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Profile of writer Merrill Findlay

Australian writer Merrill Findlay was born in Condobolin, a small town in central western New South Wales, but spent much of her childhood on her family’s farm near the village of Bogan Gate. She now lives for part of the year in Forbes about 50 km from where she grew up. [More on the farm >>]

Photo: Merrill at the head of the Khyber Pass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier in October 2006.

After a couple of very bohemian years in Sydney in the early 1970s, Merrill began her professional writing career as a reporter on a regional newspaper, the Forbes Advocate. She has continued to write both non-fiction and fiction ever since. Her oeuvre includes a critically acclaimed novel, Republic of women (UQP 1999) set in Melbourne, numerous essays, speeches and feature articles published in Australia and overseas, and a range of community cultural development projects.

Current literary project : a narrative non-fiction (very) tentatively called Into Australia's 'heartlands', a journey. This new work about 'boat people' and migrations is a response to Australia's 2001 'Tampa Affair'. It draws on the author's work with asylum seekers and refugees, her post-Tampa visits to Maribyrnong Detention Centre, her long involvement with refugee diasporas and indigenous communities [more], her interest in the processes of decolonisation, her travels in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Eritrea [more] and, most recently, Pakistan's frontier provinces of Balochistan and Pakhtunistan or North West Frontier Province, as well as her own family background which includes countless 'boat people'. More >>

UPDATE: Merrill is currently completing this project as a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Design and Creative Practice (Creative Communication) at the University of Canberra.

Idiosyncratic oeuvre

Merrill Findlay's work is distinguished by her deep commitment to a range of progressive social movements in Australia and elsewhere. It is within this context that her oeuvre is best understood, because her publications and other creative activities don't fit comfortably within any single 'genre' or literary domain. Indeed, as a friend commented recently, "People don't known what to do with you, Merrill, because you don't fit into any particular box."

Merrill Findlay speaking about her work in 1999 after publication of Republic of Women.

1980s-90s: Merrill's early work includes a coffee table book, Carnarvon: reflections of a country town, completed as part of a pioneering residency for the Western Australian Arts Council in the isolated Gascoyne region of northwest Western Australia; a magazine, We the peoples, she founded and edited for the United Nations Association of Australia (Victoria); numerous speeches about ecological sustainability written for prominent environmentalists associated with the Australian Conservation Foundation, including the 1990 Charles Joseph La Trobe Memorial Lecture, The Environment Movement and its role in changing Australian society, presented by the then- Executive Director of the ACF, Philip Toyne (La Trobe University, 7 November, 1990); briefing papers for the Eritrean Relief Association in Sudan; evidence to the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade's hearings on Australia’s relationship with Indonesia (Melbourne, 4 February, 1992, Official Hansard Report, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, p.54); a speech on East Timor presented on behalf of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid at the UN Decolonisation Hearings in New York; numerous dispatches for the Canadian-based Environmental News Service, for which she was the Australian correspondent; many newspaper and magazine features on issues such as the American invasion of Perth (1981), the war in Eritrea, and the reburial of the remains of Native Title warrior Eddie Mabo on Murray Island; plus journal publications and book chapters. Her fiction and community cultural development work is informed by all the experiences represented in her nonfiction publications.

In the 1990s Merrill Findlay initiated a number of innovative cultural development and futures projects through Imagine The Future Inc, the small project-based not-for-profit organization she established in Melbourne with the support of many individuals and organisations, including the ACF, the Australian Multicultural Foundation and Arts Victoria, with seed funding from the Victorian Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia. She also developed an e-journal for ITF, Redreaming the plains, with sponsorship from the Australian Film Commission's New Media Unit and in-kind support from many other partners, including RMIT University and Victoria University.

Her recent fiction includes six preliminary chapters of a second novel-in-progress published in the peer reviewed journal Eucalypt No. 2, in 2002, by the Australian Studies Centre, Barcelona, Spain, where she was a guest writer in 2000. This novel has been put on hold, however, while she completes other projects, including the Kate Kelly Project with composer Ross Carey, and 'Heartlands'.

In recent years Merrill has supported her writing and creative activism with consultancy work plus teaching and editing through the School of Globalism Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University, Melbourne. She has also conducted writing workshops in rural communities to encourage country folk to write and publish their own stories.

Merrill has a Masters in Social Science (by research) and is a member of the Australian Society of Authors, a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, a research associate (hon.) at RMIT University, Melbourne, a recent breast cancer survivor and, most recently, a PhD candidate (Communication/Creative) in the Faculty of Design and Creative Practice at the University of Canberra

Visit the archives for her more recent non-fiction, fiction and cultural development projects.
 

URL for this page: http://www.merrillfindlay.com/author/profile.html

Content last updated 30 June, 2008.
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