Author: Kirrily MacRaild
MacRaild, Kirrily, 2025 Ordinary Trauma and Everyday Empowerment: The Life-writing of Defence Children in Australia, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Over the past few decades, the wellbeing of Australian Defence Force families has come into view in Australia across a range of disciplines. This thesis brings the discussion to creative practice and the field of life narrative. It argues for the significance of representation of military children in the Australian military narrative, contributing to a necessary diversification of how military life and experience is understood and represented. It asserts that the wellbeing of military children can benefit from significant intersections with life writing as a discipline and practice.
This creative-led thesis claims that self-representation through memoir is a powerful way to increase representation of children in the literary field of military storytelling. My creative artefact, a memoir of childhood, accomplishes this representation. Set during the ‘Long Peace’ of Australia in the 1970s-1980s. She Scripts Away In Silence: A Childhood Memoir of Military Service, narrates my lived experience as the daughter of a career soldier in the Australian Army. The personal archive of life writing I kept from age nine to nineteen is the main resource and was my inspiration for the memoir.
The exegetical component of this thesis opens by reviewing the emergence of a new if small wave of Australian literary publications relating to military children, contending that more self-representation is essential. It situates my creative artefact within the Australian military memoir genre, arguing that it offers a new type of ‘war story’ in a genre driven by essentialism and stereotypes.
My textual analysis of the memoir begins by asserting the value of the personal archive as a site that reveals the values and routines of military life, as well as the development of ordinary trauma. Conceptualised by Jennifer Sinor to describe the case study of her own diary writing produced during her military childhood, ordinary trauma describes the experience of a military child who is exposed to war-related threats and consequential trauma but perceives neither the threats nor the trauma (“The Life Writing,” 240-241). I argue that an effective technique to empower the traumatised child is to craft the memoir with an ensemble of narrative voices. Drawing on psychology, sociology, military and trauma studies, I use an original framework to conceptualise three characteristics of ordinary trauma: isolation, hypervigilance and lack of agency. I contend that a life writing practice can offset these trauma-aligned traits, providing a therapeutic potential for both the military child and adult.
My creative-led methodology exposed esoteric ethical challenges military children face when writing archive-based memoir. I assert that the military’s culture of secret-keeping increases the memoirist’s perception of risk for their subjects and themselves. By prioritising the social benefit for other military children, I argue that military child authors are empowered to speak their truth about the impact of a military upbringing. Ultimately, I contend that memoir is an effective way to bring the military child’s voice, needs and wellbeing into view in a way that is also nuanced and empowering for the author.
Keywords: life writing, military children, personal archive, ordinary trauma, memoir, diary
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2025
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Kylie Cardell