AustLit

'In this article, the authors propose that in order to learn how to act effectively within, and after, dynamic situations (including distressing or traumatic situations), one can profitably receive training in narration. Prior to writing this essay together, the authors have worked separately with narrative modes of sense-making and leadership for emergency-situations in business studies (Gibson), medicine (Crea) and military conflict (Chambers). Combining their insights, they have a sharpened focus on the general field of narrative and emergency-training, with a particular emphasis on the military context. Developing ideas from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The art of the storyteller’ we observe that stories convey strongly-felt, vicarious experiences such that they are a means of accelerating the acquisition of wisdom and resilience among the community that attends to the stories. We propose a narrative training system that expedites the acquisition and transfer of wisdom and resilience in military contexts and in other emergency situations.' (Publication abstract)

'In early 2016 a call went out, seeking Expressions of Interest in a new segment of government infrastructure: ‘Transport for NSW is interested in commissioning moving image art for the “Wynyard Walk” between Wynyard Station and Barangaroo in Sydney.’1 I was one of a small group selected to offer prototypes and, eventually, to generate a complete artwork.' 

'The brutality of the colonial frontier in Australia is often denied by those who prefer not to see it; or the violence assumes an invisibility-via-banality for those who have seen too much of it and thus become numb to its force. In the mode of creative-practice-led scholarly research, ‘Violence Covers Them as a Garment’ investigates how and to what effect one might redact and redeploy ‘prosaic’ artefacts from the public record in order to establish the veracity and persistence of the violence while also activating emotions of engagement and custodianship to counteract the inaction that so often settles around the aftermaths of settler violence. To this end, the public record is subjected to historical ‘fair review’ as the author brings evidence and agitates against apathy by drawing on texts from historical government archives and from everyday, contemporary photographs of Indigenous country such as they are recorded and requisitioned by companies like Google and other digital mapping agencies.' (Introduction)

'In teeming numbers the eels move through this vibrant world of water. Arriving during the rainy season when the remnant-lakes swell and the volcanic plain swells like a colander in a tub, the eels leave the salt water, summoned to the freshwater by a baffling endocrinal change that compels them landward to furlough as another kind of fish for a while.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Here are scrummed gangs of criminals and police, with all their lurks, quirks and argots. The underworld and its overlords: how ingenious and energetic, how ardent both sides can be. What brutes they can be too, day after day, as they track and trick each other, as they make and need each other. Ross Gibson’s poignant rewriting of a found dossier of police records has some Dickens, some Dostoevsky, and some DeLillo threaded through it. The sharp local language of Christina Stead, Kenneth Slessor, Arthur Stace and Ruth Park resounds in here too.' (Publication summary)

Essay in which Ross Gibson sets out the process of writing poetry by becoming a pedestrian in Google Maps. Two poems written by this process follow.