Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar (taking place both in-person and via zoom)

Thursday 10 August, 1-2pm, AD Hope Conference Room (see CuSPP email or contact wesley.lim@anu.edu.au for zoom link)

A little-known aspect of the Australian child sexual abuse royal commission (2014-2017) is the work done by a team of narrative writers. These writers, of whom I was one, listened to audio recordings of personal testimony given in closed hearings to commissioners, and recomposed what they heard as third person narratives. Nearly 8000 people attended one of these private sessions to share their experience of institutional child sexual abuse with a commissioner, and 3947 of those accounts were transformed into written narratives, presented as an appendix to the commission’s final report and published online.

While personal testimony collected by commissions of inquiry is often presented in the public domain in some mediated form, it is unusual for such testimony to be reworked to the extent that occurred with the narratives produced at the child sexual abuse commission.

This paper examines how the writers understood their role and how this affected their approach to the task. A view of the work as something more than scribing was affirmed by a visit from Helen Garner one day, who brought with her a list of questions that provide the structure for this paper. My discussion brings rare and useful transparency to a process of mediation, exploring questions about the purpose and outcomes of transmitting private testimony to the public sphere in this way.

Sally Zwartz is a PhD student in ANU’s School of Literature, Language and Linguistics. Her project draws on memory studies, narrative studies and cultural theory to examine the child sexual abuse royal commission narratives as a site of memory, an archive, a witnessing project and a collection of individual stories intended to build public understanding of the experience  and impacts of child sexual abuse. She was prompted to examine this subject by her own experience as one of the RCIRCSA writers, and recently held a similar role at the Disability Royal Commission. She also works as an oral historian, currently contracted by the State Library of NSW for an oral history project on children’s literature.