The compassionate bastard: Memoir of an immigration officer, and the creative reality: A dissertation on the ethics and practice of memoir writing

This PhD project involved the writing of a memoir entitled: 'The Compassionate Bastard: Memoir of an Immigration Officer.' Concurrent with the writing of the memoir was the production of a substantial, theoretically informed dissertative critique of the ethics and practice of memoir writing. The memoir is drawn from a thirteen-year career with the Australian Department of Immigration (1990-2003). It features, among other things, stories of Compliance raids on premises in New South Wales, tales of asylum seekers, depictions of life under mandatory detention at Sydney's infamous Villawood detention centre and an account of the Australian Government's humanitarian response to crises in Kosovar and East Timor. It is a unique contribution to knowledge on the subject and may be the first Department of Immigration memoir in Australia.

The dissertation explores the process of the memoir's creation with regard to its location within the genre of memoir and, more specifically, within Australian governmental and administrative memoirs. Important themes are the interplay between the personal and the public narrative, between poetry epigraphs and prose anecdotes, between humour and seriousness in treating dramatic subjects, along with issues of integrity and the legality of public service memoirs (with special focus on the politics of enforcing Official Secrets legislation), and the use of literary devices in a non-fictional form. This combination of research elements constitutes a unique contribution to knowledge of the ethics and practice of memoir writing in Australia.

The concurrent nature of the main elements of the thesis - the creative writing memoir and the dissertative research - resulted in a synthesis as the research came to influence the form of the memoir and vice versa. The dissertation evolved to become something of a memoir about the writing of a memoir, while the memoir evolved, as a result of the research, from the 'whistleblower' work that was originally proposed to a more balanced and reflective piece. Most significantly, therefore, I have concluded that my experience in combining creation and research is a clear demonstration of the contemporary scholarly relevance of creative research as an academic discipline.