Jeanti St Clair – “There’s lot’s of versions of Jeanti but I can talk about the Jeanti who came to Lismore. I used to work for the ABC on a Radio National programme called Bush Telegraph. I’d never had much to do with rural or regional Australia before then but working at that program for 3 years, I discovered how rich and how much heart the regional areas had in Australia. I literally fell in love with regional Australia.
I moved on from the ABC to work as a travel editor so I had a couple of years of going on holidays and writing about those trips, which was great but I had made the decision to leave Sydney. I was going to go back to Melbourne but I thought I’d have an interim visit and live somewhere else for a couple of years. I thought I might go to Wellington so I went there but no, it was way too windy. I had come up here to do a travel article about a Yoga / surfing retreat in Byron Bay and after that had finished I was driving around and thought, this looks like a great area. A little later I came back here and looked at a house I’d seen in the window of a Bangalow Real Estate. It was nowhere near Bangalow, it was actually just to the north of Lismore. I did an analysis of the area and if we’d be a good fit: I was working as a journalist and there was a uni here that taught journalism. There was a newspaper that needed journalists, there was an ABC and the other big plus was it had a really large alternative and Queer community. It had a beautiful arts centre with a gallery and a lot of creativity so they were all the things that led me to Lismore. I moved here in 2008 and the university nabbed me quite quickly to do some teaching in journalism. Eventually I started working there full-time.
That’s one version of Jeanti! I did things when I arrived to enrich my experience as well. I joined a choir, I set up the Lismore Ukulele Club. I joined the Northern Rivers Roller Derby league and was president for a bit. I managed to get Suzi Quatro to pose with the roller derby team which is another story. So I’ve been a part of this community now for 13 years.
I’ve been doing radio since I was 14, at school radio stations then community radio and I’ve always been really interested in oral history-based storytelling about people’s experiences. I’m always drawn to people’s personal stories. I think we can understand so much about major events by looking at the individual person’s story. If you can collect enough of them together, so you have many voices, those many voices give you a really great insight. Governments love to collect numbers but numbers don’t tell you what it was like. They tell you how many were impacted by a flood or a fire for example, but they don’t tell you how they were impacted on a personal level.
In 2019, I went to Ireland to an audio/arts festival called Hearsay. There was a massive audio storytelling family there, people who were interested in crafting stories from audio and the sounds of our environment. One of those groups was an organisation called the Empathy Museum and they had a wonderful project called ‘Walk a Mile in my Shoes.’ What you do is you pick up a pair of shoes, you don’t know whose they are, you put them on, they give you headphones and an MP3 player and you go walking in this person’s shoes while listening to their story. It could be stilettos or it could be runners or a pair of slippers, anything, and you don’t know. I had some lovely conversations with the staff there and when I returned to Australia and we were a couple of years post flood, I tried to get them to come to Lismore after being at the Melbourne Arts Festival but we had no funds and it couldn’t happen.
Thinking through that trip I decided I would like to gather stories from people who were impacted with the 2017 flood but also the people who were involved in the clean up and the recovery. That was important. I really want to show my debt to the Empathy Museum for inspiring some of the structure of how Flood Stories works. This embodied listening process of embracing an outfit whether it’s somebody’s shoes or, as with Flood Stories, you come and don a raincoat and gumboots and walking while you’re listening, it really concentrates that experience.
I put a public callout for people who felt ready to tell their story. I recognise there is still a lot of trauma in the community. Flood Stories isn’t for everybody. Some people feel extremely triggered just by heavy rain. I ended up with 10 storytellers. We did this storytelling workshop where we talked about how to tell a story in a way that turns it into an acoustic film. On top of being about what they saw, I wanted all the senses activated, how things felt and how things smelt and tasted. I recorded individual interviews with everyone and whittled them down to the flood story where they talk about what happened. It’s not about dark tourism or trauma entertainment, it’s about resilience. They tell their story but they also talk about how they were changed by the experience. For the most part, people grew. They developed and found new strengths. They talk about what the community response meant to them and what we still need to know, what we need to understand about living in a flood town and what we would do in the future.
Flood Stories is a residency of The Quad at the moment. I have put a shipping container in the middle of The Quad. It’s a bit clean actually. I was hoping they’d send me a dirty, beaten up one so I was a bit disappointed. I think they thought they were doing me a favour sending a shiny new one. I would like to have covered it in mud. (laughs). Inside the container there are 2 rows of bright yellow raincoats with pairs of gumboots sitting under them. The idea is you immerse yourself in the story by putting on the uniform. By putting on a raincoat and gumboots you’re acknowledging your part in this bigger event. When you put the hood up and you’re listening through the headphones to that one voice, it helps you immerse in the story and it’s a really intimate experience. People have emotional responses. Sometimes they cry in the happy parts about people’s recovery and where they are now.
Another couple of amazing things that have come back to me about wearing the uniform is, when you are walking down the street in town wearing a bright yellow raincoat and gumboots when it’s not raining people ask ‘Excuse me, what are you doing?’ More often than not, they tell their story of what happened to them in the flood. It’s a conversation starter. It’s important that we keep reminding ourselves… Do we have a flood plan? Wearing the raincoat also made some feel uncomfortable which helped them immerse themselves in the story because the flood state was not in their comfort zone either.
I’m still really interested in people to record their flood stories up to about 5 minutes on their phone and then email that to lismorefloodstories@gmail.com. I would like to include those stories as part of the archive of Flood Stories. I’ve had one submission talking about the flood s in the ‘70s.
As I was working through editing the stories together, I started to realise that this could actually be a model for storytelling for creative recovery in impacted communities. The sorts of things I was hearing back from the storytellers was ‘I never thought I could tell my story or that my story was valid’, or, ‘I’ve never been able to tell my story until now’. Before the stories were made public, everyone had a chance to listen to their story and let me know whether it was a good concentration of their story. Everyone said yes and a lot came back and said they had a bit of a cry. One of them said, ‘I hadn’t cried at all during the flood because I was too busy being strong for everyone else and this is the first time I let some tears come out.’
I feel very humbled to be the caretaker of these stories. It’s been an absolute honour to be able to work with these stories and bring them to the public.”
Tomorrow is the last day you can experience Flood Stories at The Quad.
https://www.facebook.com/lismorefloodstories/
I moved on from the ABC to work as a travel editor so I had a couple of years of going on holidays and writing about those trips, which was great but I had made the decision to leave Sydney. I was going to go back to Melbourne but I thought I’d have an interim visit and live somewhere else for a couple of years. I thought I might go to Wellington so I went there but no, it was way too windy. I had come up here to do a travel article about a Yoga / surfing retreat in Byron Bay and after that had finished I was driving around and thought, this looks like a great area. A little later I came back here and looked at a house I’d seen in the window of a Bangalow Real Estate. It was nowhere near Bangalow, it was actually just to the north of Lismore. I did an analysis of the area and if we’d be a good fit: I was working as a journalist and there was a uni here that taught journalism. There was a newspaper that needed journalists, there was an ABC and the other big plus was it had a really large alternative and Queer community. It had a beautiful arts centre with a gallery and a lot of creativity so they were all the things that led me to Lismore. I moved here in 2008 and the university nabbed me quite quickly to do some teaching in journalism. Eventually I started working there full-time.
That’s one version of Jeanti! I did things when I arrived to enrich my experience as well. I joined a choir, I set up the Lismore Ukulele Club. I joined the Northern Rivers Roller Derby league and was president for a bit. I managed to get Suzi Quatro to pose with the roller derby team which is another story. So I’ve been a part of this community now for 13 years.
I’ve been doing radio since I was 14, at school radio stations then community radio and I’ve always been really interested in oral history-based storytelling about people’s experiences. I’m always drawn to people’s personal stories. I think we can understand so much about major events by looking at the individual person’s story. If you can collect enough of them together, so you have many voices, those many voices give you a really great insight. Governments love to collect numbers but numbers don’t tell you what it was like. They tell you how many were impacted by a flood or a fire for example, but they don’t tell you how they were impacted on a personal level.
In 2019, I went to Ireland to an audio/arts festival called Hearsay. There was a massive audio storytelling family there, people who were interested in crafting stories from audio and the sounds of our environment. One of those groups was an organisation called the Empathy Museum and they had a wonderful project called ‘Walk a Mile in my Shoes.’ What you do is you pick up a pair of shoes, you don’t know whose they are, you put them on, they give you headphones and an MP3 player and you go walking in this person’s shoes while listening to their story. It could be stilettos or it could be runners or a pair of slippers, anything, and you don’t know. I had some lovely conversations with the staff there and when I returned to Australia and we were a couple of years post flood, I tried to get them to come to Lismore after being at the Melbourne Arts Festival but we had no funds and it couldn’t happen.
Thinking through that trip I decided I would like to gather stories from people who were impacted with the 2017 flood but also the people who were involved in the clean up and the recovery. That was important. I really want to show my debt to the Empathy Museum for inspiring some of the structure of how Flood Stories works. This embodied listening process of embracing an outfit whether it’s somebody’s shoes or, as with Flood Stories, you come and don a raincoat and gumboots and walking while you’re listening, it really concentrates that experience.
I put a public callout for people who felt ready to tell their story. I recognise there is still a lot of trauma in the community. Flood Stories isn’t for everybody. Some people feel extremely triggered just by heavy rain. I ended up with 10 storytellers. We did this storytelling workshop where we talked about how to tell a story in a way that turns it into an acoustic film. On top of being about what they saw, I wanted all the senses activated, how things felt and how things smelt and tasted. I recorded individual interviews with everyone and whittled them down to the flood story where they talk about what happened. It’s not about dark tourism or trauma entertainment, it’s about resilience. They tell their story but they also talk about how they were changed by the experience. For the most part, people grew. They developed and found new strengths. They talk about what the community response meant to them and what we still need to know, what we need to understand about living in a flood town and what we would do in the future.
Flood Stories is a residency of The Quad at the moment. I have put a shipping container in the middle of The Quad. It’s a bit clean actually. I was hoping they’d send me a dirty, beaten up one so I was a bit disappointed. I think they thought they were doing me a favour sending a shiny new one. I would like to have covered it in mud. (laughs). Inside the container there are 2 rows of bright yellow raincoats with pairs of gumboots sitting under them. The idea is you immerse yourself in the story by putting on the uniform. By putting on a raincoat and gumboots you’re acknowledging your part in this bigger event. When you put the hood up and you’re listening through the headphones to that one voice, it helps you immerse in the story and it’s a really intimate experience. People have emotional responses. Sometimes they cry in the happy parts about people’s recovery and where they are now.
Another couple of amazing things that have come back to me about wearing the uniform is, when you are walking down the street in town wearing a bright yellow raincoat and gumboots when it’s not raining people ask ‘Excuse me, what are you doing?’ More often than not, they tell their story of what happened to them in the flood. It’s a conversation starter. It’s important that we keep reminding ourselves… Do we have a flood plan? Wearing the raincoat also made some feel uncomfortable which helped them immerse themselves in the story because the flood state was not in their comfort zone either.
I’m still really interested in people to record their flood stories up to about 5 minutes on their phone and then email that to lismorefloodstories@gmail.com. I would like to include those stories as part of the archive of Flood Stories. I’ve had one submission talking about the flood s in the ‘70s.
As I was working through editing the stories together, I started to realise that this could actually be a model for storytelling for creative recovery in impacted communities. The sorts of things I was hearing back from the storytellers was ‘I never thought I could tell my story or that my story was valid’, or, ‘I’ve never been able to tell my story until now’. Before the stories were made public, everyone had a chance to listen to their story and let me know whether it was a good concentration of their story. Everyone said yes and a lot came back and said they had a bit of a cry. One of them said, ‘I hadn’t cried at all during the flood because I was too busy being strong for everyone else and this is the first time I let some tears come out.’
I feel very humbled to be the caretaker of these stories. It’s been an absolute honour to be able to work with these stories and bring them to the public.”
Tomorrow is the last day you can experience Flood Stories at The Quad.
https://www.facebook.com/lismorefloodstories/