Last month, Batchelor Institute creative writing students Vincent Forrester and Lance Verburg attended a two-day workshop in Darwin with internationally published Australian author, Courtney Collins.

The workshop, held at the Darwin sailing club overlooking Fannie Bay, was titled “Beneath the Surface”. Like the name suggests, Collins encouraged all of the participants to reach for the deeper imaginative place that a writer must go, and with impressive results.

Lecturer Sam Carmody said that the workshop was a great way to meet fellow writers and to learn from their different approaches, but also was an opportunity for students to pass on their insights to Darwin writers: “It is great for our writing program to establish that relationship with the Northern Territory Writer’s Centre, and for other writers in the community to meet our talented students and hear their stories.”

The Diploma of Creative & Indigenous Writing at Batchelor Institute provides students with the opportunity to develop writing skills in a variety of genres, and establish a firm knowledge base for the strengthening of Indigenous culture through an understanding of Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing traditions.

In particular, it emphasises how these genres continue to be used by Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere to articulate their own ‘voice’, and to communicate their histories and contemporary experiences to, and within, dominant non-Indigenous powers and the broader society.