Kate Ahearne

Kate Ahearne is the convener and chief cook and bottle-washer of the Fair Media Alliance website. She’s new to this brave new world of internet publishing and enjoying the hell out of it.

In the 1970s, she had a wonderful time in the world of street-level publishing, including producing and presenting a weekly programme called Writers’ Radio for Community Radio 3CR in Melbourne and taking part in the launch of the Poet’s Union, as well as indulging in the production of various rat-bag literary magazines.

In 1980, armed with her MA from Monash University, she went to Libya with her family, where she worked for a couple of years as a lecturer in English as a Second Language at Garyounis University in Benghazi.

Back in Oz, she had the cheek to offer The Age a piece on the Gaddafi regime and life in the Great Libyan Arab People’s Jamahiriya. Before she could turn around, the piece had been sold to all the major papers (excepting the Murdoch Press, of course) and her career as a journalist took off.

During the ’80s she worked full-time as a journalist, mostly producing ‘literary’ journalism, but all sorts of feature work as well — her work appearing mostly in The Age, The National Times, Australian Book Review, Australian Society and broadcast on ABC radio. She taught Creative Writing and English as a Second Language for the Council of Adult Education, and also worked as Assistant to the Director of the National Book Council, traveled around the countryside conducting workshops and seminars for writers, and eventually taught on the inaugural Professional Writing course at RMIT.

In 1989, her youngest child was born, and the following year she retired from the rat-race.

In 2009, with her ‘baby’ all grown up, she returned to teach in Libya, and later worked in Kuwait and Yemen.

Now, thanks to the dire straits we find ourselves in with the vast majority of media outlets so hostile to our elected government, and so dishonest, she’s back in the rat-race.

To pinch and bowdlerize a line from L.P. Hartley:

‘The future is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

Articles written by Kate Ahearne (1)

15 May 2013 | Writing on the sky: an IA night at Jimmy Watson’s

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Kate Ahearne

Articles written by Kate Ahearne (1)

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