Bridget Haylock

Australian College of the Arts, Academic, Head of Course Development

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*PhD Arts (Creative Writing) - School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, examined by Associate Professor Anne Brewster (UNSW). MRS funded.
*Master of Creative Media (Creative Writing), (RMIT)
*Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, The University of Melbourne
*Diploma of Arts Professional Writing & Editing, (RMIT)
*Advanced Diploma of Arts Professional Screenwriting, Film, TV & Digital Media, (RMIT)
*The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, London. Awarded full scholarship.

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Nicola Jane Holt

University of the West of England

Mark Deuze

University of Amsterdam

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Cristiana Facchini

Università di Bologna

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Julia Hell

University of Michigan

Göran Bolin

Södertörn University

Didier COSTE

Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

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Papers by Bridget Haylock

Emerging from Entrapment: Sue Woolfe’s modern Gothic Painted Woman

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A Fragmented Life: Writing Intergenerational Trauma in Morgan Yasbincek's Liv

Hecate, 2015

In this article I engage trauma theory to analyse the narrative strategies that Morgan Yasbincek ... more In this article I engage trauma theory to analyse the narrative strategies that Morgan Yasbincek deploys in the novel liv (2000). I demonstrate how Yasbincek makes the expression of creative emergence from catastrophically fracturing intergenerational trauma significant as a theme and a process and how the text makes this imaginatively and effectively available to the reader. I analyse the representation in liv of the paradox inherent in the traumatic shattering of subjectivity and the ensuing reconstruction of identity facilitated through creative writing, where the imperative to create enables an oblique access to the foreclosed traumatic experience. liv is a fictionalised account of a family's Croatian-Australian migration and, although it was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2000, and commended by the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards of the same year, critical analysis of the work has to date been limited. The narrative is enacted throu...

Women writing traumatic times

Resilience Education and Drug Information: The Big Move, My TV, REDI for School

Screen education, 2005

Mr Bailey's Minder [Book Review]

Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice

Text Journal Special Issue 'Writing and Trauma'

Writing is a crucial process to the understanding of trauma. Whether trauma is represented throug... more Writing is a crucial process to the understanding of trauma. Whether trauma is represented through literature, fiction, non-fiction, auto/biography, memoir, post-generational and Indigenous narratives, poetry, graphic novels, art, photography, dance, plays, film, or closely observed by practitioners teaching creative writing within a classroom or an academic context, this issue includes the many and varied ways writers are bearing witness to trauma in the written form. Writing trauma offers a way of confronting, unpacking, questioning, de/constructing and navigating, the silence and the space, the gaps and the holes, the aporia, the unrepresentable and unknowable, of the sayable and unsayable, in order to reach a better understanding of how trauma is being re-presented within these diverse narratives. The aim of this Special Issue of ‘Writing Trauma’ has been to showcase a selection of papers from emerging and established Australian and international creative writers, educators, scholars and academics, with a strong emphasis on the complex creative/critical relationship when writing about and addressing trauma. As editors, the purpose in the final selection and compilation of the Special Issue, was to present to its readership a scope of current scholarship, textual reading and teaching practices regarding creative writing and trauma. We have therefore compiled the papers into several categories ranging from: Australian Literature and Indigenous writing and the transgenerational traumatic experience; pedagogical and scholarly research into the trauma memoir as a form of creative writing, researching Australian academics and the supervision of RHD candidates writing about the traumatic experience, and trauma-informed practice within the creative writing workshop; autobiographical writing of the body as a site for trauma, performing trauma in the graphic narrative, and the visual affective
representations of trauma; the examination of individual and collective testimonial narratives and memoir, and works re-presenting second and third generation trauma, postmemorial narratives and Holocaust literature; the performative and feminine representation of trauma in Gothic literature and the spacial aspects of circumscribing trauma. Following the articles is an excerpt of autobiographical prose and a book review. Each article offers a unique contribution to the body of knowledge in the hope of raising greater awareness and recognition of the critical theory, practise and discourse currently being written about creative writing and trauma.

The Trauma of the Colonised: Writing Female in Barbara Bayton's Human Toll

Is this a Culture of Trauma? Eds. Bick, M. and Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ebook., 2012

In this paper I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton"s (1857-1929) novel, H... more In this paper I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton"s (1857-1929) novel, Human Toll (1907, foreshadows contemporary feminine appropriation and subversion of the Bildungsroman genre which testifies to traumatic experience; specifically the creative emergence from the traumatic inheritance of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by concern with feminine subjectivity and signified by the colonised female (body). What Baynton argues for in Human Toll is an autonomous place for feminine expression, for écriture feminine, in the symbolic world. In a perturbation of genres, Baynton combines melodrama-the genre par excellence in which women have agency by default; romance; and the Bildungsroman, to create an impression of how fraught access to creative agency is for women in the context of trauma, and the cultural constraints on women at the cusp of Federation in the Australian Bush. As her heroine emerges from the feminine traumatic paradigm, her encounters with many aspects of the phallocentric world provoke traumatic repetition. For Baynton no masculine edifice is sacrosanct: Catholicism, property law, marriage, sex, education, wealth, and class are all found to be wanting in relation to the feminine. Experiences of opposition and denial serve to spur the protagonist into a fervent conviction of her desire for agency, and to find creative and cathartic expression in writing. In doing so, as Suzette Henke contends, the female author initiates an enabling discourse of testimony and self-revelation. In audaciously reinscribing the claims of feminine desire into the texts of a traditionally patriarchal culture, this écriture feminine attempts to reframe embodied experience through experimentation of assumptions around signifying practices, interrogating the outcome for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity.

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Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright's Carpentaria

Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice. Eds. Barrette, C., Haylock, B. and Danielle Mortimer. , 2011

, explores embodied and indigenous subjectivity in presenting Australian society reeling from the... more , explores embodied and indigenous subjectivity in presenting Australian society reeling from the genocidal trauma and subsequent rage at its foundations: consequences of colonialism. Carpentaria shows the progressive amplification of indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to intra-familial to societal, and illustrates many areas of indigenous people's lives that trauma affects: from modalities of the maternal, through gendered temporality to embodied subjectivity, and specifically, the indigenous relationship to country. Wright uses the experience of the attempted genocide and ensuing ongoing displacement of the peoples of her nation as a synecdoche for the experience of colonised people world-wide. Wright's work is a chronicling of the fury of the occupied, emphasising the indigenous view that the land and people are one. The novel centres around the development of land, the result of continued colonisation, and how rage can be a mobilising force for action. In this paper I will explore how, through the implicit use of the Bakhtian carnivalesque, Wright subverts social assumptions. I will also examine in the subsequent polyphony, what radical ideas she presents for cultural and political debate in the light of Deborah Bird Rose's thesis of an ethics for decolonisation. Wright projects and presents a world where the abject, traumatised, indigenous subject parodies would-be oppressors; in mirroring white society, she echoes Mary Douglas' thesis that absolute dirt exists in the eye of the beholder. Through the deft use of Mudrooroo's 'maban reality,' the indigenous genre of Australian writing that privileges oral storytelling, Wright performs emergence from trauma for readers by finding the words, breaking the silence and speaking place. While Germaine Greer contends that colonialism was successful in destroying Aboriginal culture, leaving a selfdestructive rage in its wake, this is an invader's point of view; Wright's Aboriginal man enacts agency and enlists rage to regain his land and his dignity. Wright suggests that from enraged abjective experience, empowerment and transformation is not only possible, but also essential.

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Books by Bridget Haylock

“The Strangled Cry": The Communication and Experience of Trauma. Eds. Bray, P. and Aparajita Nanda. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Print.

In this chapter I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton‟s (1857-1929) novel,... more In this chapter I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton‟s (1857-1929) novel, Human Toll (1907), foreshadows contemporary feminine appropriation and subversion of the Bildungsroman genre which testifies to traumatic experience; specifically the creative emergence from the traumatic inheritance of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by concern with feminine subjectivity and signified by the colonised female (body). What Baynton argues for in Human Toll is an autonomous place for feminine expression, for écriture feminine, in the symbolic world. In a perturbation of genres, Baynton combines melodrama—the genre par excellence in which women have agency by default; romance; and the Bildungsroman, to create an impression of how fraught access to creative agency is for women in the context of trauma, and the cultural constraints on women at the cusp of Federation in the Australian Bush. As her heroine emerges from the feminine traumatic paradigm, her encounters with many aspects of the phallocentric world provoke traumatic repetition. For Baynton no masculine edifice is sacrosanct: Catholicism, property law, marriage, sex, education, wealth, and class are all found to be wanting in relation to the feminine. Experiences of opposition and denial serve to spur the protagonist into a fervent conviction of her desire for agency, and to find creative and cathartic expression in writing. In doing so, as Suzette Henke contends, the female author initiates an enabling discourse of testimony and self-revelation. In audaciously reinscribing the claims of feminine desire into the texts of a traditionally patriarchal culture, this écriture feminine attempts to reframe embodied experience through experimentation of assumptions around signifying practices, interrogating the outcome for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity.

Voicing Trauma & Truth: Narratives of Disruption & Transformation. Eds. Bray, O. and Peter Bray. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Print.

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), explores embodied and Indigenous subjectivity in presenting A... more Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), explores embodied and Indigenous subjectivity in presenting Australian society reeling from the genocidal trauma and subsequent rage at its foundations: consequences of colonialism. Carpentaria shows the progressive amplification of indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to intra-familial to societal, and illustrates many areas of indigenous people’s lives that trauma affects: from modalities of the maternal, through gendered temporality to embodied subjectivity, and specifically, the Indigenous relationship to country. Wright uses the experience of the attempted genocide and ensuing ongoing displacement of the peoples of her nation as a synecdoche for the experience of colonised people world-wide. Wright’s work is a chronicling of the fury of the occupied, emphasising the Indigenous view that the land and people are one. The novel centres around the development of land, the result of continued colonisation, and how rage can be a mobilising force for action. In this chapter I explore how, through the implicit use of the Bakhtian carnivalesque, Wright subverts social assumptions. I also examine in the subsequent polyphony, what radical ideas she presents for cultural and political debate in the light of Deborah Bird Rose’s thesis of an ethics for decolonisation. Wright projects and presents a world where the abject, traumatised,
Indigenous subject parodies would-be oppressors; in mirroring white society, she echoes Mary Douglas’ thesis that absolute dirt exists in the eye of the beholder. Through the deft use of ‘maban reality,’ the Indigenous genre of Australian writing that privileges oral storytelling, Wright performs emergence from trauma for readers by finding the words, breaking the silence and speaking place. While Germaine Greer contends that colonialism was successful in destroying Aboriginal culture, leaving a self-destructive rage in its wake, this is an invader’s point of view; Wright’s Aboriginal man enacts agency and enlists rage to regain his land and his dignity. Wright suggests that from enraged abjective experience, empowerment and transformation is not only possible, but also essential.

Emerging from Entrapment: Sue Woolfe’s modern Gothic Painted Woman

TEXT

A Fragmented Life: Writing Intergenerational Trauma in Morgan Yasbincek's Liv

Hecate, 2015