Researching and writing an historical fiction of the early–mid Twentieth Century Woolloomooloo community: A creative practice-led narrative inquiry
Creators: name: Owens, Alison R.
Publisher: name: Central Queensland University
Year: 2018
Subjects: Historical fiction
Australian historical fiction
Narrative inquiry
Creative practice-led research

description: This thesis is comprised of a novel, ‘Woolloomooloo Bad’, and an exegesis that seeks to investigate the research and development processes involved in completing the novel. The research question posed for this thesis was: how can a creative practiceled, narrative inquiry, drawing on personal stories as well as public and private documents and artefacts, generate a fictional account of lived historical experience? The novel presents the story of a working-class family set in the 1930s and 1940s in the Sydney dockside suburb of Woolloomooloo. This story is inspired by the early life of my deceased father-in-law and his closest relatives and spans an important and challenging era for ordinary Australians encompassing the Great Depression, the spread of communism and associated class struggles, the unionisation of labour and the second World War. In the novel, my young protagonist, as well as his mother and sister, are abandoned by his father for a ‘fancy woman’ and leave their home in Brisbane to reside with their paternal grandparents in a Woolloomooloo terrace house, where his mother finds work as a shop-girl at the iconic department store, David Jones. The suburb of Woolloomooloo has had a colourful history since colonisation displaced the original Aboriginal inhabitants. This was initially with the establishment of a grand home and farmland developing by the late nineteenth century into a lively, commercial fishing village. In the twentieth century, Woolloomooloo transformed into an industrialised, maritime economy with busy wharves and a local population of wharf workers, sailors, fishermen, prostitutes and bohemians living in closely stacked terrace houses in increasingly crowded lanes. The young hero grows up under the influence of the other males in the family who are wharf workers caught on either side of a developing struggle between wharf management and labour as the economy collapses and the Great Depression threatens every family, but particularly the working class. Woolloomooloo and its neighbouring Kings Cross were also characterised as hotbeds of criminal activity including illegal bookmaking, standover work, drug and alcohol trading and counterfeit. The novel explores the different and overlaid elements of criminality evident in this community from the petty crimes of bookmaking, prostitution and sly-grog trading, to the socially embedded and normified injustices of a ruthless system of labour and, ultimately, the atrocities of yet another world war. The exegesis provides an account of the research that was undertaken to background this story, pursuing a creative practice-led narrative inquiry approach which sourced the personal accounts of surviving family members as well as non-fictional and fictional texts depicting the Woolloomooloo environs and community. The exegesis also explores the relationship between this research and the creative process of fiction writing, providing examples of key texts and textual elements that influenced the development of the fictional account of this community, their experiences and concerns. The thesis concludes that creative practice-led narrative inquiry is a functional methodology for historical novelists seeking to research fact-based personal and public accounts of an historical era, as well as other non-fictional and fictional accounts, in order to create a story that resonates with the data but also provides an empathetic account of the human experience.