Contents of A Life Between the Layers
Viewing Block One.
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Block One
The starting point of my life story and an experimental beginning: recovering, organising and publishing material drawn from decades of documents, writing, records and conversations.
Chapter 1 The Record
Memory, records, evidence and the layers between lived experience and institutional history.
Chapter 2 Forty-Five Geologists
A young coach driver, a busload of geologists and an education in the Australian landscape.
Chapter 3 Behind the Chronicle
Teenage years at The Yea Chronicle: printing, machinery, sectarian loyalties and the events that brought my apprenticeship to an abrupt end.
Chapter 4 Thursday
Why Thursday? A childhood accident, repeated anaesthesia, fear of not waking, and the nurse whose reassurance stayed with me.
Chapter 5 Robert
My older brother, years of bullying, the shooting, and the complicated history that shaped what happened before and long after it.
Chapter 6 Janette
My younger sister, an event in Yea in 1962, the consequences that followed, and the way her childhood story returned decades later.
Chapter 7 The Melbourne Process
Decades after childhood, I tried to place what had happened into a formal process. What returned to me was another layer of records, uncertainty and questions about whose account would be believed.
Chapter 8 Patrick Smith
My engagement with the Royal Commission, the first male professional to whom I spoke substantially about abuse by women, and what happened when even that process became difficult to fit.
Chapter 9 Canada
A country I had imagined before I saw it, a journey that began with a relationship, years of driving and travel, and one of the patchiest periods in my memory.
Chapter 10 When the Patient Meets the Record
Decades of experience enter the modern health system, where observations, diagnoses, records and the patient's own account do not always describe the same reality.
Listen to the book
The 56 published chapters have been recorded with David V, an AI-assisted Australian reading voice. The written chapters remain the primary published record.