Fullers Bookshop: The Media and the Massacre book launch, 5:30pm Thursday April 21
Adam Ousten, Fullers Bookshop
In the lead-up to the twentieth anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, Australian author and journalist Sonya Voumard will launch her new book, The Media and the Massacre, at Fullers Bookshop, 5:30pm Thursday April 21.
Chilling in her portrayal of journalism, betrayal, and the storytelling surrounding the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Voumard brings to bear her own journalistic experiences, ideas and practices in a riveting inquiry into her profession that is part-memoir and part ethical investigation.
The Media and the Massacre explores the nature of journalistic intent and many of the wider moral and social issues of the storytelling surrounding the events, the people – in particular Martin Bryant and his mother Carleen – and their place in our cultural memory. She takes aim at the intent of the authors behind the controversial Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer and calls into question the actions of numerous journalists and social commentators.
Sonya will be in conversation with eminent journalist and former Mercury editor Garry Bailey.
‘Powerful [and] important’ The Saturday Paper
‘A fascinating case study’ Australian Book Review
Sonya Voumard is a journalist and author who grew up in Melbourne during the 1970s, the daughter of an Australian journalist father and a mother who was a refugee from wartime Europe. Her formative years were shaped by her mother’s wartime experiences, the protests over the Vietnam war, the death of her father in 1975, the sacking of Gough Whitlam and the deaths of the Australian newsmen in East Timor.
Having begun her career as a cadet journalist on the Melbourne Herald in 1980, Sonya worked as a political reporter on the Age in the late eighties and early nineties. These experiences inspired her 2008 novel Political Animals, which an Age literary critic described as ‘a sharp, dark and credibly drawn descent into the benthic relationship between Australian politicians and the media.’ Her memoir pieces have been published in Griffith Review and Meanjin. Sonya now teaches non-fiction writing at UTS while working on a Doctorate of Creative Arts on ‘The Power Dynamics Between Journalists and their Human Subjects’.