Coolooloi
- Publisher:
- Australasian Association of Writing Programs
- Publication Type:
- Conference Proceeding
- Citation:
- Authorised Theft: writing, scholarship, collaboration, 2016, 2016, (Refereed proceedings of the 21st conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs), pp. 1-11
- Issue Date:
- 2016
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The etymology of the word ‘interview’ comes from Middle French s’entrevoir – to see each other. Using interviews to research relationships between dingoes and people on Fraser Island (K’gari) enables me to see the people who talk with me and to see a complex situation from different perspectives. Some of the controversies around dingoes and people on K’gari are exemplified in the case of Jennifer Parkhurst, a dingo researcher who in 2010 was prosecuted by the Queensland government for feeding dingoes and for interfering with a natural resource on K’gari.
An interview is a staged dialogue between an interviewer and an interview participant for an audience or reader that also requires ‘a continuous negotiation of terms’ (Masschelein et al. 2014, p 25). As a form of collaborative practice an interview combines ‘preparation and anticipation’ with ‘improvisation and spontaneity’ to create something that is ‘never entirely predictable’ (Masschelein et al. 2014, p 21).
The qualities that make an interview a collaborative work of art in its own right involve trust. They relate to an interviewer’s preparation, what an interview participant says and/or does, the ways both participants shape the live interview, and the context that an interviewer provides in the transcription and narration of the interview when it becomes text.
This extract, ‘Coolooloi’, applies techniques of ‘repair, assemblage and re-assemblage, stitching together, a kind of bricolage or experimental tinkering’ (Gibbs 2015) to an interview with Jennifer Parkhurst. It aims to balance the documentary aspect of the situation (Gornick 2001, p 13), or the ‘problems and provocations’, with the ‘sensations, affects, intensities’ that the writing is seeking to create as its ‘mode of addressing problems’ (Grosz 2008, p 1). From this interplay emerges the story itself, which belongs to neither Parkhurst nor me. Ideally interviewer and interview participant become complementary narrators who allow the voice of the reader ‘its role in the creation of the narrative’ (Adelaide 2007).
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