About Karen
Karen's journey weaves together teaching, writing, social and environmental activism, casting a light on the landscapes of society, gender, and the human experience.
Karen has spent much of her life as a teacher, beginning her career teaching high school History and English at Crookwell High. She moved on to lecture in Politics, Sociology, and later, Women’s Studies across several universities. In the early nineteen seventies, she completed a Masters degree in Politics. Then in 1996, Karen earned a second Master’s, this time in Women’s Studies at La Trobe University. In this degree she focused on work-family dynamics and constructions of masculinity, specifically studying men who work part-time in an effort to create a better home-life balance for themselves and their families.
Her professional journey encompassed various research and policy roles in the trade union and women’s movements. Notably, she was a coordinator/researcher at the Labour Resource Centre, which provided research for the trade union movement. She was also one of the first Equal Employment Opportunity Officers employed in Victoria, and from the beginning of the 1980s (and for the next ten years) worked across a variety of public sector organisations in this capacity.
Karen’s early writing experiences mirrored her work interests at the time. Her first book, The Pursuit of Happiness, focused on Australia’s dependant foreign policy, and was published by Hyland House in 1988. As her focus shifted to gender in the workplace issues, she wrote a second book, entitled Taking Back Time, a work of creative non-fiction about trade union and feminist responses to part-time work. Taking back Time reflected her personal experience in attempting to balance work and family life.
In her later writing she concentrates largely on poetry, with six collections published to date: The Old King and other poems (2003), Remembering How to Cry (2004), Chain of Hearts (2013), and The Dialectics of Rain (2019), all published by Ginninderra Press. She self-published her book, Motherhood Statement in 2015, and most recently, Angles, co-authored with her long-term friend and acclaimed writer, Carmel Macdonald Grahame. Angles was published at the end of 2022 and was launched in 2023 at Carlton’s iconic Readings Bookshop.
Over the years, Karen’s poems have been featured in various journals and anthologies, including Westerly, Overland, Quadrant, Meanjin, the Hunter Writer’s Centre’s Grieve Anthology, Margaret River Press’s Fire Anthology, and Ginninderra’s anthologies Mountain Secrets and I Protest! Poems of Dissent. In 2013, her poem ‘The Artist’s Muse’ placed second in the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition organised by the Nillumbik council, and in 2016, Motherhood Statement was shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers’ Book of the Year Award, securing second place. In 2017, her manuscript, I-spy: The Man Who Wasn’t There was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (for an unpublished manuscript of creative non-fiction). This book was later re-titled The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime - Ric Throssell Against ASIO, and was published by Interventions Press in July, 2021.
Karen has been an active participant in her community’s poetry and writing scene over the years: hosting an annual poetry reading, The Grand Read, in her hometown of Warrandyte for a decade; acting as a judge in both the National Alan Marshall Short Story Competition and in the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition; coordinating and editing a student anthology titled ‘Glass Half Full’. In 2012 she returned to her roots as a teacher and began running creative writing classes for a series of local Neighbourhood Houses and Living and Learning Centres, work she continues to this day.
4 Things About Karen
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She is a long-term political activist – these days her main focus is gender equality and the environment. In earlier years she went to gaol during the Vietnam war, was sued for libel and slander for writing a pamphlet exposing MacDonalds labour practices, attended a Woolworths shareholders meeting to make a speech against their ownership of poker machines, and dressed up as bleached coral in the Commonwealth bank to protest against their funding of the Adani coal mine.
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She has always been an optimist, believing that it is society that creates the monsters and that there is more good in humankind than evil and that we just have to focus on devaluing the bad and promoting the good.
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Her many casual jobs include gladioli farmer, encyclopaedia sales person, life model, barmaid and biscuit factory assembly line worker.Her longest ‘real job’ was as an Equal Employment Opportunity Officer, where, amongst other things, she tried to encourage more women train drivers, shunters, panel beaters and able bodied sea women.
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She was the first girl to ride a surfboard in her little corner of the coast, as well as the first female postie in Canberra. They had to buy special boots for her, and she learned to be afraid of dogs It was also as a postie that she discovered gender discrimination, when she learned she was paid less than any of the blokes while she worked just as hard and had to put up with the hail and the dogs just as they did.