusing on the reader’s efferent and aesthetic stances. Crockett conducted a three-day
exercise with her students (she does not provide the number surveyed in her thesis) and
concluded genre does influence reader response. The students first had to read and respond to
a story, The Exit, described to them as non-fiction, then again the following day with the
same story described to them as fiction. Unbeknown to them the story had been written by
their teacher and was a work of fiction. Their responses were given in the form of a class
discussion and also in individual written responses to set questions. Crockett found the
students were less likely to be hurt or scared by fiction than non-fiction, because the
characters in non-fiction were real people. She also found the students were reluctant to
criticise a character when they believed she was a real person than when they were told she
was fictional. This discovery, albeit from a small, one-off survey, is interesting when
considering the way readers respond to works of literary journalism, where the characters in
the stories are real people, often people still alive and functioning in the world, not safely
fixed in a non-changing story. It suggests the status of individuals as real people does have an
impact on how readers respond to texts, that they are engaged “over the edge”, as mentioned
earlier.

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Genre

“Each genre makes its own kinds of conventional demands on the reader – that is, once he
has set up one or another such expectation, his stance, the details he responds to, the way he
handles his responses, will differ.” (Louise Rosenblatt, 1978)

Reader response and reception theory must consider the impact of genre on the way a text is
received. Genre is a useful way of categorising creative works by their use of conventions,
structures, themes and devices. Publishers, for example, categorise works into genres as a
means of marketing to targeted audiences, so consumers of romantic fiction know what to
expect when they buy a book promoted as belonging to that genre and consumers of a
different genre, for example, true crime, will have completely different expectations of their
purchase. Within any identified genre, readers will find a reassuring similarity, but also
novelty and innovation to ensure interest. Working within a genre allows a composer to work
within a structure and a set of conventions, while also exercising the freedom to invent.

John Frow defines genre as a “set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the
production and interpretation of meaning (2015, p. 10). He draws on Derrida’s hypothesis in
The Law of Genre (1980) – that texts don’t belong to genre so much as they participate in one
or several genres, that there is no genreless text, but that participation in genres does not
amount to belonging to a genre (Derrida, 1980, p. 65) – to argue that texts “work upon genre
as much as they are shaped by them, genres are open classes, and participation in a genre
takes many different forms” (Frow, 2015, p. 30).

Even when a text disrupts all the expectations we may have of it, these expectations
nevertheless form the ways in which we can read it and the ways in which we can change our
minds (that is, develop new expectations). (pp. 30-31)

Gledhill notes that one perspective on this issue is that some of those who write within a
genre work in creative “tension” with the conventions, attempting a personal inflection of
them (1985, p. 63). This explanation of texts not belonging to genres but having a “reflexive
relation to one or more genres” helps to allay some of the concerns of literary journalism as a
dangerous form that blurs the borders of fiction and non-fiction. John Swales contends the
“principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is

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some shared set of communicative purposes”, and “…a communicative event is here
conceived of as comprising not only the discourse itself and its participants, but also the role
of that discourse and the environment of its production and reception including its historical
and cultural associations” (1990, p. 46). Swales goes on to suggest genres can have sets (sic)
of communicative purposes, citing news broadcasts as an example because of their
conflicting purposes, which include keeping audiences informed while presenting their
broadcasting organization in a favourable light (p. 47).

Genre is an important element of the relationship between the reader and a text, as it serves as
a signpost for how the reader should proceed to engage with the text. In An Introduction to
Genre Theory, David Chandler (1997) says genres can be seen as constituting a kind of tacit
contract between authors and readers. Semiotician Gunther Kress, as cited by Chandler,
suggests each written text provides a “reading position”; for readers, a position constructed
by the writer for the “ideal reader” of the text (Chandler, 1997, p. 5). Chandler suggests
genre offers a way of framing texts that sets up expectations and helps comprehension.
“Recognition of a text as belonging to a particular genre can help, for instance, to enable
judgements to be made about the ‘reality status’ of the text (most fundamentally where it is
fictional or non-fictional” (p. 8.) Chandler finds knowledge of other texts within the same
genre can help readers sort salient from non-salient narrative information in an individual
text.

Audience researcher Sonia Livingstone’s work on media literacy and audiences is useful for
this thesis, which is aiming to demonstrate the competency of readers of literary journalism to
decode texts in a way that mitigates against truth-telling concerns. Livingstone sets out to
challenge “how empirical findings contested the pejorative conception of the audience
problematically yet persistently imagined by theorists of media power during the twentieth
century” (2019, p. 170).

In more equitable times, critical recognition of ordinary people’s agency and values in
engaging creatively with and through media texts and technologies in diverse lifeworld
contexts comes to the fore. In today’s heady climate of media panics – over so-called fake
news, election hacking, Internet and smartphone addiction, the algorithmic amplification of
hate speech, viral scams, filter bubbles and echo chambers, discriminatory data profiling and
data breaches, the crisis in quality journalism, the demise of face-to-face conversation, and a

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 host of digital anxieties about youth – fears about audience gullibility, ignorance, and
exploitation are again heightened in popular and academic debate. (p. 171)

Livingstone describes the critical literacy of audiences to check, deconstruct and

contextualise, and resist unreasonable media influence (p. 172) and draws on the research of
Stuart Hall and others from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(1964-2002), where researchers talked to actual people about their media consumption,
finding, as Livingstone puts it:

a transformative picture emerged of an active audience, an interpretative audience, far from

simply subject to the causal influences of powerful others. Not only were media effects
minimal, but texts also proved to be polysemic, necessarily open to audience interpretation,
even resistance. (2019, p. 174)

Which brings me to the audience I am studying here: readers of literary journalism.

The underprivileged reader

“The problem with this whole question is you’re dealing with a true story that happened,
you’re dealing with an author who has all the fiddly bits in her brain to cope with and you’re
dealing with a reader who comes from another angle and how the whole thing gets sorted out
in the wash … Well, it’s a very complex problem but a very, very interesting one.” (Reader
19, semi-structured interview)

This thesis is focussing on Eagleton’s underprivileged readers and their response to the genre
of literary journalism. While the work of the reader reception and response theorists centres
mainly on works of fiction, there has been some analysis of how readers respond to works of
journalism. In a 2017 study, Tandoc and Thomas found readers value objectivity over
transparency, judging non-transparent articles as more credible in a quantitative research
project exploring the effects of objectivity and transparency on perceived news credibility
and newsworthiness.

While the standard of transparency has been proposed as a better alternative to the standard of
objectivity, the participants in this study still judged non-transparent articles as more credible.

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 This can be interpreted as a symptom of a deeply embedded set of normative beliefs on what
news is supposed to read like. This suggests that the hopes of many scholars, commentators
and bloggers that transparency will supplant objectivity as a guiding journalistic norm are yet
to be realized. (p. 41)

This is a fascinating finding in that it subverts an assumption developed during the past two
decades of media convergence that a more transparent media would be one more trusted by
audiences, that the ability to provide consumers with all the relevant documentary evidence
and interview transcripts using the extra space the digital universe afforded, would engender
more trust in journalism. Steven Maras devotes a book to the concept of objectivity in
journalism, finding four important reasons why we should care about it: the importance to
democracy of impartial information; the power of the media in society; the value of
objectivity to media audiences; and objectivity as a form of judgement in news production
pertaining to what stories are deemed newsworthy and how journalists navigate facts (2013,
p. 14).

Judgement comes into play in seeing the relationship between the facts and the truth, but also
the facts and the shape or momentum of the story. Bad judgement can lead to a crossing of
the ‘invisible frame’ whereby the journalist inserts him or herself into the story, or even
becomes a ‘player’ in the story. (p. 14)

A study of reader response and long-term recall of journalistic texts looked at the roles of
imagery, affect and importance, by getting college students to rate and recall magazine
feature article writing the authors described as “combining elements of various modes of
discourse, including narration, description, exposition, and even persuasion” (Sadoski &
Quast, 1990, p. 260). The authors interpreted their findings as “suggesting readers may be
more likely to remember content that is subjectively important (reflecting in imagery and
affect ratings) than content viewed as objectively important (reflected in importance ratings)
(p. 256). One student wrote, “I can’t remember anything specific because the article wasn’t
interesting and personal to me like the other two were” (p. 270). Thus, personal involvement
and interest in the people and events appeared to mediate free recall. The authors’
observations on what they call the subjective aspects of meaning and their conclusion that
readers respond differently (gauged by their ability to recall material and not recall material)
to those aspects of the text that they related to on a personal level is relevant to this study of
how readers respond to works of literary journalism because “importance ratings may tend to

44
reflect the reader’s reconstruction of the author’s idea hierarchy – what the reader has
clinically thought through” (1990, p. 271). Imagery and affect ratings, on the other hand, may
tend to reflect the construction of personal meanings – what the reader has vicariously “lived
through” (p. 271). In a later experiment (Goetz et. al., 1994) extended reader response
research to news articles from a widely read daily newspaper. The authors found imagery and
affective responses were significant predictors of comprehensibility (1994, p. 134).

In a paper applying reader response theory to journalism, Linda Steiner (1987) posits that
readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from
articles as opposed to passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Steiner claims
scholars and practitioners have largely ignored readers’ involvement in journalism’s
storytelling but suggests it has been recognised in the context of New Journalism (p. 22),
citing Eason’s work on the meta-language of new journalism (1982, 1984), and Tom Wolfe’s
(1973) insights into the connection between the world the writer tries to create in the mind of
the reader that resonates with the reader’s own real emotions – the notion of reading as
“grounded in the acceptance of symbolic conventions and of readers as constructing reality
based on the cues given in reports has been at least partially acknowledged in New
Journalism” (Steiner, 1987, p. 23).

Grounded theory, also known as the constant comparative method or pattern coding
(Weerakkody, 2009, p. 281), is used across many disciplines, especially in the social
sciences. Sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967) who developed it, describe it as a means to
generate theory from systematically gathered data. According to Lawrence and Tar (2013),
grounded theory is:

… invaluable when conducting empirical research; it has some attraction for a researcher
using qualitative techniques for the first time and it offers well sign-posted procedures. The
grounded theory is iterative, requiring a steady movement between concept and data, as well
as comparative, requiring a constant comparison across types of evidence to control the
conceptual level and scope of the emerging theory. (p. 30)

Bogdan and Biklen find theory developed from inductive qualitative research emerges from
the bottom up (rather than the top down), from many disparate pieces of collected evidence
that are interconnected (1992, p. 32). This fits well with my research design, as I am using

45
textual analysis of systematically gathered data from the book groups and the semi-structured
interviews. What are the reader’s expectations of a work of reportage and how does this
affect their response to the works? How much do readers use their knowledge of the
conventions of the genre of the work to inform their interpretation? In the following chapters
I will endeavour to answer these questions through an analysis of mediated and unmediated
responses from readers guided by the objectives of a grounded approach and informed by the
myriad theories referred to in this chapter.

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 Chapter Three: Methodology

“Qualitative researchers set up strategies and procedures to enable them to consider

experiences from the informants’ perspectives. For some, the process of doing qualitative
research can be characterized as a dialogue or interplay between researchers and their
subjects.” (Bogdan and Biklen, 1998)

This doctoral thesis is examining how works of literary journalism are received by their
audiences to better understand how readers make sense of a genre of non-fiction that brings
two potentially incompatible approaches to writing true stories. As explored in the previous
chapter, much of the critical debate around literary journalism has focussed on the fact or
fiction conundrum, the apparent contradiction of journalism and literary styles, but less if any
study has been done on whether understanding how readers process works of literary
journalism might ameliorate those concerns. My research questions are:

• Do readers comprehend its blurred genre status and if so, how?

• What are some of the trigger points by which readers might care about the factual
status of a work?
• Do readers accept the author’s version of the story as the version of the story and, if
so, what are the implications for the genre’s truth-telling claims?

Research design (and me in the research)

As this research is about how human beings experience reality and construct their own
versions of the “truth”, particularly in regard to written and published accounts of actual
people and events, it is well suited to a multi-method, qualitative approach. The data will be
interpreted rather than subjected to statistical analysis (Weerakoddy, 2009, p. 16). What
Robson (2011) calls flexible design research fits well with this project, as it allows for
multiple data collection techniques and starts with a single problem that the researcher seeks
to understand (p. 134). In this case, does how readers receive works of literary journalism
have any implications for its truth-telling claims?

The qualities Robson claims a researcher needs for flexible design research are an open and
inquiring mind, the ability to listen, “general sensitivity and responsiveness to contradictory

47
evidence”, a lack of bias, a good memory and the ability to interpret information, that
produces writing that is “clear, engaging and helps the reader to experience being there”
(2011, p. 134). As a journalist, these are attributes I have spent 30 years developing and
refining, using them on a daily basis in my research and information gathering. When I
moved into academia in 2008 to become a Lecturer in Communication at the University of
Newcastle, I further developed these research skills to write lectures and courses in
journalism, radio and writing, synthesising complex information into teaching resources. I
will explore the principles of being a reflective and reflexive practitioner, as explored by
Donald Schon (1983; 1991) in Chapter Four, when it comes into sharp focus during a book-
group discussion of Helen Garner’s The First Stone.

As this research is into a particular form of journalism, it seems appropriate to adopt the
stance of the journalist in the context of the object of my research, that is, as an observer,
ideally an impartial one, and recorder of phenomena. Given I have also been a participant in
both the practice of journalism and book groups, I must acknowledge the potential for being
vulnerable to subjectivity in this study of literary journalism. I recognise that my enthusiasm
for the form might have an impact on how I interpret the data and will be mindful of this
throughout the project, while also recognising that enthusiasm for the subject of a scholarly
inquiry has advantages as well. When I practiced as a journalist I was conscious of my own
prejudices and biases when reporting in the field or interviewing, and I strove to maintain
objectivity or to at least be fair. In their influential book The Elements of Journalism, first
published in 2001 and revised in 2007 and 2014, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel distilled
the principles of journalism to nine elements, beginning with its first obligation being to the
truth and its first loyalty being to citizens (2007, p. 5). The other elements of journalism
defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel are:

* Its essence is a discipline of verification.

* Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
* It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
* It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
* It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
* It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
* Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience.
* Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news. (p. 5)

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As a practising journalist I had more of tacit understanding of these elements than a
conscious and articulated one, but since becoming a journalism academic I seek these
elements in all forms of journalism I consume, including literary journalism. The crossovers
between qualitative research and journalism research are apparent to me but tend to be a
contested area in academia. In the early years of working as a Lecturer in Communication
and on the eve on embarking on this doctoral thesis, my then Head of School sent me, with a
colleague who was also a former journalist, to a Qualitative Research course at the University
of Sydney, conducted by eminent scholar David Silverman (cited elsewhere in this chapter),
who had remarked throughout the course that qualitative research undertaken without a sound
research design factoring in all variables was nothing more than journalism. This was said in
a disparaging tone that my colleague and I found both amusing and irritating, but which has
led me to reflect on the differences between the approaches to information gathering in the
hope of drawing on both. Sociologists Robert Bogdan and Sari Biklen claim they do not link
qualitative research with journalism disparagingly, finding journalists share some of the goals
and standards of social scientists and “some produce research of greater social-science value
than those who flaunt their academic credentials” (1992, p. 44). But they believe academic
researchers do work in a different way from journalists.

Journalists tend to be more interested in particular events and issues and tend to have a bias
towards the newsmakers. Journalists work under deadlines. Rather than spending years
collecting data and carefully analysing it, they usually write with less evidence; they shoot
from the hip… Journalists are also not necessarily grounded in social theory… they do not
address their findings to theoretical questions. (p. 44)

Nonetheless they conclude the line between social-science research and good investigative
journalism is “sometimes” non-existent (p. 44). As an academic researcher and a journalist, I
hope to bring the best of both worlds to this study.

Ontologically, I consider myself a critical realist in that I see the world as existing
independently of human beings and their interpretations of it, but I also “accept our inquiry
into reality ‘out there’ can easily become distorted or muddied. Our pre-existing ideas,
subjectivity, or cultural interpretations contaminate our contact with reality” (Neuman, 2011,

49
p. 92). Settling on an epistemological position is more difficult, but in doing so I considered
Crotty’s point that the researcher must ask what theoretical perspective lies behind the
methodology in question, defining the theoretical perspective as “the philosophical stance
informing the methodology and this providing a context for the process and grounding its
logic and criteria” (2003, p. 3). Weerakkody contends that, in communication research, the
three most relevant epistemological positions are objectivism, constructionism and
subjectivism (2009). Crotty defines objectivism as the view that things exist as meaningful
entities independently of consciousness and experience, that truth and meaning reside in them
as objects, and that careful (scientific) research can attain that objective truth and meaning,
while subjectivism “takes the polar position that meaning is imposed on the object by the
subject, that we make our meaning out of our dreams and beliefs (2003, p. 9). Or as Kalof,
Dan and Dietz put it:

At one pole is the belief that we can conduct objective, unbiased observations and through
them come to understand the world accurately. At the other pole is the view that all
observations of the world are our own social constructions rather than images of an objective,
external world. (Kalof et. al., p. 19)

My position is somewhere in the centre: a constructionism approach that takes into account
the complexities and subjectivities in observing reality but believes these do not inhibit our
ability to define and understand objective reality. Nonetheless, data analysis must take into
account the possibility of value judgements, social contexts and age and gender of
participants obscuring or complicating what the research data may yield.

Methods for data collection

Qualitative data collection includes participant and non-participant observation, interviews,

document analysis, case studies and focus groups. While cautioning against its over-
generalisation, David Silverman (2011) adapted Hammersley’s table of preferences of the
qualitative researcher (1992) to provide five preferences of qualitative researchers: a
preference for qualitative data – words and images rather than numbers; a preference for
naturally occurring data – observation rather than experiment; unstructured versus structured
interviews; a preference for meanings rather than behaviour; a rejection of natural science as

50
a model and a preference for inductive, hypothesis-generating research rather than hypothesis
testing (2011, p. 37). Finding these five preferences chimed in with my temperament and
experience, I chose a qualitative approach using: case studies, a focus group, and semi-
structured interviews.

There are many ways to access the response of readers, for example through naturally
occurring data in the form of reader reviews on book-selling websites and comment threads
on reading-related sites, as well as blogs, or through interviewing a substantial number of
readers and analysing the data collected through a particular reader response theory or
through collating data from a survey. A researcher could also design a quiz or test for the
reader or get them to write an essay responding to a specific text. For this project I wanted to
capture unmediated data in the form of case studies of book groups as a non-participant
observer and more focussed responses from semi-structured interviews with readers and a
focus group.

The choice of analysing book group discussions has its limitations, of course. According to
Allington and Benwell (2011), reading group data is a “situated account occasioned by the
specific conditions in which it is produced”, suggesting for others it might be a substitute for
reception or a report of reception (p. 230). Taking into account the element of constraint the
book group setting might impose on readers, and recognising it as a constructed conversation,
it was nonetheless an opportunity to capture a number of thoughtful responses from four
groups of engaged readers to prescribed works of literary journalism. The four case studies
allowed the collection of data from recordings of discussions of book groups responding to a
specific text, while the semi-structured interviews with 21 individuals selected from within
the book groups and beyond allowed for deeper probing of these readers’ reading habits. I
also conducted a focus group with a group of university students studying Joe Cinque’s
Consolation, which allowed for a more mediated discussion.

Yin’s definition of the scope of a case study (2009) was useful here. He argues a case study is
an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its
real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not
clearly evident (p. 18). Yin maintains the case study is the preferred method when how or
why questions are being posed, the investigator has little control over events and the focus is

51
on a contemporary phenomenon within a real-life context (p. 2). The recorded discussions of
book groups met these criteria.

Books and Book Groups

While it was feared the book would be yet another victim of the internet disruption to the
media, books continue to be published and consumed, whether read in hard copy or in digital
form on kindles or listened to as audio books. The popularity of such programs as Oprah
Winfrey’s Book Club in the US (from 1996), The Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK
(from 2008) and The Book Club on ABC TV in Australia (2006-2017) suggest an engaged
readership, and publishers and libraries have recognized a growing interest in people forming
book groups by providing resources such as book sets and discussion points to support them.
Marilyn Poole notes:

The proliferation of interactive publishers’ websites and literary cyber-salons; the marketing
practice of introducing writers to readers both online and at over-subscribed writers’ festivals;
the Australia Talks Books on-air book discussion for radio which invites listeners to take part
in a reading group-style discussion on prescribed books; and, most significantly, the
continuing and increasing popularity of reading groups meeting in domestic living rooms.
(2003, p. 263)

Reading a book is a solitary activity, but people find ways to make it social by joining
reading circles and book groups, either in public spaces such as libraries, in their private
domains or in online reading groups on the internet (Nightingale, 2011, p. 29). Elizabeth
Long says that when she began to research book clubs, she discovered that despite being
deeply important to the mostly female participants, book clubs were invisible to scholars.

Scholars of popular culture had not found reading groups interesting because the group read
canonised fiction and did not transform their cultural consumption into a “resistant”
subcultural style. Communications departments had not researched them because reading
groups were not engaged with the mass media. Leftists were uninterested because book group
participants were middle class and clearly not part of proletarian or potentially revolutionary
culture. Reading groups had slipped through disciplinary cracks to find themselves in a
scholarly no-man’s land. (2003, preface)

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But there is growing, albeit fragmented and small, recognition in the academy for the value of
book groups as a phenomenon worth analysing, with numerous books and articles about the
value of book groups produced by scholars from various disciplines, including the social
sciences, gender studies and communication. One is Frances Devlin-Glass (2001), who
claims cultural theorists have long ignored reading groups, focusing their research into
cultural consumption and taste on the relationship between hierarchies of taste and class, or
on the individual reader, and while linguists have looked at the collaborative nature of
women’s talk and communities of practice, none have centred on women whose talk is book-
focussed. Devlin-Glass says, “There is a dearth of research on the nexus between text-
selection and group talk. So far, there has been no analysis of the kind of cultural ‘work’ they
do” (2001, p. 572). Devlin-Glass’s pilot study found that reading groups constitute, in fact, a
significant cultural practice “whereby women exercise discrimination in a semi-private
world” (p. 571). In The Discourse of Reading Group Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural
Perspectives, Peplow, Swann, Trimarco and Whiteley (2016) find a growing interest in the
phenomenon in academic research, and book group discussions worthy of academic study for
a number of reasons, including the insights it provides to readers’ interpretative activity.

In her large-scale study of women’s book groups in the mid-1990s, when she surveyed nearly
800 book group members, 98 per cent of whom were women, which she followed up with 21
individual interviews, Linsey Howie observed that women’s book groups use reading a book
as a vehicle for expressing their own ideas or opinions about a text or author “and in so doing
developing a growing self-awareness, a sense of identity that is developed in the company of
others at monthly meetings” (2011, p. 140). Robert Clarke and Marguerite Nolan conducted a
pilot study in 2014 using book clubs as sources of information on how works of fiction are
received in the public sphere to examine the functions of contemporary Australian fiction and
“specifically those texts that we term the ‘fictions of reconciliation’” (2014, p. 121),
justifying their methodology of choosing book clubs by asserting that “book clubs are
popular and meaningful forms of cultural activity” (p. 122).

The four books I chose for the Australian examples of this genre were Helen Garner’s Joe
Cinque’s Consolation and The First Stone, Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and Estelle
Blackburn’s Broken Lives, selected in the hope that each would prove to be a “revelatory
case” (Weerakoddy, 2009, p. 236). In choosing these books I had to justify their inclusion in
the genre of literary journalism and examine their critical reception and cultural context to

53
provide a framework against which to analyse the groups’ responses. This notion of a “thick”
description of the phenomena we study comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973),
who believed researchers should provide deep descriptions of what they are analysing and
place it in context, which I will do in Chapters Four, Five Six and Seven.

Book groups provide an accessible means by which to hear from readers; the choice of book
groups for the case studies imposed certain limitations on the scope of this project. Clarke,
Hookway and Burgess surveyed 22 book groups, looking at their ability to build community
and found that book groups appeared to be “a distinct middlebrow cultural practice with
membership dominated by well-educated, middle-class, late-to-middle-aged women” (2017,
p. 173). This was borne out by the book groups I selected, as they were drawn from my
extended friendship networks. I decided against using my own book group of middle-class,
middle-aged and older women, but three of the four book groups I studied comprised the
same demographic, so I sought out a men-only book group in the interests of gender balance.
One of the female book groups had a male attend the night of the recording as well. All the
book groups chosen matched the profile described by Clarke, Hookway and Burgess as
“made up of people in full or part-time work, or those who have retired from employment”
(2017, p. 174).

Not surprisingly, book club attendees identify themselves as readers: that is, reading and
attending book clubs are important parts of how they understand who they are and how they
relate to the world” (p. 174).

Griswold, Lenaghan and Naffziger (2011) contend that ethnographic work on book groups
tend to focus on groups of women readers. Elizabeth Long (2003) noted one of her groups, a
Houston reading group known as the League of Women Voters, with an interest in non-
fiction and a serious approach to meetings, refused to let her tape the meeting “because it
might interfere with discussion” (p. 124). None of the groups I studied objected to the
recording and it appeared to not inhibit the conversation in any way. Long also noted the
groups she observed judged non-fiction not on literary merit, but on social relevance (p. 121).
I found a similar response from the four book groups I recorded, whose discussions ranged
widely across the social and historical context for each story and the relevance of each story
to Australian society (See Appendix 2, Timetable of book group recordings). Long’s
observation about how participants in book groups tend to interact was borne out by my
experience of the four books groups studied for this thesis.

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 Participants in book groups create a conversation that begins with the book each woman has
read but moves beyond the book to include personal connections and meanings each has
found in the book, and the new connections with the book, with inner experience, and with
the perspectives of the other participants that emerge within the discussion. (2003, p 144)

In a pilot study on book groups reading the “fictions of reconciliation”, Clarke and Nolan
(2014) found that while the members of each group in their study held similar ideological
viewpoints, there was clearly a lot of variety in their specific opinions.

For some the book club had a specific ideological purpose, as for Group 1. For the rest, even
though the book club served as a context for a group of friends to gather on a regular basis, it
also provided a forum in which such acquaintances could feel able to address issues of
specific political and moral importance. (p. 137)

In a further study examining the response of five book groups to Kate Grenville’s novel The
Secret River (2005), a work of historical fiction from the point of view of white settlers on
the Hawkesbury River in NSW, Nolan and Clarke noted that, irrespective of their personal
views or preferences with respect to The Secret River, the readers in the five book groups
they studied “are not convinced by the argument that there is a need to distinguish
categorically between history and fiction; they seem comfortable reading in the space
between these modes of writing without necessarily seeing them as the same” (2014, p. 25).
In assigning the books to the groups I divulged little about the details of the project other than
the “aim of this research is to investigate and analyse how readers receive works in the non-
fiction genre of literary journalism and to ask permission to record their discussion of the
chosen book” (See Appendix 2, Participant Consent Form). I had no intention of intervening
in this discussion or contributing to it. I am not studying book groups as a phenomenon; I am
studying the discourse that arises from book group discussions with the aim of abstracting
from that discussion insights into how readers respond to works in a specific genre. While I
will pay attention to the impact of the group dynamic on the discussions and on the focus
group, this is not a sociological study of how that operates.

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The focus group

One obvious advantage of the focus group is it allows a number of views to be elicited at the
same time in a highly focused setting. Robson (2011) argues it is also a good means of
breaking down taboo subjects, as individuals in the group draw support from “less inhibited
members” and it is easy to access the extent to which there is a “consistent and shared view”
(p. 294). But there are disadvantages to the focus group, among them, according to
Weerakkody, a lack of naturalness and the possibility members might express extreme views
due to being carried away by the discussion or the captive audience (2009, p. 199). Other
shortcomings outlined by Weerakkody include: the group leader effect, false consensus
effect, group think syndrome, positive self-representation, and effects of the “spiral of
silence” (p. 199). When it comes to analyzing the data, I have considered to what degree
these dynamics had affected or possibly even contaminated the data. My 30 years’ experience
as a print journalist and broadcaster who conducted many interviews for stories in varying
contexts and situations and for use in various media, including live-to-air, has equipped me
with the skills to conduct interviews and to interpret and synthesise the information in them
and recognise when an interviewee is being untruthful.

I conducted a focus group with four students undertaking Communication at the University of
Canberra who were studying Joe Cinque’s Consolation in a course on narrative non-fiction. I
was involved in this discussion as the facilitator of the focus group, the students’ involvement
was voluntary, and it was conducted outside their regular classes. Their involvement was not
connected with their assessment in the unit or their grades and I did not perceive any ethical
concerns or any conflict of interest from their participation. While the participants in the
focus group were articulate and engaged readers, I have decided against including the data in
this study as it is too mediated to be reliable in this context. Their views were interesting but
did not add substantially to the insights gained from the book clubs and semi-structured
interviews. One reason may be that they were studying this area of writing and so perhaps
were already attuned to the issues but not in a fully formed way.

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The semi-structured interview

To further tease out the individual’s reading process – and to learn more about their personal
circumstances and backgrounds – I conducted semi-structured interviews with individual
readers, because adding the interviews to the unmediated book group discussions would
address some of the concerns referred to above. These readers were secured from two
sources: participants in the book groups who were willing and able to commit to an interview
either after the book group discussion or later, and students at the University of Canberra.
These students were randomly selected during a visit to the campus I made for my doctoral
confirmation seminar in 2013. Four of the students were drawn from the focus group I
conducted; the other five students I came across in a walk around the campus. The data these
interviews produced was rich and abundant, as will be demonstrated in the coming chapters.
The aim was to get a good range of readers in terms of age, gender and education level, and
to capture data that was mediated and more structured to complement the data from the book
group discussions (See Appendix 4, Timetable of reader interview recordings).

The interview is a common and popular method of qualitative research. It differs from the
surveys or questionnaires used in quantitative research, which tend to be fixed questions in a
pre-decided order and standardized wording (Robson, 2011, p. 278). Robson says interviews
can be structured, semi-structured or unstructured, can be conducted one-on-one, and face-to-
face or via telephone or email, and can also be used in group settings (p. 279). Semi-
structured interviews allow for a list of open-ended questions that are put to all respondents,
with the researcher granted the freedom to add other questions or vary the wording.
Unstructured interviews allow for some flexibility on the part of the researcher, who Robson
suggests “is free to use any form of wording or question order during the discussion and can
add topics to the list” (p. 168). Interviews can be incorporated into other methods of data
gathering, including ethnographic study. They are a highly effective means of accessing
information and can offer insights into people’s behaviour and responses to phenomenon. A
dilemma facing the researcher who uses interviews is that the validity of data from interviews
can be challenged. Silverman (2011) talks about a style of qualitative interview that aims to
get inside the heads of particular groups of people and to tell things from their point of view.
Gubrium and Holstein’s (1995) concern there might be multiple meanings of a situation or of

57
an activity represented by what people say to the researcher, to each other, to carers and so
on, raising the issue as to whether interview responses are to be treated as giving direct access
to “experience” and “feelings” or as actively constructed “narratives” involving activities
which themselves demand analysis (Silverman, 2011, p. 179). Robson (2011) has similar
misgivings, writing, “For example, following detailed analysis of the interaction between
interviewers and respondents in standardized social survey interviews, Houtkoop-Steenstra
(2000) suggests that interview results can only be understood as products of the contingencies
of the interview situation, and not, as is usually assumed, the unmediated expressions of
respondents’ real opinions” (p. 279). When conducting the interviews, I followed the list of
prepared questions (See Appendix 5, semi-structured interview questions) with only the
occasional deviation to tease out a particular point to ensure a uniformity of approach that
would yield the most reliable data. But I have considered to what degree these dynamics had
affected or possibly even contaminated the data and endeavoured to make allowances or
account for it when analysing the data. The nature of these interviews protects them against
some of the concerns outlined by Silverman who is, after all, a sociologist with an interest in
conversation and discourse analysis, whose research delves into deeply personal subjects
such as HIV-test counselling (2011, p. xii). The content of these interviews does not call for
personal revelations or touch on delicate matters. There is no reason for any interviewee to
obfuscate or lie. However, I am mindful of research by Allington and Benwell (2012) that
questions whether data from the use of interviews and focus groups to research the way texts
are understood by consumers can be considered transparent and argues that any method for
analysing reader response must take into account the context in which the statements are
made. They say, “Statements describing a reader’s experiences in reading a particular book
may appear to be literal reports of events taking place in a pre-existing reality, but to an
ethnomethodologist, these must be seen as accounts constructing reality” (p. 217).

This certainly adds another layer of complexity, given I am researching how readers respond
to books that are themselves constructing reality. I have noted where a reader has revealed a
personal bias that might have affected their response to the subject matter of the book and
also when a reader might be influenced by the group in expressing their opinion.

In their ethnological analysis of one book group’s 30-minute discussion of a narrative poem
called The Adoption Papers, Allington and Benwell (2002) noticed that certain responses got
validated in the context of the discussion.

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 Using a turn-by-turn discourse analytical approach, we demonstrated how reader response is
collaboratively worked up in the course of a situated discussion. At issue is the way in which
particular opinions are ratified, taken up, and endorsed by the group … We are interested in
examining which interpretations are taken up by other members, how this is achieved
discursively, and how utterances that do not chime with the collective will of the group are
not developed. (p. 220)

The purpose of this kind of analysis was to demonstrate that readers responses can be
affected by the immediate context and are therefore subject to change. I did notice that in
each book group there tended to be at least one dissenting voice, with the other members
ideologically aligned in response to the subject matter. But I did not perceive any modifying
of the dissenting voice over the course of the discussion. While it is important to note the
impact of ‘group think’ on these book groups, it is beyond the scope of this thesis to explore
it in any depth.

Analysing the data

The data I gathered from the methods deployed were transcribed by the professional
company Outscribe. I organised the data around the three research questions I was seeking to
answer. The only systematic approach to the coding was to identify themes around each
research question. These were: genre; blurred status; author’s objective; position of author;
and trigger points. I then used colour highlighters on hard copies of the transcripts and cut
and pasted into separate word documents the most relevant, illuminating and useful reader
responses to those themes, while also seeking the connections and comparisons. As noted by
Bogdan and Biklen, “the process of data analysis in qualitative research involves working
with data, organising it, breaking it down, synthesising it, searching for patterns, discovering
what is important and what is to be learned, and deciding what you will tell others” (1982, p.
153).

I set out to demonstrate that engaged readers have strategies for understanding works of
literary journalism that should mitigate scholarly and critical concerns about its truth-telling
claims, drawing largely on the work of Daniel Lehman (1997), and Eric Heyne (1987, 2001),
both of whom refer to the reader as a crucial part of their theories and who have each coined

59
useful terms that I will draw on: Lehman’s “blurred boundaries” and “reading over the edge”
and Heyne’s “a certain kind of caring”, as discussed in Chapter Two.

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 Chapter Four: The First Stone by Helen Garner, and the Friends of the University of
Newcastle book group

“As a writer of nonfiction, Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes
and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life’s
secular apocalypses - “a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold,” as she memorably
describes herself.” (James Wood, 2016)

“Yeah, as I said, there’s too much of Helen Garner intrudes in this book, and that’s
irritating. I mean, I thought when she tells you about how she went to have the massage. Oh
my God. Truly.” (Participant 4, Friends of the University of Newcastle book group)

“I would like the text to be such that the reader has room to come in.” (Helen Garner, 1992)

The First Stone: Some questions about sex and power was published in Picador by Pan
Macmillan Australia on the first of April in 1995, and is described in its first, unnumbered
page as the first “non-fiction book” from Australian writer Helen Garner, who had already
published six works of fiction, including a screenplay (Garner, 1995). In an author’s note on
the fifth, unnumbered page of the first edition, Garner states:

At first, when I imagined this book as an extended piece of reportage, the only names I
changed were those of the two young women, since our law forbids the identification of the
complainants in cases of alleged indecent assault. However, I soon encountered obstacles to
my research which forced me, ultimately to write a broader, less “objective”, more personal
book. They also obliged me to raise the story on to a level where, instead of its being an
incident specific to one institution at one historical moment, its archetypal features have
become visible. This is why I have felt free to invent names for all the characters. (n.p.)

While the back cover stated this was a “gripping blend of reportage and personal experience”,
that note was the only qualifying word from Garner on the status of her book as a work of
non-fiction. Many more would follow the book’s publication, making it a rich seam to mine
for this research project, because, for all the thousands of words written about The First
Stone, by academics, feminists, journalists, book reviewers and reader reviews online,
including five books in direct response (Brennan, 2017, p. 166), scant scholarly attention has
been paid to how readers might receive such a controversial, contested work.

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The First Stone sold 30,000 copies in its first fortnight (Manne, 1995) and 70,000 in the first
few months and more than 100,000 copies overall (Brennan, 2017, p. 164). It was an
immediate media sensation, generating heated debate in both print and broadcasting forums.
There had been considerable media interest in the run-up to publication, with extracts in The
Weekend Australian magazine and The Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning
Herald. ABC TV dedicated an episode of its flagship current affairs program 4Corners to it,
broadcast on March 22, 1995. It was reprinted by Pan Macmillan in 1997 and also published
in the US by Bloomsbury that same year.

Four months after the book was released, on August 8, 1995, Helen Garner addressed a
meeting of the Sydney Institute to defend her work from its, at times, vociferous detractors.
An edited transcript of her speech was published in the following day’s editions of The
Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian, and generated press coverage from The
Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Mirror, The Courier Mail and The Hobart Mercury
(Taylor, 2007, p. 74). The Australian editorialized that it was a defining moment in the
history of contemporary writing (The Australian, August 9, 1995).

The genesis of The First Stone is not unlike that of Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation and
indeed Capote’s In Cold Blood, in that it was triggered by an item in a newspaper. Garner
opened The Age one morning in August 1992 and read that the Master of Melbourne
University’s Ormond College was to appear before a magistrate that day on a charge of
indecent assault (Garner, 1995, p. 15). A student had accused him of putting his hand on her
breast while they were dancing at a college function. Garner had an immediate response to
this “desolate little item” and spoke to women friends of her age, “women pushing fifty”,
who shared her incredulity that a woman would go to “the cops” over this act (p. 15). She
tells us that without stopping to analyse her repeated “rushes of horror”, she wrote a letter to
the accused man, who she calls Dr Colin Shepherd, but whose actual name was Dr Alan
Gregory. In this letter Garner expressed sympathy for his plight and her sorrow at what had
happened to him, while admitting she knew nothing of the details of the case, or the woman
involved. Part of the letter reads:

What I want to say is that it’s heartbreaking for a feminist of nearly fifty like me, to see our
ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness. I expect I will never know

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 what “really happened”, but I certainly know that if there was an incident, as alleged, this has
been the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it. (p. 16)

Willa McDonald, an academic and scholar of literary journalism, notes that while the letter
was not written with a book in mind, it was an unwise move. “As Janet Malcolm, one of
Garner’s transnational influences, commented in a review of the book in the New Yorker,
Garner did ‘what a journalist must never do – she showed her hand too early’” (2011, p. 265).

After posting the letter, Garner continued to follow the case with “sporadic attention”, noting
that while the magistrate found the charge of indecent assault proven, no conviction had been
recorded, but when in late August a second set of allegations appeared in the paper, made by
another student, Garner decided to go to the Magistrate’s Court for the judgement (1995, p.
18). Her attempts to get the story behind these two court cases by interviewing the main
stakeholders involved is the heart of the book. What Garner builds around that core is a
meandering, reflective, seductively readable meditation on her feminism, which, as Garner
herself would go on to point out in her Sydney Institute address, raised more questions than it
answered.

The book is sub-titled not an argument about sex and power but some questions about sex and
power. There are more questions in it than there are answers. Because it declines or is unable
to present itself as one big clompy, armour-clad, monolithic certainty, it’s not the kind of
book that is easy to review crisply. Because it’s a series of shifting speculations with an open
structure it’s hard to pull out single quotes without distorting it. What the book invites from
the reader is openness and answering spark. (August 8, 1995)

In the book, the two complainants are given the pseudonyms Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole
Stewart, while the Master is called Dr Colin Shepherd. In the written critiques that followed
the book’s publication, prominent feminist critics and scholars, including Anne Cossins,
Jenna Mead, Anthea Taylor and Virginia Trioli, expressed outrage at Garner’s hostility
towards the women making the allegations, which bordered on contemptuous, and her stated
sympathy for the perpetrator. In innumerable newspaper articles, in journal articles, in
conference papers and in book chapters, the debate raged.

She was accused of selling out women and their hard-won legal rights; of contributing to the
backlash against feminism as described by Susan Faludi; of feeding claims of a “victim

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 feminism” as proposed by writers such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Rene Denfield in
an international debate that had until then not forcefully reached the Australian public.
(McDonald, 2011, p. 262)

Much of the debate was framed as a David and Goliath battle between older, so-called ’60s
feminists such as Garner, who saw themselves as having fought the battles that younger
women were benefitting from in both domestic and public spheres, and younger feminists,
who were even more militant, and not prepared to compromise in matters of sexual
harassment, more willing than their older counterparts to take legal action against alleged
abusers. Moira Rayner (1999), the Victorian Sexual Discrimination Officer at the time, who
had some involvement in the two women’s legal proceedings against Dr Shepherd, skilfully
summarised this tension in a review of the book for Eureka Street four years after it was
published, describing The First Stone as a very personal working out of a considered public
position on women, power and responsibility.

[Garner’s] conclusion: that a “prissiness, cowardice and brutality” had destroyed lives; that
older women with their sixties libertarian version of feminism have a more generous attitude
and a greater wisdom than the young, passionate and judgmental campus feminists of the
1990s; that women have “potential power” which they do not use, that by characterising the
full range of sexual harassment as “violence against women” they caricature and trivialise
real violence between women and men, and (aggrievedly) that she, who insists on drawing
such distinctions, has also been victimised. It isn’t, of course, so simple. (Rayner, 1999, p. 2)

But while Garner infuriated a lot of feminists with her deeply personal and biased account of
the Ormond case, it was her use of another device that proved to be of greater concern for
stakeholders in the story and for scholars including Mead (1995, 1997) and Ricketson (1997).
It emerged after the first edition was published that Garner had not only changed the names
of the actual people involved in the Ormond case, as she admitted to in the author’s note at
the start, she had invented at least six characters to disguise the identity of one of the two
women’s supporters, Jenna Mead. In a speech to the Sydney Institute on September 20, 1995,
in response to Garner’s address in August, Jenna Mead, who as a member of the Ormond
College Council at the time tried to have the students’ complaints addressed, claimed the
book turned real life into a confusing narrative of changed names, confused events and
unclear meanings, substituting hearsay and innuendo for fact and evidence.

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 Real people rub shoulders with invented characters – some people, like the High Court Judge
get no name, others have a new one, some people (like me) get six or seven names, only
Helen remains herself … the fictionalising of me into six or seven individually named
characters creates the impression of a feminist conspiracy (1995, p. 123).

When he learned of this, Ricketson, who had been “swept up in Garner’s beautifully crafted
prose”, felt “the book’s power implode” (2014, p. 219). Mead was, in fact, Dr Ruth V, Ms
Vivienne S, Ms Rose H, Mrs Barbara W, Ms Margaret L, a “thin-faced, thin-bodied woman
in her 40s” and perhaps two separate senior women in the college” (p. 219). Brennan finds
that Garner’s strategy made the book an easy target for those who argued it could not be
taken seriously as non-fiction (2017, p. 159). Garner would go on to acknowledge this breach
of journalism ethics, that splitting one person into six fictional ones was a flaw in her method,
but she had done it on the advice of her publisher’s lawyers, who feared a lawsuit (Ricketson,
2014, p. 220).

One effect of this strategy, the use of which I deeply regret—not least because it
prevents me from being able to state unequivocally that the book is "nonfiction", is that –
in some people's opinion, anyway - it creates an impression of a feminist conspiracy against
the Master. I think this objection can be sustained only if one imagines that Dr Mead was the
sole feminist in the university who supported the young women: clearly a grotesque and
untenable belief. But I do consider the strategy a flaw in the book, one the necessity for which
should compel examination of our defamation laws. (Garner, 1997, p. 20)

Garner told Ricketson in an interview that she regretted the violation of her contract with the
reader: “It shows that when the chips are down I was a coward and it distorted the nature of
the story, just that bit, but it was a crucial bit” (2014, p. 221). For Ricketson, it undermined
the credibility of her story by imprinting “feminist conspiracy” on the mind of the readers.

With the revelation of the splitting up of Mead, the rhetorical force of Garner’s argument
collapses, which, coupled with her unfair treatment of the two young women, seriously
undermines the credibility of The First Stone, which is a pity because it is in many ways a
powerful book. (p. 221)

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For Mead, this, and Garner’s admission that the innocence or guilt of Colin Shepherd was “to
me the least interesting aspect of the story” (Garner, 1995, p. 40), meant the truth about the
events was irrelevant and that facts didn’t matter.

The key to The First Stone is this lack of interest in the truth. Helen’s book doesn’t discover
“archetypal figures” or “deeper truths”. It doesn’t ask “some questions about sex and power”
either. This is not about facts or information or ethics or truth. This is a book which presses
buttons. These buttons are labelled “feminist conspiracy”, “a man’s career”, and “wounded
victim”. The book works by turning the ugly, corrupt, brutal facts of the Ormond case into
what Meaghan Morris calls “a beautifully sculpted emotion”. That emotion is called panic.
The First Stone pitches one kind of panic to the men who read the book and another kind of
panic to the women. (Mead, 1995, p. 125)

But Mead does not address Garner’s key grievance against her, which is that she declined to
be interviewed by her for the book. Had Mead consented to an interview, Garner would have
had access to Mead’s version of events and the result could have been very different. With a
named source such as Mead, Garner would have had no need to create her notorious
composite cast of characters, which is not to excuse her choice. Journalism practice would be
to include the fact that Mead declined to comment, not invent composite characters, but it
does suggest at least an impetus for Garner’s decision.

In bodyjamming (1997), a collection of essays published in response to The First Stone,

Ricketson dissects Garner’s journalism and finds it flawed. That it is a work of journalism, he
does not dispute, noting it deals with real events in a real place at a real point in time (p. 80).
But he finds it is the “muddying of what is and what is not real that is The First Stone’s most
serious flaw” (p. 87). While Ricketson is critical of Garner’s research methods, he does not
dispute her facility with language, finding her main journalistic asset is her “astonishing
ability to unlock the minutiae and meaning of unexamined everyday events” (p. 94).

Apart from being a compelling read, The First Stone’s impact owed much to Garner’s
established reputation as a popular writer and public feminist. As Cossins (1995) points out,
Garner writes from a position of considerable standing in the literary world.

From the power derived from that position, Garner has been able to make “claim[s] to truth”
in a work of non-fiction which, contrary to available evidence and in the absence of sound

66
 theoretical or empirical analysis, no academic would be permitted to make … Her non-fiction
story becomes an uncontested statement affirmed by her status as an author “in a hierarchy of
knowledge” comprised of those for her and those against her. But it is important to recognize
that a point of view does not necessarily equate with all knowable facts, and to recognize the
connection between having a point of view, conversion of that into fact and “the truth to be
described” and hence power: that is, “Power to create the world from one’s point of view”. (p.
536)

It is the truth claims of literary journalism that this thesis is endeavouring to interrogate and
understand through the responses of readers to this compelling example. The First Stone is
presented as non-fiction, as established earlier, and is written in the first person in a style that
is reflective and highly personal. Garner constantly questions her responses to events and to
interactions with her interviewees; she questions her emotional responses to the women’s
refusal to talk to her, for example, and why she is so moved by the plight of Colin Shepherd
and his family. Garner comes across more as a seeker of at least her own truth than this
maker of truth suggested by Cossins. Other critics take a similar view. James Wood, writing
about The First Stone 21 years after publication, describes Garner as a “baited animal,
attacking and retreating”, wavering between finding the women’s response to Dr Shepherd’s
advances offensively out of proportion and doubting her own judgement, drawing on her own
unexpected responses to similar incidents in her past to cast further doubt on herself (2016,
para. 13). Wood considers Garner’s book “a brilliantly prescient book – in its complexity, in
the tense torque of its self-argument, and in its very vulnerability and stunned intolerance”.

Feminism had indeed changed between the nineteen-seventies and the nineteen-nineties, and
Garner’s narrative registers, with often uncomfortable honesty, a generational shift. Sexual
harassment was coming to be seen as, invariably, a matter of institutional power. There was
no narrative space left for Garner’s blithe admission of her youthful affair with an older tutor,
and certainly not for her appreciation of its educative richness. (2016, para. 18)

It is this positioning by Garner of herself as the main protagonist of this true story that makes
The First Stone such a rich example to explore with readers. As Sue Joseph (2016) points out,
Garner’s writing practice is not, at its heart, journalistic, though its fact-gathering, which
Garner does through interviews and documentary evidence, may be “deemed journalistic in
nature … It moves more towards personal essay with degrees of autoethnographic
deliberations” (p. 732). But fiction writer Marion Halligan finds that level of subjectivity in a

67
work of journalism problematic. In a keynote speech at the 1998 Tasmanian Readers’ and
Writers festival, Halligan concedes that, while she agrees with people who consider Garner a
terrific journalist, The First Stone is not a piece of journalism.

…it’s a novel whose main character is Garner, acting out the role of journalist, following in
fact the classical form of the whodunit and that’s okay if it is how it is read but I suspect it is
seen as a simple factual account, telling the truth that the situation holds. You only have to
consider how different the book might have been had the two girls talked to her to see that, if
the book does tell the truth, it is only one of many. (Halligan, 1998, n.p.)

But according to Ricketson, while some like Halligan read The First Stone as fiction, most
read it as non-fiction “because, apart from some names Garner invented to avoid a
defamation suit, all other factual details correlated – or purported to correlate – with specific
incidents that occurred to actual people at Ormond College’s smoko night in 1991 that led to
actual consequences” (2014, p. 145).

Throughout the controversy provoked by the book, supporters and detractors, readers and
those involved in the case all discussed the book as an account of real events and people.
They all demonstrated Eric Heyne’s “certain kind of caring” about competing accounts that
show when a work has left the domain of fiction. (p. 145)

James Ley, writing in the Sydney Review of Books about Garner’s 2014 book This House of
Grief, describes Garner as bringing to the task a “novelistic intelligence” and trying to
understand events empathetically whether writing fiction or non-fiction (2014, para. 8). Ley
finds the ethical and political issues tend to be subordinated to the more intimate concerns of
her work and that her personal investment in what she witnesses compromises her notional
role as a disinterested reporter, which he claims is what happened in The First Stone, when
Garner is advised by supporters of the two women that the case is not being pursued for the
benefit of her finer feelings.

But Garner’s “finer feelings” are precisely what The First Stone ends up being about, despite
her no doubt genuine insistence that she is striving to be open-minded. This inbuilt quality is,
in part, a consequence of the women’s overmastering silence, which turns her outwardly
directed enquiries back in on themselves, but it is also a consequence of the confessional

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 method Garner uses throughout her non-fiction, which muddies the distinction between
observing events and intervening in them, between grasping their import in an intellectual or
imaginative sense and projecting her feelings and anxieties onto them. (2014, para. 10)

And therein lies a conundrum: are Garner’s confessional style and ruminations on her
personal responses to events in her non-fiction that render it so compelling to her readers
casting a shadow over the truth-telling claims of her literary journalism?

The use of first-person narrator in literary journalism is one of its defining features. John
Tulloch (2014) focussed on the ethical implications of this narrative choice in one of his last
articles, published posthumously in the journal Journalism, finding the foundation of trust in
journalism lies not in the objective truth of its observations but the truthfulness of its practice.

Fundamental to this is the construction of an authentic narrative voice, ranging from the so-called
“omniscience” of the invisible storytelling, where the narrator is banished from the scene, through
various forms of narratorial presence, to the fully formed “subjective” account of the so-called
“new” (circa 1960s) journalist. (Tulloch, 2014, p. 631)

Tulloch describes the work of the British journalist Ian Jack as making extensive use of the
first person in his columns and long-form narrative non-fiction, which takes four principal
forms: the “witness” narrative, in the form of “I saw this”, where the witness functions as a
trusted ambassador; a narrative that reflects on the personal impact of the subject upon him; a
narrative that analyses his own recent experience; and a narrative that reflects on his own
memories and childhood.

Jack’s writing is recognisably, though not completely, in a tradition created by George

Orwell. The main characteristics of the style are a tone of candour, honesty and self-
deprecation. In particular – and what is largely absent in Orwell – is the playful telling of
rueful stories against oneself, which is a central feature of Jack’s writing. (2014, p. 631)

Helen Garner deploys all of these in The First Stone by attending the relevant court cases;
interviewing the relevant stakeholders who consent to it; and letting the reader in on her
doubts and insecurities early on. Garner tells her readers that she had been taking an interest
in the case without committing to writing about it but found the story was haunting her and
making her anxious.

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 I had thought of myself as a feminist, and had tried to act like one, for most of my adult life. It
shocked me that now, though my experience of the world would usually have disposed me
otherwise, I felt so much sympathy for the man in this story and so little for the women. I had
a horrible feeling that my feminism and my ethics were speeding towards a head-on smash. I
tried to turn on this gut reaction what they call “a searching and fearless moral inventory”.
(1995, p. 39)

Garner provides detailed examples of her own experiences with unwanted male attention and
sexual harassment and wonders if her sacking from a teaching position for discussing sexual
matters with students was the reason for her sympathy for the Master (p. 39). Her narratorial
style is one of candour, honesty and self-deprecation and she tells rueful stories against
herself, as when she was kissed on the lips by a man giving her a massage and not only did
not complain, but paid for the massage, which she describes as behaving like a child, “That
is, I declined to take any responsibility in the situation” (p. 174). This is a voice that invites
the reader in and indeed according to Ricketson, “the narrative voice in her non-fiction –
sometimes rhapsodic, other times querulous, always wincingly honest – is immediately
recognisable and welcomed by her many readers” (2014, p. 145). But he also offers a note of
caution when he asks: “what happens if the practitioner’s narrative voice so dominates the
book that it squeezes out alternative perspectives?” (p. 133).

For Ricketson, the narrative voice is an important means for writers of true stories to
engender trust with their readers (2014, p. 233); the other, he contends, is through the
paratext, the additions to published texts described by Genette (1987) that provide
opportunities for further explication of a writer’s intention and methods (Ricketson, 2014, p.
203). Garner’s paratext is limited to her preface (discussed earlier), but Garner has the added
benefit of the mass of epitext (material that extends and comments on the text) that followed
the publication of The First Stone and includes her address to The Sydney Institute, the
chapter in True Stories (Garner, 1996), reflecting on The First Stone, and the numerous books
and articles written about The First Stone, some of them cited in this chapter.

In a talk published in the journal LINQ, Garner (1997) offers insight into how she came to
draw on her skills as a writer of fiction for her first non-fiction book. Until she read Janet
Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, about the biographers of the poet Sylvia Plath, Garner hadn’t
realised she could use the tools she’d used in her novels and short stories, which she thought
were out of bounds for non-fiction.

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 In other words, I saw that I could use physical imagery to sketch character and situation, the
way one does without thinking in fiction because this has always been the preserve of fiction.
I'm thinking, for example, of the way the Master served me sweet biscuits in a cereal bowl, or
how the hostile young Women's Officer at the student union inadvertently sat sideways on to
me with a glaring window behind her, so I couldn't see anything of her but a silhouette, or the
little incident of the smell of moss and the biscuit jar. (p. 18)

Garner’s biographer Bernadette Brennan explains how Garner’s observational skills work in
The First Stone.

So, she used the inefficient, demanding fireplace in the Gregory’s lounge room as an image of
Mrs Gregory’s generosity; “her uneconomical, exhausting, undiscriminating, selfless good
will”. She appreciated that when, during their interview, Sir George Lush put the lid back on
the biscuit jar, he was, despite saying otherwise, refusing to give her any more information.
She came to understand that the smell of the moss outside his house rekindled childhood
memories of her grandparents’ home and lulled her into a more subservient, accommodating
frame of mind. (2017, p. 132)

Wolfe referred to these details as status markers, which came to be considered an important
quality in literary journalism for their ability to delineate class. It’s arguably fanciful to find
someone’s personality reflected in their fireplace and it is possible Sir George, identified in
the book as Mr R, did not want to share any more biscuits given Garner noted how good they
were and that she may have had as many as three (Garner, 1995, p. 93). He assures her his
action was not to keep her out of the biscuit jar, but she infers from this he has “put the lid
back on” what he knows (p. 93). But Garner does not spare herself from this interpretative
process, finding the smell of moss in his garden evoked childhood memories that so put her
off her game that Mr R had taken control of the interview and told her hardly anything (p.
191).

But Garner’s ability to write evocative prose takes second place to her transgressions of
omissions and commissions. While lauding Garner’s literary style and keen observation,
Ricketson (1997, 2014) finds her research methods and argument undermine it. He claims
Garner leaves out vital and relevant information, including 17 statements from witnesses to
the events, the fact that the Master had five other complaints made against him about the
same night, and fails to provide facts and figures about Ormond College that would provide
context to the events (1997, p. 96).

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 If Garner struggled to gather raw material that was sitting around waiting for her, she soon
gave up when she encountered obstacles to her research. When neither Mead nor the two
complainants would talk to her she did not know what to do. (p. 96)

Ricketson also finds it highly problematic that in the absence of these points of view she
makes herself the centre of her inquiry. “Refracting an issue through your own prism also
helps explain why argument is subordinated to emotion in The First Stone… Instead of solid
research and a carefully weighted argument, the reader is offered a view that is, at best,
partial (1997, p. 97). Ricketson concludes that Garner suffers in comparison to other literary
journalists such as Janet Malcolm and John McPhee, for whom the most important thing
about the story is the story.

In The First Stone Helen Garner aspired to this journalistic terrain. She is clearly a fine stylist
and a magpie for telling details, but weak on research and argument. Splitting one person into
six or nine different characters means Garner has, as McPhee put it, hitchhiked on the
credibility of writers who earn the reader’s trust. In the end, the most important thing in the
Ormond case for Helen Garner was not the story but Helen Garner. (p. 100)

For her biography, Brennan was granted access to some of Garner’s files, which are in the
National Library of Australia, embargoed to January 2022. She writes there are 500 letters in
response to The First Stone, including eight from readers objecting to various aspects of the
book and letters from readers expressing gratitude.

One after another the correspondents say they read through the night, that they could not put
the book down, that it exorcised their feelings of guilt for their passivity in past experiences.
Many said they have never written to an author before but felt compelled to contact Garner.
Some began by noting they too were firing off a letter in quick response to reading …
Obviously Garner’s strategy to make the text porous and invite the reader into a conversation
worked because so many letters, extending anywhere up to eight foolscap pages, sought to
continue a conversation with Garner and indeed to answer many of the questions posed in the
text. (2017, p. 169)

In her book written in response to The First Stone, Generation F (1996), journalist Virginia
Trioli describes how polarizing the book was, with reaction from feminists and commentators
mirroring the generational divisions that played out in it.

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 Many took up Garner’s point about the need to ‘grade’ the offence of sexual harassment, and
therefore calibrate the response it should draw. The corollary of this was that the alleged
incidents at Ormond College did not warrant a legalistic response. Columnists and writers
started to respond to each, and the debate took up two of Garner’s points: one was a
discussion of “younger feminism” – whether it was or wasn’t the priggish new orthodoxy
Garner wrote of. The other was the issue of “the punishment fitting the crime”. (p. 30)

These two key arguments of the generational divide and the punishment fitting the crime,
were certainly what occupied the minds of the Friends of the University of Newcastle book
group at its meeting on the morning of Monday, February 24, 2014, at the home of one its
members in Cooks Hill, for what proved to be a rather explosive discussion of The First
Stone. It was a discussion that clearly demonstrated Garner’s ability to invite the reader into
the conversation, if not her hope that they would not find her a “pain in the arse” (2018)2.
There were eight members present, all retired women over the age of 70 with a connection to
the university, mostly through marriage to academics. Seven of the eight had tertiary
educations and the book group had been founded in 1995, so had been going, with various
membership changes, for nearly 20 years, when it met to discuss The First Stone. As is
customary with this book group, the host led the discussion. Coffee and sandwiches provided
by the host were served at the end. The discussion lasted for one hour and 15 minutes. Most
of these readers had a similar response to the events of The First Stone as Helen Garner’s in
that they were sympathetic to the Master and suspicious of his two accusers and they did not
consider his actions, even if they did take place, which they didn’t consider proven here
anyway3, warranted his fall from grace. While each individual had their own opinion and
held different levels of conviction about these main points, from the less certain to the
resolute, there was a basic consensus that concurred with Garner’s position. By the end of the
discussion the readers agreed they had, on the whole, subscribed to Garner’s version of the

2
In an interview published in The Monthly (2018) Erik Jensen asked Garner what she wants her readers to
think of her. Garner gave this reply. “A divorced grandmother who’s seen a bit of life, had some troubles and
sadness, lost things that she should have figured out how to keep, caused pain to people through selfishness
and carelessness, but who likes people and wants to understand them, is good with children, likes a drink and
a laugh, and tries hard to be generous and to keep her word and not to be a pain in the arse – in short,
someone through whose eyes a reader might be interested in looking at the story.”

3
It’s worth mentioning that a magistrate found the charge of indecent assault made against Colin Shepherd by
one of the two complainants was proven but no conviction was recorded and Shepherd later appealed and
won, though the judge described the woman as an excellent witness with an impeccable record for honesty
(Garner, 1995, p. 36). The charge of indecent assault by the second woman was dismissed by a magistate,
with police ordered to pay costs.

73
story but they also recognized her influence on their response, lending some credence to
Jenna Mead’s (1997) claim the book “encourages misogyny and moral panic”.

The First Stone isn’t a work of investigative journalism or feminist inquiry. The character
called Helen poses as a pseudo-intellectual claiming the high moral ground of truth and the
credentials of feminist activism. What Helen Garner calls this “more personal, less objective
book” turns out to cannibalise the lives of real people, licenses misinformation and prejudice
and encourages misogyny and panic. (1997, Author’s notes.)

Like Garner, the women of Friends of the University of Newcastle book group shared their
own experiences of being groped by men in inappropriate situations, but claimed they
shrugged off these unwelcome advances as evidence of the frailty of men and their own
sexual power as then young women. (Participants are referred to as P, for example Participant
7 is P7)

P7: I mean, immediately when you, from my generation it’s Garner talking about the, you
know, we came up through the ’60s, I mean fending off every, just about every day
when I started work at 16 there was assault. But I couldn’t prove it, because nobody
held back, I mean, it was fun to assault the new secretaries coming into the Education
Department in Britain, it was male bastion and it was a joke and you had to learn to
take it, to get a stiff upper lip and just learn to cope with these things.

P4: Soldier on. You soldier on.

Like Garner and her friends, it would not have occurred to these women, a mixture of
Garner’s generation and older, to go to the police over a clumsy or poorly targeted pass. They
considered the actions of the two young women to the Master’s alleged, unwanted advances
an irritating over reaction, but they acknowledged their response was coloured by their own
experiences and their own times.

P5: And Paul’s College. I mean, I’m the same age as Helen, and I went to boules at
Paul’s College, and they were pretty disgusting. You were really pressured sexually.
And I don’t think she, I don’t know whether Ormond was like that, I suspect it was.

P3: Well, I don’t know either.

P5: And I don’t think she makes much of it if it was. That whole pressuring of women,
and demeaning of them…

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P7: …I mean, my parents never talked to me about sex, and if I’d said I’d been groped
they would have probably thought that quite a good thing that somebody fancied me.
(Group laughter)

These readers frequently acknowledge they are of a different generation to the young women
in The First Stone and that their experiences have shaped their responses to the young women
taking what they might have experienced themselves and regarded as a trivial matter, to the
police. Participant 7 in particular fails to recognise the power imbalance between the Master
and the students when she responds to a comment from Participant 1, even making a joke
about it.

P1: And I think too because of all our experience and what we’ve been through, I mean,
I’ve been groped by a specialist and had to pay the money, that got me down.

P2: Did you get your rebate?

P4: Don’t go on with it, I’m going to a specialist on Friday.

P7: And if she doesn’t get groped she’s going to be very disappointed.

But while they empathised with Garner’s generational bewilderment at the women’s punitive
behaviour to what these older feminists considered a fairly trivial offence, this did not mean
they let Garner off the hook, finding her foolish to have sent the letter to the Master, which
led to the complainants not being willing to talk to her for the book. The book group also
found Garner irritating in her constant imposition on the narrative. And much like the book
has polarized women along generational lines, the discussion had an unexpected, involuntary
intervention by this researcher at the midway point (discussed later in this chapter) and the
impact of this on the remaining discussion has been taken into account.

The discussion began with Participant 1, the host, observing that she had been thinking about
what one thing in the book would convince her that the story was true, that would give her
the sense that what she was reading was the truth, even if she were “seeing it second hand
through someone else’s interpretation”.

P1: And for me it was the physical setting of the story that makes the book seem real …
Ormond College itself became the leading character… And she [Garner] brings the
College onto the stage early in the book, describing it as “The most spectacular of
Melbourne’s residential colleges, a massive neogothic pile crowned by a high pointed

75
 tower. It radiates power. Its foundations are deep in private patronage” … And then
there were all these huge pictures blown up, black and white ones, of sporting teams
and manly students puffing on pipes. And there were a couple of women academics,
because women had been there for about 20-something years I think when she wrote
the book. But the only other women in any of the photographs were in white caps and
aprons, and they were the maids. And I think the overwhelming effect Ormond
College had on her was that the halls in their grandeur were overwhelmingly
masculine, Spartan, comfortless and forbidding.

The very first remarks by the host of the book club for this meeting convey a number of
useful insights, beginning with her recognition that a work of literary journalism is about
events based on facts, but because she was aware that the facts are received second-hand,
through “someone else’s interpretation”, she searched for another reason to be convinced the
story was true, which for this reader was the physical setting of the story, Ormond College.
This reader has settled on something significant here, which is the recognition by Garner of
the power of the setting where the events took place and the gender imbalance depicted in the
images on its walls. In her study of the work of Helen Garner, Kerryn Goldsworthy (1996)
notes that almost no-one mentions the book’s structure or two scenes near the beginning of
the book that she believes counterbalance all of the very real concerns expressed in the
intense debate about the book’s shortcomings. Goldsworthy quotes the passage recited by
Participant 1 above, highlighting Garner’s attention to the photographs which Goldsworthy
says “speak volumes about gender relations to a large number of people who would be made
impatient by that phrase, even more so by a lecture on it; that, of course, is one of the reasons
why Garner has so many readers in the first place” (1996, p. 82). This reader certainly
understands what Goldsworthy suggests Garner is doing with these opening passages.

P1: I think that the building that was Ormond College, together with a male ethos that
had fostered for so many years, it was strong enough to distort the way people acted,
and I think she’s captured that very precisely and conveys it to her readers. So, I think
in a funny kind of way by making, and this is only the way I think about it, she makes
Ormond College and the people in it the main character, and in a way, and what it’s
done to the people who were part of this whole sad, sorry story, I think she’s given
them a kind of absolution, both the accused and the accusers.

After this eloquent and insightful observation that putting Ormond College and its male ethos
at the centre of the story provides a backdrop against which to better understand the
behaviour of both the accused and his accusers, Participant 1 questioned why the author had
not used the real names of the people involved, admitting she hadn’t read the Author’s Note

76
referred to earlier, in which Garner explains why she invented names for all the characters
and goes on to express concern that the two women won’t talk to her, saying this is a “basic
problem” for her in trying to write the book. The readers pick up on this point a little way
into the discussion.

P1: But Helen Garner does make a disclaimer in the beginning which I didn’t make a note
of, where she says, because she couldn’t talk to the girls, she can’t really give a
factual account, because she’s so one-sided. She has to go to the personal and bring
other elements in, that if she could have had the girls’ accounts, she could have ...

P7: But she really, she closed that door by the letter.

P4: She did.

P3: She did, immediately, and from the very beginning. She sort of ...

P5: … Do you think it was that? It was that?

P4: Yeah, she wrote a letter, and the girls were able to read it.

[Talking over each other]

P6: Yeah, she put her flag up the mast, didn’t she?

P7: And they were photocopying them, handing them out, saying “Why would I talk to this
woman?”

P5: But she was not, she was not aware that that would be made so public.

P2: Oh, well, then she was a dope, wasn’t she?

These readers understand that by writing the letter, which the women at the centre of the
complaint were later able to read, Garner ruined her chances of an interview with two of the
main people in the story and that this compromised the credibility of the book. They return to
this later in the discussion.

P1: It would have been a fascinating book if she’d got the two girls to talk. And I don’t
think she was trying to get them to say whether it was the truth or not, she just wanted
to talk to them about how they felt about all the things we’ve been talking about.

P7: I think it would have been an interesting book if she hadn’t have meddled in the first
place with the letter, and she’d, because that’s disturbed everything.

P2: Approached it from a more, mm ...

77
P7: Yeah, because she kind of really nailed her colours to the mast there, didn’t she?

P2: Yes, right at the beginning.

P5: And it was pretty clear all the way through.

The fact that Garner didn’t manage to secure an interview with the two women because of
her letter, despite making repeated efforts, is clearly a trigger point for this group of readers
that makes them care about the factual status of the work. They recognise that Garner has
intervened in the story and “disturbed everything” (P7), depriving them of a richer and more
balanced account of the events at Ormond College. They demonstrate an understanding that
the author inserting herself into the story in this way is not a typical way for a journalist to
behave. In not behaving as an ethical journalist as these readers (and myself) understand one,
Garner has made them question her credentials.

P7: She’s a journalist. I mean, if it was you or I that’s sending something personal, you
can, you can I think forgive a bit of naivety, and say “Well, it wasn’t meant for other
people, blah, blah, blah”, but as a journalist and a well-known writer, and
particularly somebody who’s just coming up in court, wouldn’t you gather every bit of
defensive evidence that you could?

P2: And use it.

P7: Yes, I mean ...

P1: … But was she so well known then?...

P2: Well, not as, was it more as a novelist than a journalist, yeah.

P5: More as a novelist, yeah.

P3: A novelist, yes.

Clearly these readers think Garner should have known better than to write the letter, as
indeed she should, as it transgresses a fundamental rule of journalism to offer all parties
concerned the right of reply, but they do register that prior to the publication of The First
Stone Garner had been best known as a writer of fiction. But interestingly, despite their
reservations about Garner’s approach, they tend to concur with her interpretation of the
events and share her disdain for the way the two young women reacted to the Master’s
alleged advances.

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P4: Well, that, that, you’ve just said it, you have said it. If that man had groped, had
touched her breast and she liked it, she wouldn’t have said a word, not a word.

P7: That’s right, that’s right.

P4: Even if he was 30 years older than her.

P7: That’s right.

P4: It was the fact that she didn’t find it sexually arousing, so she ...

P7: And he didn’t read it right. He didn’t read it.

P4: No, poor, poor, poor man …

P2: Well, that’s the other point, isn’t it?

P5: We will never know ...

P2: … But she didn’t write the book to prove whether he did it or he didn’t.

P3: No, she didn’t.

P2: She wrote the book to show that this was a seminal point in feminism, didn’t she?

Participant 4 appears oblivious to the irony of her comment that had the woman (she does not
identify which of the two she is referring to, but both allege the Master had touched them on
the breast) been sexually attracted to the Master, and aroused by his touch, she would not
have “said a word”, even if he were 30 years older than her. This betrays a poor
understanding of female agency in sexual relationships and a lack of awareness about the
power balance between Master and student and suggests Garner could have done more to
address that than just cast Ormond College in a leading role and leave it to the reader to
appreciate the metaphor. Participants 4 and 7 are also critical of the women for failing to read
the Master’s advances as delusional – “he didn’t read it right”. Their sympathies lie entirely
with him, in spite of the fact that it is not incumbent on students to ensure their teachers and
supervisors behave appropriately. But Participant 4 provides an insight into a possible
influence on her response.

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P4: But I know there was a principal at Dubbo High School, and this young woman
decided she’d have a bit of fun by accusing him of molesting her, and it was not, it
was not true. And it was a most dreadful thing in his life and his family’s life.

P2: And then it influences your attitude probably to, yeah, that sort of thing.

P3: Yes, well, that again influences us, doesn’t it, about this book, because she says that
the Master’s life was ruined, but she doesn’t tell us about the girls.

P5: No, that’s a real gap.

Perhaps had Garner filled in more of the gaps and taken a less strident approach these readers
would have had a more nuanced response to the two women’s predicament. Ricketson’s
question in Telling True Stories cited earlier in this chapter – “what happens if the
practitioner’s narrative voice so dominates the book that it squeezes out alternative
perspectives” (2014, p. 133) – appears to be in evidence here. But the readers themselves do
conclude that how they – and Helen Garner – respond to the events depicted in The First
Stone may well be a generational divide between them and the young women at the centre of
the story as described earlier by Moira Rayner (1999).

P5: Well, she made it, quite a point about why women go so passive…Which I think’s
simple, but I don’t know if young girls now go passive or launch out, I don’t know. I
don’t know if she’s talking about a certain generation.

P2: I thought she said that her generation had been passive, didn’t she? She gave
examples of being on a train and ...

P5: But she’s also assuming that the young women she’s writing about to some extent
were passive too...

P5: I mean, as one of the men said, why didn’t she knee him in the balls?

P2: Oh, yes, at the time they were passive, well, yeah, that’s true...

P1: … But then she then brings in Ormond College and all the weight of everything that
she’s seen ...

P2: The power and, mm …

P1: ... as something that stops or increases the passivity…And actually makes them
passive. But I found, and I agree with (name redacted), leaping up through various
generations I found very confusing, because I think we can, I’ve never really thought
what kind of feminist I would be, and I’ve never really thought how that’s changed

80
 since then, I’m stuck in my time. We’re all stuck in our own time to some extent. We
can be modified, but we’re still thinking that level, aren’t we?

P7: And we’re all coloured by our own experience of course, aren’t we?

P2: Of course, yes.

Much as Helen Garner does in The First Stone, these readers recognise that their own
experiences and history will affect how they respond to the events in the book, but Participant
1’s point that – while we can be “modified” we still get “stuck in our own time”, especially
when it comes to ideological positions on things such as feminism – is astute, as this is very
much the tenor of Garner’s approach and, as mentioned earlier in the critical responses, this
tension between old and young feminists underpins The First Stone. While it is important to
note that these women are of Garner’s generation and it is therefore perhaps more likely they
will sympathise with her position, it is also clear these readers have been persuaded by her
argument that the Master has been hardly done by, while the women have been humourless
and punitive. Participant 3 declared a potential bias early on in the discussion, which she later
proclaimed as an outright bias, because she is “completely on the side of the Master” when
she told the group her husband had been a Master in a college and this had concerned her,
because he is a “touchy, feely man” and she cautioned him about ensuring his behaviour
towards the female students could not be misconstrued. But the triggering comment for this
researcher, after a build-up of similar comments, comes from Participant 1.

P1: But what comes over in the book is the absolutely awful things that have happened to
the Master. I mean that, utter destruction, for what, to us, probably at our age, would
be “cope with it”. But that, I think that’s ...

At this point in the discussion, I allowed my emotions to overcome my professional

detachment as a non-involved recorder of the discussion and I spoke for the first time, saying
I was struggling to stay silent. (I refer to myself as FB in the dialogue below.)

FB: Oh, I’m having such a struggle staying silent through this. (Laughter)

P1: But ...

FB: I wouldn’t cope with it. If I was a student, and a man touched me on the breast, no.

P5: I think it’s the power that, you’ve got to, you’ve got to take the power into account.

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P1: But we’ve only got their words that he did it. We’ve only got that they said that he did
it, that is the whole thing, there is ...

FB: Yeah, and his word that he didn’t.

P1: His words that he didn’t, their word that he did. What do you do?

FB: Why don’t you just trust them?

As a woman who was in my 50s at the time of the book group meeting, a mother of two
young women and a feminist, but also an admirer of Helen Garner’s writing and this book, I
found it difficult to comprehend the readers’ attitude towards the complainants. Their
sympathies were firmly with the Master, whose life they believed had been ruined by the
punitive and possibly, in their view, malicious behaviour of the two women, whose stories
they either didn’t believe or at best considered their taking the matter to the police an
overreaction. I had a less visceral response to reading the actual book: first as a young woman
– when it was published I was 37 – and when I reread it several times for this thesis, than I
did to listening in on this book group’s conversation. Garner’s constant reflection, her self-
doubt and her drive to understand ameliorated the irritation provoked by her position and my
dispute with it, but these qualities were not evident in this discussion. Participant 1’s claim
that “we only have their word that he did it” is incorrect, as The First Stone documents that
the court heard testimony from witnesses to one of the complainant’s distress (1995, p. 30).

But I pulled myself together, closed my mouth, resumed my status as a disinterested

observer, and the discussion continued, with the participants going on to cover a wide terrain:
discussing how the matter came before the courts; that it was the women’s word against his
(there were no witnesses to the alleged assaults even though they did end up in court); how
the Master could have managed to grab a breast while dancing (“he must have had a very
long arm”, is one remark); how in the 1970s several academics at La Trobe University were
charged and dismissed for sexual relations with students and how academics from Melbourne
and Sydney Universities should have been; and even a short debate about whether abusive
priests were worse than abusive doctors. It is clear these readers well understand power
imbalances and abuse of power, but they downplay the severity of what happened to the two
women in The First Stone as opposed to what happens when women are raped, though
Participant 5 recognises that if a woman complains about an unwanted sexual approach, she
runs the risk of becoming a social pariah. Then there is an exchange that demonstrates that

82
these readers are highly engaged “over the edge” (Lehman, 1997, p. 30) and have an
appreciation that the people in The First Stone are real people with lives beyond the covers of
the book.

P1: I wonder what happened to those women?

P5: Yes, I’d like to know.

P4: Well, I’d like to know what happened to him…

P6 … He went back to the Education Department.

P3: Yes, I think so. He tried to get a job and couldn’t get it, I think.

P2: In the book we don’t know, but you’d have to do other research to find out what
happened…

P3: …No, he tried to get a job, and his wife was very distressed, wasn’t she?

P6: Yes, and his kids, how were they?

P6: And the kids, yes. It destroyed him, really.

It does not appear as if my interruption has tempered their discourse in any way. Their
sympathies still remain with the Master and how he has fared as opposed to how the women
have got on. But it is the discussion that follows that provokes me to interrupt the discussion
for a second time.

P4: I feel very strongly that the first girl there, she had an agenda.

P6: Yes.

P5: Yes.

P4: And she, she enjoyed making a fool of him.

P3: She had a lot of problems, though, didn’t she?

P4: Oh, yeah … She reminded me of the girl, there was a similarity between her and the
girl in Joe Cinque. 4
4
In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, “the girl” is Anu Singh who killed her boyfriend by injecting him with heroin.
These facts are not disputed. The “first girl” referred to here is Elizabeth Rosen, who according to the Master’s
statement to police was fined for not undertaking mandatory chores at the college and left her room in such a
foul state the carpets have to be replaced and the walls cleaned and in some cases repainted. Dr Shepherd

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P3: Joe Cinque.

P4: They are amoral in a sense. But the other silly girl on the dance floor, who knows? I
mean, he was probably, the first girl had probably set his hormones racing, and he
went out on the dance floor and just acted like men, a man. (Laughter)

P5: But he wasn’t just a man, he was the Head of the College.

P3: He wasn’t just a man, you can’t do that, you can’t ...

P4: Oh, look, (name redacted), when you’ve had all that drink, and some girl turns you
on, I’m afraid ...

P3: Not when you’re in a position of power like that.

P8: You can’t …

P2: No, you can’t afford to.

P3: You can’t do it.

P2: You can’t afford to.

FB: I’m sorry, I can’t stay ...

I have a fight or flight response that makes me shaky and close to tears and I again lose
control of my role in this case study as a detached, non-participant researcher. It is something
that happened to me occasionally in my practice as a journalist, where I would become
emotionally involved during an interview5 with someone who had experienced trauma or lose
objectivity and occasionally my temper with an interviewee espousing views I found
offensive (about race, gender, sexual orientation and so on). I am unable to recall specific
examples of where the latter response occurred, so I expect it was not a fight or flight
situation, more of a heated exchange. Adversarial exchanges with interviewees on political
matters were actively encouraged in my workplaces, so this would not have seemed
untoward. That journalists can have emotional responses to the stories they cover is well
recognised and has been documented by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at

speculates that their history of disciplinary conduct might have led her to make allegations against him that he
claims were untrue (Garner, 1995, pp. 4-9).
5
During a radio interview I conducted in the early 2000s for community radio station 2NURFM in Newcastle,
with a woman who counselled bereaved parents, I cried as she recounted some of her encounters with people
who had lost very young children in traumatic circumstances. It was live-to-air and she too began to weep. The
veneer of journalistic detachment is just that at times.

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Columbia University (2020)6 and by scholars Browne, Evangeli and Greenberg (2012);
Feinstein, Owen and Blair (2002), Pyevich, Newman, and Daleiden (2003).

In The Reflective Practitioner, Schon (1983) considers reflection-in-action and reflection-on-

action, arguing that when a practitioner finds themselves in a situation they find uncertain or
unique, where they experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion, they reflect on the
phenomenon and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in their behaviour.
“He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the
phenomenon and a change in the situation” (p. 68).

In her article Envisaging Journalism Practice as Research, Niblock (2012) cites Sandelowski
and Barroso explaining reflexivity in the context of nursing:

Reflexivity is a hallmark of excellent qualitative research and it entails the ability and
willingness of researchers to acknowledge and take account of the many ways they
themselves influence research findings and thus what comes to be accepted as knowledge.
Reflexivity implies the ability to reflect inward toward oneself as an inquirer; outward to the
cultural, historical, linguistic, political, and other forces that shape everything about inquiry;
and, in between researcher and participant to the social interaction they share (Sandelowski &
Barroso, cited in Niblock, 2012, p. 505)

Applying these principles of the reflective practitioner and reflecting on action, I deduce my
response in this book group setting was triggered by numerous factors: the impact of the book
itself, which has provoked many passionate responses; my own experience in the late 1970s
and early ’80s as a cadet journalist in the newsroom of a regional newspaper where females,
including myself, were subjected to varying levels of sexual harassment including low-grade
assault; my past journalism practice, which involved covering crimes in the courts, police
rounds, interviewing the victims of crimes and general exposure to the trauma of others; and
my identification as a feminist. Other factors would include that I participate in a book group
(not one of the groups studied in this thesis but the one that inspired this thesis) and I am a
reader. Applying Bourdieu’s (1987) reflexive sociality, I am also younger than the
participants by one to two generations and this would have had a bearing on how I behaved. I
would also factor in what people close to me have identified as a hyper-sensitivity and
tendency to flare up and flee confronting situations. And while I am a mature PhD candidate,

6
There is an Asia Pacific Dart Centre in Melbourne.

85
I am also an apprentice researcher of limited experience in scholarly research. What I have
gleaned from reflecting on my actions is to be more mentally and emotionally prepared when
in the field to enable the detachment required from non-participant data gathering. But while
my outburst is surprising to me, the participants seem unperturbed.

P1: Well, you say what you think.

P2: Turn this off. [Referring to the recording – I don’t.]
P3: Yeah. Yes.
FB: I’m dismayed at your attitude to these young girls. I feel like you’re blaming them and
excusing his behaviour. He was in a position of power. I’ve been sexually assaulted at
work. I didn’t put in any, sorry, this has just brought some stuff out. I thought we
were all feminists in this room.
P4: No.
P1: Well, we are.
P4: We don’t want to be labelled anything, very much.
FB: Okay, fair enough.
P6: We’re talking about the book though.
P4: We’re not feminists, we’re just women, for God’s sake.
FB: Women, women who are not supportive of young women who were in a situation
where they felt compromised by a man who was in a position of power over them.

P5: It’s the power that makes a difference.

FB: And I just find it, it’s upset me, because I would have thought you would have been
more sympathetic to the girls in this situation, but you’re talking about them as if
they’re mentally unhinged and ...

P1: No we’re not, no, no.

FB: ... as if they’re at fault because they complained.
P1: No, not …
P6: No.
FB: I find that, I find that quite strange.
P6: I think we’re talking about Helen Garner, really, and the way she’s ...
P2: Presented it.

It is possible that Participant 6 is trying to mollify me by suggesting that they are talking
about how Garner presented the story as opposed to their own response to it, but even if this
is the case, this comment does convey an awareness that this is the author’s version of the

86
events as opposed to the version and this conclusion is backed up by other exchanges in the
discussion. A little later Participant 3 says, “I think there’s confusion between us and Helen
Garner, that really don’t take it out on us, because it’s really her fault”. These readers are
sympathetic to the author’s interpretation of these events and her emotional responses to the
people involved but are not accepting her version as the version because they are aware of
her subjectivity. While they are clearly influenced by Garner’s version, they are able to
contemplate how Garner has influenced them through her authorial voice, what one describes
as her “intrusions” into the story. They compare her unfavourably to Chloe Hooper, who also
wrote in the first person with The Tall Man and had been a novelist before writing a work of
non-fiction.

P4: But I found, well, I compared it to other books which were like “The Tall Man”, do
you remember we did “The Tall Man”? And she, and then that, what’s her name?

P2: Chloe Hooper.

P4: Chloe, yeah. She has a much more detached way of presenting the story, and I think
there’s only one or two occasions where she does become involved emotionally. And
I find that the most irritating thing about Helen Garner’s writing, is that not only is
she fulsome about the story, but she’s fulsome about herself, and who wants to know
about Helen Garner? Not at all.

For Participant 4, Garner’s narrative mode is irritating rather than enlightening, because it is
too focussed on the self, but it is a highly subjective narrative mode that Garner has adopted
for all her subsequent works of non-fiction and indeed some of her later fiction, including Joe
Cinque’s Consolation (2005), The Spare Room (2008) and House of Grief (2014). In a
cultural analysis of new journalism, David Eason (1984) claims there are two modes of
constructing reality in journalism: ethnographic realism and cultural phenomenology, which
he also called modernism. As discussed in Chapter Two, Giles and Roberts (2014) took
Eason’s two modes approach and combined it with Webb’s theory of rationalism and
romanticism in journalism (1974) to situate works of literary journalism along a spectrum
from objective to subjective (p. 101). Giles and Roberts described ethnographic realism and
cultural phenomenology as:

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 … two modes of responding to and organising the experience of reporting, which is typically
a personalised, interpretive, and evocative account of reality, with ethnographic realism
including texts that have a narrator and “utilise literary techniques associated with reflective,
exploratory, and essentially personal forms of literary journalism”. (2014, p. 101)

Cecilia Aare, in an essay presenting her model for analysing the interplay between voice and
point of view in literary journalism/reportage (2016), describes it thus:

ER [ethnographic realism] usually is based on reconstruction as a journalistic method and

combines an omniscient third-person narrator with “objective” representation techniques
influenced by social realism, according to Eason, who terms this form realism. CP [cultural
phenomenology] makes the reporter’s own “subjective observations visible and combines a
first-person narrator with a pronounced reflective and questioning approach, which is directed
both toward the reporter’s observations and the status of the narrated text. (p. 110)

Aare finds Eason’s two modes too limiting and comes with up with five different ways of
describing the authorial point of view in literary journalism. Using Aare’s framework, The
First Stone would be considered a Dissonant First-person Narration, where the story is
internally focalised through the reporter (p. 124).

When the I-narrator’s perspective is emphasized in the form of a questioning attitude

(dissonance) the paradox arises that reality may be depicted as more nuanced, that is, more
complex, and that other characters’ subjectivity is thus given room to grow. Dissonance here
may accordingly become a tool to create empathy with the Other. All together these ways of
narration illuminate my conclusion: what transforms the texts from self-narration to
journalism is a matter of direction (Aare, 2016, p. 134).

But some of these readers find Garner’s narrative voice annoying and it diminishes their
enjoyment of the book and confidence in its veracity.

P4: Yeah, as I said, there’s too much of Helen Garner intrudes in this book, and that’s
irritating. I mean, I thought when she tells you about how she went to have the
massage. Oh my God. Truly.

P5: She tells us about all her friends, so she’s just sharing her own experience …

P5: … She does use an awful lot of colourful, well, evaluative description of characters. I
don’t like that.

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P4: No, I think she, if she’d done it in a much more rational, detached way, I would have,
I would have judged this book more kindly…

P3: … Yes, I think so too. It’s, yes.

P4: Yes.

P2: A different way of telling the story would have been better.

“A different way of telling the story would have been better” is a perspicacious comment
from Participant 2, with its inherent criticism of Garner’s approach and implicit
understanding that it has in some way distorted the telling. Participant 5 considers Garner’s
colourful descriptions of characters, a literary device employed by literary journalists, as a
negative. Tulloch (2014) argues that the mode of telling the story is the first choice for the
journalist constructing a narrative, because trust in journalism lies in the truthfulness of its
practice not the objective truth of its observations.

Fundamental to this is the construction of an authentic narrative voice, a voice we are

disposed to trust. These choices are directly related to the representation of a narrating voice,
ranging from the so-called “omniscience” of the invisible storyteller, where the narrator is
banished from the scene, through various forms of narratorial presence, to the fully formed
“subjective” account of the so-called “new” (circa 1960s) journalist. (p. 631).

The First Stone is unapologetically a fully formed subjective account, but for these readers,
Garner’s is not a voice they are disposed to trust. In fact, some of her editorial decisions have
them questioning the validity of the book as a work of non-fiction.

P6: Would it have been better if she’d written it as fiction rather than this mish mash,
where we had Vivian F and someone else, and you couldn’t hold in your head who
these characters were, that was very irritating ...

P7: … And changing the names made it a fiction then.

P6: Yes, all of them had their names changed.

P7: If it was journalism, you can, you state the names.

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This leads into a revealing exchange about literary journalism and truth-telling, where these
readers are demonstrating Hellmann’s theory (1981) that readers would find it obvious when
an author speculated or fantasised in a work of journalism.

P1: There also were tedious passages where you thought the reportage didn’t sort of ring
true somehow every now and again.

P5: I think she padded it out a lot with her thoughts on things really.

P1: Yeah.

P5: Yeah, I was sick of the whole thing by the end of it.

P7: Yes.

P4: Well, and that doesn’t do any service to the book.

P5: Didn’t she do the same in that John, that Joe Cinque thing, a lot of it was about her as
well?

P2: Oh, not as much.

P5: Yeah, but she does intrude a hell of a lot into her work, doesn’t she?

P2: But not as much as this one.

P5: No.

P1: Well, is that literary journalism, to intrude yourself, I suppose? Does that negate the
fact that she’s so much in the book, does that actually make you suspect the truth of
anything she’s writing.

P6: I think it does, I think it does.

P5: Well, no, it negates the genre of literary journalism, as far as I’m concerned.

P2: Yes.

P7: Yeah, I agree, I didn’t think ...

P2: Well, it should be one or the other.

Here these readers are trying to navigate the blurred boundaries of literary journalism and
obviously finding it difficult. Participant 1 asks if the intrusion of the journalist into the
narration “makes you suspect the truth of anything she’s writing?”, which is one the most

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serious criticisms levelled at the genre, that it does precisely that. Participant 5 decides it
negates the genre of literary journalism and Participant 2 concludes it should be one or the
other, implying it should be fiction or non-fiction, journalism or literary journalism, not a
conflation of the two. But simply by asking the question and reflecting on it, I would argue
these readers are not only navigating the blurred boundaries of literary journalism, they are
drawing their own conclusions about the veracity of Garner’s version and it is this reflective
practice that is most useful when considering whether readers accept the author’s version of
the story as the version of the story. These readers clearly do not and have given reasons why.
Which is not to say they did not find “truth” in her account, as Participant 3 says, it’s the truth
as she saw it. It is then up to the reader to decide how much of that truth they are willing to
believe.

P5: So, can you claim that she was telling the truth in her novel?

P2: The truth as she saw it.

P5: Or her book, rather.

P1: Well, she didn’t have their, their input, did she, so how could she tell the whole truth?

P2: No.

P1: No, she couldn’t.

P2: But she had their accusations of course.

P5: No, I think she made it clear there’s no such clear-cut thing as the truth in these
situations, it depends entirely on your viewpoint.

P6: Yes.

P5 : I mean, the truth bit might have been did he actually put his hands on them, but we’re
never going to know that, and after that it’s everyone’s own interpretation.

Participant 5 claims we will never know whether or not the Master put his hands on the
women as they allege, with the implication that this is the “truth” of the situation portrayed in
The First Stone. But the discussion has revealed that, for these readers, that is not actually
their primary concern as much of their discourse has focussed on whether or not his actions,
whatever they amounted to, warranted what happened to him.

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P1: ... is the punishment fitting the crime.

P5: That’s what we’re talking about.

P2: Yes, yes.

P1: And the punishment was a destruction, whichever way you look at it, of a man, his
wife and his kids, really, because that family, which presumably everything she writes
about him, he sounds a decent bloke.

Research question three asks: Do readers accept the author’s version of the story as the
version of the story and, if so, what are the implications for the genre’s truth-telling claims?
The fact that Helen Garner’s position on the events chimes with some of the readers’
positions on the event does not mean they are accepting her version of the story as the story –
but nor does that negate the genre’s claims to truth-telling, because this example of it has
amplified larger truths for these readers.

P5: But she did raise some really important issues. She brought the situation to the public
... in a way that lots of different points of view got put. So, if you were reading it, you
could always find someone whose point of view you agreed with. It wasn’t cut and
dried.

P3: No.

P1: Yes, but it’s not what I think, I mean, because we’ve questioned so much about it, you
can’t say it’s a truly factual account of anything, can you?

P5: No, it’s more a book that gets you thinking about the whole issue.

P3: Yes, it’s sort of sociological isn’t it, really? I mean, the different attitudes …

P3: … But the fact that she insisted it’s fiction7, it’s not reporting, it gives her the access
to tell untruths, really.

P2: Well, I don’t know whether she, I don’t think it’s under fiction, is it?

P4: No.

P2: No, it’s under, what is ...

P3: … Literary journalism.

P2: Is it literary journalism, yeah.

7
Garner has never asserted The First Stone is a work of fiction but it is probable Participant 3 misspoke.

92
P4: … I think it’s semantics really, it’s just semantics to say something’s, it’s to make you,
it’s to make you sort of think “Oh well, this is this”, it’s just ...

P2: Yeah, but you have to read everything in terms of, well, I think, its genre, I would say,
you’ve got to judge it from what the writer is writing from, the point of view...

In pushing back against Participant 3’s comment that it’s a work of fiction thus allowing the
writer to tell “untruths”, Participants 2, 4, and 5 demonstrate an understanding that this is a
work of a specific genre and needs to be read accordingly. These engaged readers have also
recognised where the author has imposed her interpretation of events on the narrative and
even how this might have influenced their response to it. They have been engaged “over the
edge” and by reflecting on their struggles with the blurred boundaries of literary journalism
have shown themselves capable of determining the veracity of Garner’s version, recognising
it as “the truth as she saw it” (Participant 2).

The discussion revealed that these readers did find Garner intruded on the book at times, as
observed by Participant 4 at the start of this chapter, but that Garner did allow them room to
come in, as she said she hoped to do. Their reflexivity as readers helped them navigate The
First Stone’s complexities and ambiguities and settle on an understanding that it was telling
Garner’s truth if not the whole truth. They identified the work’s trigger points for them and
drew conclusions about how the way the story was told impacted on their appreciation of it.
They demonstrated Heyne’s “certain kind of caring” (2001) with the depth of their
engagement and expressions of concern for the fate of the Master (if not so much the young
accusers). In Chapter Five a very different approach to the writing of a work of literary
journalism disappoints the Annandale Book Group for its lack of authorial intrusion on the
narrative.

93
 Chapter Five: Broken Lives, by Estelle Blackburn, and the Annandale
book group

“But what I really am very interested about in this whole idea of writing narrative
non-fiction is, what makes a credible read? What is it that we love about this sort of genre?
And how hard is it to write it? And in a different way how hard is it to read it too.”
(Participant 5)

“I knew that I wanted to tell a good story, one that would attract the jury in the street
– general readers – in any case anything beyond that in legal terms was impossible. It
would be a challenge to get the authorities to acknowledge a mistake made by their
colleague decades ago. So, I chose a style that I thought would appeal to the average
crime reader – one that moved along like a novel rather than a straight piece of
journalism full of facts but not particularly engrossing.” (Estelle Blackburn, 2007)

Broken Lives, The Complete Life and Crimes of Serial Killer Eric Cooke, by journalist Estelle
Blackburn, was first published by Stellar Publishing, Mosman Park, WA, in 1998, with
revised and updated editions in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005 by Hardie Grant and republished
by Reader’s Digest in 2008 (Trove). In painstaking detail, it recounts the crimes Eric Cooke
committed between 1958 and 1963 in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, which included
eight separate murders, 14 attempted murders and numerous break and enters and robberies
before he was found guilty and hanged in Fremantle Gaol in 1964. Cooke chose his victims at
random and deployed a variety of methods to kill and maim. In an article comparing
Blackburn’s book with two others that drew on the same events, but in different genres: Tim
Winton’s novel Cloudstreet (1991) and Robert Drewe’s memoir The Shark Net (2000), Paul
Genoni describes Cooke as an “opportunist murderer”.

Unlike most serial killers he had no obvious modus operandi – his murders including
the running down of a pedestrian; a stabbing; a bludgeoning with a hatchet; a
strangulation, and four shootings. It was because of this bizarre aspect of his crimes
that police and the public took some time to realise they had a serial killer in their
midst. (2012, p. 1)

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Cooke’s victims were both male and female, varying in ages and from different social
classes. Blackburn wrote the book to try to establish the innocence of John Button, who had
been wrongly convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, who died after
being run over by Cooke on one of his nightly, random rampages. The book also considered,
but in much less depth due to the lack of involvement by the Beamish family, the case of
Darryl Beamish who was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment, for the murder
of 22-year-old heiress, Jillian Brewer, in 1959, a murder subsequently found to have been
committed by Cooke, who confessed to it after he’d finally been caught in 1963. John
Button’s manslaughter conviction was quashed by the WA Court of Criminal Appeal in 2002
and Darryl Beamish’s wilful murder conviction was eventually quashed in 2005, after earlier
attempts to have the conviction overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal failed.

Broken Lives is much awarded and lauded. In 1999 it won the WA Premier’s Award for
historical and cultural studies, the West Australian Media Alliance Clarion Award for
greatest contribution to journalism, and the Perth Press Club Award for sustained excellence
in journalism. In 2001 it won the Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime Book, and
Blackburn won the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2002 for service to the community
through investigative journalism in Western Australia and the Walkley Award for Most
Outstanding Contribution to Journalism in 2001 (The Walkley Foundation).

According to excerpts published in the first pages of the 2005 edition, Broken Lives has been
described by critics as “an outstanding work of investigative journalism (Red Harrison, The
Australian), a “brilliant reconstruction of the crimes of Perth’s hare-lipped serial killer”
(Evan Whitton, The Australian, deploying an unfortunate and unnecessary juxtaposition of
hare-lip and serial killer), and “one of the greatest works I have ever read on crime, courts
and police…the Australian literary equivalent of In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) and
Executioner’s Song (Norman Mailer)” (Ken Pederson, Innisfail Advocate, Queensland). As
mentioned in Chapter Two, In Cold Blood (1966) and Executioner’s Song (1979) are
recognised classics in the genre of literary journalism, so this critic places Blackburn in
illustrious company as well as supporting the book’s inclusion in the genre being explored
here.

There are other clues to justify its inclusion in the genre of literary journalism. In the preface
to the 2005 edition, the author Blackburn states the book is factual, a result of her

95
investigations over six years involving original research and interviews with more than 160
people. “At points where I have found conflicting evidence, I have chosen the version that I
find to be most acceptable” (p. ix). Blackburn’s source material listed comprises police
records, prison files, state archives, legal documents, court transcripts and recordings;
Hansard from the Parliament of Western Australia; books; journal articles; unpublished
manuscripts; newspaper articles; television programs; letters; interviews conducted by the
author; and site visits. In her book The End of Innocence (2007), which is about the process
of writing Broken Lives, Blackburn details the difficulties of gaining access to these records
and documents, and for getting the go-ahead to write the story at all, which involved the
consent of Eric Cooke’s widow, Sally, and their six living children. Blackburn gains access to
nine boxes of Cooke’s police files, which she has to copy using shorthand under the watchful
eye of a police officer (2007, p. 52). Cooke’s files included hand-written descriptions by
Cooke himself of his movements when he perpetrated the crimes, including times and
transport. In the preface to the 2005 edition of Broken Lives Blackburn writes, “The only
sections that are not factual are those relating to the thoughts and emotions of Lilly Button,
who died in 1989” (2005, p. xii). In The End of Innocence Blackburn expands on this.

I was moved by Lillian Button’s pain and determined efforts on behalf of her son. In Broken
Lives – what I describe as a factual book – I invented her emotions and described how she
felt. I drew on some of my own life experiences and a feeling of a spirit connection with
Lillian8, but of course it was still fictional. I believe this to be an allowable literary technique,
which I adopted to illustrate the wrongful conviction affects more than the prisoner sitting in
his cell. (Blackburn, 2007, p. 62)

In laying her cards on the table in the preface to the 2005 edition, Blackburn lets her readers
know that, while she proclaims Broken Lives is a “factual book”, it is not exclusively one.
She also addresses the most contentious aspect of the book, the inner monologues she invents
for Cooke.

My reconstruction of Eric Edgar Cooke’s complex personality, his thinking and motives is
entirely my interpretation. I formed my opinion through my research and discussions with his

8
Blackburn has earlier referred to a spiritual upbringing and says she “gets it” when Lillian’s daughter refers to
her late mother’s presence in the hallway.

96
 family, psychiatrists and a psychologist who examined him and surviving victims. (2005, p.
x11.)

It is her use of these inner monologues and other literary techniques such as descriptive
writing, reconstruction, character development, and dialogue, that helps identify the book as a
work of literary journalism. Interestingly, Blackburn didn’t set out to write a book of that
genre. In an interview with Sue Joseph for Behind the Text (2016), Blackburn claims she
didn’t understand the theory behind In Cold Blood when she read it but was drawn to the
style as a means of getting people to care about John Button’s innocence.

I just chose it, naturally thinking that’s the style I want to use. So only after I did that did I
discover there’s this whole genre and it’s got various names and it’s a particular style. It
seemed the natural way for me to write this book to achieve what I wanted to achieve.
(Joseph, 2016, pp. 171-172)

Blackburn goes on to confess to her interviewer that she didn’t know what she was doing
when she deployed this style in Broken Lives. She explains that came later, when she was
approached by Murdoch University with a scholarship to do a PhD on how she wrote Broken
Lives. “They wanted to help legitimise this genre of nonfiction. So, then I understood.
There’s literary journalism, they’re trying to legitimise it as a genre, it just came absolutely
naturally to me” (2016, p. 176). Blackburn demonstrates an awareness of the impact this style
of writing can have on the reader, and she seeks to justify her choices.

It's impossible to be entirely objective – the book title, like a newspaper headline, already
gives a slant to a story before the reader gets into it. Quite naturally I'm colouring the writing
with descriptions and choice of words and layout as I see it. I write Button in terms of being
small, frightened, wimpy, cowering, innocent, naive, traumatised, grief-stricken. Cooke is
criminal, malevolent, creeping, sneaking, murderous, cold, angry, hateful, vengeful. Though I
take his life through from birth to death, I start with a precis of his execution – I do so for the
drama, including the dramatic gallows confession. But it also immediately puts into the
reader’s mind that he is criminal, violent, a murderer. The police are big, blinkered, biased,
pressured, cold-hearted, stand-over merchants. The judges are just cut-out figures, just parts
of the huge juggernaut that rides roughshod over little people unable to stand up for

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 themselves. While not putting myself in the script like Ludovic Kennedy and David Yallop9
do, I am in there because my views are an integral part of the way I have written it and the
language I have used. I am, after all, trying to persuade the reader to a particular point of
view. (Blackburn, cited in Phillips & Tapsall, 2002, p. 301)

With this comment, Blackburn concedes she has deployed the techniques of narrative and
character description to frame her story in a way that will achieve her goal, which was to
demonstrate to readers the innocence of Button and Beamish and establish the guilt of Cooke.
But she tries to justify this approach by referring to the “slanted newspaper headline”
suggesting daily journalism, ostensibly a practice rooted in objectivity, indulges in similar
techniques. Newspapers run campaigns advocating for their communities for change or for
justice. For example, The Herald in Newcastle, NSW, campaigned for a Royal Commission
into the sexual abuse of children in religious institutions in a prolonged campaign called
Shine the Light. In 2013, The Herald team of senior journalist Joanne McCarthy, editor Chad
Watson and reporters Ian Kirkwood and Jason Gordon, won the Walkley Award for coverage
of community and regional affairs and McCarthy, who advocated for victims who shared
their stories, won the Gold Walkley the same year (The Walkley Foundation archive).
McCarthy would go on to win another Walkley Award, for Public Service Journalism, in
2017, for her series “Living a Nightmare”, which advocated for women suffering ill-health
from mesh implants, published by the then Fairfax Media (The Walkley Foundation archive).

Robert Jensen (2008) defines advocacy journalism as combining the use of journalism
techniques to promote a specific political or social cause. “The term is potentially meaningful
only in opposition to a category of journalism that does not engage in advocacy, so‐called
objective journalism” (The International Encyclopedia of Communication, p. 1). The
#MeToo movement is a resonant example of advocacy journalism. The phrase “me too” was
first used on the social media site Myspace in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke. In the wake of
the exposure of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein as a serial abuser of women by The New
York Times in 2017 (Kantor and Twohey, October 5, n.p.), and with media outlets publishing
the testimony of survivors of sexual harassment and assault independent of any legal

9
Kennedy, a British journalist who wrote about miscarriages of justice and advocated for change and David
Yallop a British journalist who has written several books on unsolved crime, are both writers who include an
overt authorial viewpoint, as does Helen Garner, discussed in Chapters Four and Six.

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proceedings, the hashtag #MeToo began to spread globally. The Weinstein accusations
triggered a wave of allegations of sexual assault and harassment against powerful men,
including producers, actors, directors, and politicians (Zarkov & Davis, 2018).

Within days after the first accusations against Weinstein appeared in the media, women who
had had similar experiences began to use the #MeToo platform to tell their story. Since then,
#MeToo has become a global phenomenon, spreading from the US to the UK, Canada,
Australia, Israel, India and beyond. The end is nowhere in sight. (p. 3)

Willa McDonald and Robert Alexander’s book Literary Journalism and Social justice, which
is to be published in mid 2022 by Springer International Publishing, examines how a
commitment to social justice and equity has occupied a place in the global history of literary
journalism.

In the process, this volume focuses on the critical attitude the writers of this genre bring to
their stories, the immersive reporting they use to gain detailed and intimate knowledge of
their stories’ subjects, and the array of innovative rhetorical strategies on which they draw to
represent those encounters. The book’s contributors explain how these strategies encourage
readers to respond to injustices of class, race, indigeneity, gender, mobility, and access to
knowledge. Together, they make the case that, throughout its history, literary journalism has
proven uniquely well adapted to fusing facts with feeling in a way which makes it a
compelling force for social change. (SpringerLink, “About this Book”, para 4)

There are obvious crossovers between advocacy journalism and literary journalism that
differentiate it from “objective” reporting. All four texts being studied in this thesis could be
regarded as examples of literary journalism that contain elements of advocacy journalism, be
it advocating to establish the innocence of two men (Broken Lives), the failures of the justice
system over the death of a young man at the hands of his partner (Joe Cinque’s Consolation),
the damage done to Indigenous Australians by colonisation (The Tall Man) or the harm
caused to an academic by the punitive nature of 1980s feminism (The First Stone). What
distinguishes them from one another is the varying literary techniques the writers deploy and
the extent to which they are transparent with their readers as to what they’re doing.

Broken Lives is structured as a series of short chapters, each with a title and a date or a time
frame, for example “Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe 1931-48” is about the birth of John

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Button during an air raid in Liverpool, England. Each chapter contributes factual information
on an aspect relevant to the story, in particular the circumstances of each of Cooke’s crimes.
The victims are written about in careful detail: their age and appearance; their childhoods and
backgrounds; their hopes and dreams as gleaned by interviews with the living; and the
appalling circumstances of their death or injuring by Cooke. Street names and suburbs and
times and dates are all recorded, and events and exchanges of dialogue are reconstructed. The
impact on the victims’ families is given due weight, resulting in an impressive work of
reportage.

As mentioned earlier, Blackburn begins her book on the day Cooke is hanged: October 26,
1964. In the second paragraph she writes:

A short, slight man with dark, wavy hair and a twisted mouth has watched the first streaks of
light herald the day through the small slit window high up in a narrow cell in the punishment
block at the back of Fremantle Prison. (2005, p. 1)

Given Cooke was in his narrow cell and dawn would have broken on October 26, 1964, as it
does every day, Blackmore might safely assume there were streaks of light through the bars,
but she cannot know Cooke watched the streaks of light, so in the second paragraph of the
first chapter the author has imposed herself on the narrative by taking a literary liberty with
the facts by assuming Cooke watched the dawn break on the last day of his life. It is worth
noting for its implications for the rest of her story-telling’s claims to journalistic legitimacy.
Blackburn can more confidently know, as she goes on to write, that Cooke makes a last
confession to the prison chaplain in the cell with him 10 minutes before being taken to the
gallows. He swore on a Bible that he had killed Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson. This
much has been documented in The End of Innocence (2007), a detailed account of the process
of producing Broken Lives, where Blackburn writes about taking elaborate steps to get access
to the Reverend Jenkins’s statement which he had written following Cooke’s execution.
Dated November 12, 1964, it includes an account of Cooke’s confession on the Bible and
notes that Cooke was in a calm and controlled state of mind. But Blackburn’s speculation that
it’s likely Cooke watched the streaks of light sets the tone for the book. Throughout, the
writer describes the emotions characters are feeling in response to events and information,
most controversially she suggests the state of mind Cooke is in when he kills. It’s one thing
for a writer to construct and shape a story, as Blackburn describes above; it’s another to

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presume to know what another person is thinking. This is the province of fiction, of course,
but given that, in real life, reading minds is the one thing humans can reliably know cannot be
done, this does weaken the book’s status as a work of journalism, even though it was
awarded journalism’s highest honour in Australia, the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding
Contribution to Journalism in 2001 (The Walkley Foundation archive).

The problematic use of the interior monologue in literary journalism is explored by Matthew
Ricketson, who devotes a chapter of his book Telling True Stories (2014) to its use, asking
“are they ‘one more doorbell to push’ or the province of fiction?” (p. 176). Ricketson finds
the interior monologue the most controversial element of the narrative approach in non-
fiction and uses a number of examples to assess whether it is a technique that can be
deployed with ethical impunity or at least journalistic accuracy. Ricketson provides three
examples of Blackburn’s attempts to get into Cooke’s thoughts. He is critical of her use of
language, saying the monologues “read like a Gothic novel, in phrases such as ‘a powerful
new urge stole over him’” (Ricketson, 2014, p. 187) and finds that the horrific nature of the
crimes and the fact that Cooke is dead exacerbate the difficulty of trying to determine another
person’s thoughts. Ricketson concludes that in venturing into interior monologue territory,
Blackburn set herself a task that was bound to backfire. “The potential benefit of gaining at
least some understanding of Cooke seems outweighed both by the likelihood of offending the
surviving families and appearing to be voyeuristic, despite her best intentions” (p. 188).

Ricketson draws on interviews he conducted with seven Australian writers of narrative

journalism and on the work of Robert Boynton, who interviewed 19 American writers of non-
fiction for his 2005 book The New New Journalism, and notes that 19 of the 26 writers
interviewed avoid the device (2014, p. 189). But Ricketson concludes that while it’s not
impossible to ethically write interior monologues, it is difficult. “… too difficult to do
successfully, that the margin for error is too great, the consequences of failure too serious
and, finally, because many believe the interior monologue sits more comfortably in the
domain of fiction writing” (p. 189).

In The End of Innocence, Blackburn reveals that she wrote the interior monologue for Cooke
at the urging of her editor, Zoltan Kovacs.

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 He reminded me that I knew more about Cooke than anyone after all the research I had done
and said that I had the right – the duty, even – to try to get into his head to explain his
motives. I had been very careful never to put words into Cooke’s mouth other than those he
had written in a statement or said in court. Now Zoltan was telling me to be an author, not just
a journalist. I wondered if I could be that bold, but I had Zoltan’s blessing – practically his
instruction. (2007, p. 185)

She had Cooke’s confessions, his life story from his legal, medical and mental files, and had
met several people who knew him. She read Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936), which
featured a hare-lipped killer, getting ideas from its cold protagonist. In her attempts to re-
create Cooke’s psychological state with an inner monologue as he commits unspeakable acts
on one of his victims, Blackburn became aware of “the dark side within us all … But I felt I
got it right. I felt it explained Cooke, his anger and emotions, and made him a human being
instead of just the cold-blooded Nedlands Monster” (2007, p. 193).

With the benefit of hindsight, Blackburn recognises the perils of using the inner monologue
for Cooke by telling Sue Joseph (2016) she should have put the internal narrative in italics
“in that it is fiction” but goes on to reveal that she had wanted to include Cooke’s confession
in the appendices, but claims she was advised against it, without revealing by whom. “But
what that would have shown is how much of that internal thinking, conversation, comes
directly from the confessions” (p. 177).

Blackburn recounts a meeting with Cooke’s children where they complain about her “daring
to know what their father was thinking” (2007, p. 232). She tells them the inner monologue
was based on her research, including interviews with a psychologist and two psychiatrists
who knew Cooke.

…and that it was aimed to make him a human being with thoughts, emotions and
explanations instead of just a cold-blooded monster. When I asked them where they thought I
was wrong, there was silence, which suggested an emotional basis to their complaint. (p. 232)

With this comment Blackburn exposes a certain naivety given she might have expected an
emotional response when talking to the offspring of a serial killer, which detracts from her
slight sense of umbrage that they complained about her use of the interior monologue. That

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they failed to articulate where she was wrong in her construction of Cooke’s frame of mind
does not mean she got it right.

Phillips and Tapsall (2002) have written about the ethical challenges of investigative
reporting that deploys the techniques of storytelling, arguing that when writers put words into
the mouths of characters long dead or create several characters from one person, they “break
their contract with the public to present the truth” (p. 301) and therefore jeopardise the right
of the piece to be awarded the appropriate status of journalism. They describe Blackburn’s
six years of research compiling Broken Lives as a “true crusade during which she put her
professional and personal life on hold, made use of her multiple personal and journalistic
networks, and persuaded, cajoled and pestered those whose cooperation was essential to
revealing the whole story” (p. 308), and conclude that she successfully made the case for a
reinvestigation of John Button’s conviction and thus served the public interest.

Applying the ethical slide rule, it appears from the success of Blackburn’s book and the
subsequent public acclaim and reopening of the case that public opinion here was prepared to
endorse the journalist’s judgement concerning the merit of the case and found acceptable the
ethical licence Blackburn admits she had to take from time to time in order to gain access to
material, or to present the story (Phillips & Tapsall, 2002, p. 308).

While Broken Lives concerns itself largely with a detailed chronicle of Cooke’s vile crimes
and of the two miscarriages of justice that occurred alongside them, it does address larger
themes, including the impact of Cooke’s actions on Perth itself. Paul Genoni (2013) writes
that Blackburn portrays Perth in the ’50s and ’60s as an innocent and optimistic land of
conservative middle-class values, while also suggesting that Perth society was beginning to
show signs of the stresses that emerge when social and financial advancement is highly
valued.

Cooke’s urge to kill is described by Blackburn as a desire for “revenge against the happy,
beautiful people” (161), both for the insults they had directed towards him and their lifestyle
that he envied. In this way Cooke’s murderous deeds are represented as a repellent
manifestation of class-based hatred in a city that prided itself on its lack of class distinction …
Perth, Blackburn informs the reader one final time, was “vastly changed” by the Cooke
murders and “would never be the same again”. (p. 305)

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Blackburn immersed herself in this Perth and in the era covered by Broken Lives with
obsessive attention to detail (2007, p. 92). She tracked down all the victims of the hit and
runs; police hadn’t charged Cooke with these crimes so they were not easy to locate. One in
particular, Kathy Bellis, resisted all approaches until Blackburn flew to where she lived in the
hope a face-to-face encounter would pay off. It did. Regarding the hit and run of Kathy
Bellis, Blackburn says she wanted to build a picture of the days preceding the attempted
murder to demonstrate how happy family life was shattered but Bellis cannot recall exactly
what they did on Boxing Day, the day before the hit and run of December 27, 1958, and so
Blackburn tells her it was a hot day and Bellis responds that they had most likely gone to the
beach. Blackburn asks which beach and so on, to build the details of what probably
transpired, but confesses she is aware these descriptions in her “factual book” were not
factual, but she believed it was a legitimate literary device in a narrative-style book (p. 104).
Blackburn claims writing in the style meant she had to gather information that went beyond
the facts: she had to build the story through scenes and descriptions, including detail on what
the weather was like on a particular day. She visited crime scenes, walked the routes of
funerals, and trawled through history books and even her own diary. She employed interview
techniques aimed at getting a person to open up and interviewed more people than she needed
to. “Far more work was required than would have been had I written the book as a straight
piece of journalism” (p. 164). While Blackburn is, as she recognises, straying into the realm
of fiction, her diligent approach to providing a solid foundation for her reconstructions
mitigates against it being a major concern. Again, it comes back to how readers receive her
account, and whether they can accommodate the blurring of the boundaries between fact and
presumed fact when engaging with a work of literary journalism.

Blackburn’s approach to her research had a sound ethical base. Mindful of not wanting to
betray anyone’s trust, she allowed each of the 11 women to approve their chapter. She was
also mindful of the sensitivities of John and Helen Button, the Cooke family,10 the victims’
families and the surviving victims and their families, which meant she was “walking on
eggshells while writing” (2007, p. 165). Blackburn forged a friendship with Sally Cooke, and
with Helen and John Button. She drew on her own emotions and experiences. “However, the

10
Blackburn met with the five Cooke children in March, 1999 and recounts they were mostly concerned about
the sexual focus and Blackburn daring to know what their father was thinking (discussed earlier in this
chapter). She says they were courteous, listened to her points, and she felt they understood her position a
little better. She learned Sally, Cooke’s wife, hadn’t passed on to the children that Blackburn had sought her
approval of her interpretation of sexual motive.

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essence of this style is that the author stays out of the narrative…” (p. 165). It’s true that
Blackburn, unlike Helen Garner, does not use the first person or insert herself in the narrative
by observations of her own feelings about certain events or how she responds to the
individuals she interviews on a personal level. In this sense, the author does “stay out of the
narrative”, but her empathy for the stakeholders in the story is clear from the above examples
and from her dogged mission to help achieve justice for John Button. Joseph (2011) argues
empathy for the people who have entrusted their stories, often born of trauma, to a journalist,
is an essential part of a journalist’s ethical practice.

The book group that met in an Annandale terrace in Sydney one evening on December 5,
2013, was made up of five women and one man. The man, a retired senior Qantas executive,
was not a regular member, but contributed a great deal to the discussion as he had read the
whole book, unlike his wife, a PhD in Anthropology, who admitted to not finishing it in time
for the meeting. This group comprised neighbourhood friends, all tertiary-educated
professional women and mothers. One was a primary school music teacher and specialist,
another a lawyer with Legal Aid; one worked in the disability sector and another in the
community health sector. The group had been asked to read Broken Lives and the general
consensus at the outset was that it was repetitive and heavy going, with more detail on
Cooke’s crimes than was necessary. One participant described the detailing of each crime as
“unrelenting” (Participant 3), two found the writing “pedestrian” (Participants 1 and 4) and
cliched (Participants 1 and 5). Participant 3 asked permission to speak and went on to declare
the book “incredibly boring”.

P3: Even though the book was about the most horrendous crime, of every sort, because it
was unrelenting. It was just fact, after fact, after fact thrown at you, in a very
immature way I thought. It was this pattern of introducing you to the victim, telling
you how nice the victim was, and how innocent they were, and then what happened to
the victim, and then the consequences on their life and the family’s life… And it just
went on, every time … Unless… its purpose was to establish the guilt or innocence of
both or… It just seemed to be a waste of about 250, 300 pages.

Given the purpose of the book was indeed to establish the guilt of Cooke and the innocence
of both Button and Beamish, men falsely accused of crimes committed by Cooke, this
criticism seems a harsh, but valid recognition of the formulaic way Blackburn has presented
the material. As demonstrated in the opening quote of this chapter, Blackburn not only
wanted to demonstrate the need to exonerate the two men, she wanted to engage readers by

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writing the book in a style that went beyond journalistic reporting, and these readers seemed
unimpressed with the level of detail and prosaic prose. The participants also found fault with
the editing, one describing it as “sloppy”, going on to suggest the writer had overly relied on
police records and transcripts, which were not interesting and full of grammatical errors.
Participant 2 said the editing was average and cited a couple of examples as to why. “One
minute it’s a shotgun, then it’s a rifle, then it’s a bullet, then it’s pellets.” This example was
trivial in a 462-page book so densely detailed and meticulously researched. But Participant 2
returned to the editing later with another example: “She had the Luftwaffe bombing them in
1944. The Luftwaffe didn’t even cross the coast after about 1942 or 3… she obviously just
looked up the compendium 1944 and just bang”. In fact, German bombs continued to fall on
Britain until 1945. While not comparable to the scale of the Blitz of 1940-41, the Luftwaffe
undertook bombing raids on Britain in 1944, what’s referred to by historian Williamson
Murray as a Babyblitz (1983, p. 251). But Participant 1 picked up on Participant 2’s point,
asking if it affected his interpretation of other things and if he thought it made the writer less
reliable. Participant 4 asked if he wondered what else was missed and he replied: “This was
just a speed hump along the way, you sort of park it”. This notion of readers “parking”
concerns about the status of certain facts is a useful one in that it suggests readers can
accommodate small errors of fact without it necessarily compromising their appreciation of
the book; they notice the credibility gaps but store them away to focus on the work. But it’s
not until Participant 4 ventured that she liked the detail and was interested in the story, in
particular the role fate plays in the destinies of the victims, that the mood in the group shifted,
helped by the intervention of Participant 5.

P5: Well, I had a slightly different response, I guess. I read it to the end because I wanted
to know how they caught him first of all. I guess that was the hook which kept me
turning the pages. It’s a very flat factual style, and I found that a little overbearing
sometimes. But at the same time, there’s a whole, there’s, sometimes there’s a whole
lot of material where I kept thinking, how do you know that? Hang on just a moment,
that’s beyond the police transcript.

P1: What sort of things?

P5: What he was thinking as he crept through the undergrowth, what was in his mind.

Participant 5 demonstrated she had intuited the “blurred genre” status of creative non-fiction
and her unease with it, with the observation that a lot of material went beyond the police

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transcript, and she wondered how the writer knew what Cooke was thinking. She recognised
this tension between the real and the imagined when she went on to say:

P5: But that’s the interesting thing, isn’t it? About reportage, and fiction. Where you
either imagine facts or you imagine feelings, and then extrapolate them in a broader
situation. So, I had queries about that.

It’s not clear here whether Participant 5 was distinguishing between reportage and fiction or
conflating the two, but either way, her “queries about that” remark suggests this “imagining”
is a trigger point where this reader cares about the factual status of the work, particularly
when it involves the writer using their imagination. Of course, the constraints of reportage are
accuracy and accountability. Facts and feelings cannot be invented or imagined in the
retelling of a true story. But the way the story is framed in the retelling, the choices made by
the writer to include or not include certain bits of information or quotes from their sources,
inevitably has an impact on the way the story is told and received. Journalism is a mediated
form of expression, after all, and practitioners of longer forms of journalism engage their
creativity and their imaginations. Ricketson points out this happens from the start of the
process of producing a work of journalism, as the journalist has to come up with ideas for
stories and angles on stories, and creativity is also engaged with the writing of leads and the
structuring and shaping of features (2018, p. 3). Ricketson describes journalism as being
more supple than is thought, with creativity in journalism as a “both, rather than either/or
proposition” (p. 11).

From relatively straightforward features to more ambitious long-form pieces, journalists can
and do exhibit creativity, imagination and inventiveness. These qualities jog alongside more
easily recognisable journalistic traits – doggedness, independence and aggression. It seems
clear, though, that these qualities are inherent in much good journalism and that they can lift
individual pieces from competent to compelling and memorable. (p. 11)

Janet Fulton (2011) investigated journalism practice by interviewing 36 journalists, editors

and cadets, and applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity in analysing
the data and found that print journalists are creative when they understand the rules and
procedures from the domain, understand the preferences of the field, and use this knowledge
to produce an article that is novel and appropriate.

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 A print journalist cannot be considered creative within the common-sense, Romantic view but
by placing the journalist, as individual, within Csikszentmihalyi’s systemic Rationalist
approach and viewing the social and cultural contexts as of equal importance within the
creative process, all genres of journalism can be seen to be able to produce creative cultural
texts. Rather than using a narrow, person-centred view of creativity, encouraging a broader
understanding could lead to better journalistic practices. (2011, p.13)

But Participant 5 used the phrase “imagined facts” to imply reporters made things up to allow
them to generalise or locate the universal in specific events. If so, Participant 5 would be
demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the ethical foundation of reporting and
indeed, literary journalism, but extrapolation of universal truths from a situation is often the
point of covering the story in the first place. Journalism is more than just a relaying of
information; it’s a means by which consumers of journalism make sense of the human
experience. Individuals may extrapolate different truths and versions of reality from the same
story, but that is beyond the author’s control. In her essay on the role of the imagination in
literary journalism, Lindsay Morton (2018) reminds us that invention and imagination are not
synonymous and argues the imagination has an ethical role to play in the construction of literary
journalism, finding it a key component of literary journalism practice (p. 93).

Another distinction between literary and more traditional forms of journalism is evident here:
Objective, empirically driven journalism relies primarily on the reproductive imagination to
make judgements that render the world meaningful, while literary journalists exercise the
productive imagination by embracing subjectivity and affect, but more importantly push into
the symbolic realm. (2018, p. 98)

What’s important to this investigation is that Participant 5 was identifying a trigger point
where she cared about the factual status of the work, the trigger being Blackburn’s use of
interior monologue. This reader is a deeply engaged reader, she is reflective, and this ability
to reflect and question what she is reading suggests she is competently navigating the blurred
boundaries of literary journalism, even if not fully cognisant of the use of the imagination in
the creation of these works.

Our engaged reader, Participant 5, also demonstrated an understanding of the power of

literary journalism to evoke place and to structure reality through extensive research and a

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narrative approach when she commented on how well the author had evoked Perth, which
was also recognised by critic Paul Genoni, as referred to earlier in this chapter.

P5: I liked the sense of, I liked the way, I think she recreated Perth in the ’60s quite well.
This parochial small town, people living at the end of the dirt road in the new suburb.
That’s done well.

P4: And it’s still a bit like that too …

P5: … it’s a feat of re-creation, there’s no doubt about that. She’s done the hard yards,
she’s read every fact, and she’s strung it together with some kind of structure… But I
found the style a bit wearing sometimes because it was so unadorned, and it was a bit
like, a bit like a police report with grammar basically [laughs].

While Participant 5 commended Blackburn for her “feat of recreation”, recognising this came
from hard work, extensive research and careful structuring, like her fellow readers she found
the writing in Broken Lives “unadorned” and the style “a bit wearing”. The discussion tended
to circle back on this concern, in particular when it came to the psychology of Cooke and
how he was able to commit such appalling crimes.

P6: … someone can write an, invent a fiction about terrible things people have done and I
think oh God they’ve gone too far. But in fact, that thing about the truth is always
stranger than fiction.

P4: [Overtalking] Truth is always stranger than fiction.

P1: Well maybe that’s the fault with this writing, is that in a way she’s trying to make it
very factual and just oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. But we want it to be just a little bit
more ramped up. But maybe she’s trying to say …

P4: [Overtalking] Downplay, downplay, downplay.

While not privy to this discussion, Blackburn might agree with the criticism; she certainly
acknowledges her limitations as a writer in her interview with Sue Joseph. “I certainly
wouldn’t say I was a good writer. Sometimes I read books and I think, oh what a beautiful
turn of phrase, what a beautiful word painting. I am a journo, I’m a pretty straight journo and
have a go at fancying it up but…” (Joseph, 2016, pp 183-184).

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“Fancying it up” means changing the appearance of something or someone to make it or them
more appealing (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). One might fancy up an outfit with
accessories, enhance a face with make-up or adorn a hall with streamers and balloons. When
it comes to facts, fancying it up suggests deceit or distortion, but it could simply be a means
of presenting the facts and the “characters” in the story in an interesting way for the reader.
Fancying it up is the province of literary journalism, which in adopting literary devices to tell
a true story does run the risk of deceit or distortion. But fancying it up, ironically, is what this
group of readers found lacking in Broken Lives. The group returned to genre later in the
discussion when Participant 6 asked a series of questions about the writing of what she called
narrative non-fiction: “What makes a credible read? What it is that we love about this sort of
genre? And how hard is it to write and to read?” Certainly, these readers found that a strict
recounting of Eric Cooke’s crimes, the recitation of dates and names and facts that Blackburn
relays in her text, wasn’t enough to hold their attention across 462 pages.

P6: So how do you write this stuff well? And what do you look for as a reader that allows
you to keep turning the pages without feeling that you’re just, as you said, reading a
police transcript with a few extra bits of florid detail into it… is it more powerful to
write it as a series of tellings? When people have traumatic events and they take
narratives that have, some histories of those events people tell those traumas in
exactly this way. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and
then this happened. And she’s just done that over 460 pages, I guess. Is it more
powerful to follow that formula? Or is it more powerful to write it, as (name redacted)
said, as a novel? Or as a movie where we have interpretation?

These questions suggests that the very things that are problematic in narrative non-fiction as
Participant 6 referred to it, the devices that are deployed by writers of the form – authorial
point of view, recreated dialogue, character descriptions, inner monologues – are the very
things that make the writing compelling, as asserted by Ricketson (2014) earlier. As stated at
the start of this chapter, Estelle Blackburn says she chose to write the book in a way that
would appeal to a reader of crime to get away from a straight-forward reciting of facts, but
these comments demonstrate that, for these readers at least, it hasn’t been as compelling a
page-turner as it might have been had it been written as a novel. Blackburn’s meticulously
detailed outline of every crime and her decision to set Cooke’s crimes in chronological order
make it appear to these readers, on first reading, as pedestrian in approach. Indeed, as
Blackburn tells us in The End of Innocence, the book’s editor, Zoltan Kovacs, said the first
draft read like a ‘series of police round stories” (Blackburn, 2007, p. 163).

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Participant 5 compares Broken Lives with the writing of the new journalism of the American
novelist and essayist Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote,
who she claimed used literary forms to write about politics.

P5: And I don’t know if people have read Hunter S. Thompson11 but he’s off his head on
acid most of the time, and the prose is as wild and as florid and fulsome, but it’s a
great ride at the same time… He’s actually telling you a whole lot of things under all
this extraordinary barrage of adjectives. And this struck me as being incredibly plain
by comparison.

P3: Yeah you’re right.

P4: [Overtalking] Yes plain. It’s a good word.

P5: So, it’s as if she’s taken a literary form but she’s eschewed the characteristics, the
literary characteristics to kind of embellish what she’s writing.

P6: So, it hasn’t worked though.

P1: But why did she do that? Did she feel that it would undermine it?

This type of debate around an author’s lack of rhetorical flourish in talking about profoundly
upsetting events reflects the critical response to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published in
an entire edition of the New Yorker on August 31, 1946.

Hiroshima was ranked first on the list of the Best American Journalism of the
Twentieth Century and remains in print many decades after publication, but it was
also attacked by critics as the prime example of an all-pervading understatement in
The New Yorker, whose “denatured naturalism” and “antiseptic” prose becomes a
“moral deficiency”. (Ricketson, 2014, p. 138)

11
That Hunter S. Thomson was on drugs when he was writing is disputed by Ricketson (writing in The Age on
January 10, 2009). Ricketson describes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the bible of every drug-whacked
hippie. “Since its publication in 1971, many readers have believed Thompson was on drugs when he wrote the
book but, in fact, as shown in Thompson's letters to Jim Silberman, his editor at Random House, he was
working carefully to "simulate a freak-out" and was sent back to his desk in a funk when Silberman
commented on a draft that it was "obvious" he hadn't been on drugs when he wrote it.

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In a letter to the Politics Editor of The New Yorker in November 1946, the novelist Mary
McCarthy described Hiroshima as an insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare. “To
treat it journalistically, in terms of measurable destruction, is, in a sense, to deny its
existence, and this is what Mr. Hersey has accomplished for the New Yorker” (1946, re-
published in Politics, 3, (1968).

Ricketson finds that Hersey’s apparent understatement of the magnitude of the dropping of a
nuclear bomb on civilians was understandable for many reasons, including the historical
context of it being World War II and the author’s terror during his three weeks in Hiroshima.
Instead of expressing directly how he felt, then, Hersey channelled his energy into enabling
the reader, as far as possible, to sympathise with the bomb survivors’ experience (Ricketson,
2014, p. 139). Blackburn’s aim in Broken Lives was to get readers to recognise the innocence
of Beamish and Button, and her systematic recounting of each of Cooke’s crimes
demonstrates his guilt. Given the horrific nature of the crimes, which is detailed by
Blackburn, you do wonder what the book group felt was lacking.

As well, the absence of the omnipresent narrator in Broken Lives seems to trouble these
readers in the same way Hersey’s absence in the narrative troubled his critics. But Ricketson
points out that many authors of narrative non-fiction come from a background in journalism,
where they’ve been advised to keep themselves out of it. Unlike the range of narrative voices
available to a writer of fiction, writers of non-fiction are limited by the nature of the events,
issues and people they are portraying. “Is an omniscient narrative voice appropriate in
narrative non-fiction when, by definition, a writer cannot possibly know everything about the
actual events they are portraying?” (Ricketson, 2014, p. 133).

Earlier in the discussion, Participant 1 had asked the group if it wanted more from the
writing; she later repeated the question and Participant 5 suggested the writer hadn’t revealed
anything about the problems and challenges in writing such a book.

P5: …And trying to get inside people’s heads that are dead and gone, and you’re reduced
to reading the newspaper and the police transcripts… So, I didn’t get a sense that she
was fully aware of the difficulties and the problematic nature of writing this kind of
book. It’s like she kind of avoided the hard bits sometimes.

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P1: Or do you think that it’s because, it was either going to be about a miscarriage of
justice, or it was about the last man hanged in Western Australia?

P5: Or is it about trying to understand psychopaths? She, it could’ve been those three
directions.

P3: Or had she done this other thing, which was to present you with all the facts …

P5: [Overtalking] Yep, all the facts.

P4: [Overtalking] Make up your mind. I think that’s what she did.

P1: And then you decide, try and make it out yourself.

This group would have been intrigued to know Blackburn went on to write a book about the
experience of writing Broken Lives and, in that, addressed many of the questions they ask
here. And Participant 1, at least, recognised that it was up to them to decide for themselves
once presented with the facts. But without recourse to The End of Innocence, the group
returned constantly to the book’s perceived weaknesses. In one exchange, Participant 2 even
criticised the book for not manipulating her in the way crime writers do.

P2: Oh, God I’ve got to read the next chapter because you’re two in the morning and you
really hate the author for playing tricks with you like that. Whereas this one I had no
trouble at all I could just go.

P6: Pick that up tomorrow.

P2: Pick that up tomorrow.

The readers seemed disappointed that the book stuck so rigidly to the facts, which provides a
useful contrast to the reservations readers in the other book groups expressed when they
perceived Helen Garner (discussed in Chapters Four and Six) and Chloe Hooper (discussed in
Chapter Seven) straying too far into fictional territory with their authorial interjections into
the narrative or overly descriptive passages. Those readers feared a distortion of the material
facts of the story, a skewing of the narrative by the author to advance an agenda or sway them

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to a particular point of view about the events on Palm Island or the guilt of Anu Singh. But
these readers wanted less telling and more analysis.

P5: Well, that’s want I mean, it’s factual but on a surface, there’s no underneath bit and I
keep thinking dive down a bit.

P3: [Overtalking] Where’s the analysis?

P1: What do you mean? What do you want that you didn’t get from it?

P5: More analysis.

P4: Yeah, and less telling.

P2: [Overtalking] Would it be just investigation?

P1: [Overtalking] But she says at the beginning that she doesn’t want to, she says
something about all, the suppositions about her psychological state are my own.
Because maybe she feels that the evidence wasn’t there to support it.

P2: But again, that’s the journalist reaction, I’m not going to oppose anything in this and
it just ends up being flat.

P6: And that’s why she’s got a Walkley award after all, because it’s an award for
journalism. They judge it as good journalism.

P4: Yeah but journalism is more than that too. It doesn’t just do that eighteenth century
thing of the lithograph of detail, does it.

P1 Well I don’t know. Does it? Should it?

P4: It can.

Participant 4’s comment that journalism doesn’t “just do that eighteenth century thing of the
lithograph of detail” is an appealing turn of phrase, but it’s not clear what it means other than
a reference to printing practices in the early days of newspapers. But it suggests these
engaged readers recognise that contemporary journalism is not just facts on a page, but a

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shaping of language into stories that resonate, while also being aware of journalism’s
constraints; for example, they expressed disappointment at not getting a sense of Cooke’s
motivations, but Participant 1 acknowledged that this might be a limitation of the form.

P1: And that was the thing that pissed me off. Not having a strong enough sense of what,
she didn’t get inside him, and I think maybe that’s what you can’t do in narrative non-
fiction … She imposes herself a bit in the other characters, but not to him, not really.

It’s harsh criticism that Blackburn didn’t get “inside” the head of Eric Cooke, given he was
dead and a serial killer, and in the light of earlier criticisms of her use of interior monologue
to try to describe his motivation to rape and kill. It was a wise choice of Blackburn’s not to
try to explain the inexplicable and certainly not to offer “analysis” that she was not equipped
to offer. In setting out the facts, Blackburn is inviting her readers to draw their own
conclusions about Cooke’s motivations, something this group of readers at least, seems
reluctant to do, although Participant 1 acknowledges later in the discussion that Blackburn
has invited her readers to draw their own conclusions. Perhaps if Blackburn had been more
transparent about her methods and choices, as she went on to be in The End of Innocence, she
might have avoided these criticisms. Certainly, Helen Garner and Chloe Hooper, with their
more overt authorial presences, have avoided being found wanting by their readers when it
comes to writing compelling prose and drilling down into their stories with analysis.

Participants again compare Broken Lives unfavourably with the works of Tom Wolfe, Joan
Didion and Truman Capote, suggesting their work is more compelling because they put
themselves into their stories. But they do recognise this as a constraint of time, and the fact
that Blackburn’s subject matter happened in the past, meaning she could not immerse herself
in the situation in the way a writer covering a present-day story does. And Participants 1 and
5 at least concede it’s difficult to interview someone who is dead.

P5: I guess that’s the difference between re-creation and something that’s more current.
Again, I’m thinking of those other books that I remember by Joan Didion and Tom
Wolfe where they were all a participant in the… activities and they were engaging.
So again, they were removing the barrier between the journalist and their observation
and the actors I guess, in the activity that was happening. So that’s a different thing.
But I guess that’s a particular form of literary non-fiction isn’t it? When it’s
attempting to re-create the past in that way.

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Participant 5 draws a distinction between the re-creation of past events and writing from the
point of view of a participant or observer of events in real time, mentioning Joan Didion and
Tom Wolfe, saying it removes a barrier between the journalist and their observations and the
people involved in the event. This is a perceptive insight, and one that has been the focus of
many scholarly responses to literary journalism (Aare, 2016; Eason, 1984; Roberts and Giles,
2016; Webb, 1974, among others). Aare takes a narratological approach to literary journalism
to present a model for analysing the “interplay between voice and point of view in literary
journalism reportage”, which “problematises the reporter’s special role as an eyewitness by
highlighting how narrative techniques can create empathy with the Other and move the
reader’s gaze away from … the one who is witnessing” (2016, p. 107). Using tools from
classical narratology, Aare studies the form of the texts to conclude it is the narrator’s
visibility that determines the position of the text on a scale between “subjective” and
“objective” forms (p. 107). It is Blackburn’s decision in Broken Lives to be an invisible
narrator – what Aare describes as reconstructed third-person narration (p. 133) – that
disappoints these readers and leads Participant 1 to call it a “failure” of its genre. Participants
5 and 3 agreed that if Blackburn had put herself into the story in some way, even if just to say
she was investigating it, they would have “bonded with her in the journey” and implicitly
been more sympathetic to her cause.

P1: [Overtalking] But maybe she didn’t want to herself as the central figure…

P5: … But she’s still deliberately very impersonal. And that’s the choice she’s taken.

P1: [Overtalking] It’s very impersonal. To try and make it as credible, maybe. And that
it’s not about her, that it’s actually about, she’s just telling, this is what he did and
this is what the cops did …

P4: [Overtalking] Yeah exactly. Not about her.

P1: And this is what happened and it’s truly truly terrible. I think that’s the point.

P5: [Overtalking] But I think part of the power of new journalism was to challenge that
impersonality. And to …

P6: [Overtalking] Exactly. And to push those boundaries.

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P1: Yes but this is not an example of that though.

P5: No, it’s not, no no no. What I’m saying is that that kind of work I think either
consciously, or they did anyway, borrowed more literary techniques and I guess there
was, it’s more a crossover between fiction and non-fiction. But this is all very
resolutely… in the non-fiction category.

P1: In the non-fiction camp, yes… So, then that ultimately fails then doesn’t it?...

P5: …Yeah. I couldn’t read it again.

P2: [Overtalking] I think that on so many levels it was fine. It just wasn’t what you
thought it might have been I think, it wasn’t In Cold Blood.12

P1: [Overtalking] Yeah exactly.

P6: Which was a great read.

P2: Which was a great read.

P3: [Overtalking] Which was a great read. You could read it again.

The readers are implying here that they would rather read a book about a true crime which
draws more heavily on literary techniques than one which is purely factual, because it makes
for a more compelling read. This tells us something about their ability to manage the so-
called blurred genre status of literary journalism. These readers recognise the boundaries
exist, but they accommodate border incursions in the interests of experiencing more
satisfaction as a reader. When a writer sticks too rigidly to the facts and resists embellishment
or authorial input, these readers feel let down, as their expectation is that they will be
entertained and provoked as opposed to just informed. Their comments about Blackburn’s
“impersonal” approach also tells us they have an awareness of the power of the author’s
voice to persuade and would have preferred her to play a more prominent role as narrator to
get them more invested in the story.

12
In Cold Blood has an omnipresent third-person narrator too, as it happens.

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In The End of Innocence, Blackburn states that the essence of the style of narrative
journalism she attempted in Broken Lives is that the author stays out of the narrative. She
acknowledges the book was coloured by her perceptions, but says she strived to stay
objective and adhered to the Journalists’ Code of Ethics point 4: “Do not allow personal
interest, or any belief, commitment, payment, gift or benefit, to undermine your accuracy,
fairness or independence” (MEAA, n.d.).

Nevertheless, my views are present in Broken Lives in terms of how I structured the story, my
terminology, my descriptions. John Button is generally “John”, and described sympathetically
in terms of a frightened, grieving, traumatised, small, cowering innocent. Eric Edgar Cooke is
named in full in the style of police, who always use the middle name when referring to any of
their cases, or as Cooke with no title, as newspapers refer to criminals (Blackburn, 2007,
p.166).

Blackburn recognises the myriad ways the mediating task of writing impacts on the way a
work of journalism is constructed. The choices a journalist makes when confronted with data
or events to shape into a news story, feature or book affect every text, from the headline to
the caption on the photograph, which is also chosen from a range of possibilities to illustrate
the story. As Keeble puts it:

Take, for instance, a conventional hard news story: There’s the conciseness and immediacy of
the intro section (capturing the news value); the overall tone to consider, the use of quotations
(to invest the coverage with a “human interest” element); the often subtle handling of
attribution; perhaps the brief description of a person or place; the insertion, appropriately, of
background, contextualizing information; the close attention to the specific style of the
publication; and the clear structuring of the report. And so on. Isn’t all that creative! (2018, p.
96)

In The End of Innocence, Blackburn goes into some detail demonstrating how she privileged
Button over Cooke in her recounting, and the Annandale Book Group readers clearly
recognise this in their reading of Broken Lives. But Blackburn’s extensive research and
decision to interview as many of the victims and their families as was possible might have
obscured the clarity of her storytelling, so the quest for justice is not as clearly foregrounded
as it could have been. Certainly, the following exchange, where they compare Button to
Cooke as if they are characters in a novel with back stories and motivations, indicates they

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failed to fully grasp that John Button was, from the start, an entirely innocent man who found
himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was the victim of a miscarriage of justice,
and that Estelle Blackburn wrote her book to demonstrate his innocence and have him
exonerated. How he was treated by his father really has no bearing on the facts.

P4: Right at the beginning you could tell she had sympathy for John Button. I mean she,
right at the beginning of the book she said …

P5: [Overtalking] Yeah, she was overt about it.

P4: This is what happened, and he lived as this, and in the end thirty years later he’s
married and he’s blah blah so he was very, she was very positive about him so there
was no way she was painting a picture of him as guilty…

P4: …In another funny way she was almost comparing Cooke and Button for a little
while.

P5: Yeah I think that’s true.

P4: Like, he had a rough, he had it very rough. But what made this guy become such an
overt hideous psychopath? And literally living two separate lives and presenting
themselves really completely differently. And John Button who also had separations
and bullying and …

P3: [Overtalking] But he had love.

P1: [Overtalking] He had been loved, yeah.

P4: Cooke’s mother loved him too, but she couldn’t protect him. And that was the
difference I think … And I think in a way she was asking that question, how come that
happens … But I thought about it while I was reading.

P1: But maybe that’s a good thing.

P5: She didn’t to me but that’s another opportunity she didn’t take.

P1: No but then maybe that’s because she’s saying, take those opportunities ourselves as
the reader. The reader can take those opportunities. And you did.

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Participant 1’s comment to Participant 4 – that the fact that she thought about the influence of
Cooke’s childhood when pondering how it was possible he went on to commit the crimes he
did suggested the author was offering opportunities to the reader to decide for themselves
what to make of Cooke – is valuable, as it suggests that readers of non-fiction are agents and
co-creators in the same way readers of fiction have been described by the reader-response
theorists, in particular Wolfgang Iser (1972), who found texts were comprised of the
determinate (the facts of text) and the indeterminate (the gaps in the texts where things are
not explained) that allowed a reader to make their own interpretation. While Iser was writing
about fiction, this notion can be applied here. Literary journalism, even of the most prosaic
kind, leaves room for the reader to decide about the truth of a real-life event and to draw their
own conclusions. The sophisticated readers of Broken Lives repeatedly demonstrated that
they were capable of accommodating its occasional literary flourishes and indeed wanted
more of them, to keep them engaged in the narrative. But they were engaged enough to be
capable of what Lehman calls “reading over the edge” (1997, p. 3), where the “characters” in
works of literary journalism are actual people, often still alive, and so a reader is engaged
both inside and outside the story (Lehman, 1997, p. 30).

P1: So, his children are a bit younger than us, aren’t they? They would be in their? How
old would the children be?

P6: So, they’re still around.

P5: That’s the other thing did she interview the children? What are they like?

P1: Yes. What happened to them?

P5: What are they like?

P3: Changed their names.

P1: You wouldn’t be able to Google them I imagine. Let’s Google them.

P6: That’s a bit scary.

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P1: And send them a nasty email. (Laughter)

P5: They’ve probably changed their names I suspect.

P6: I’d suspect so too.

P4: Must be horrible.

The laughter that followed Participant 1’s remark about sending a “nasty email” made it clear
she was joking, but what this exchange shows is that these readers have some empathy for
Cooke’s children and are willing to speculate briefly as to their existence in the world beyond
the book. Lehman (1997) ties this idea of “reading over the edge” with his theory that readers
can navigate the “blurred genre status” of literary journalism, and this discussion
demonstrates these readers are capable of both.

In The Ethics of the Story, David Craig (2006) argues that storytelling devices deployed in
investigative journalism may illuminate or obscure the truth, and sometimes do both. Craig
cites Ettema and Glasser, who have “pointed to the power of narrative form – in particular the
narratives of investigative journalism – to frame the morality of situations of terrible
wrongdoing” (Craig, 2006, p. 17). For this group of readers, Blackburn failed to frame the
morality of the injustice committed against John Button, by incarcerating him for a murder he
did not commit, powerfully enough to move them. Indeed, several participants demonstrated
they didn’t fully grasp the facts of it, with their comparison of Button to Cooke, as if the two
had anything in common other than a cruel twist of fate. Given Blackburn’s pains to keep
herself out of the frame in Broken Lives, it's ironic that her follow-up work, The End of
Innocence, where she focuses the narrative on her engagement with the story, is a more
compelling book. Framed against the journalist’s daily struggles to research and write the
story, it more successfully conveys the magnitude of the injustice against Button, and
Cooke’s vile crimes.

Towards the end of the discussion, it seems to dawn on the members of the Annandale Book
Group that Blackburn’s research and dogged persistence was an extraordinary achievement in
helping get justice for Button and Beamish, for which she was awarded a Medal of the Order

121
of Australia in 2002 for service to the community through investigative journalism in
Western Australia.

P2: [Overtalking] But if you read the back bit.

P1: I mean I haven’t read it; I can’t quite remember.

P2: Someone said she’s showing off a little bit at the end and there was one paragraph
where she takes a leaf from the judges, the what do you call it?

P3: Transcript?...

P2: … No, the summing up. The judgement. And you know she’s to be complimented and
it’s all to her doing.13 And I think it was as a trigger of that.

P1: So, it was her book. So really it was an amazing thing that she did really I guess, it’s
fantastic.

P4: Done a lot of work.

P3: Well in that context, well done … no, that was a good book.

At the start of this chapter Blackburn says she wanted to attract the jury in the street, but this
particular group of readers did not quite grasp what was expected from them in their failure
to appreciate her mission to clear Button’s name. Blackburn also stated she wanted it to
“move along like a novel rather than a straight piece of journalism full of facts but not
particularly engrossing” and with this group she has missed the mark there as well.
Participant 5’s comment that she wanted to discover what makes a credible read in the
writing of narrative non-fiction, how hard is it is write and to read it, was answered by her
conclusion that Blackburn failed in her ambition to write a compelling work of literary
journalism.

13
The edition read by this group was published in 2005 and included an update on the verdict in Button’s
appeal. The transcript Participant 2 is referring to is a statement read outside the court after Button was
exonerated by his junior counsel Jonathan Davies, who said the appeal had been possible “due to the insight,
energy, and years of dedication put in by Estelle Blackburn” (Blackburn, 2005, p. 461).

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However, Participant 1 has since told me that Broken Lives has proved to be what she called
a “lingerer” in that it has remained in her consciousness years after she read it in spite of her
negative first response. And as this chapter demonstrates, in discussing the book, the group
came to a more positive conclusion about it than they started with, one based on thinking
more deeply about the journalism behind it than judging it on surface level as a piece of
storytelling. This book group tends to read fiction, which might explain why they found the
prose disappointing, but for Participant 1 at least, a connection had been made.

The readers in this group demonstrated an understanding of the limitations and possibilities
of works of literary journalism and expressed a desire for more rhetorical flourishes than
Blackburn provided to keep them invested in the story. Unlike the Friends of the University
of Newcastle Book Group who wanted less Garner in The First Stone, this group wanted
more of the author’s perspective on events. In the next chapter, the (all-male) Merewether
Book Group analyses Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation and finds it much like Goldilocks’
porridge, just right, with enough authorial intervention to keep them interested, but not too
much.

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 Chapter Six: Joe Cinque’s Consolation, by Helen Garner, and the all-male
Merewether book group

“What I want to do, I said, surprising myself, for until that comment I had not
managed to articulate it, even in my thoughts, is to enlarge my imagination to the
point where it can encompass truths as widely separated as your version of events
and the Cinques’.” (Helen Garner talking to the father of the convicted killer of Joe
Cinque, in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, 2004, p. 188).

“Well I didn’t want to read it. When you gave me the topic I said: “What crap.
There’s no way in the world would I ever pick up or choose to read a book about a
court case I just, would bore the shit out of me.” So I was really surprised that I
actually enjoyed it, and it’s not a book about a court case at all; it’s about a whole lot
of other stuff.” (Participant 5 of the Merewether Book Group)

The controversy among critics generated by Helen Garner’s second book of non-fiction, Joe
Cinque’s Consolation (2004), focussed more on her story-telling techniques than on any
suggestion she’d fabricated material by creating a composite character as discussed in
Chapter Four in relation to The First Stone. She writes again in the first person and puts
herself, again, centre stage in the story, confessing at the start of the book that when it was
suggested to her she write the Cinque story she was a “woman at the end of her tether”, 55,
coming out of her third marriage, jobless and still bruised from The First Stone controversy
four years earlier. Garner says her marriage break-up had left her humiliated and angry, that
she wanted to:

… look at women who were accused of murder … I needed to find out if anything made
them different from me: whether I could trust myself to keep the lid on the vengeful, punitive
force that was in me, as it is in everyone – the wildness that one keeps in its cage. (2004, p.
25)

As narrator, she shares her emotional responses to the murder and the trial, and she puts
herself firmly in the Cinque camp. She expresses her dismay that she cannot secure an
interview with the two accused women. “My fantasy of a journalistic even-handedness, long
buckling under the strain, gave way completely (2004, p. 269).14

14
Garner herself concedes she didn’t succeed in that particular endeavour when she told Suzanne Eggins she
didn’t get to talk to Anu Singh or Madhavi Rao and that very early on she formed a strong commitment to the
Cinques (Eggins, 2005, p. 125).

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McDonald (2011) finds this technique somewhat disingenuous: “Garner acted as her own
devil’s advocate, constantly using personal revelation, and rarely flattering revelation, to
create a sense that the texts were even-handed and trustworthy” (p. 267).

Mainstream media critics were more favourably inclined. Writing for Australian Book
Review, Peter Rose (2004) found Garner’s gifts as a writer set her apart from the “usual run
of crime journalism”. She writes not as an expert in law or criminal psychology, but as a
literary artist – equipped with a rare sensitivity to nuances of dress, speech, and body
language, and with the faith that such details can reveal the essence of a personality or a
moral condition.

At the same time, Garner stresses her own unreliability as a narrator, questioning but refusing
to abandon her instinctive emotional responses: pity for Cinque and his shattered parents, rage
towards Singh – who reminds her of the worst aspects of her younger self – and baffled
horror at the friends who knew of Singh’s plans and did nothing to stop them. Thus, the book
tells two stories in one: the story of Cinque, Singh, and their circle; and the story of Garner’s
quest to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. (2004, ABR, n.p.)

Feminist scholar Maryanne Susan Lever compares Joe Cinque’s Consolation to another
prominent and much lauded Australian work of non-fiction, Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2013),
suggesting that what the two books have in common is this “authorial persona who asks both
readers and interviewees to trust her observation, sensitivity, and moral strength” (2006, p.
1). But it could equally be argued that Garner is simply being honest with her readers about
her own frailties and inconsistencies, signposting to them her personal struggles, potential
biases and tendency to be overwrought. By being transparent with her readers she is leaving
it open to them to judge the material accordingly. She had expressed her regret at not
disclosing she had created a composite character in The First Stone, as discussed in Chapter
Four. And by the time she wrote Joe Cinque’s Consolation, she had established a reputation
as a renowned writer who could perhaps be forgiven for having confidence in her “authorial
persona”.

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In a review of the book in Australian Women’s Book Review in 2004 Maryanne Dever writes:
“Gripping, yes, but I can’t help feeling that, just as she did in The First Stone, Garner here
carries the privileges of fiction across to the genre of non-fiction … to produce, not truth, but
a series of well-honed truth effects” (p. 26). Dominique Hecq contends it is, “an example of
creative non-fiction gone wrong in terms of characterisation and point of view” (2011, p. 3).

In other words, despite the author’s “fantasy of journalistic even-handedness” (Garner 2004,
p. 269), she unwittingly proves disrespectful towards both material and reader: firstly,
because of her motivation in writing the book and the ensuing biased construction of Anu
Singh; and secondly, because she identifies with some hypothetical “ordinary” citizen, which
reflects and informs social stereotypes, thereby shunning alterity. (p. 4)

McDonald (2011) notes that several academic reviewers, such as Suzanne Eggins (2005) and
Dever (2004) accused Garner of trying to manipulate the reader.

They resented Garner’s manoeuvring of her audience to her point of view through her use of
subjective reflection and her appeal to the reader’s emotions. They also disapproved of her
contrived tone of authenticity and objected to her use of sweeping generalisations to include
all women in her particular point of view as demonstrated in this passage: “Dislike of the
body. I imagined every woman in the court thinking, with an ironic twist of the mouth, Tell
me about it!... Maybe only another woman could intuitively grasp the extent to which Singh,
like the rest of us, was ruled by her body, imprisoned in it and condemned to struggle against
it”. (p. 267)

The book has been compared to the worst kind of sensationalist crime reporting (full of
unexamined assumptions, prejudices and stereotypes). In a review of Joe Cinque’s
Consolation published in the journal Current Issues in Criminal Justice, Jude McCulloch,
JaneMaree Maher and Sharon Pickering (2004) accuse Garner of framing the story as a
morality play casting the evil, powerful offender (Singh) against the good, innocent victim
(Cinque) and of a lack of sophistication regarding the criminal justice system, concluding:

By drawing on the ‘common-sense’ interpretive schema of good and evil, and particularly the
myth of the evil woman, Garner’s account serves to entrench and validate commonly held
misunderstandings about crime, criminal justice and the influence of gender on crime and
justice. (2004, p. 240)

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Hecq too is highly critical of Garner’s representation of Anu Singh, who had been diagnosed
as suffering from borderline personality disorder, as a “manipulative and narcissistic bitch”
(2011, p. 6), suggesting it’s dangerous to represent inherently singular experiences in a
reportage mode.

What the author fails to convey is that morality is a system of approvals: there will be as
many moralities as there are groupings in society. There is no empirical way of establishing
which is to be preferred. Instead, she closes ranks with “ordinary” citizens. Ironically, for all
its flaws, the redeeming aspect of Joe Cinque’s Consolation may be that it widens the focus
of its own examination, in part by clinging to the point of view of conventional morality, and
in part by misrepresenting mental illness. (pp. 7-8)

Dever (2004) is critical of Garner dismissing out of hand Anu Singh’s claims that she had
been terrified of Joe Cinque, arguing the narrative is manipulative. “It remorselessly pits the
figure of naïve and trusting Joe Cinque against that of the scheming and seductive Anu
Singh” (p. 26). Dever is also critical of the unflattering portrayal of the middle-class Singhs
versus the salt-of-the-earth Cinques, and even finds the cover photograph of the apple too
obvious a reference to the Garden of Eden, even though she acknowledges that it could also
be a reference to the fact revealed in the book by a former girlfriend that Joe liked to eat a lot
of apples (and also perhaps to the bowl of green apples found in Joe’s apartment). Brigid
Rooney (2005) teases out the religious imagery in the novel in her essay “The Sinner, the
Prophet, and the Pieta: Sacrifice and the Sacred in Helen Garner’s Narratives”, describing it
as “Garner’s particular form of the sacred” (p. 161).

Still rankling from the hurt of The First Stone, Garner does not avoid repeating its mimetic
rivalry in Joe Cinque's Consolation. Both texts challenge secular, legal institutions for their
moral and spiritual inadequacy … Furthermore, in a strange twist, the ferocity of the attack by
pharisaical forces on The First Stone's hapless Master returns in Joe Cinque's Consolation in
the visceral anger projected by the narrative towards the accused. Despite its occasional
compunctions, the narrative drives more strongly towards punishing than imaginatively
understanding its unlovable wrongdoers. (2005, p. 162)

But Rooney concludes that “the troubling ambivalences attending Garner’s performance are
what lie at the very heart of her success” (p. 164). As Kerryn Goldsworthy notes, “People

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who dislike her work are profoundly irritated by those who think she is one of the best writers
in the country” (1996, p. 20).

Newcastle-born Joe Cinque died in Canberra on Sunday, October 26, 1997, after being
drugged with Rohypnol and later injected with heroin by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, at a
dinner party at their flat the night before. Anu Singh, the daughter of two doctors, had moved
to Canberra from Sydney to study law. She was living with Joe, a young civil engineer, and
they planned to marry. She was charged with murder, along with her closest friend, Madhavi
Rao, who had allegedly conspired with Singh to commit the murder. A month into the trial in
1998, a legal problem saw the jury dismissed and the joint trial aborted (Garner, 2004, p. 14).
It was decided the two women would be tried separately. Garner was initially reluctant to
cover the story. She had been asked to consider it by a senior journalist who rang her in
March 1999 to sound her out, thinking it was more her sort of story than his because he
“can’t do psychology” (Garner, 2004, p. 13). The journalist had had a tip-off that Joe had
been murdered after a dinner party at the couple’s house and wondered if the guests had been
told that the crime was going to be committed that evening. Garner writes that she knew he
had thought of her because of The First Stone.

He didn’t spell it out – you’re interested in women at the end of their tether – but I saw at
once why I was the writer he had called … By questioning the kind of feminism that had
driven the story, and by writing it against the determined silence of the two women and their
supporters, I had opened myself to long months of ferocious public attack. The parallels
between that story and this one were like a bad joke. No way was I going back there. (2004,
p. 13)

But Garner finds it hard to say no to someone who thought he was doing her a favour and
contacts the journalist’s source. By this time, Anu Singh’s trial was in progress and Garner
had missed the Crown case against her. She writes she was ready to give up when she read a
newspaper clipping from The Daily Telegraph of the committal proceedings, which included
the transcript of the emergency call Anu Singh made while Joe was dying (Garner, 2004, p.
21).

It was the shrill blast of this dialogue that broke through my indifference and galvanised me:
the killer’s voice pleading, dodging, feinting: the dispatcher’s desperate striving for

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 command; and the jolting visual flashes of Joe Cinque’s death throes – the close presence,
behind the screaming, of a young man’s body in extremis – his limbs, his mouth, his teeth, his
heart. (p. 21)

Garner’s visceral response to the newspaper article is itself expressed in a shrill blast of
words which convey her emotional, almost primal, reaction to Joe Cinque’s death. As she is
pulled into the story, she pulls her readers in with her, using staccato rhythms in her language
and a cinematic description of a scene she did not witness, which is what literary journalists
do, as discussed in previous chapters. In an interview with Brenda Walker in The Writers’
Reader (2013), Garner described this technique as arranging the material in such a way that
it does the “heavy lifting” (p. 163). “This is a fictional technique I suppose. I want to haul
readers right into the text. Push them right up against the people and the situation – make
them feel and smell things, so they have to react (Walker, 2013, p. 163).

Garner arrives at the ACT Supreme Court on April 6, 1999, when Singh’s defence is in
progress. She describes herself as a writer who has heeded the call of a story: “A story lies in
wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals” (2004, p. 24).

Joe Cinque’s Consolation begins with a short preface.

The first time I saw Joe Cinque among his friends and family, the first time I ever heard his
voice, was in the living room of his parents’ house in Newcastle, in the winter of 1999. By
then, of course, he had already been dead for nearly two years. This is the story of how I got
to know him. (p. 3)

This short statement positions Garner and Joe at the centre of the book, immediately
signalling her role as narrator, her attitude towards Joe, and setting the sombre tone. The
book ends with Garner on the couch in the home of Joe’s parents, Maria and Nino, watching
a wedding video featuring Joe as Master of Ceremonies. “Maria and I leaned forward, rapt.”
(p. 327).

Joe Cinque’s Consolation is subtitled A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law. What
defines it as a work of literary journalism are the following, all of which have been referred
to earlier: it is about real events; the people in it are actual people, both living and dead; the

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writer draws on documentary evidence and secondary sources as well as interactions with
stake-holders; the writer deploys literary devices such as dialogue, repetition of a phrase,
description of character; re-creation of scenes; and she puts herself in the story as narrator,
including details of her personal life and emotional response to the events she’s covering.
Garner attends the second trial; she examines all the relevant police documents, photographs
and court transcripts in the department of Public Prosecutions in Canberra; and she speaks to
everyone she can who is connected with the story, including police, Anu Singh’s father, Joe’s
parents, Maria and Nino Cinque, his brother, friends, and his first girlfriend. The writer also
spends time in Newcastle, Joe’s hometown, attends a victims of crime rally, hangs around
lawyers, and interviews the judge who presided over the murder trials. But this is no
dispassionate re-telling of a crime and its punishment; this is a story about the author and her
relationship to the story and how it impacts on her lived reality. Garner places herself at the
centre of the story and each discovery is framed against its impact on her, from her first
encounter with Maria (Garner, 2004, p. 39), to her interview at the end with Judge Crispin.
“Sitting there at the coffee table with this tired, serious, decent man, I felt the self-righteous
anger seeping out of me. There was nowhere for me to go with it. All that remained was
sorrow, and loss” (p. 317). Garner’s self-righteous anger has fuelled her re-telling of this
story, but the full impact of the tragedy seems to hit her at this moment.

Garner is open about her emotional attachment to the Cinque family throughout, while taking
a dim view of Anu Singh – a view formed from reading court reports of the original joint trial
that had been aborted after one month (p. 14). Included in evidence at the trial were letters
Singh wrote to her family and others when on remand. Garner decries Singh’s “adolescent
voice” (p. 18).

She seemed to lack a language deep enough for the trouble she was in, a language fit for
despair. With dread I recognised her. She was the figure of what a woman most fears in
herself – the damaged infant, vain, frantic, destructive, out of control. (p. 18)

Much like when she wrote the letter to the Master in The First Stone, Garner nails her colours
to the mast, describing Joe in the warmest tones and Singh in the harshest, as observed by
Dever, Taylor, and Hecq. There is nothing subtle about it and she reflects on it with candour,
being transparent with her readers about whose side she is on. This technique of taking the
reader into her confidence is what makes her writing so compelling but could be considered

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manipulative. As will be explored later in this chapter, some members of the (all-male)
Merewether Book Group readers found it problematic while others felt it enhanced the
storytelling.

Ronald Weber (1974) contends it is dishonest with the reader as well as oneself to deny the
shaping presence of the reporter because of the theoretical demands of detachment and
objectivity in reportage. “It’s also to erroneously imply that detachment is accuracy, that what
is seemingly stripped of personal opinion and individual feeling is therefore to be trusted and
replied upon” (p. 18). Weber suggests that to remove the author’s take on the story is to
remove literary journalism’s power.

In good literature the whole point is to get the reader to see life on the writer’s terms. Serious
literature is always in a sense escape literature in that it removes us from ourselves and to
some degree locks us within another’s vision of things – with, of course, the paradoxical hope
that, through sharpened perception or broadened awareness, we will plunge back into our own
reality to a greater depth than was possible before. (p. 22)

By being open about her lack of detachment and objectivity and making herself such a central
character in the story, Garner is signalling to her readers the type of book she is writing. This
is not an attempt at subterfuge or obfuscation; this is the sort of transparency that was lacking
in The First Stone, when readers felt betrayed by some of the artistic liberties the author took,
as discussed in Chapter Four. In considering the ethical challenges of writing creative non-
fiction, Theodore Cheney claims ethical problems diminish with personal non-fiction where
the writer deliberately inserts themselves into the story, “Since reader scepticism usually
derives from the question of credibility, readers of personal non-fiction can assess for
themselves the reliability of the writer” (2001, p. 221). McDonald (2011) too credits the
reader with the ability to understand the terms of the writer’s contract with the reader.

Writers who do successfully dance on that line between invention and fact are able to do so
because their readers understand that – through the choice of subject matter and the way the
texts have been constructed – the writing comes closer to a fictional literature than to
journalism. There is a contract, albeit sometimes a subtle one, between the writer and the
reader. (p. 265)

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This is what this thesis is setting out to demonstrate: that the reader can deduce from the
author’s clues when they are being manipulated, deceived, misled or compromised. The more
transparent the author is, the more reflective, the better the reader is able to judge and
respond accordingly.

The Merewether book group

It was 8pm on Wednesday, April 30, 2014, when the all-male Merewether Book Club met at
the home of one its members. The group meets monthly and comprises professional men in
their 40s and 50s. The six members who attended that night had been asked to read Helen
Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. This was the first work of non-fiction they had read as a
group. The men settled in the living room and were supplied with wine, beer and snacks
provided by the host. After some preliminary conversation about sport, they turned to the
book, and their discussion lasted 90 minutes. I recorded the session but did not participate in
the conversation. The discussion was later transcribed. During the discussion the readers
made several references to journalism and reportage that demonstrated an understanding of
the principles of both, but they also revealed an awareness that there was more going on in
Garner’s book than strict reportage.

P2: So, in terms of this book would you say, I must admit there were times I was reading
this and thinking, I’m reading a very prolonged article out of the Good Weekend, or
I’m reading a, it was clearly journalistic… as opposed to a, I think it felt like
journalism to me.

P1: Oh, absolutely. It was like a very prolonged newspaper-like article, which it is a
journalistic book.

P3: Oh, I disagree. I think the…

P5: Yeah, I didn’t think so.

P3: … personal reflections were …

P2: Yeah, well it wasn’t just fact reporting but…

P5: Yeah, it wasn’t, which is what I thought it would be; that’s why I was sort of, “I
wouldn’t read this for quids”, but I think it had a lot more to it and Helen Garner, or
whatever her name is, put a lot more of herself into it, her emotions into it.

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P2: I agree, I agree … I guess it’s because it’s a true story, I guess it’s purely true.

Participant 2 seemed able to accommodate that it was a true story and a work of journalism,
but one that went beyond just the reporting of facts. But Participants 3 and 5 picked up on
Garner’s “personal reflections” and her emotions. Implicit in their comments was a
suggestion this was more than the “journalism” Participant 2 alluded to.

P4: Yeah, with the characters, like, because the characters are real. So even though it
was like a journalistic style because I knew the characters were real you know, it was
easy to engage.

P3: But the other things is, was the story was so bizarre that at times it felt like fiction,
didn’t it? Didn’t it to you?

Participant 4 noted that the characters being “real” people helped him engage with the story.
He is “reading over the edge” both inside and outside the story, as Lehman conceptualises it:
“The writer of non-fiction produces a document for an audience that reads history as both text
and experience, an audience that is engaged over the edge, by which I mean both inside and
outside the story” (1997, p. 3). There is other evidence these readers were engaged over the
edge, with references to their proximity to the story and how these references made the story
feel more real to them.

P2: Yeah, I must admit, having the Newcastle angle in this made it a little bit more …

P3: Azzurri Club.

P2: Yeah, that’s right, the Azzurri Club, you know, the Charlestown address and the …
somewhere in Tudor Street they talked about. They talked about going out to the
Brewery…

P4: The Brewery …

P3: … That’s where they met, wasn’t it?

P5: Yeah.

P2: Yeah, that’s right. They met at the Brewery. So that was, I felt that added an air of, I
guess, reality into it.

But for Participant 3 the actual events of the story were “so bizarre” it felt “like fiction”. He
didn’t say the writing style made it feel like fiction, but the actual story itself, an important

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distinction when trying to deduce if readers are accommodating the “blurred genre” status of
the work. Later in the discussion the readers return to Garner’s skill as a writer.

P1: …because she would insert opinions and, actually I really liked the way she’d
occasionally insert just little bits of her own life; it was really beautiful…

P3: I thought her observational skills were superlative. You know, I think, do you
remember she talked about the letter, how it sort of drifted off, almost like the effort of
writing was so great that it got to the end of the line… and the descriptions of the
people in the dock and things, that were…

P1: I actually quite liked that…

P5: … Yeah, I thought it added something to the characters…

Unlike like the Friends of the University of Newcastle who read The First Stone, these
readers appreciate Garner’s narratorial presence.

P4: And I liked her vulnerability, like the fact that times she was raw and completely taken
aback, and other times she was just completely having sat in Joe’s chair and not
realised it…

These comments imply the participants are aware of the author’s filtering of the story through
her own emotional response to it, but rather than detracting from the work, for the readers
this enhances it and makes it a more readable book. Participant 4 says that while he is “no
student of journalism at all”, he considered it an interesting kind of journalism in that he
didn’t think the author investigated much, rather she reported and observed beautifully.

P1: … It took me by surprise when she first sort of, what’s that doing in the book? I sort
of grew to like it. And there’s a really beautiful piece when she’s talking to Rebecca,
his girlfriend, and it’s really beautifully written where she discovers that Rebecca was
saving herself for marriage and she’s shocked by this, she reckons she’s never met
anyone…and then she, Garner, says, “I remember myself at that stage just raring to
get up and get into it, and leaving a trail of destruction and waste behind.”

P2: Misery, yeah.

P1: That’s just really quite beautiful.

P3: And another beautiful quote, I think it was a friend of hers said something like, oh,
and I tried to remember it: “The world stops at your children’s skin” … and I really
liked the way she did that too.

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P1: And she talked about the doctor, the Indian doctors wearing the gloss of their
profession; I thought that was great.

These readers are recognising Garner’s skill at deploying words to create images that
transport them. Participant 1 particularly enjoys her intimate asides, her willingness to share
her own frailties within the frame of the story, which he finds “beautiful”. This exchange
suggests the readers are recognising how Garner’s techniques of inserting her opinions and
experiences from her own life, along with observation and character description, her
“observational skills”, add to their enjoyment of the story. When Participant 1 described it as
“beautiful”, no-one expressed reservations that this might detract from the veracity of the
account.

Quite early in the discussion, Participant 2 asked the rather startling question: “Did anyone
read the actual book?” What he meant, it transpired, was did anyone read the printed book, as
opposed to reading it on a screen, in this case a Kindle, in digital form. Some had. Participant
2 referred to the fact that on the last page of the digitised book there is an image of Joe.

P2: When you turn the last page and there’s, and it’s a visual thing, but that’s the first
time I’ve got a sense of it.

P5: Because you’ve built your own picture of what he might look like, and it was actually
a…

P2: It was quite a powerful thing to put that there.

P1: Was that on Kindle, was it? I didn’t see that picture.

P4: Yeah, it’s on the Kindle.

P2: Yeah, I thought that was an interesting little thing to do actually.

What’s interesting about this exchange is it demonstrates that Participant 2 is attuned to

aspects of the text beyond the words – Genette’s “paratext” (1987), referred to in previous
chapters – and has made some deductions about the placement of the photo, but also that with
technological changes in publishing one reader may experience the physical reality of the
book differently from another, an unintended consequence perhaps and a challenge for reader
response theorists who believe that even the same reader reading the same text on two

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different occasions will probably produce different meanings because so many variables
contribute to our experience of the text (Tyson, 2006, p. 170). The differences in the way
readers receive texts between a printed book and an online version, and indeed across multi-
media platforms, is beyond the scope of this research project, but would be a question for
future projects, especially considering the surge in popularity of talking books, which brings
an extra dimension in the form of a voice actor interpreting the words in performance and
creating different voices for each character. What this exchange suggests that is relevant here
is that these readers are aware of a degree of manipulation in the placement of the photograph
but are seemingly untroubled by it.

Unlike the other three book groups studied for this thesis, the all-male Merewether Book
Club gives each book a score. During the scoring of Joe Cinque’s Consolation towards the
end of the discussion, Participant 1 reflected that, because it was a true story, it was less of an
achievement for the writer, who didn’t have to invent the story or the characters, but he
recognised the skill involved in the way Garner has told it.

P1: I found it a very compelling book to read and I read it very quickly, but that was, as
(name redacted) said, that’s I think mainly because it’s just the most extraordinary
story and so it’s a little bit hard to score a book where the writer hasn’t thought up
the story, it’s been sort of handed to them. Some aspects of the writing I liked. I
didn’t have very high expectations because I’d read some fiction of Helen Garner’s
and I don’t particularly warm to it, so I was a bit surprised that I really did like the
way she wrote this book, and I really liked the bits of herself that she put into it. So
yeah, I thought it was a good book. I’d give it a seven, I think.

Participant 1 accepts the characters are real people who exist both inside and outside the
story;15 acknowledges Garner’s personal take on the story and her investment in various
aspects of the story; and recognises literary techniques are being deployed to enhance the
power of the story. But his score of seven is based on the fact that, unlike a writer of fiction,
Garner has not had to invent the story, as opposed to any perceived deficits in the way the
story is told. This is an interesting perception of the art of literary journalism which it could
be argued is harder to write than fiction because of its constraints. Indeed, Garner described
one of the many challenges of this form in the 2013 Walker interview. “I had to precis the
barrister’s whole submission in a murder trial, but still make it sound like talking. Hardest

15
At one point during the discussion, Participant 5 Googles Anu Singh to find out what she is up to now; he is,
in Lehman’s term, engaged “over the edge”.

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work I’ve ever done. But it gave me a terrific sense of being informed” (Walker, 2013, p.
163).

Garner’s hard work pays off with this reading group. Early in the discussion the men discussed
the way the writer told the story, commenting on how Garner reinforced the story from different
viewpoints and how effective that was in confirming the reality of the events and the emotional
response of the different people involved. But they did have concerns.

P1: Well, it was a terrible shame in the book that there was no interview with her16… and
that was a great weakness in the book, whether it could have been avoided criticism
of the book, but I found that a very frustrating aspect.

P4: I wouldn’t see that as criticism, because I think she did try to, really hard … to
present a balanced view, but found herself being caught up in the story, and also the
limitations of being able to interview the people in the story. She just had unequal
access.

P3: But surely that was a great, that was for me an enormous strength of the book that
she… revealed her feelings and the conflicts she felt, and that was…

P4: Yeah, and in the end it became …

P3: … a dispassionate description would have been interesting, but not, nothing like …

P4: Yeah, in the end it became a story about people, for me. So, it’s nice to see the
characters come through fairly strongly, you know, to some sense of it.

The readers here demonstrate an understanding of journalistic practice (the need to secure
interviews with all stakeholders in the story) and the need for balance, while also recognising
that straight reporting with no authorial perspective would not have made such a powerful
book. The ethical implications of these “limitations” of being able to interview all the main
stakeholders in the story are also a concern to Sue Joseph (2015), who explores how Garner
resolves the problem of the voices missing from three of her works: The First Stone, Joe
Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief: The story of a murder trial. Joseph suggests
publishing long-form narrative with “missing voices” makes a dubious claim at ethical
practice (2015, p. 4). But she finds that with This House of Grief (2014) the denial of access
to key figures “completely frees Garner and her narrative from the dubious ethical tensions of

16
Anu Singh

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past texts and the notion of ‘missing voices’” (2015, p. 18). “There is now an unfettered
quality to Garner’s writing as ‘she strides across’ the judicial terrain, lacking any self-
conscious apology, stated or inferred, of failing to present an impartial perspective by
presenting two sides” (p. 19).

And her readers understand the nuances. As Shakespeare implores his audience in the
prologue to Henry V to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”, these readers are
able to contextualise the difference between a straight recounting of the facts of the story and
Garner’s authorial interventions in the storytelling, finding it has made for a richer reading
experience, what Lehman (1997) describes as literary journalism’s special power. Participant
4 said Garner set out to give an account of both sides, but the way the story worked out was
that the different players had different emphases in the story, and for some people the
emphasis was just really forgotten. Participant 2 found this imbalance of emphasis
commendable as opposed to problematic.

P2: I thought she was advocating, I got the sense that somewhere in the story she realised
that the parents particularly and he were being dealt a rough deal by the whole
system, and I felt this was her way of kind of putting something on the record to stand
up to, or to sort of somehow redress the account just a little bit…

But the readers identify a trigger point for concern about the factual nature of the book when
they discuss the opening. Joe Cinque’s Consolation starts with a transcript of the phone call
Anu Singh makes to Triple 0 after she has injected Joe and while he is dying. The
conversation between the male dispatcher and a young woman is reproduced in full. This is
followed by Garner’s description of the paramedics arriving at the flat and their actions and
their conversation with the girl. Garner describes in painful detail the dying man’s parlous
state, and the young woman shrieking and flinging herself on the man’s naked body
screaming, “Can't you do anything? This is not happening! I don’t believe this! You can’t
stop! You have to bring him back!” (Garner 2004, p. 9). Then the fire brigade and the police
arrive. Anu Singh is arrested after telling police she gave the man Rohypnol and heroin.
Garner offers no source for the details she supplies. The book group participants found it a
riveting but disturbing way to start the book but questioned how it was possible for Garner to
recreate the arrival of the paramedics, asking where she had got the information from, as she
didn’t witness the scene first-hand or manage to interview Anu Singh.

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P2: Well, how has she got any of this stuff?

P1: Well, a lot of it was off transcripts of the recorded …

P2: Yeah, so I’m guessing that’s what that was.

P1: Well, no, because it’s not, that’s not on the phone, the bit about what the ambulance
and talking to her.

P2: No, no, so that’s one of the few bits in the story where she’s, you don’t know where
that’s come from, whether that’s…

P1: No, and so you don’t really know whether it’s even remotely factual …

P3: Who was there, just the ambulance officers and her?

P1: … what she’s telling you.

P2: … two points. Okay, maybe you’re right, maybe she didn’t get the story right. But then
I wonder where she got that bit of the story from, because all the rest of it is basically
her own observations, isn’t it?

P1: Absolutely.

P2: And the transcripts of …

P1: … she’s saying the girl asked them for Narcan and they said, “No.” I’m pretty sure
the ambulance people aren’t going to tell you that without giving you a reason.

The readers don’t draw any firm conclusions about these concerns, but they do ask questions
about it, going on to question why Garner leaves out aspects of the narrative, such as was
Singh arrested at the time and what happened to Joe’s body. In fact, Garner does tell us that
Anu Singh is arrested at the scene. “They arrested her near the front door of the house and put
her into the police car” (Garner, 2004, p. 11). And it’s likely that Garner was able to extract
the information from court transcripts of the first trial, because while she takes us to the scene
as if it’s unfolding in real time, she goes on to tell us that she came to the story two years
later, when the Crown case against Anu Singh had been presented to the court and the
defence at the trial was underway. She was prepared to let it go until she read the transcript of

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the emergency call Anu Singh made to the paramedics “while Joe Cinque lay dying on their
bed” (2014, p. 21). It was this that made her continue with the story, and she uses it to invest
her readers in the story in the same way. So, while this recreation of a scene she was not
present at is a trigger point of concern for the readers here, it’s actually one that is answered
by closer reading of the text. What is revelatory about this exchange is that errors of omission
and commission are identified by these readers as potential trigger points for concern, but
they interrogated it and made sense of it in their own way.

P4: Yeah, it’s interesting that she didn’t just choose to tell, to give a narrative of what
actually happened in the end. It’s all just the bits and pieces that have been put
together from the transcripts…

P3: Well, there was one bit that I went to a few times in the middle where she said, “I’d
pieced together the bits after she’d been in the library.” And I kept going back to that
to refer to it.

This engaged reader is being both reflective and reflexive as he takes steps to resolve his
need for clarity on this point.

Several of the participants expressed irritation with one of the literary techniques Garner
deploys, which is the repetition of the italicised sentence “Joe Cinque is dead” or writing
“And Joe Cinque is dead” at the end of some sections. Cheney (2001) uses the term “litany”
in a work of creative non-fiction as a “special technique” which “because of its vague
resemblance to church litany, simply lists single words or short phrases that accumulate in the
reader’s mind to create and leave an impression of a person, place, or thing” (p. 175). In her
doctoral thesis “Creative Empathy: How writers turn experience not their own into literary
non-fiction”, (2013) Jo Parnell refers to Cheney’s observation and describes this four-word
praise in Joe Cinque’s Consolation as Garner’s “litany”.

Garner points out to the reader that there is a limit to one’s empathy, “Because when all is
said and done, one brutal fact remains. Joe Cinque is dead”. This four-word phrase is
Garner’s litany … Garner’s constant refrain makes it obvious that her empathy does not, in
actuality, extend to self-centred women who wilfully inflict harm on others. (2013, p. 83)

But this “litany” was a trigger point of concern for Participants 1 and 2, who were
particularly averse to Garner’s repeated use of the phrase.

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P2: I mean apart from telling the story she seemed to want to honour his memory as the
un-, as the forgotten victim of this, because she, every now and then she kept on
writing, “Joe Cinque’s dead”.

P1: I hated that, I just hated it.

P2: “Joe Cinque’s dead”. And that was a bit irritating.

P1: I knew he was dead. 17

Participant 1 found Garner’s recourse to the literary device of repetition unnecessary, because
the story did not need it. Percy Lubbock’s distinction between showing and telling in his
1921 book The Craft of Fiction, to “show not tell” when it comes to creating compelling
texts, resonates here. Garner is underestimating her readers with the hammer blow approach
of stating the obvious. While this use of a literary device struck a false note with some of the
participants, it wasn’t enough to cause serious concern as they returned to the basic premise
of what constitutes good writing: a good story, well told. They discussed Garner’s ability to
describe without sensationalizing certain events, such as Anu Singh drugging Joe Cinque and
then a needle in his vein, with Participant 3 saying this was a “really chilling kind of
description”. They appreciated her “matter of fact” approach to such scenes as the dinner
party where the guests discussed the possibility of killing Joe and no one intervened to stop
Anu Singh from her plan. They appreciated (as Lubbock would) that she “showed, rather
than concluded that the legal system has, there’s major flaws in it” (Participant 2).

Later the discussion turns to Garner’s motivation for writing the story, written, as Participant
2 points out, when she was in a low point of her life, with a broken relationship. They discuss

17
I was so intrigued by this response I asked Participant 1 to expand on it after the book group’s formal
discussion concluded. He said he thought it was a very crude device that didn’t serve any purpose.
P1: It was a bit, I found it a bit…
P3: …it was that reminder to keep bringing you back to the point.
P1: I thought it was very like, I just thought it was a bit kind of almost childish, trying to emphasise a point
really obviously. But maybe that’s just me.
P4: Yeah. Look, I think it’s a perpetual issue we have with literature, like one is how good the story is, and
two is how good the writing is. But a good story just draws you in, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.
P5: Oh, it can be written terribly though.
P4: That’s true. But you know, even beautifully written books, even if they’re written about nothing, won’t
draw you in.

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how during the process of writing the book Garner came to identify with the victim and the
parents of the victim, but that it took her a while to develop a relationship with Maria Cinque,
the victim’s mother, and she spent a lot of time “umming and ahhing” (2014, p. 1). They
recognise that Garner identifies with the suffering and the loss of the Cinques and this is
when the book really gets going and she “goes on a bit of a crusade to remember Joe”
(Participant 4). But there’s no suggestion the readers find this detracts from the book.

P4: …It doesn’t seem, that’s not so obvious in the first part of the book.

P3: That, I mean there’s surely some selfish element to this, that she’s an author and it’s a
good story, and you know, she can write well and she probably knew it was going to
sell.

P4: Given her tendency, like I mean I don’t know a lot about her other work, but given,
the only other work that I’ve read which was “The First Stone” one, was, it was
almost like she was taking up a cause with that one, and she’s kind of take, in the end
she’s taken up a cause with this, but I don’t know that she recognises this as a cause
when she first was fascinated by it. I don’t know that this was going to be a book until
she recognised things like she connected with the…

P5: Well, that’s part of the story that she’s written. She’s written the story of…

P4: Of her own…

P5: … deciding to write the story.

P4: Yeah, I agree.

P5: Yeah, which is one of those additional elements that makes it an interesting read.

Garner reflected on this in an interview with Kerry O’Brien on ABC TV’s current affairs
program 7.30 on July 29, 2004.

O’BRIEN: Would it be fair to say you became a captive of the Cinque's family grief, Joe’s
mother in particular?

GARNER: A captive? I was certainly very deeply affected by it. I’ve never been in the

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 company of that sort of grief and been, as it were, the carrier of it before. And plainly – I
suppose a very experienced and perhaps more detached journalist, more detached than I am –
might say, "Oh, well, you made every mistake in the book”, and perhaps I did, but it’s hard
not to become swamped, I think, by emotions like that. (O’Brien, 2004)

For this group of readers at least Garner’s lack of detachment has enhanced rather than
impeded their engagement with the book.

This group of male readers did not appear to share the concerns about narrative framing that
so incensed the feminist scholars cited earlier in this chapter, but they were aware their
gender was relevant with the following exchange.

P1: But we’re also looking at it from a middle-aged blokes’ point of view…

P4: Mm, which is the correct view. [laughs]

They certainly devoted a significant part of the discussion to Anu Singh. Two participants
said they hated her guts throughout the book, but their view changed when they read the
Judge’s comments to Garner towards the end of the book.

P1: … and that was the best bit of the whole book in that it totally changed my view of
everything I’d read, well, not totally, but I found that more interesting…

P4: You mean when she caught up with the judge later on and he …?

P1: … And you realised well, she [Singh] was just a nutter, she was seriously mentally ill.
And you know, her parents knew that and everyone knew that.

P5: That’s the real, that’s the real crime in it, that the parents had sort of run it up the
flagpole, tried to do all sorts of things about getting someone to do something about
it, and nothing happened.

These remarks don’t suggest the men were manipulated by the writer into forming any
particular opinion of Singh, as the critics cited earlier claimed. Earlier, the participants had
discussed the fact that Garner does not provide much information that a possible motive for
Anu Singh was that Joe had obtained the drug Ipecac for her and that Anu believed this had

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caused her debilitating disease. This is referred to during the trial of Madhavi Rao by Crown
witness Lauren Taylor. “Madhavi said Anu wanted to kill herself, but that she was going to
take Joe with her because he was responsible for her illness” (Garner, 2014, p. 239). Later in
the court proceedings Rao’s lawyer, Lex Lasry QC, dismisses the Ipecac business as “a
ridiculous motive which no one believed” (p. 246). Earlier in the book, Garner recounts Dr
Singh’s testimony at the trial of his daughter. He details her eating disorder and tells the court
that in September 1996 she brought home a new boyfriend, Joe Cinque, but despite his
daughter being happy, her physical complaints continued and by May 1997 she became
convinced her muscles were gone. Garner refers to the Ipecac earlier in the book, in Part One,
when she is sketching out what she knows of the story and is describing Anu Singh. Garner
says Singh traced her undiagnosed ailment as the result of taking large doses of Ipecac, a
vomit-inducing syrup, saying Singh blamed this on Joe, claiming he told her models used
Ipecac to control their weight (p. 15). Two of the book group participants found Garner’s
account of the Ipecac element wanting.

P2: Did you get frustrated reading it at all? Not by the bad writing or anything, because I
think it was great writing, but by the way the events were being unfolded?

P3: I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, yeah, I think there were, I didn’t understand, I don’t think
she, the Ipecac thing, I just sort of found hard to understand, and I didn’t, I thought
that needed some elaboration, because I didn’t quite know what the motivation was,
because if, because there was this thing about, that he had …

P1: Well, he just mentioned it …

P3: … caused her muscle wasting disease, but I don’t know whether that, it was only sort
of half-said really, because if she genuinely thought, “He has caused my illness,” then
that would be motive.

P4: See, that’s an interesting point, because I think the other thing about … no student of
journalism at all, but I thought it was an interesting kind of journalism in that she
didn’t actually … I don’t think she investigated much. She reported and observed
beautifully, like really well, but she didn’t seem to investigate much. Like say for
example, she didn’t investigate, she didn’t look up Ipecac or check it out for herself.
It’s not, like she didn’t go behind the scenes particularly.

The comments by Participants 3 and 4 suggest there is some frustration over how Garner has
gone about telling elements of the story as regards to the Ipecac and whether it might provide

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Anu Singh with a motive, but no articulation that this is a deliberate ploy by Garner to skew
the narrative as suggested by Hecq, Taylor and Dever. Participant 4 noted Garner could have
investigated Ipecac and there was some discussion of Garner’s tendency to divide opinion
when Participant 3 brought in The First Stone.

P4: How well did this book do? Did it receive much publicity?

P2: I think it was well-regarded. She sometimes divides opinion, Helen Garner. I think she
did very much …

P1: She really did with that other one. [laughs]

P2: Well, “The First Stone” really was controversial because it was very much about …

P1: They didn’t like her point of view.

P2: … that was about a, was it a rape? Is that right?

P1: It was about charges of sexual harassment …

P3: … It was the Master of the college in, Ormond College in Melbourne.

P2: That’s right, and she was kind of trying to justify his point of view as…

P4: …Why because it wasn’t a sisterly act? Or …?

P2: Yeah, she wasn’t …

P1: … It was anti-feminist.

P2: That’s right, it was anti-feminist to some degree. So, she is slightly controversial, I
suppose. And I must admit, when I picked this up the first time, not having, not this
time, I think I was a little bit aware of that and I was perhaps a bit more sensitive to
looking for signs of her being a bit biased or in some way to this. I thought, I don’t
think she was particularly, but it was, I was a bit prepared for that … I thought in this

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 her motive was very much to remember Joe; that was obviously her, that seemed to be
her motive. I mean apart from telling the story she seemed to want to honour his
memory as the un-, as the forgotten victim of this, because she, every now and then
she kept on writing, “Joe’s Cinque is dead”.

Participant 2 came to Joe Cinque’s Consolation with an awareness of Garner’s previous work
generating controversy as being “anti-feminist” and to mitigate against this he is “a bit more
sensitive” to watching out for signs of bias. He concludes that while he was prepared for it,
he did not find concerning evidence of bias and concludes Garner’s motive in writing the
book was to remember Joe and to honour his memory as the forgotten victim of the story.

P2: I think what she did quite well in this book was not, she didn’t preach or, to the most
part, or draw big conclusions, but she just showed I think, rather than concluded, that
the legal system has, there’s major flaws in it. I don’t think she actually made big
pronouncements about it, but that was one of the flaws that she clearly pointed out,
was how their voice was lost in all this, even though they were the victims ... I thought
she did that well actually.

The conversation ends with Participant 5, who, having at the start expressed surprise at how
much he enjoyed the book, given he didn’t want to read it, considered the topic “crap” and
would never pick up a book about a court case, because it would “bore the shit out of me”,
declared it the most enjoyable book club choice he has read.

P5: So, and I think that was a bit of the concept about writing a story and probably the,
even the name of the book was around well, you know, like there’s not too much you
can do; you can’t change the sentencing and stuff, but at least we can actually tell the
story, and I think that’s what Maria [Joe’s mother] was wanting, someone to actually
at least get the truth out there so that people will understand the impact. So he wasn’t,
Joe wasn’t dead for nothing

This notion of the book as “redemption for Joe” is implicit in the title, Joe Cinque’s
Consolation, and Garner’s transparent positioning of herself throughout as an advocate for
the Cinques. Participant 5 appears here to be accepting the truth-telling claims of the genre.
He recognises the book is well-written and appreciates the insights offered into the victim’s
side of the story. He sees the importance of the story being told, even while acknowledging it
can’t change the fact of Joe’s death or the sentencing of his killer. He talks about Maria

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(Joe’s mother) “getting the truth out there”. The human elements of the story have clearly
touched him. It is Participant 5 who fully grasps Garner’s stated desire to “enlarge her
imagination” to encompass “widely separated truths”. These readers have demonstrated an
appreciation of the compelling nature of literary journalism; demonstrated their engagement
over the edge; and accepted the author’s version of the story as her version of the story that
she has been able to justify in a way that satisfies them. They have been able to enlarge their
own imaginations to appreciate that all stakeholders in this story have not been afforded
equal weight in the telling and that there are elements of advocacy behind the way the story is
told, but that this has not detracted from the writer’s motive for writing the book, which is to
provide some sort of consolation for the tragic death of a young man. In the final of the book
group chapters, Chapter Seven, the mature white women of the Newcastle Book Group find
the subjectivity of the author of The Tall Man, Chloe Hooper, helps them experience the story
in a way that engages their emotions as well as their intellects.

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 Chapter Seven: The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper, and the Newcastle book group

“At the end of the day, I just felt that I had to tell the truth and I hope I’ve done that the
right way.” (Chloe Hooper, 2013)

“I think she was a great storyteller, that’s it.” (Participant 3)

“Mind you, the story was there.” (Participant 5)

Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man was first published in The Monthly between 2006 and 2008 as
a series of Walkley Award-winning articles before being expanded and published by Penguin
as a book, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, in 2008. It won the Western
Australian Book Awards as both overall winner and winner of the non-fiction category in
2008, the Douglas Stewart Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2009 and the
Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2009.
There are 15 editions in the National Library of Australia. In a review by Nalini Haynes
(2013) the book is described as narrative non-fiction: “Hooper tells the story in narrative
form describing scenes unfolding before her during her investigation interspersed with
exposition and narrative from historical records and eyewitness accounts” (Haynes, 2013,
para 1). Chloe Hooper had already had a novel published but wasn’t a trained journalist when
she came across the story after meeting lawyer Andrew Boe at a Melbourne party and his
suggesting she follow up on a death in custody on Palm Island by attending the inquest and
writing about it (Harper, 2009, p. 9). She described the book in a February 23, 2010,
interview on ABC radio 702 as a “non-fiction novel”, about a “fatal collision between black
and white Australia”. She told interviewer Deborah Cameron she didn’t approach the
material with any political axe to grind but was curious to find out more about reconciliation.
Cameron then questioned Hooper about her use of the term “non-fiction novel”.

CAMERON: …it’s an interesting thing though, because um, it sort of defies categorisation,
it’s certainly beyond journalism in a way, I mean, obviously it’s not made up and yet you’ve,
you’ve dwelt in the interior lives of these key characters.

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 HOOPER: Ah well I guess, um, you know there are lots of sort of fantastic, I guess, true
crime novels if you want to call them that, or there’s you know fabulous literary non-fiction I
guess In Cold Blood being a kind of ah particular example you could get inspiration from.
(Cameron, 2010)

Critics have indeed compared The Tall Man to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Campbell,
2009; Case, 2008), a commercially successful but controversial “non-fiction novel” about the
murder of four members of the Clutter family in the small farming community in Kansas,
published in 1966. According to Ricketson, In Cold Blood “significantly enlarged the scope
of narrative non-fiction by exploring the extent to which such works could be developed so
they read like a full-length, socially realistic novel” (2014, pp. 72-73). But as referred to in
Chapter Two, Capote was criticised for inventing elements of the story and for getting
emotionally involved with one of the murderers to the extent his judgement was impaired.

This is one of the five main issues that arise in the writing of In Cold Blood: Capote’s
avowedly omniscient narrative voice; the extent to which Capote relies on reconstruction of
scenes; the paucity of attribution of information; Capote’s willingness to invent details and
even scenes; and his distorting of evidence to match his artistic vision. (2014, p. 72)

In a 2008 promotional review of The Tall Man on the bookshop website Readings Monthly,
editor Jo Case said: “Like Garner, or Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, Hooper puts
herself in the story; but she is only there in the margins, as a stand-in for us, the urban
middle-class readers; our way into the story” (Case, July 1, 2008).

Case’s comparison of Chloe Hooper with Helen Garner and Truman Capote is reasonable but
needs qualification. While all three writers referred to are novelists who also produced works
of non-fiction while not being trained journalists, there are significant differences in how
each author positions themselves in their non-fiction works. In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, for
example, Garner begins the book with an account of where she is in her personal life when
she comes across the story of the murder of Joe Cinque, a trope that continues throughout,
while Truman Capote considered himself the “omniscient narrator” (Nance, 1970, p. 184).
Capote told George Plimpton (1966) he didn’t believe the author of a non-fiction novel
should appear in the work.

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 Ideally, once the narrator does appear, he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line,
and the I-I-I intrudes when it really shouldn't. I think the single most difficult thing in my
book, technically, was to write it without ever appearing myself, and yet, at the same time,
create total credibility. (Plimpton, 1966)

Sam Ruddock, writing for the blog Vulpes Libris in 2010, also places The Tall Man alongside
In Cold Blood in the pantheon of the true crime genre. He commends Hooper for her fair
reportage and willingness to consider all sides, to probe the contradictions within the story
and talk to a wide range of the people involved and to report without judgement or distortion.
“Fusing personal story with anthropology, history with mythology, and the literary acumen of
a novelist with the clear eye of a reputable journalist, Chloe Hooper has written a stunning
work of narrative non-fiction” (Ruddock, 2010, para. 3).

Positioning In Cold Blood as the gold standard for true crime might be considered selling The
Tall Man short, given the credibility problems identified by Ricketson and others in In Cold
Blood. No one has accused Chloe Hooper of making anything up. According to reviews from
the inside cover of its first paperback edition in 2009, The Tall Man has been highly praised
by a number of celebrated writers. American novelist Philip Roth calls it a “masterful book of
reportage … a kind of moral thriller about power, wretchedness and violence”. Australian
novelist Peter Carey claims it is “impossible to overestimate the importance of this book”.
And Helen Garner declares Australians will “weep over it. It is first-class reportage,
meticulously researched, studded with superbly observed human detail – and all the more
moving for its intense restraint”. Mark Dapin’s review from The Sydney Morning Herald
says the book is everything it should be:

…a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man’s death, interwoven with the brutal history
of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology … It is The Tall Man’s triumph
that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and
the street drinker, the living and the dead. (in Hooper, 2009)

The Tall Man is about the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee, 36, on November 19,
2004, on Palm Island, off the coast of Queensland, after he was arrested by Senior Sergeant
Christopher James Hurley for swearing. He died on the floor of a police cell of severe
internal injuries, caused, according to the police, by Hurley and Doomadgee tripping at the

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doorway to the station and falling to the floor (Hooper, 2009, p. 25). Hurley and the island’s
Aboriginal Police Liaison Officer, Lloyd Bengaroo, had been attending to the assault of three
sisters, escorting one to retrieve medicine from her home, when they encountered
Doomadgee, who spoke to Lloyd Bengaroo, the Police Liaison Officer, questioning him over
his policing role. Hurley alleges Doomadgee swore at him, but witnesses claim he was
singing Who Let the Dogs Out (p. 23). Hurley arrested Doomadgee for creating a public
nuisance, put him in the van and took him and another man, Patrick Nugent, who’d been
arrested and placed in the police van for swearing to the station (p. 24). After Hurley opened
the cage doors to the van, Doomadgee struck him on the jaw (p. 25). Accounts differ over
what happened next. Witnesses say Hurley punched Doomadgee in the ribs and the two men
struggled as they approached the station door (p. 25). Hurley, Bengaroo and a young
constable standing outside all said that when Hurley and Doomadgee got to the doorway they
tripped over and fell inside the station (p. 25). What is indisputable is that Cameron
Doomadgee was dead on the floor of a watch-house cell 45 minutes after encountering Senior
Sergeant Hurley on the street on Palm Island, “with internal injuries so severe that even with
instant medical attention he would not have survived (p. 47). The first pathologist’s report,
released one week later, found Doomadgee’s death was the result of an accidental fall, with
no sign of police brutality. A riot ensued and the police station and Hurley’s house were
burned to the ground. A coronial inquest found Hurley responsible for a death in custody and
Hurley was charged, but in June 2007 he was acquitted of assault and manslaughter.

Hooper arrived on Palm Island in early February 2005, a few weeks after she’d met lawyer
Andrew Boe, who had invited her to join him at the inquest. Hooper writes she knew very
little about Indigenous Australians. “Like most middle-class suburbanites I grew up without
ever seeing a black person, except on the news” (2009, p. 9). While on the island she had
“never even heard of”, Hooper interviewed the key players, including Doomadgee’s sisters;
Andrew Boe, who had volunteered to represent the community pro bono; and the Mayor,
Erykah Kyle; and she attended the inquest, held three and a half months after the death. As
well, she accessed a variety of documentary sources – articles and books about Aboriginal
culture which she lists at the end of the book (pp. 274-278) and the Fitzgerald Report of the
Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Conduct,
published by the Queensland Government on July 3, 1989 (Crime and Corruption
Commission Queensland, 1989). Hooper later visited Doomadgee, the Aboriginal settlement
where Doomadgee’s family came from and where Hurley worked at times, and Burketown,

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where Hurley lived from 1998-2002; she attended the resumed inquest held in Townsville in
August of 2005; and she went to Hurley’s trial, held in Townsville in June 2007.
Researching her book was a thorough and prolonged act of investigative or immersive
journalism with a level of transparency provided by the author revealing her sources.

Despite this widespread critical acclaim for the prize-winning book, it has had its detractors.
In her mostly positive review, Nalini Haynes (2013) expresses concern about some aspects of
Hooper’s storytelling, suggesting Hooper may have been influenced by Hurley’s good looks
(as described by Hooper) and tall stature. “Although I understand the value of balance in
narrative journalism, it seemed like Hooper searched rather hard and used exposition
excessively to build up a picture of Hurley’s behaviour as understandable and possibly even
relatable” (Haynes, 2013, para 8). An example of this is where Hooper speculates about why
Hurley reacted to Doomadgee’s behaviour on the day he was later to die in the police cell.
“But Chris Hurley, who had endured every insult in existence, heard something more
offensive, and this time he decided not to let it go” (Hooper, 2009, p. 24).

Perhaps there was something about “fucking queenie cunt” that got to him. Perhaps he was
thinking of the abuse flung at Lloyd Bengaroo, who’d recently asked for a transfer after being
hospitalised for stress. Perhaps he was thinking of the three women who’d just been beaten by
a drunk like this one. Or perhaps his uniform was sticking to his skin in the heat and he could
feel the sweat in the roots of his hair and the whole island was vibrating, the whole place out
of control, and it was up to him to still it. (p. 24)

The repeated use of “perhaps” has echoes of the litany technique used by Garner in Joe
Cinque’s Consolation referred to in Chapter Six. It is a rhetorical flourish often deployed in
advertising to persuade through emphasis. Hooper choice of the word “perhaps” allows her to
speculate as to what Hurley might have been thinking without presuming to know, to suggest
that this is the way things might have unfolded without positioning herself as the omnipresent
narrator. Estelle Blackburn could have deployed this technique for her contentious inner
monologues for Eric Cooke in Broken Lives and perhaps spared herself some criticism.

Haynes claims Hooper’s presence and “biases” influenced the story but qualifies this by
suggesting it is “better to be honestly biased than dishonest in non-fiction” (2013, para. 10).
Another online critic, Rachel Cramp (2008), finds Hooper invests too much time and space

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looking into Hurley’s background and character, calling these the “weakest chapters” in the
book.

…The Tall Man is very informative for anyone wanting to know the details of the case.
However, while Hooper is more definitely sympathetic to the Indigenous side of the case and
to the pursuit of “justice”, she still attempts to present the case in a “balanced” way, even
though the truth is staring any reader in the face. (2008, para. 12)

Cramp overlooks the role of the journalist with this rather naïve remark, of course, as ideally
a journalist sets out to determine the truth by examining all sides of the story without
prejudice and should do nothing less than strive for balance but Cramp does make a pertinent
point about the ethical challenges of balanced reporting in sensitive cases such as this
Aboriginal death in custody.

Jane Stenning (2014) describes The Tall Man as a culturally endorsed representation, given
the work’s celebrated status through positive reviews and many awards, but finds the book
fell victim to news-framing common to Indigenous Affairs reporting, specifically it
“narrativises events through the discourse of fatalism, a strongly recurring frame used in
Indigenous Affairs reporting that emphasises futility, hopelessness and Aboriginal as ill-
destined” (p. 1). Stanning argues the use of a literary register in the storytelling lends the
work cultural authority. The use of literary allusion (references to Joseph Conrad’s The Heart
of Darkness (1899) for example), Biblical and apocalyptic literary tropes and features of
medieval morality plays led to the characterization of the protagonists as victims of
circumstance invoking Eggins’ caution that “the risk of using fictional strategies is that one
will interpret real life in the simplifying archetypes of fiction” (2005, p. 6). Stenning claims
that, despite moments of self-reflexivity, Hooper constructed a discourse of doom, with
Hurley and Moordinyi (Doomadgee) running headlong into their shared fate.

The purpose of investigating the fatalism frame in this text is to consider the negative
implications of a narrative that portrays violence against Aboriginal people as inevitable and
which undermines people’s claims for hope. This may well be a narrative strategy designed to
provoke, but Hooper’s honest accounts where she felt “the whole thing was hopeless” (94)
can encourage the reader to agree. (Stenning, 2014, pp. 3-4)

In his research into media coverage of Aboriginal health, Mark Brough expressed his concern

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that the fatalism reflected in the media imagery he discovered in his analysis of newspaper
articles written between 1988 and 1998 was more deeply rooted in Australia’s collective
historical and political consciousness. He said the doomed race theory “rested squarely in
racist Darwinian social evolution, in which the least ‘civilized’ societies of the world would
inevitably succumb to the most civilized” and he warned us to be wary of the “enemy” of
fatalism, “in which no solutions are possible” (Brough, 1999, p. 9). In her reading of The
Tall Man, Stenning (2014, p. 2) found evidence of a rhetorical mode that had more in
common with these typical patterns of reporting than had previously been suggested in the
critical response to the book.

One of the scholars who has argued for a very different reading from Stenning’s is Janine
Little. Little finds Hooper’s way of working helps subvert some dominant ideological news
media representations of Australian Indigenous peoples because it privileges strong source
relationships set in an extended narrative structure.

As part of a longer tradition of the non-fiction novel’s capacity to show both the ethics and
morally questionable techniques of using information from such source relationships, The
Tall Man connects journalists to some practical methods of building detail responsibly. (2010,
p. 53)

In comparison with Stenning’s concerns about the dangers of engaging the imagination of
readers in matters of political importance, Little found it helpful.

The role of imagination in putting structural technique to its best journalistic use is apparent
in Hooper’s re-telling of the Snake Dreaming wrapped around reportage of the Palm Island
“riot”. This is evident in Hooper’s presentation of its leader, 37-year-old Lex Wootton as “a
fantasy of a figure before white contact” (p. 64); in her recording of events at the coronial
inquest into Mulrunji’s (sic) death; and in her evocation of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley’s
actions in the cell, when a “tall man’s knee pressed on the chest of someone pinned against a
concrete floor” (p. 10). None of us was there, but with Hooper’s explanatory sequencing of
the events at Palm Island, that no longer means we do not know what occurred. (2010, p. 53)

In her reference to the Snake Dreaming wrapped around reportage of the riot, Little is
commenting on the device deployed by Hooper to punctuate or underscore elements of the
story where she weaves in stories and myths from the Aboriginal Dreaming. Contrast that
with Stenning’s interpretation of this device.

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 In The Tall Man, Aboriginal people (past and present) are seemingly at the mercy of every
condition: the mischievous, random spirits (the mythical tall men), the sea of blue uniformed
tall men (the police), the missionaries, the welfare office, the legal system. Within this
historical context, Hooper mythologises Palm Island as perpetual “frontier” and its violent
history of Wild Time becomes an inescapable fact of the present. History is set to repeat
itself. (2014, p. 4)

Sarah Keenan (2009) mounts a case for The Tall Man being recognised as an original and
important work of critical legal geography because of its tracing of the laws and state policies
that perpetuate racial tension and violence in parts of Australia, which Keenan fashions as a
tension between Australia’s north and south. Keenan claims the fusing of this indigenous and
non-indigenous knowledge was “…enabled by the unique genre of Hooper’s book”, which
“straddles the line between journalism and the (usually fiction) novel” (p. 196).

This liberty carries the danger of giving the writer scope to potentially divert from the truth,
but it also allows the writer to challenge popular conceptions of the truth on a deeper, more
affective level than straight journalistic or policy work can. Hooper’s beautifully written
narrative captures the emotion of the trial and the coronial inquest in a way that academic and
journalistic accounts cannot. As a non-fiction novel, The Tall Man is able to communicate to
readers both the “hard facts” of what happened and the emotion that results from those facts
at a level of detail usually reserved for academic studies but in a format that reaches far
beyond an academic audience. Hooper weaves together Indigenous and white understandings
most powerfully in her telling of the indigenous story of the Tall Man. (2009, p. 196)

John Hartsock, in a note from the editor in an edition of Literary Journalism Studies, writes
about the power of literary journalism as an aesthetic practice to “engage the subjectivities of
the reader and subject by means of the journalist’s subjectivity” (2011, p. 6).

It seems to me that what’s been missed from the civic journalism movement is what I have
always found inherent to literary journalism. It is that the genre helps to re-establish what
English cultural critic John Berger ably described as the “relation between teller, listener
(spectator) and protagonist(s)” . . . Particularly missing is the relationship of the journalist-as-
teller to the listener and the subjects or protagonists. (2011, p. 6)

So, does this particular work of non-fiction, The Tall Man, which satisfies the criteria for
belonging to the genre of literary journalism for the reasons outlined above also satisfy the
expectations that the genre will “engage the subjectivities of the reader” as Hartsock (2011)

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suggests? Will it communicate to readers both the “hard facts” of what happened and “the
emotion that results from those facts” as Keenan (2014) claims it will?

The Newcastle book group

The Newcastle Book Group comprises white, tertiary-educated women aged in their 50s to
early 80s. I attended the meeting on the evening of Thursday December 12, 2013, at the home
of one of the participants, and recorded the group’s discussion of the book, which they had
borrowed from Newcastle Region Library, which offers a service to book groups where
multiple copies are made available. There were six members in attendance. Participant 6 left
early for another commitment. The participants knew little about the research I was
undertaking, other than the details in the consent forms I distributed for them to sign. The
discussion lasted one and a half hours.

This relationship between teller, listener and protagonist(s) described by Hartsock (2011), is
tacitly acknowledged immediately the discussion begins, with Participant 1 telling the group
she went first to the acknowledgements to see who the author thanked and that it was clear
from the acknowledgements that her heart was with the Aboriginal participants. But
Participant 1 went on to say the author had made every effort to try to see the world from the
perspective of the police even though they “hardly spoke to her”. Participant 3 said the
author’s reference to Orwell18 made her think she was quite cynical in the way she was
viewing the police.

P3: Like she was trying to appear as if she was unbiased, I think but I didn’t get the
feeling she was at all.

It’s clear from these opening remarks that these readers anticipate the possibility of a biased
account of the story and are alert to any indications in the text that the author is taking a side
or is approaching her material subjectively. While noting that the author’s sympathies lie
with the Aboriginal participants, Participant 1 seems inclined to give the author the benefit of
the doubt in her approach to the police, while Participant 3 is more wary, interpreting her
reference to Orwell’s essay as indicative of cynicism towards the police. It’s important to

18
Hooper quotes from Orwell’s 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to illustrate a point about Hurley’s attempts
to “impress the natives” with “acts of kindness and of force” (Hooper, 2008, p. 162).

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these readers to clarify the author’s position, which suggests they care about the factual status
of the work and also that a trigger point for caring is how the author positions herself in the
story and that she declares it or reveals it in the book (through the acknowledgements, for
example). Participant 4 reinforced this when she remarked that what she liked about the
writing was how Hooper “punctuated” the book with declarations of where she was coming
from.

P4: How she’d moved along the journey in different ways and I thought it was an attempt
to be open to both sides and to want to listen to both sides. But it became clear she had
taken her heart…

P1: … She certainly had adopted her position.

P4: Because she told us what that position was.

P1: That’s it, it was her own personal journey, yeah.

This exchange indicates Participant 1 and Participant 4 feel comfortable with Hooper taking a
position because she has been transparent about it; they appreciate being kept in the know.
Then Participant 4 declared her own position as lining up with her interpretation of Hooper’s
and the discussion took a rather dramatic turn.

P4: And let’s face it, it’s a position that we’re all sympathetic to, speaking for myself of
course. I don’t know, somebody else might have felt another perspective.

One reader did have another perspective.

P1: (Name redacted), you look as though you’re about to speak.

P5: Actually, I wasn’t at all but if you’re really asking me, be careful. I hated it.

P4: Oh good, that’s good. That’s good for a discussion.

P5: No, I absolutely hated it and I can’t remember another book that I have actually
hated.

Participant 5 went on to say she read it only because she was asked to, but she did not like the
author’s approach. She said the author had an agenda and an angle, which she found

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intrusive. She questioned what the outcome was, beyond satisfying a journalistic urge, and
wondered what the point of a book about such a horrible situation was if there were no
recommendation for change. Hooper has “engaged the subjectivities of the reader” (Hartsock,
2011) in this case, but not in a way this reader finds constructive or useful. While the book
has certainly had an emotional impact on Participant 5, the reader felt let down that the book
hadn’t offered a recommendation for change for the people of Palm Island.

P5: In fact, I think it just makes me feel worse about the whole issue than I feel already
and more hopeless about it, in a sense. You know that whole issue of how on earth
does some place like Palm Island, with those people who are clearly treated wrongly,
clearly by this and other things we hear, how does that get to change? That’s what I
lacked. That next stage, I think.

Participant 5’s response bears out Stenning’s concerns about Hooper’s “narrativising through
the discourse of fatalism”, (2014, p. 1) referred to earlier in this chapter. This reader certainly
appears to have succumbed to Hooper’s helplessness, but the other five readers did not share
her pessimism.

P6: But isn’t it raising awareness and a consciousness of not only the current situation on
Palm Island but the whole history of dispossession?

P3: Intergenerational.

P6: Yeah the intergenerational reproduction of the inequities and …

P5: And did we not know this?

There follows some discussion about whether or not the author positions herself as an activist
or a journalist. No consensus is reached on this point, but Hooper is commended by the group
for acknowledging that she’s an unlikely person to write the book, being a white, middle-
class woman who had never met an Aboriginal person in her life when she first considered
writing the story.

P1: But I actually think that, from a literary point of view it’s actually quite a brave piece
of work. She’s trying to bring to life the lived experience, as a white woman, she’s trying
to bring to life the lived experience of the people of Palm Island.

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This kind of transparency on the part of the author matters to these readers. But they do have
concerns about two of the “literary” aspects of the journalism that have already been
discussed in this thesis: the use of the inner monologue and the recreation of dialogue.
Participant 2 claimed the author “gets into the head of the Aboriginal (sic), of Andrew Boe
and Chris Hurley and in a way that a factual account couldn’t”, while Hooper’s use of
descriptive language raised concerns for Participants 2 and 3.

P2: Hurley wouldn’t grant her an interview so – well I’ve been re-reading today his
reactions after. You know, after the murder, really, after the manslaughter/murder he
slumped to the floor and his head was in his hands and she says, “what could he have
been thinking”. And she sort of postulates what he could have been thinking. Was he
thinking “I’ve been caught”, was it remorse?... I can see why she needed to have it in
a fictional form because with the absence of any contact with Hurley she had to
speculate. His reaction, she watched his body language in the inquest, in the court.

Participant 2 uses the term “fictional form” when she refers to Hooper’s description of
Hurley’s physical response after the incident when she speculates as to what he’s thinking.
This reader appears to be grappling here with the blurred genre status of literary journalism,
but she acknowledges the difficulty for the author in not being able to interview Hurley. She
sees that Hooper relies on Hurley’s body language to speculate on how he feels about the
situation: is he remorseful, is he genuinely sorry or is he upset about being caught, is he
fearing for his career? Participant 3 picked up on this too and expressed her concern that it
was overdone and dangerous to go too much into Hurley’s body language.

P3: … “And his fists were clenching and he was moving this and doing that”. And I just
thought, “oh come on”.

But Participant 1 disagreed, saying she found it useful that the author brought the characters
to life.

P1: It’s a literary approach but it’s not fiction. It’s not true crime either because it’s not a
‘whodunit’ but it’s not fiction. It’s turning …

P4: It’s turning a set of facts into a narrative.

P1: … a real story into – because it’s a narrative but it’s actually, she’s, it’s reportage.

P2: And it’s meticulous.

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Participant 1 recognises that Hooper’s approach is literary, but not fictional, and comes up
with the elegant phrase “elaborated reportage”. According to the Cambridge English
Dictionary reportage is “the activity of, or style of, reporting events in newspapers or
broadcasting them on television or radio” (dictionary.cambridge.org). But as discussed in the
Literature Review in Chapter Two and elsewhere in this thesis, the word reportage has been
used to describe journalism that goes beyond merely reporting events and facts, as this reader
has recognised.

But not all the readers are as comfortable with the use of the descriptive device as
Participants 1 and 4. A little further into the discussion, Participant 5 returned to this point
about Hooper describing Hurley’s body language and speculating as to what he’s thinking.

P5: …she talks about Hurley and his head’s down and what might he be thinking. That’s
leading. If ever there was leading, that’s leading the thinking.

P1: But he wouldn’t be interviewed. She had to depend on…

P5: Well even so.

P4: Her readings of his body…

P3: … He was guilty until proven innocent at that point to her. She had made her mind
up.

P5: I’m not defending him; I wasn’t trying to do that. But I meant I just…

P3: But I mean that’s part of that narrative.

P5: It is her style.

P3: That’s the prerogative isn’t it, of the researcher and the writer.

P5: Absolutely, absolutely.

While Participant 5 accuses the writer of “leading” the reader with her presumptions about
what Hurley might be thinking, seeming concerned that she is being manipulated by Hooper
drawing inferences from Hurley’s body language, she nonetheless is willing to concede it is
the role of the researcher and writer to do that. She then goes on to describe the work as
compelling because of the detailed nature of the writing style.

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P5: …having said all the negatives that I have said, I would like to say, have on record,
that I think that she … it’s, I won’t say engaging because I didn’t like it so that’s not
the appropriate word, but it’s compelling I think, was perhaps a better word.

P4: Yes, I find it compelling.

P5: And I think that she attempted to cover a great deal of what was happening.

[overtalking]

P5: I think she tried very hard to put it into a context and she tried to put it into that
historical context, and to give us a picture of Palm Island, which I think hasn’t, for
me, hadn’t been out in any of the media stuff… Anyway, that kind of thing I think she
did well and put it out in that respect and perhaps set that picture.

P4: We can thank her for that.

P5: Yes.

The readers commend Hooper for putting the story into context, even Participant 5, who had
expressed deep reservations about the book, reveals she finds it “compelling” and appears
able to accommodate the author’s interpretation of certain events. But later in the discussion
the readers turn again to Hooper’s reporting style and use of descriptive language.
Participant 4 talks of Hooper’s ability to include a lot of history and to “problematise” it to
reveal insights into how the characters have found themselves in this situation. Participant 2
commends her “great anthropological tone”, while Participant 3 describes the book as like
“an ethnographic sort of qualitative thesis”. These readers appreciate the author’s approach to
the material as “polite”, as “dispassionate”, but further discussion around her descriptions of
the different characters draws out concerns very similar to the critical response to Helen
Garner’s description of Anu Singh putting her hair up in court in Joe Cinque’s Consolation
(2004, p. 46).

P1: Well, she is a journo. This is one of the things that I think is interesting and you’d say
this was anthropological too but then you have to have a question about it, I do
anyway. This is page 213, “I looked at the jury, a platinum blonde with a double chin
never stopped writing in her court issued notebook. Two senior men with short back
and sides hair and the prodigious scars of old sunburn wore carefully pressed short
sleeved shirts in tropical tones of mango and papaya.” Shit. [laugh] She goes over
the top.

P4: They are fairly stereotyped.

[overtalking]

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P3: … I agree totally. The way she was describing Hurley, all the way, his body language
and what he was wearing and his hair …

The descriptions above seem fairly innocuous and factual if a little personal, but these readers
find them excessive and “stereotypical”. But when it comes to Hooper’s descriptions of the
Aboriginal women it appears some members of the group are concerned about the
implications of the words, rather than the veracity.

P2: The descriptions of the absolutely pathetic appearance of the Aboriginal women and
how they had to …

P5: Again, that was questionable too.

P2: I thought that was absolutely relevant because it showed their inequality.

P5: You have to be careful that that doesn’t put them down. You do have to be careful.

P2: I tell you what … not to put who down?

P5: That that doesn’t.

P3: Aboriginal people. Like is that being derogatory by describing them?

P2: No, I didn’t think. I thought it was sympathetic.

P3: But is it really victimising them? Is that the word? Like making them victims.

P5: I guess what that showed though wasn’t it, that what was happening was that the suit
that Hurley was wearing, which funnily enough would have been so inappropriate in
that heat, was actually part of his defence.

P1: Carefully constructed.

P5: Yes and carefully constructed definitely. Constructed to put a slant on the others that
they’re not able to measure up to. I mean that does have the factual base. And so does
that, for that matter.

P5: So, does what I just read, yeah. You have the factual base.

Participant 5, it seems, has been won over by Hooper’s meticulous adherence to what she
observes, to her respect for fact and detail. The readers here demonstrate an acute
understanding of the slippery nature of reporting, how reality is constructed by journalists,
how by focussing on one aspect of a situation over another a writer can skew an account in a
way that influences a reader to interpret the situation one way over another. They also
express concern again about the portrayal of the Aboriginal women as victims in such a way

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that reinforces stereotypes, (Stenning’s “discourse of fatalism” in Indigenous Affairs
reporting (2014) referred to earlier in this chapter), but they then acknowledge that it is a fact
that Hurley is wearing a suit, however manipulative such a gesture appears; that the
Aboriginal women do appear pathetic. The readers’ anxiety about how the Aboriginal women
are described could be a manifestation of what Ghassan Hage has identified as the coloniser’s
trauma of guilt, of feeling “responsible for a shameful act”.

The colonised have an equally Australian history, and traumas specific to them as colonised.
The shame of the colonised is the shame of defeat, and its relation to injustice is one not of
“recognition”, but of endurance and resistance. (2003, p. 57)

This recognition of the way what a writer chooses to include and to leave out can impact on
the effect of the words on the reader came up again at another point in the discussion, when
Participant 4 referred to Hooper’s description of the friend of Hurley’s girlfriend in the court
(2008, p. 228).

P4: She had a hole in the back of her stocking. (Laugh) I thought that was a rather
unnecessary detail. That was supposed to have let us know that they were a bit floozy.

These readers clearly recognise literary techniques are being deployed by the writer in a way
that could be considered manipulation – this “turning a set of facts into a narrative”, as
Participant 4 puts it – but they don’t express concerns that this will impact on the “meticulous
reportage” or ability of the author to bring to life the “lived experience” of the protagonists.
In fact, Participant 1 suggests the writer being sympathetic and drawing on the weight of
history lends the work significant purpose. They seem to recognise the difficulty of
“separating what happened from how it is told or experienced” (Lehman, 2001, p. 18) and
their responses suggest they are “reading history as both text and experience, an audience that
is engaged over the edge, by which I mean both inside and outside the story” (p. 3).
On other literary aspects of the work, the readers were enthusiastic, praising the way Hooper
told the story. Participant 4 praised the way the author structured the book, how the
“characters unfold” and how details are added, and demonstrated an appreciation of Hooper’s
use of plot, character and description – her skill in taking the reader into the landscape.

P4: I thought, I just loved the way she, I just thought it was incredible the way she
summarised the plot and then gradually unfolded the character and gradually added

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 details about the island. She says she wore the heat; it was like wearing the heat. You
were conscious of the environment. The environment impinged on you all the time.
The beautiful surroundings and the contrast with the abject lives that they led. Just the
way she gradually built up the characters and the plot.

There was enthusiasm for Hooper’s skills in evoking the environment – “the beautiful
surroundings and the contrast with the abject lives that they led” – her “weaving in of
Aboriginal kinship systems and relationship to land and the song lines and just the whole
belief system”.

P3: …The Dreaming stories, how that’s all woven in through the facts and the violence
and the horror of reality, she brings in this beautiful, the whole belief system and
traditional ways of living.

P4: And she describes Palm Island, the islands around, as the shards of the backbone of
the Rainbow Serpent. She doesn’t say it’s myth or legend, she just accepts it.

P3: So, is she contrasting, really making that point, the contrast between traditional
lifestyle and how it is now? And what have they got now?

P4: The magical elements of the stories of the Bible have been absorbed and made to fit
fairly, even though they seem contradictory they fit fairly seamlessly in with, or not
seamlessly but they sit side by side with a belief in the Dreamtime stories.

Rather than seeing these elements as an imposition on the “facts”, or undue poetic licence,
the subjectivities of the author are helping these readers more fully experience the lived
experience of the people in the story, which Hartsock claims is the power of literary
journalism (2011, p. 6). Rather than detract from the work, this layering in of narrative and
use of literary devices more commonly found in fiction has enhanced their enjoyment of the
book while not detracting from her representation of the actual events.

P2: I just think she was an amazing researcher because apparently Boe just threw a whole
lot of stuff at her. Ethnographical, there was a great list of it. And so, she researched
it and it was really thanks to Boe, just made sure that she was steeped in Aboriginal
religion. And the full six volumes of the Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generation,
she was well prepared. And yet it didn’t come, because she released the information
at certain periods throughout it didn’t come through as indoctrination. You were
gripped by the story.

P3: I think she was a great storyteller, that’s it.

P5: Mind you, the story was there.

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P2: But what I liked about the story telling was that we had the incident in Palm Island
but then what she’s done is go right back to the initial clash of cultures and the
power. The power relations right the way through Australian history, culminating in
a sense in this book with the incidents and the whole way that it was handled in Palm
Island and covered up and not covered up and the abject nature of life for Aboriginals
on Palm Island. So, I think that she went from there. She went right back and wove
that down. That’s what I liked about the writing and the storytelling.

While these readers were able to identify trigger points where they became concerned about
the factual status of The Tall Man – Hooper’s use of descriptive language for the people
involved, for example – these did not detract from their appreciation of how she told the
story. They recognised her position in the narrative as a middle-class white woman as
aligning with theirs, in the main, and were able to separate out the occasional moments where
Hooper’s rhetorical flourishes distracted them from the narrative. They were satisfied Hooper
had done justice to the tragedy on Palm Island with her immersion approach to the reporting
and admired her ability to place it in the broader context of colonisation.

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 Chapter Eight: Talking to readers about reading literary journalism

“Well, it’s a story told creatively without sacrificing fact or credibility… Something that is
beautifully crafted, that the story is beautifully presented, that I have the facts I want. Having
read it, I believe I’ve been given the knowledge that I was looking for, but that the beauty is
in the telling of it.” (Reader 6)

“And I was thinking over in my head, how do I define fiction or non-fiction, what’s the
dividing line; I guess the bread-and-butter definition is, is it imagined or is it true?... And to
me, good literary non-fiction often is very, can be imaginative and literary in its techniques
that it uses too. So, to me, it’s a more blurry distinction.” (Reader 11)

“All non-fiction is someone’s version of the truth.” (Reader 20)

This thesis sets out to address three research questions being asked of literary journalism and
how it is received by readers: Do readers comprehend its blurred genre status and how? What
are some of the trigger points by which readers might care about the factual status of a work?
And do readers accept the author’s version of the story as the version of the story and, if so,
what are the implications for the genre’s truth-telling claims? In Chapter Two, the Literature
Review, I examined the work of the reader response literary theorists, focussing especially on
Louise Rosenblatt, whose transactional theory of reading (1978) recognises the role of the
reader as an active participant in the production of meaning of a text, and Stanley Fish, who
went so far as to claim a text could not have meaning independent of the reader (1967). Fish
also wrote of the informed reader who possessed linguistic and literary competence (1970)
which informed their processing of works of fiction. German scholar Wolfgang Iser wrote
The Implied Reader, published in English in 1974, originally published as Der Implizit Leser
in 1972, a collection of essays with the stated aim of providing a foundation for a theory of
literary effects and responses based on the novel (1974, p. xi). The term “the implied reader”
refers to the active process of both the text’s potential meaning and the reader’s “actualisation
of this potential through the reading process” (p. xii).

The act of recreation is not a smooth or continuous process, but one which, in its essence,
relies on interruptions (sic) of the flow to render it efficacious. We look forward, we look
back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their

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 nonfulfilment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the dynamic process of
recreation. (p. 288)

The Methodology chapter discussed the multiple method approach undertaken for the
gathering of data: case studies; a focus group and semi-structured interviews. The interviews
were designed to capture a more general response from readers to their reception of literary
journalism than the focussed, unmediated discussions of the four book group case studies.
The aim was to tease out a range of readers’ understanding of the term literary journalism and
their expectations of the genre when reading a work they recognise as a work of literary
journalism. Questions were asked about their general reading habits; their preference for
fiction or non-fiction; their favourite genre; what drew them to a work; how they identified a
work of fiction from a work of non-fiction; what might trigger a concern about a book’s
status as a work of non-fiction and what means they had, if any, to determine if the truth of a
true story had been distorted (see Appendix Five for the full list of questions). The questions
were designed to provide consistency across the interviews while allowing for small
deviations to clarify or expand on the responses.

I conducted these interviews with 21 engaged readers I came into contact with in the course
of collecting the other sources of data – the focus group and the book groups and comprised
eight university students between the ages of 18 and 25 studying Communication and Arts at
an Australian university, and 13 men and women over the age of 50 drawn from the book
groups. They took place across a range of locations from university teaching spaces to private
homes. Each interview was conducted face to face and went for between 10 and 20 minutes
and followed the list of questions in Appendix 5, with some small variations. These
interviews were recorded and transcribed. What comes out of this data is further compelling
evidence that engaged readers have strategies when they approach works of non-fiction that
help them draw conclusions about the veracity of what the author is telling them.

All the interviewees read both fiction and non-fiction, with fiction overall the preferred genre,
although two expressed a preference for non-fiction. Asked why they read fiction, they all
expressed a desire to be transported into another world, to escape, to relax, and to lose
themselves. The most popular reason for reading non-fiction was to learn something and to
read an account of a real-life event or situation from the point of view of a specific writer. (In
responses, readers are identified as Reader 1 to Reader 21, also abbreviated to R1 to R21.)

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The question “What do you understand by the term literary journalism?” led to some useful
definitions, all of which demonstrated a basic understanding of what defines the genre, with
several readers giving similar responses: high-quality journalism that is evocative and draws
the reader in (R3); written in a narrative form with real facts (R5); something very, very well
written with experience and knowledge (R16); about using literary devices, so techniques and
ideas, and methods of imaginative writing, and applying those to shape factual material
(R11); instead of just plain article writing, more of an insight and an engaging way of
presenting it (R9); telling a story in a novel type of way with the purpose of delivering a
message or describing events or situations (R20); and journalism with a flair, more nuanced
than hard news (R8). Reader 13 demonstrated a recognition of the inherent contradiction
within the term and the genre.

R13: I think it’s an interesting mixture, literary journalism, and I’m not sure quite how it
works because to me they are almost competing genres; journalism, fact-based, non-
emotive, the journalist not part of the story but merely collating and representing a
series of factual events, although of course that is always skewed by various factors ...
Whereas literary I think of as being, fanciful is not the word, what’s the word, more
imaginative, far more imaginative.

Reader 14 has a similar response to the intrusion of journalism into the literary realm, saying
“I’m not sure that journalism, literary journalism fits into literature. I can’t see that it
encompasses literature in a sense”. Both these readers have questions about the combination
of literary and journalism as antithetical, which one might safely infer means they approach
the reading of this genre with this apparent paradox in mind. A recognition that the
boundaries of the genre are blurred suggests an informed reader, one who will process the
text having already acknowledged the need to be alert to the genre’s pitfalls.

All the interviewed readers share a number of convictions about what qualities are crucial for
any form of journalism to be credible, the dominant one being accuracy, with all 21 readers
referring to the importance of factual accuracy in these works. These readers also expect
works of literary journalism to be well written, researched and structured. They expect the
writers to be unbiased and tell the story from all relevant points of view. But while they
expect the writers to be honest and truthful, some of these readers are equipped to recognise
that the literary aspect of the work might have an impact on the way the story is told that
could impinge on the genre’s truth-telling claims.

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Reader 1, aged 19, is a student, a writer, and an avid reader of realistic fiction, which she says
depicts honest accounts of people, their flaws and inspirational qualities, as opposed to
fantasy and crime, which she finds too one-sided in their depictions of people. She is willing
to get out of her reading comfort zone, however, and if there is a deal in a bookshop, for
example, three books for $10, she will choose books she wouldn’t normally buy. She has
high regard for fiction writers who can “explain almost an entire day in one sentence and do
it so perfectly” and while she reads some non-fiction, mainly for her university courses, and
enjoys using “true elements” in her own writing, she claims “no story is as good as it can get
without a little liberty being taken”. Reader 1 has already worked out what she will not
tolerate in a work of non-fiction and refers to it as a bias that is clear from the outset.

R1: Really, the point of view that they put across and whether or not they have the right to
have that point of view. Which sounds a bit odd, but especially if someone comes into
something, for instance hypothetically in this Helen Garner19 book she came in with
an objectivity, a subjectivity towards it, I would find that almost wrong, because
you’re meant to be writing a book to inform people and by the end you’re more, it’s of
course you’re going to have some sort of bias, but to come in with a bias at the start
of writing something I find incorrect.

This reader does not like being pushed in a certain way by the author, preferring to draw her
own conclusions. She is wary of an author taking a position that allows no room for the
reader and expects a work of journalism to present both sides of the story. If it fails to do that,
in this reader’s eyes, it becomes a work of fiction.

R1: Because they’re not letting me gain my own knowledge. And that people who come in
objectively towards their subject they allow you to read between the lines whereas
people who write very subjectively about a subject it’s so, they allow no space for you
to read between the lines, to see the little innuendos that maybe even the author didn’t
see, whereas a subjective author almost cuts out all possibility which I really don’t
like and I find that’s poor writing… again it comes to the subjectivity of the author.

This reference to work “that allow you to read between the lines” suggests a level of
sophistication in how this reader approaches reading non-fiction that will inform how they
process the work, regardless of if it is fair to conclude that a subjective approach by the writer
allows no space for innuendoes or the contestable claim that work where the writer takes a

19
The reader was referring to Joe Cinque’s Consolation.

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position becomes a work of non-fiction. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate readers have
the thought processes and reflexivity to recognise where a work, in their interpretation, strays
too far from non-fiction for comfort and to reach a conclusion about what that means for the
genre’s truth telling claims. Reader 1 goes on to say:

R1: I’ve read things and because they’re just so subjective, as far as I’m concerned
leaving out massive pieces of information and just completely avoiding them
altogether, is turning a piece of writing into fiction rather than non-fiction because
you cannot call something a true story without at least acknowledging another side of
it… Like a trial cannot stand up on its own two feet without two sides of evidence, and
I agree with a piece of non-fiction writing, it can’t stand up as a piece of non-fiction
writing. It can be biased, but at least it has to admit to the other side, and at least give
reference to it. If it hides things entirely, I will rack it up to fiction.

Reader 1 demonstrates a clear means of distinguishing what she will accept as the limits of
non-fiction with her insistence that it be evidence-based but allowing it can be biased as long
as it presents both sides.

R1: Truman Capote is probably my favourite example of this. He’s a non-fiction writer,
again in quotations, but he takes liberty with what he says, and hence why I like
fiction more is because you’re allowed to. You’re not constricted. And the amount of
times I’ve read non-fiction and gone “Oh I wish that this was so much more
interesting” but then you think about it and you’re like “Well what can they do with
it? It’s the facts. They can’t meddle around with them too much unless they want to
get slipped into the fiction genre.

Reader 1 says she puts quotation marks around her description of Capote as a non-fiction
writer which suggests his “liberty taking” brings into contention his status as a writer of non-
fiction, but because of it she enjoys his work. She refers to the constraints of non-fiction as a
negative, in that adhering to the facts makes the work for her less interesting, but she seems
confident that if a writer meddled with the facts too much they’d be “slipped into the fiction
genre”. As to who would do the slipping for the author, the reader might be referring to the
gatekeepers – publishers, book sellers, critics – in which case she seems to feel confident
there would be consequences if a non-fiction writer strayed from the facts. But she confesses
to preferring it when a writer makes the facts of a true story more interesting to read by
taking “liberties” with their modes of expression. This is a reader who demonstrates she has
the skills to navigate the blurred boundaries of literary journalism. She recognises a personal
preference for literary embellishments of factual stories but knows where her personal trigger
points are and where she draws the line at boundary incursions with her insistence on

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objectivity and presenting all sides of the story. When it comes to deducing the inherent
“truth” of an individual account of a true story – to accepting the author’s version of the story
as the version of the story – she ultimately trusts in the author’s intent.

R1: The biggest thing for me is if I am sitting next to my brother at the dinner table and
I’m telling them about a silly thing that has now become a family story of what we did
one Christmas, my version is entirely different to his, yet both of us believe that
they’re entirely true, and that’s because it’s the intent of truth that I find the most
important about non-fiction. It might come up and end up being not quite true, but if
you honestly remember it being that way or that’s what you honestly think happened,
as far as I’m concerned that’s truth … And so yeah, it’s the intent, it’s author intent
for me … If the author is writing, trying, is recollecting dialogue and they get two
words wrong and it changes the entire story, but that’s honestly what they thought the
person they were interviewing was saying, they haven’t done anything wrong …
They’ve got the best opinion than anyone else because they’re the ones who have
researched it and done the interviews, so they’re, even if it’s a little bit skew, it’s still
a hell of a lot closer than anyone else’s point of view.

Reader 1 recognises that memory is unreliable and comes up with the phrase “the intent of
truth”, implying that this is the best we can hope for given the different ways we all recall the
same events. This notion of the author’s intent is brought up by several of the readers, who
also share Reader 1’s trust in the author’s intention to tell the story to the best of their ability
and a similar willingness to overlook small distortions. Reader 4, aged 18, a student of
writing and history, takes a forensic approach to the question of authorial intent. He believes
all authors of literary journalism have an agenda and he searches for clues, such as their
repeated use of a certain phrase, to work out what it is. Like Reader 1, Reader 4 expects truth,
but not 100 per cent accuracy from literary journalism and demonstrates a willingness to
accept its blurred boundaries that extends beyond Reader 1’s.

R4: There’s an implicit trust if it’s in the non-fiction section that the author has written
with the best of intentions, accurately describing what happened with at least an
emotional truth or a factual truth. Narrative fiction 20 is happy to break those
boundaries and play around with it.

Reader 4 trusts that the author of a work of non-fiction has written with the “best of
intentions” and will accurately describe the emotional or factual truth of a situation because
of that trust. But he then goes on to say narrative fiction plays around with those boundaries
and is happy to break them, implying he is comfortable with that too. His trigger points

20
I accept that he meant to say narrative non-fiction not narrative fiction, as that is what we were discussing.

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where he would not be comfortable include the interpretation of a character’s thoughts,
feelings or motives; if the writing becomes too literary and includes jumps in time or gaps in
accounts; and the repeated use of specific phrases. Reader 3, also a student of writing, has a
similar approach to both Readers 1 and 4 and is comfortable with the possibility that while
some facts may have been subjected to an author’s “spin”, if the “general gist” is truthful she
doesn’t mind. (I have referred to myself as FB.)

R3: I approach it with the mindset of um it’s based on the truth and it’s going to contain a
decent whack of the truth, but I know that I’ll never be able to tell what is fact and
what she’s put a spin on or she remembered wrong or something like that.

FB: And does that concern you?

R3: No, because the general gist and most of it would still be true and I don’t mind so
much if the rest of it isn’t true.

Reader 3 bases her trust on the writer’s reputation and believes readers will pick up on
attempts by a writer to trick them, saying she will do some research herself and not trust that
writer again. She will tolerate an inaccurate recall of a conversation, but not facts being
changed to “suit the narrative”. She appreciates a writer being honest with the reader and
with the people they interview.

R3: I found JCC [Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation] a lot easier to get into, not
because I have anything to do with murders or the trials or anything like that but
because, oh how do I put this, but because it was a lot more than just relaying the facts,
a lot more than just relaying what people say, she did put her own personality into it
but she also looked, while it’s mainly about Joe Cinque and his family during the trials,
she also tried the best she could to get interviews with the other people, she tried to get
onto the other side. It showed that the only reason why she couldn’t was because they
wouldn’t let her.

Reader 3 refers here to Helen Garner’s technique of keeping her readers informed about her
process as a journalist. This reader finds the transparency adds to Garner’s credibility. And she
has a useful metaphor for Garner’s writing style.

R3: She was an observer but she’s kind of like a filmmaker who will focus on something but
will come in and say, well I thought this at the time and will just sort of almost like you
have the movie and then you’ve got the audio commentary over the top.

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This is a well-articulated insight into the complexities of literary journalism and why it makes
for such rich and compelling reading. Reader 3 recognises the layers inherent in the style and
is able to delineate between where Garner is imposing her focus on a fact or incident –
perhaps amplifying it beyond its actual importance – and the fact or incident itself. Here is a
reader not likely to be seduced by writerly impositions on the narrative. Reader 13, a music
teacher in her early 60s, is another reader who appreciates an author of this genre being open
about their process and their inherent prejudices but is more prescriptive than Reader 3 in
what she will and will not tolerate. Reader 13 professes to take what she is reading on face
value and trusts a work of non-fiction will be what it claims to be but is aware “that the
writer’s own proclivities and political biases and moral and ethical perspective influences the
way they have perceived something in the first place”.

FB: So, does it concern you that some facts might be changed or even invented by the
author to suit the narrative of a non-fiction work?

R13: Yes, that probably would concern me.

FB: And why would it concern you?

R13: Because I would feel then that the account was not completely reliable, unless they
said, in italics, this last little bit is my own invention. If they were to signal to the
reader that this is their supposition, this is their analysis, this is their take on what
they’re talking about, then I wouldn’t mind that so much.

Reader 13 expects a little more than Reader 3 in that she demands full disclosure from the
author as opposed to Reader 3’s willingness to accommodate some uncertainty. Reader 13
finds that the “literary” in literary journalism “lets the journalist off the hook very nicely” in
that the reader expects there will be things added to make it a more satisfying reading
experience.

R13: So, I suppose in a way it’s not so much the misrepresentation of fact that can occur in
literary journalism, it’s an embellishment or a turn of phrase that, while being
satisfying to read as a construction of a sentence or a group of words, may skew the
facts slightly, and that’s the big question of it all, isn’t it?

While that is a big question, it is not the question this thesis is setting out to answer. This
thesis is not looking at whether the facts get skewed in literary journalism, it is looking at

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whether this matters if it can be demonstrated that readers have the skills to judge for
themselves when an author has misrepresented a fact or situation and has developed
techniques to mitigate against that.

Reader 21 is doctor who works in palliative care and psychiatry and is particularly interested
in personality styles and disorders so looks for consistency of how these personalities are
described in both fiction and non-fiction. He applies this search for consistency to the author
when assessing the credibility of a work of literary journalism such as Garner’s Joe Cinque’s
Consolation.

R21: I look for I suppose whenever an author writes they write from a particular world
view and I try and pick up what their world view is. And the other thing I try to look
for is consistency and like are all the different parts of the story internally consistent.
Because if the story espouses different world views from different angles it makes me
think I don’t really know where you’re coming from.

While R21 prefers the author to “disappear into the background” to allow the “story to come
forward”, he accepts that, while an author might invent facts and change facts to suit their
narrative, it is “at the end of the day their narrative”.

R21: … so it’s actually about trying to pick up the position that the author’s coming from,
like how emotionally involved are they in this and for what reasons and what are their
personality style what’s their world view … One of the difficulties today is the
increased polarization in everything we see but the very fact that you’re polarized
means… you have to denigrate the other side of the story. But it’s hard to pick up if
an author’s doing that because it can be concealed. But at the end of the day, you’d
hope they would be fair to both sides of the story.

Reader 21, as with Reader 13, has a sophisticated understanding of the polarising effect of the
media and recognises the difficulty for readers to discern when a writer is “denigrating the
other side of the story”, but he has developed his own method for seeing through these
attempts, which is to focus on the writer’s emotional investment in the story and their world
view. As a reader with a medical background in psychiatry he might be better equipped than
most to apply this method, but Reader 20, who also works in a health-related field, has a
similar forensic approach, and describes himself as “increasingly sceptical” when
approaching non-fiction because of the internet age.

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R20: My career’s been based on doing stuff based on evidence and so I tend to look for
plausible evidence. If someone’s saying something on what basis are they saying it
and what is their background and what references do they use … is that just
someone’s opinion or is that something based on research?

Reader 20 will “google” to confirm any doubtful claims and will research an author to assess
their reliability. For Reader 20, the topic is the most important aspect and if he cares enough
about it he will look more deeply at the book and care more about the factual status. He is not
concerned about an author recreating dialogue for unwitnessed scenes if it helps to tell the
story and mentions Australian historian and journalist Peter FitzSimons as being “upfront that
he invents based on research”. FitzSimons is a journalist and writer of historical books, who
has produced 27 works of non-fiction. In the acknowledgements in Gallipoli (2014),
FitzSimons writes that, as with all of his books with historical themes, he wants it to read
“like a novel but fill it with accurate raw detail and perch it in 2000 or so firm footnotes to
show that it is nevertheless real” (2014, p. xx).

Reader 2, a 25-year-old university student who is “trying to become a writer” of fantasy

fiction, has also devised methods for working out when a writer has transgressed her very
clear and firm demands for non-fiction. She reads mostly fiction but will read non-fiction to
research her novels and be informed about the world. She likes non-fiction because it is a
“shared reality we all have”. She expects writers of nonfiction will not lie to her and will get
their facts straight. She identifies works of non-fiction from where it is located in the
bookshop and also other clues in the body of the book such as photographs, and refers to a
book by John Safran, Murder in Mississippi, published in 2013.

R2: With the John Safran book, it was located in the Dymock’s bookshop in the non-
fiction section, biography section, or autobiography section, and it had, you open it
and there was pictures of the murder victim, Richard Barrett, and it had pictures of
him, it had pictures of John Safran as a young boy as well, and it had pictures of the
murderer, and so on, so it provided proof, I guess, in the picture, that it was based on
real events.

Here the reader is demonstrating a grasp of how paratext (Genette, 1987) can be used to make
determinations about a book’s provenance. Despite her firm views on non-fiction, Reader 2
found she could accommodate a writer changing the names of individuals to protect them
after reading Murder in Mississippi, in which Safran changed the name of the sister of the

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main character, Richard Barrett, to protect her privacy (Safran, 2013, Acknowledgements,
n.p.). Reader 2 found this acceptable.

R2: Yeah, when John Safran wrote the book he didn’t call her whatever her real name is,
he gave her a false name, he gave her the name Geraldine Craft, it’s not her real
name and we don’t know what her real name is, and that’s to protect her privacy, as
you well should … Yeah, that’s a legitimate means to lie a little bit, to protect
someone’s life, you know, I presume they stick to the broad facts, don’t they?

Reader 2 also wasn’t concerned when Helen Garner changed the names of two people in Joe
Cinque’s Consolation to protect their identities because she recognises that it is sometimes
necessary. She is engaged “over the edge” (Lehman, 1997, p. 30) in her understanding that
the people in these works have lives beyond the text. Reader 2’s method for deducing when a
writer is credible is when they stick to what they can know and not what they cannot know,
such as what a person is thinking, what she calls “sticking to the known truth”.

R2: Well, we don’t know, for instance, what Anu Singh was thinking [in Joe Cinque’s
Consolation], and Helen Garner never makes a claim to know what Anu Singh’s
thinking. Whenever she does those scenes which Helen Garner didn’t witness, she
does it, she just sticks to the facts, she doesn’t go inside Anu Singh’s perspective, so
that’s a good example of doing what you’re supposed to do which is sticking to the
known truth.

Of the description of Anu Singh playing with her hair in court (Garner, 2004, p. 46) that
bothered the feminist critics as discussed in Chapter Six, Reader 2 says that it is “fine”
because it is a “concrete exterior detail” that was witnessed by Garner and others in the
courtroom.

R2: Dramatizing it, sure, using that literary-novelist technique to brilliant effect, and yet
she does it without going into dishonesty.

But Reader 2 concedes it can be difficult to reach a judgement in all cases and refers to
Garner’s The First Stone – which she hasn’t read but has read about – and Garner’s use of a
number of characters to represent one person (as discussed in Chapter Four), making it seem
there was “some sort of evil feminist conspiracy to take this poor, sexual-harassment creepy
guy down”.

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R2: … and that’s a distortion, and it’s quite hard for the reader to know that that’s a
distortion unless they’ve read the journalistic piece where the person who was the
basis for the 10 characters (sic) was actually one person. She said, “It was just me,
actually,” so how can we know that? It’s quite difficult to know. I guess when I read a
work labelled non-fiction, and the author presents it as non-fiction, I expect to have
the person respect me enough, respect their reader enough to tell them the truth
whenever possible.

Reader 2 recognises it is not always possible for a reader to discern where a writer has
breached their trust. Her method for dealing with this is to filter out her choice of works to
protect her from that occurring. Reader 2 remarks that she would never read a book that
claimed to be non-fiction but wasn’t, citing James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003)
(discussed in Chapter One) as a book she would never buy.

R2 I won’t ever read that book, because the guy claimed he was writing non-fiction, and
he wrote a work of fiction …

FB: So, what was the trigger point for that?

R2: Dishonesty of the author, claiming to write non-fiction, because I think in terms of
writing style, non-fiction’s easier to write, you don’t have to resort to those literary
devices, and all the effort that goes into writing a piece of fiction, the literary effort.
And basically when you write a piece of fiction in the non-fiction style, it’s so
incredibly easy, sort of like a cheap way out, isn’t it, and it’s a cheap way out to
market it, oh, this is my true story.

Clearly Reader 2 values ethics and transparency in her reading but, as well as filtering what
she reads, she has worked out a means of navigating the blurred boundaries of literary
journalism and demarcated the limits of her tolerance. She has identified the narrative devices
or triggers that would concern her (composite characters, the writer presuming to know a
character’s point of view and making things up) and what she will allow (protecting the
identities of the living when necessary, and description). Her means of navigating the blurred
boundaries are clearly expressed.

R2: Well, I think if I read a piece of literary journalism which goes inside the head of
somebody, I begin to be suspicious, because I don’t think the author could possibly
know… I know how my fictional characters think, even if I’m not writing from their
point of view, because they’re my creations, whereas Helen Garner is not the god of
this world, and she is not the owner, not the creator of Anu Singh, right. So she can’t
know how, so, what Anu Singh’s thinking. So, when I read a work which claims to
know how any person was thinking, or feeling, without the person specifically telling

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 them or describing them in an interview, then I question its validity, and I start
questioning what else might be made up as well.

Reader 2 has not only skilfully identified the pitfalls of the use of the inner monologue in
literary journalism she has proffered a means for a writer to mitigate against it affecting the
credibility of a work by demanding the person has specifically told them or described them in
an interview. Reader 9, a 19-year-old student, prefers what she calls “plain writing” in her
non-fiction as opposed to an excessive use of adjectives, simile, and metaphor, which she
finds can distort the recounting of an event or conversation by affecting the way it is received
by the reader.

R9: It’s not focussing on the truth of it. It’s just saying it was like a, well that’s simile, but
it was a train through the conversation, and you go “What does that mean?”.
[Laughing] So sticking to what is actually very plain.

It is difficult to fully appreciate this point without the benefit of the context of the example,
but it’s a point worth teasing out. If a writer deploys a metaphor to describe a feeling or a
quality, it can easily be interpreted in different ways by the reader, leading to ambiguity. This
is one of the hazards of this style of writing. But this reader is alert to these potential potholes
and has a means of dealing with them.

R9: Contradictions, observations are big usually. As someone who knows how to write,
moderately well at least, I can usually tell if things are used, particularly just for
story-telling or if they actually happened or if, it is often hard to tell, but some things
you can definitely say that that’s probably just added in there for story-telling
purposes.

FB: So, what means do you use for coming to that conclusion, where you can go, “I think
that’s being used for story-telling”? How do you work that out?

R9: Just the way they use adjectives usually. Actually, that’s a big one. Particular things,
like we were just talking in class before how the writer had used sounds a lot that
particularly described how things sounded, and I think that’s very real because if
you’re trying to describe something fictional you have to go that extra step in
describing a sound whereas it just, it all flowed fine, and it sounded very personal.

Reader 9 focusses on the sound being described by a writer – perhaps to evoke location or
mood – and recognises these as being in some way authentic, creating a sense of something
personal and true. Reader 9 seems alert to what Reader 19 calls false notes in non-fiction
writing and is also aware that narrative devices can compromise the truth-telling claims of

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non-fiction. But as with Reader 2, Reader 9 identifies subjectivity as a trigger point for him to
begin to question whether the story-telling techniques are getting in the way of the factual
status of a work.

R9: Distorting the truth, subjectivity, and maybe sort of not getting to the point of the truth
for the sake of the story. You can technically have all the facts right but not focus on
them as much as some story-telling aspects, which I think isn’t the point of a
non-fiction novel, or a non-fiction anything, literally, literary journalism.

Reader 14 describes herself as a bit of a snob who likes to read “what I call literature”. She
rarely reads literary journalism. Like Reader 9, she tends to be suspicious of literary
approaches to journalism and authorial intrusions on the storytelling, for example she found
Helen Garner’s descriptions of place in The First Stone irritating.

R14: I mean, she brings in the blackbirds and the sprinklers lazily arcing on the lawn, and
I find that rather irritating. It’s though she wants to draw you in with that cosy
feeling. And somehow I’d rather the book was more defined and just seemed to be
more factual because it didn’t bring her feelings into it, as we were discussing, her
prejudices at times, and I think almost stereotypes she used when she talks about the
different, for instance, the incident in court when she was sitting waiting, and two men
came in and she immediately defined them as being a protection guard around the
Shepherd family and they were obviously Presbyterian and thin, and I found that very
irritating. And then she herself was scrabbling with her bags and letting them push
past her, and yeah, that sort of thing, which perhaps you could say was literary, I
think that detracts rather than added to the whole story.

Consciously or not, Reader 14 brings her own prejudices to her irritation with Garner’s
descriptions. An atheist, for example, might not object to these two men being described as
Presbyterian and thin, in fact much might be conveyed about these men from this choice of
words that an atheist might find enjoyable or insightful. But that Reader 14 recognises the
author’s descriptions as manipulative and loaded, rather than merely setting the scene, and
that for her, this detracts from the story, demonstrates an awareness that she is navigating her
way through the blurred boundaries of the form.

Reader 6 shares similar methods with Reader 14 for detecting authorial manipulation, and
like Reader 14 she draws on her maturity and her life experience to make judgements on the
credibility of a work of literary journalism. Reader 6, a former journalist turned writer, editor,
and teacher, describes herself as being as “old as Noah”. (She is 51). She reads both fiction

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and non-fiction and draws on her experience in publishing and teaching to zone in on red
flags when it comes to reading literary journalism.

R6: I suppose things like direct quotes, level of insight into the subject when you can’t be
sure that they would have gained it, conclusions drawn on a subject’s behalf when
you wonder how they could have reached the depth of the conclusion that they have –
whether they had all the facts available. Evocative language is another. If somebody
wants me to think a certain way, then I have to make my own mind up, they can’t tell
me.

Reader 6 is clearly a reflective, questioning reader with a well-defined means of determining

the factual status of a work. Another trigger point that would make her care about the factual
status of a work is an obvious agenda on the writer’s part and the type of subject matter being
written about.

R6: I suppose an agenda, especially if it’s high-profile people, that would make me care.
Whether there’s an ulterior motive – if it’s actually propaganda disguised as
something else. So, if the motive is blurred or if its intentions, what it wants from me is
blurred.

FB: And how would you identify the motive to know it was blurred?

R6: Well, in the case of, say, the Armstrong book,21 it’s in hindsight. Any political
biography I instantly mistrust but read anyway. If somebody like Rupert Murdoch22
was to write a book about how he pioneered journalism into the 21st century, I would
instantly mistrust that because I know he’s destroyed it.

As with Readers 1, 4, 3, 13 and 9, Reader 6 identifies as a trigger point for her the author’s
approach to the story and how balanced it is and echoes their use of the phrase “even-
handed”.

R6: Particularly if it’s one-sided. If anybody beats a drum too far in one direction and
tries to lead me away from other questions, if a writer doesn’t answer all the
questions where the story goes, I mistrust them. Sometimes it’s laziness but sometimes
there are other agendas. I suppose it’s depth of research and presentation.
Something must be even-handed.

21
Lance Armstrong, the disgraced world champion cyclist, has written two autobiographies, both published
before he was exposed as a drug cheat.
22
Rupert Murdoch, the founder of the conservative-leaning media empire News Corp.

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Reader 17, a school teacher in her 50s, says that while she is no “literary expert” she is not after
a report; she wants something written as a narrative with the facts unembellished. She has a
similar approach to Reader 6 and her own way of discerning when a writer is not being even-
handed.

R17: I guess if an author is just too emphatic, and not considering other perspectives, and
even sort of attributing motivations to who they're writing about, without backing that
up with a rational, with any sort of, piece of evidence really. Where are they getting
their sources from? That's something that I look at, yeah.

As well as evidence to support a particular position or point, Reader 17, too, appreciates
transparency on the writer’s part.

R17: Well validating arguments. If a journalist is going to write a book about something
and write it from a particular perspective, then I think it needs to be evidenced. There
needs to be proper sources involved and I think they need to make clear where they
have obtained that information or … where they are making assumptions or where
they're extrapolating from, you know from a particular point.

This is a well-articulated case for what a reader expects from a work purporting to be
journalism. But in spite of these caveats, Reader 17 concedes she can accommodate an author
using their imagination when recreating scenes they were not present for.

R17: I, um again I'm assuming that the author if it's non-fiction is describing a scene as it
was. It is description, it's not, um an invention.

FB: Even if they weren't there?

R17: Mmmm, yeah so say if an author is discussing something that happened in the
Governor General's Office in 1975, no then they weren't there. So how much do you
attribute to their imagination.

FB: And can you accommodate that?

R17: I do accommodate that.

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Reader 12 is a sub-editor and yoga teacher in her 40s. Despite having worked in journalism
all of her adult life, she says she has no understanding of the term literary journalism, but her
first reference point for determining the credibility of a work of non-fiction is the author.

R12: … what is their reason for writing the book? Is it to write the next best do-it-yourself
help-yourself seller, or do they have a real message that they want to impart to
people? And do they have a life experience that reflects this message they’re trying to
give? And I think you just test what you read against what you’ve experienced in your
own life, and if the two have, if there’s a huge gap that doesn’t really resonate, then I
probably wouldn't bother finishing the book.

This notion of a reader testing what they have read against their own life experience goes to
the nub of what I am setting out to hypothesise, which is that engaged readers have a level of
media literacy when it comes to works of literary journalism that equips them to grapple with
its potential ambiguities. Reader 12 has clearly stated methods for resolving any ambiguity in
her mind about the authenticity of a writer – she puts the book down. As this reader is a
professional journalist in the business of checking the work of other journalists for accuracy,
but also someone who professed to have had no knowledge of literary journalism prior to the
interview, the following exchange is worth including in full.

FB: In terms of just literary journalism does it concern you that some facts might be
changed or even invented by the author to suit the narrative of a non-fiction work?
So, if it’s journalism written like a novel, would it concern you that the author might
play around with the facts, or even invent characters?

R12: Yeah, it sort of does really, and I guess that comes from a professional basis. I check
things and recheck things [laughs], and I just would query what the motive was of the
author; are they trying to make a point clearer and therefore it’s a fairly genuine
motive? Or are they trying to make it more interesting when perhaps it wasn’t quite
as interesting? Are they trying to make themselves, put themselves into the story when
essentially my training is the stories should be about the story, not about the writer?
So that would bother me, and although I said earlier I can see that there are blurs
between fiction and non-fiction, I think I get back to that point about the author’s
intention – what are they writing? Are they writing fiction or are they writing non-
fiction? If they do want to mess with it they should certainly state that, that names
have been changed and facts have been played around with. But then how does the
reader know which facts?

FB: That’s right.

R12: … you’re heading into fiction there and if you want to write fiction write a fictional
account and say it’s based on something that happened; don’t pretend it’s non-fiction
and add in a little bit of fiction.

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For Reader 12, it is clear cut. The work must define itself appropriately and it is the author’s
responsibility to come clean with the reader as to what it is they’re doing with the story and
choose a form for telling it appropriately This is an unsurprising response from a journalist,
but it’s useful here in that it pertains to defining what literary journalism is. Is a work of
literary journalism or creative non-fiction “based on a true story” or is it “telling a true
story”? It matters to Reader 12 that it be clear from the outset and if she finds it is not what it
claims to be on the cover, or where it is located in the library or bookshop, she will put the
book down.

All these readers have identified “even-handedness” on the part of the writer, and evidence, as
two elements of literary journalism they value highly, and all appear adept at coming to their
own conclusions if these elements are not evident in a published book. These readers enjoy
literary journalism because of its narrative approach to telling true stories, while remaining
mindful of the potential pitfalls of the form.

Reader 19 is a highly engaged reader primarily of fantasy as well as science and detective
fiction, aged in her 80s at the time of interview. She “wouldn’t trust an autobiography, not even
my own, because it relies on memory”, and expects the writing in literary journalism to be
“coloured” rather than a “plain unvarnished account of something” but has her reservations
about this.

R19: I think we’re already touching on the problem for the reader when reading something
claiming to be truth … I do read very cynically and with a lot of questions and if the
skill of the author is such as to make it sound totally plausible then I will read it as a
true story. But all the time there’s a voice at the back of my head saying, hang about
how do we know how much the author is colouring this story, how do we know that
the choice of literary terms is actually affecting the way she’s writing because a push
here and a tweak there? It only takes one word to colour a whole sentence of a whole
paragraph. It’s a very tricky thing.

Here is another reflective reader with a developed means of decoding how a writer tells the
story, the “voice at the back of her head” sending up red flags. Reader 19 recognises the pitfalls
of putting real-life events into a narrative form and comes up with the useful phrase of “false
notes” to describe moments where a reader might feel uneasy about the status of a fact or a
comment.

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P19: It is putting it into story form and that’s where you get into the danger level … If you
know about the subject, you would pick up perhaps a mistake the author made that
you know is wrong or perhaps a stretch of the imagination. I think you bring all your
critical faculties to bear on whatever you read as long as you’re reading it slowly
enough to take it in … I think if you have read for all of your life you get the false
notes.

Clearly eight decades as a reader have equipped Reader 19 with a well-developed radar for
detecting these false notes. At the other end of the age spectrum, Reader 7, aged 19, who also
prefers fantasy fiction to non-fiction, but has been studying Joe Cinque’s Consolation for a
university course, says he loves the story being told in an interesting way, “which is sort of
blended between the fiction aspects with all the lovely writing, and nice story-telling aspects,
and then also, obviously, journalistic idea with all the facts and everything like that”.

R7: … but what I don’t like is when it’s just a linear thing, a story, in non-fiction, where
you can sort of tell that the person who’s writing it is just very good at journalism but
not so good at storytelling, and that’s probably the two things I look for in non-
fiction, really, the storytelling aspects, I guess.

Here is another reader identifying what makes literary journalism compelling, but the fact
that he is enjoying the story-telling aspects of literary journalism doesn’t mean he doesn’t
share the concerns of the other readers when it comes to boundaries and constraints on the
form. He has his trigger points but also the means to deal with them and is even forgiving of
the deployment of literary devices such as composite characters if it helps make the story-
telling more engaging.

R7: I guess just try to use commonsense… In Cold Blood, the thing that triggered
something in my mind was the scene-by-scene recreation of things that an author
couldn’t know or even no-one could know because the people are dead, that sort of
thing. So, if something just stands out as out-of-place or too, not too real, because
some writers are really good at doing that, but untrustworthy, just because it’s word
for word, like, I don't know.

FB: So, does it concern you that some facts might be changed or even invented by the
author to suit the narrative of a non-fiction work?

R7: Yeah, probably if the facts are changed, but if the facts are the same but they’re
presented in a different way, that wouldn’t bother me as much. But if things are just
completely made up, then that bothers me. But if it’s a composite character or

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 something like that is created, or a conversation is created that sort of tells what
actually happened, but in an engaging way, then I don’t mind that, because it adds to
the storytelling aspects of it, which I like.

FB: So, you can kind of reconcile it in some way?

R7: Yeah.

I argue that these readers are skilfully and reflectively and indeed reflexively negotiating the
blurred boundaries of literary journalism. They are also recognising their trigger points and
finding ways to accommodate them. They are capable of determining if the author’s version
of the story is well enough researched, and written with enough good intentions, to validate
the genre’s claims to truth telling. Reader 6 recognises the truth as “an ethical and moral
issue”, but that “nitpicking can get in the way of it”.

R6: Helen Garner, being an Australian example, I mean, the amount of trouble The First
Stone caused. And if you read that book, I actually think she was quite fair, you know?
She called it as she saw it. And again, with Joe Cinque, I think the ethical issues raised
around that book were nothing like, in comparison to what the book was like, I think it
was an overreaction. I also think she has the right to call a book Joe Cinque’s
Consolation. I think she has the right to say, “This is for you.” She’s a writer, it’s her
story as much as it was his.

Reader 6 makes a very shrewd but contestable observation about literary journalism here,
positing that the story is the writer’s story as much as it is the subject’s. What Reader 6’s
comment demonstrates that is useful for this study, however, is that this reader recognises the
agency of the writer in retelling someone’s story and is comfortable with it. Reader 6
supports the conclusions drawn by Giles and Roberts (2016) as discussed in Chapter Two,
who argued that “ambiguity, imagination, and creativity are an essential and unavoidable part
of the narrative process, and do not necessarily diminish the reliability, validity, and
objectivity of the story” (p. 102).

Instead, by actively drawing attention to these subjective processes, literary journalism

reveals that narrative is always a matter of rhetoric and always subjective because the writer is
required to select and interpret in order to tell the story, irrespective of how “objective” it
appears. (2016, p. 102)

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Reader 18, a former school teacher in her 60s, reads literary journalism to be engaged in the
perspective of the author and therefore seeks out works that will be sympathetic to her world
view. She expects contemporaneous literary journalism to be factual and believes Helen Garner
and Chloe Hooper are reliable writers who would have gone to some trouble to get their facts
right, but she accepts that turning these facts into a narrative is subjective.

R18: …so to see facts in a different light and to see the story, not just facts, because facts are
not just things within themselves, but they’re enmeshed within a whole series of events
and with a particular kind of society and that’s a good author who will bring all those
things in together… it’s journalism that is more elaborated. So, in the sense that it has
some of the characteristic of literary fiction that is an interaction of characters a
storyline and an engaging sequence of events to get across a point of view that is in
sympathy with mine. I’d read the cover to get a general gist of the point of view.

Reader 18’s description of literary journalism as “elaborated” is astute, and while she
appreciates the skill of a writer who can bring out the complexities of a situation, she is not
interested in reading a work that would not be in sympathy with her own point of view and
studies the cover as a means of filtering out works she knows she won’t enjoy. She has
devised a way to minimise the risk of encountering any trigger points. Reader 10 has
developed his own means for questioning a work but is less discriminating and open to trying
a wide variety of books. A retired pilot in his 50s, Reader 10 is an avid reader, with up to 20
books “on the go at a time”. He reads mostly non-fiction, including autobiography, biography
and history, to better understands events or times he finds interesting. He talks about the
“critical monitoring” he does when he’s reading non-fiction, which is to question if an
interpretation is reasonable or not.

R10: And you’re holding a set of scales in your head all the time to say, “Well no, you’ve
gone too far, therefore you’ve lost me”, or “No, no, you’re in the normal bounds”.

Reader 10 has other sophisticated methods for determining the credibility of a work of
literary journalism, including referring to the paratext for evidence and “filtering out”
elements of the genre, such as editing, to better focus on the content. He refers to being able
to link material to its source and see what the writer has done with that material. He has a
means of concluding the writer has crossed the border into what he calls “bullshit”, at which
point he stops reading. His rationale is that as long as the writer is giving him the information
he wants he is comfortable, but in the back of his mind he is alert to the possibility the writer
will detour from the facts to the extent he will no longer want to continue reading the book.

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R10: So, you’re looking at the presentation, the research and how it’s footnoted, how it’s
acknowledged, how the person talks about their preface of the introduction or talks
about the methodology they used. And … you can usually tell where the boundary is
of, “Yeah, I can read that paragraph and I can see the police report that you’ve read
to get to that” and then you can see the step they’ve taken which is “You know what”.
But again, because that genre there’s so many, I won’t say so many, but there are
things happening all the time that are sort of like the editing and these sort of things,
and you just, but you’re reading it for the content. So, you’re sort of always, you
almost filter that out. And you say “Okay, you’ve stepped over the line there, but that
doesn’t change the fact that I’m still getting all this other information that I want from
you. I’m just, I’ll hold that as a thought”. If you get to a certain point where you’re
thinking “No, no, now you’re bullshitting me” then you would say, “Okay, I’ll put
that book down”.

This highly engaged reader has accommodated the blurred boundaries of literary journalism
and staked out his territory as to where he draws the line. Not only that, he has a process for
dealing with his trigger points as does Reader 12 – he puts the book down. This image of the
reader with a set of scales in their head monitoring the border incursions is a useful one for
writers of literary journalism to consider next time they consider embellishing, inventing,
distorting or composing fictional characters.

Reader 15 is in her 70s with a PhD in Archaeology. She reads mostly fiction, while her
husband reads nothing but non-fiction, which she finds “boring”. As with Reader 17, Reader
15 focusses in on authorial point of a view as a trigger point for her caring about the factual
status of the work.

R15: Yeah, I mean if it’s a statement as though it’s fact and there seems to be absolutely no
evidence to back it up, it just seems to come straight out of their own prejudices or
own extreme personal experience that would make me worried. If it’s something that I
already know more facts about and … I don’t agree with what the statement is, then
I’d disagree with it. It’s hard to explain. If it’s something that sounds to me like it’s
fashionable, there seem to be quite a few attitudes and points of view that are just
fashionable, and because I’m not of the age of the people putting them forward I
suppose I see them from a somewhat different point of view, and I think, “Hmm, don’t
know about that one”.

Reader 15 questions the veracity of statements that she doesn’t agree with or that don’t
concur with her view of the world. This could be considered personal prejudice as opposed to
any false claims on the writer’s part. But Reader 15 also likes a journalist to have a point of
view, so as a trigger point, this might not be a particularly powerful one.

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R15: I like journalists to, well to have a point of view, you’ve got to have a point of view,
but not to make it completely bound up with just, “This is the way I see the world and
the reader better see it the same way.” I don’t like that.

Reader 15, who expresses strong views about the quality of the media during our interview,
including that most journalists have no “feel for words”, recognises here that her background
and life experiences, including her age, will have an impact on how she responds to the work.
But she does have a process for when she reads a work purporting to be non-fiction, which
she has developed through her academic work.

R15: I try and look at the evidence that’s presented in terms of backing them up.
Archaeology, for example, is one where the facts are very similar and not very
frequent, and it’s much more often surmised. So I still have to look at what…what the
surmise is based on and how solid that seems to be, and whether there’s any other
contradictory evidence to undermine the surmise.

As with Reader 15, Reader 11, a tertiary-educated health professional of 60, is a highly
engaged, demanding and thoughtful reader whose feedback on what she expects from literary
journalists would be very useful for anyone hoping to publish in this field. She has a similarly
informed and reflexive approach to navigating literary journalism’s blurred boundaries and
draws on her knowledge of historiography to decide on a work’s accuracy.

R11: Well history’s an interesting example, because again there’s, like schools of fiction
there’s schools of historiography which debate how fictional is it, or how historical is
it, how accurate is it, how interpretative the history is. So I guess when I’m reading
something like that I’m making judgements about it using not only what I’m reading
on the page in front of me but I’m using my broader context of knowledge to help me
decide whether I think it’s fiction or not, or if it’s over extrapolated or not.

But Reader 11 also feels readers are at “the mercy of the skill and sophistication and
perspective of the writer, of course, as one is in fiction [laughs]”. As with Readers 10 and 15,
Reader 11 studies the text to seek out the writer’s intention and methodology and employs
similar methods to reach a judgement. She believes the writer of literary journalism has an
ethical obligation to make explicit to the reader their perspective, their position, what they’re
trying to do and why, referring to Helen Garner’s approach in Joe Cinque’s Consolation.

R11: …she tried to do that in the introduction, and she’s saying quite up front, “I didn’t
interview the woman who was responsible for this horrible thing,” and she says why,

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 and she states her perspective. And you read that and I think, “Okay, this is a very hard
thing to understand”. The person who was the perpetrator, to me it’s unfathomable,
but at least Helen Garner’s made her position clear. And I think that’s probably one of
the main ethical issues that an author has to do. And I guess the other thing is you need
to show your tracks in the way you should be able to explicate where the information
came from in the same way when you’re writing a journal paper you reference things
… So being open and honest about the sources of the information is really important.
And also, I guess giving a bit more context for the individuals you’re talking to and
you’re drawing from, you’re drawing the informational perspectives from; you need to
give them a context too, so as the reader you know where they’re coming from … I’d
be looking for… for clarity of style which doesn’t obfuscate, and a way of, not only a
way of communicating but some upfrontness in what the author’s telling you.

Reader 11 compares the writing of literary journalism to the writing of an academic journal
article where a writer must be scrupulous about acknowledging all their sources and must
ensure all their assertions and conclusions are evidence-based. The similarities between
academic research and writing and journalism have been the subject of academic study.
Australian journalism academic Chris Nash has long argued for journalism research to be
recognised as scholarly, describing journalism as a research practice “in so far as it originates
truth claims of significance to publics about the state of the world in some particularity”
(2013, p. 127).

The formulation of a research question in journalism (the answer to which is

the answer to ‘What’s the story?’) can adopt a range of modes: generative, inquisitional,
forensic, performative, and so on. This necessarily involves recognising and explaining the
position and purpose of the researcher or subject with respect to the research object, and
likewise the position and perspective on the topic of the intended audience/readership … In
any selected mode, the journalist researcher should be able to defend the adequacy of the
research question and modality with respect to the truth claims being made. (pp. 128-129)

In an article on the meanings of reflective and reflexive research in journalism studies, Sarah
Niblock (2007) cites David Nightingale and John Cromby (1999) looking at theory and
practice in Social Constructionist Psychology, which Niblock finds has a useful application to
her study into reflective practice in journalism.

Reflexivity requires an awareness of the researcher's contribution to the construction of

meanings throughout the research process, and an acknowledgement of the impossibility of
remaining outside of one's subject matter while conducting research. Reflexivity then, urges

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 us “to explore the ways in which a researcher's involvement with a particular study
influences, acts upon and informs such research”. (2007, p. 29)

This is how two of the literary journalists studied here approached the task in three of the four
works selected for this study – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The Tall Man
– where to varying degrees the author reflects on their engagement with the subject matter as
discussed in Chapters Four, Six and Seven. Estelle Blackburn approached Broken Lives
differently by keeping herself out of the narrative completely but was transparent about her
sources and then obligingly chronicled the experience of writing Broken Lives in her
reflective work The End of Innocence. Whether responding to these four works or other
works of non-fiction more generally, the readers who have been part of this research project
have demonstrated they are reflective and some even reflexive readers who have developed a
range of sophisticated methods for overcoming trigger points or concerns about how a writer
of literary journalism tells true stories. I argue it is time to privilege the reader in the
discourse.

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 Chapter Nine: Conclusion – Situating the under-privileged reader in the discourse on
literary journalism

“I am arguing, in short, for a definition of mimesis as a contract, wherein writer and reader
share an agreement about the conditions under which texts can be composed and
comprehended.” (Barbara Foley, 1986)

“All writers tweak things all the time. Only a terribly naïve reader believes the story already
exists in nature – that the writer just picks it up, brushes the dust off it, and puts it in a book.
A story is what you get when you mould the mess of everything into a shape …There is a
contract, in non-fiction: you’re saying, trust me, this really happened.” (Garner, 2013)

In Telling the Truth, The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction, Barbara Foley applies
Marxist literary theory to what she labels documentary fiction, which she calls a distinct
fictional kind that “locates itself near the border between factual discourse and fictive
discourse, but it does not propose an eradication of that border” (1986, p. 25). She continues:
“In all its phases, then, the documentary novel aspires to tell the truth, and it associates this
truth with claims to empirical validation” (p. 26). While it is a different form, the same can be
said for literary journalism. I use Foley here because she refers to the contract between writer
and reader in her definition of “mimesis”, a term used in literary criticism to describe the
process of imitation artists deploy to represent and interpret the world. The relationship
between reader and writer is referred to by many of the literary journalism theorists discussed
in this thesis (Hellmann 1981; Heyne 1983, 2001; Lehman 1997; Ricketson, 2014), all of
whom include the reader as a crucial part of meaning-making in their arguments. But for
Foley and for these theorists, the reader has been an abstract concept, because no-one, to the
best of my knowledge, has thought to ask readers how they process these works of literary
journalism (or documentary fiction in the case of Foley’s book) – works that are considered
contentious, because they sit, albeit in different ways, on the boundary between fact and
fiction.

I set out to contribute to practice and knowledge in the field by answering the question in my
thesis title: “Journalist or novelist: How do readers receive works of literary journalism and
what impact does that have on the genre’s claims to truth-telling and inclusion in the genre of
non-fiction?” To do this, I broke my title into three research questions:

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 • Do readers comprehend its blurred genre status and, if so, how?
• What are some of the trigger points by which readers might care about the factual
status of a work?
• Do readers accept the author’s version of the story as the version of the story and, if
so, what are the implications for the genre’s truth-telling claims?

In Chapter One, I described how my own book group was the impetus for this project when a
lively discussion of Joe Cinque’s Consolation, an example of the genre I came to identify as
literary journalism, excited us more than the novels we had been reading for previous
meetings, that there was something in this long-form story of a true crime that animated these
readers and engaged their intellects. I was also intrigued by the concerns some readers had
that author Helen Garner had intruded on the story, finding her framing of the narrative
dangerous and manipulative. I wanted to explore the ethical implications of the form, but also
its power to engage readers’ emotions, and what impact such powers might have on its truth-
telling claims. I outlined numerous cases of works of fiction (what Foley would identify as
documentary novels), that were criticised for not sticking strictly enough to the facts and
pointed out the onerous burden on literary journalists in the light of this to satisfy readers
their works belong on the non-fiction shelves of the bookshop or library. I settled on the
reader as the focus for my study, having induced from that first book group discussion that
how readers respond to these works would open up the discourse and enrich our
understanding of this contentious genre.

In Chapter Two: Literature Review I observed that the seemingly binary opposites of my
chosen genre – journalism and literature – made choosing what theory it was essential to
engage with, and what was more peripheral, a challenge. I focussed mostly on the scholarship
around the form itself and its many nomenclatures, stating at the outset that the most useful
theorical position for this study was Daniel Lehman’s contention that readers are engaged
“over the edge” when reading works about real people, and that readers can navigate the
“blurred boundaries” of what he called creative non-fiction (1997). Hellmann’s observation
(1981) that it is obvious to readers when an author speculated or fantasised in a work of
journalism provided a useful hypothesis to test. Do readers find it obvious or is Hellmann
himself speculating in asserting they do? Heyne’s claim in “Towards a Theory of Literary
Non-Fiction” (1987) – that while the author decides whether a book is fact or fiction it is the
reader who determines whether the book contains good or bad fact – was another hypothesis

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to test, as was Ricketson’s assertion that the decision by an author or publisher to label a
book non-fiction is key to how it is written and read (1997). Two other themes that emerged
in the Literature Review are what Frus calls “reflexive reading”, which she finds “this New
Journalistic practice dictates” (1994), and the notion of a contract between the reader and
writer – referred to by Hellmann (1981), McPhee (1984), Foley (1986), Chandler (1997),
McDonald (2011), Garner (2013), and Ricketson (2014) – and these have also underpinned
my analysis of the data.

In Chapter Three I outlined my methodology, which was to present case studies of four book
groups and their discussion of four prescribed Australian works of literary journalism in order
of the publication date of the books chosen – The First Stone by Helen Garner in 1995;
Broken Lives by Estelle Blackburn in 1998; Joe Cinque’s Consolation, also by Helen Garner,
in 2004; and The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper in 2008 – and supplement this with semi-
structured interviews with readers across a range of demographics with the aim of producing
rich qualitative data for my research questions.

The case study data presented in Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven revealed that readers in
book groups are engaged readers who pay attention to both the written words and the paratext
(Genette, 1987). They are Frus’s reflexive readers who – in the context of a discussion with
other readers – ask questions about genre; the position of the author in the narrative; the use
of literary devices such as reconstructed dialogue and inner monologues; and their
relationship to the subject matter. In all four discussions, readers referred to the lives of the
people written about beyond the confines of the books, demonstrating they were reading
“over the edge” (Lehman, 1997). They thought deeply about the subject matter and were able
to articulate their admiration for, and frustration with, the way the writers constructed their
narratives around this subject matter.

The Friends of the University book group’s reflexivity helped them navigate The First Stone
to reach an understanding that it was telling Garner’s truth if not the whole truth. They
demonstrated Heyne’s “certain kind of caring” (2001) with their concern for the fate of the
accused Master. The Annandale book group also demonstrated Heyne’s certain kind of caring
with their interest in the fate of Cooke’s children, but were underwhelmed by Estelle
Blackburn’s mastery of language, agreeing they would have liked a more literary approach to
the storytelling but concluding the solidity of the journalism in Broken Lives was
commendable. The (all-male) Merewether book group appreciated the compelling

193
storytelling of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation and accepted the author’s version of
the story as her version of the story, finding themselves satisfied that Garner had justified her
approach and been transparent about her position in the story. The women of the Newcastle
book group were able to identify trigger points about the factual status of Chloe Hooper’s The
Tall Man but found these did not detract from their appreciation of how she told the story.
They were satisfied Hooper’s approach to the reporting had done justice to the tragedy on
Palm Island and admired how she’d placed it in the broader context of colonisation.

These book group responses were confirmation of my initial instincts that I would be able to
prove that readers can comprehend the blurred genre status of literary journalism and that
they do have trigger points whereby they care about the factual status of a work. But what I
had not expected to find were the rich and diverse methods readers devise to work out how to
manage those trigger points, which came out in Chapter Eight: Talking to readers about
reading literary journalism. Reader 10’s set of scales that he holds in his head to assess when
a writer has “lost him” by going too far; Reader 1’s phrase “the intent of truth” whereby she
gives the writer the benefit of the doubt if they demonstrate they are giving an honest
account; Reader 4’s forensic approach to seeking out clues for possible border incursions;
Readers 3 and 20, who will Google any doubtful claims and do their own research; and
Reader 19 bringing all her critical faculties to bear so she can hear “the false notes”.

When asked to define literary journalism, Reader 13 found the two words described “almost
competing genres”; Reader 11 referred to its blurred boundaries; and Reader 20 described it
as “someone’s version of the truth”. These responses would be worth consideration by
writers of literary journalism as to how they approach the storytelling and how transparent
they are willing to be with their readers. One way of addressing these concerns, Ricketson
(2014) suggests, is for writers of narrative non-fiction to reproduce only dialogue they have
themselves reported or that has been recalled in official documents. He devotes a chapter of
his book Telling True Stories (2014) to a discussion of the use of descriptive writing, which
he calls one of the greatest strengths and one of its pleasures for writers. He acknowledges
the ethical dilemmas that arise from describing real-life people, suggesting it’s a matter of
finding the balance between vivid intimacy and unnecessary hurtfulness. He finds the origins
of good descriptive writing lie in observing people and events with an open mind and
unflinching eye (p. 155) and recommends writers give serious thought to their use of
descriptive writing, taking into account the impact on the reader, the intrusion on the person

194
being described, and whether or not their descriptions can be used to manipulate the reader or
sway them to an argument.

These readers demonstrated my hypothesis – one supported by Hellmann (1981), Heyne

(2001) and Ricketson (2014) – that it is, in the first instance, the author who gets to position
their work as fact or fiction, along with the publisher, bookseller and librarian, but it is the
reader who judges whether or not the author’s intention to produce a work of non-fiction has
succeeded. I argue that I have demonstrated the use of devices traditionally associated with
fiction need not compromise the integrity of the journalist principles of fairness, accuracy and
honesty on which these texts rely. This study has shown that these engaged readers not only
comprehend the blurred boundaries of literary journalism but have strategies to navigate their
way across them; they do care about the factual status of these works and have strategies to
mitigate those concerns; and that they recognise when they are being manipulated by a
writer’s version of the story, but if they are engaged in the story, they are willing to overlook
it. Helen Garner intuited this when she was asked by Brenda Walker if it would matter if a
writer tweaked an anecdote to move a story along and she replied it would not because “only
a terribly naïve reader believes the story already exists in nature” and because of the contract
in non-fiction where a writer is saying “trust me, this really happened” (Walker, 2013, p.
165).

The readers who took part in this study are far from naïve. Their nuanced responses to four
compelling Australian examples of the genre and their answers to the interview questions
about the form provide evidence that literary journalism’s truth-telling claims have validity.
This research has a real-world application in that it demonstrates the importance of media
literacy as a means of helping people make sense of the mass of information and
misinformation they are presented with every day. With the perils facing journalism from
digital disruption and media convergence, it is more important than ever to educate the
citizenry on media literacy. In his note from the editor in the autumn edition of Literary
Journalism Studies in 2011, David Abrahamson called for journalists to engage more with
their audiences by adopting the practices of literary journalism (p. 6). He argues the genre
helps to re-establish what “English cultural critic John Berger ably described as the ‘relation
between teller, listener (spectator) and protagonist(s)”’ (p. 6).

195
 This is where the integrity and power of literary journalism comes in. These derive, I think,
from the arsenal of language as an aesthetic practice that literary journalists draw on in order
to engage the subjectivities of reader and subject by means of the journalist’s subjectivity. It
is based on the fact, as Berger’s observation implies, that to some degree we all have
experiences we can share (the “common sense-appeal of the shared common senses” I like to
call it), even if we may have different interpretations of those experiences. It is here we can
come together and understand each other better in an act of civic engagement. (2011, p. 6)

Future research

As referred to in Chapter Seven, a possible area for future research with readers would be to
look at how readers receive texts by comparing how they respond to printed books and how
they respond to books read in digital form. A further research area would be to analyse how
listening to digital recordings of works of narrated literary journalism, which brings an extra
dimension in the form of a voice actor interpreting the words and creating different voices for
each character, changes the way the works are received.

It is time to embed the reader more firmly in the discourse and the theory, as they have
insights that will benefit both scholars and writers in this field.

196
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 Appendices

Appendix 1: Participant Information Statement

Participant Information Form

Project Title

Journalist or novelist – how do readers receive works of literary journalism and what impact does
that have on the genre’s claims to truth telling and inclusion in the genre of nonfiction?

Researcher Felicity Biggins u3064806@uni.canberra.edu.au 0408173161

Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication

Faculty of Arts and Design The University of Canberra
Project Aim
The aim of this research is to investigate and analyse how readers receive works in the
nonfiction genre of literary journalism.
Benefits of the Project
This project aims to contribute to the field of knowledge about works of literary journalism
by studying a neglected area, which is how readers comprehend works of literary journalism.
General Outline of the Project
The project involves collecting data from readers through a variety of means, primarily
through recording and analyzing the discussion of three book groups, after the group has read
an assigned book, which will be a work of literary journalism. It will also involve conducting
semi-structured interviews with readers and holding a focus group with students undertaking
a course in literary journalism. Up to 50 participants will be involved.
Participant Involvement
Readers who agree to participate in the research will be asked to:
1. Read a work of literary journalism assigned by the researcher and attend a meeting of
their book group to discuss the assigned work and participate in a discussion about
the book that will be recorded. This meeting is expected to take about two hours, but
is part of the participant’s normal routine, so should not be too disruptive.

2. Participate in a semi-structured interview with the researcher that will take no more
than 30 minutes and be recorded.

216
 3. The students will participate in a focus group discussion of an assigned text. This will
be recorded.

The information will be recorded and transcribed for analysis and the findings will be written
up as part of the doctoral thesis being undertaken by the researcher.
Participation in the research is completely voluntary and clients may, without any penalty,
decline to take part or withdraw at any time without providing an explanation, or refuse to
answer a question. The only potential risks to participation relate to privacy and
confidentiality. Please be assured that all the data collected from clients will be stored
securely and only accessed by the researcher. Great care will be taken to ensure that any
reports of the data do not identify any individual or their personal circumstances.
Confidentiality
Only the researcher will have access to the individual information provided by clients.
Privacy and confidentiality will be assured at all times. The research outcomes will be
included in the PhD thesis and may be presented at conferences and written up for
publication. However, in all these reports, the privacy and confidentiality of individuals will
be protected.
Anonymity
Due to the need to collect personal and health information from clients, it is not possible for
the research to be anonymous. However, please be assured that all reports of the research will
contain no information that can identify any individual and all information will be kept in the
strictest confidence.
Data Storage
The information collected will be stored securely on a password protected computer
throughout the project and then stored at the University of Canberra for the required five year
period after which it will be destroyed according to university protocols.
Ethics Committee Clearance
The project has been approved by the Committee for Ethics in Human Research of the
University.
Queries and Concerns
Queries or concerns regarding the research can be directed to the researcher, Felicity Biggins,
whose contact details are at the top of this form.

217
Appendix 2: Participant Consent Form

Project Title

Journalist or novelist – how do readers receive works of literary journalism and what impact
does that have on the genre’s claims to truth telling and inclusion in the genre of
nonfiction?

Consent Statement
I have read and understood the information about the research. I am not aware of any
condition that would prevent my participation, and I agree to participate in this project. I
have had the opportunity to ask questions about my participation in the research. All
questions I have asked have been answered to my satisfaction.
Please indicate whether you agree to participate in the following parts of the research
(please indicate which parts you agree to by putting a cross in the relevant box):
£ Book-group participant.
£ Participate in an interview with the researcher.
£ Participate in the focus group at the University of Canberra. (Students enrolled in
Literary Studies True Stories unit only)

Name……………………………………………………………………….……………………........…

Signature………….........................................................……………………

Date ………………………………….
A summary of the research report can be forwarded to you when published. If you would
like to receive a copy of the report, please include your mailing (or email) address
below.
Name…………………………………………………………………………….…………….....……….

Address………………………………………..……………………………………….………………….

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Appendix 3: Timetable of book group recordings

Book Group Date of recording Location

Friends of the University 24/02/2014 Newcastle

Book Group

The Annandale Book Group 05/12/2013 Sydney

The Merewether Book 30/04/2014 Newcastle

Group

The Newcastle Book Group 12/12/2013 Newcastle

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Appendix 4: Timetable of reader interview recordings

De-identified participant Date of interview Location

Reader 1 25/10/2013 Canberra

Reader 2 25/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 3 24/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 4 23/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 5 24/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 6 24/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 7 24/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 8 23/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 9 24/10/2013 Canberra
Reader 10 05/12/2013 Sydney
Reader 11 05/12/2013 Sydney
Reader 12 07/12/2013 Sydney
Reader 13 05/12/2013 Sydney
Reader 14 24/02/2014 Newcastle
Reader 15 24/02/2014 Newcastle
Reader 16 24/02/2014 Newcastle
Reader 17 12/12/2013 Newcastle
Reader 18 12/12/2013 Newcastle
Reader 19 24/02/2014 Newcastle
Reader 20 30/04/2014 Newcastle
Reader 21 30/04/2014 Newcastle

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Appendix 5: Questions for semi-structured reader interviews

1. Could you describe for me some of your general reading habits?

2. Do you read fiction? What do you find appealing about reading fiction?
3. Do you read non-fiction? What do you find appealing about reading non-fiction?
4. Which genre would you read more of? Why do you think that is so?
5. What expectations do you have when you read non-fiction?
6. When it comes to non-fiction, which type do you prefer – autobiography, travel,
crime, memoir?
7. What do you understand by the term literary journalism? (Follow up question – one
way to describe it is to say it is non-fiction that reads like a novel, is that how you see
it?)
8. What would attract you to a work of literary journalism – the subject matter? The
title? The author? The cover? The style?
9. How are you able to determine whether you are reading fiction or non-fiction: is it
because the book is about real people and events? Is it because it is labelled non-
fiction on the back cover? Or where it is placed in the bookshop or how it is
catalogued in the library? Or a note or preface the author has written in the book?
10. Does it matter to you if you are reading fiction or non-fiction? If not, why not?
11. What are some of the things that trigger whether you care about a book’s status as
either fiction or non-fiction? These might include the book’s subject matter, how
much you know about the book’s subject matter, whether it concerns high profile
people and important events and so on. Or there may be other trigger points you can
identify.
12. If you do believe it matters, can you define what elements in a book might be a
concern to you in deciding if it’s a true story or if the truth has been distorted?
13. How do you know, or suspect, when a true story is significantly distorted or even
factually false? What means do you have for coming to that judgement?
14. When you read a work of literary journalism – non-fiction that reads like a novel –
how to do determine what is fact and what could be a distortion of the facts?
15. Does it concern you that some facts might be changed or even invented by the author
to suit the narrative of a non-fiction work?
16. Do you think there are ethical issues related to literary journalism? Can you say what
those are?

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