Bad Diaries Podcast Jenny Ackland and Tracy Farr

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome to the blank first page (for Tracy, terrifying; for Jen, not) of season 2 of Bad Diaries Podcast.
In our first episode of the podcast for 2024, we look back at the summer that’s passed since our xmas episode – a summer of busy-ness, bereavement, and a broken bone.

Then we make a schmear on the blank page of season 2, and leap right into it with a chat about diarymaking – whatever diarymaking means. 

Usually on the pod we focus on the content, on the words in diaries. In this episode we shift our focus to the physical artefact – whether that’s “the ultimate in wankery” of Tracy’s current fancy notebook, or something more sensible.

We talk aesthetics and logistics, preferences and flexibility, the creative and the mundane. Jen asks whether a diary is really a place where you can be honest with yourself. And along the way we find ourselves wearing purple 80s mohair jumpers, drinking Midori and lemonade, having dalliances in smoky bars.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, join us for a new episode of the podcast each month, bringing you more guests, more chats, and more diaries (and diary-adjacent) content. Good to chat! Catch you next time!


Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

Pickle your beets, sniff your jars, and wrap the Christmas ham in a teatowel! We’ve reached the toe, the toenail, the heel – no, the sole of the year, and Jenny and Tracy are bringing (or at least name-checking) the A-list celebs for A Very Diary Xmas.

In this final episode of Bad Diaries Podcast for 2023, recorded on a thundery (Wellington) and hot (Melbourne) day in December, we bemoan the tyranny of email, and celebrate staying in bed and sensible shoes.

We look to other people’s diaries on our bookshelves (hello, Andy!), as well as mining our own diaries for the good, the bad and the ugly-crying of our diarised Christmases past.

In not-so-Christmas-y content, we ponder the power of photos vs diaries as archives and records. Tracy brings along some diary-adjacent books she’s read lately, and Coercively Controlling Ex-Boyfriend makes yet another cameo.

We finally six-of-the-best each other – as we have each six-of-the-bested our fabulous Bad Diaries Podcast special guests this season – and we look ahead to 2024, and Season 2 of the podcast, bringing you more guests, more chats, and more diaries (and diary-adjacent) content.

Wishing you all A Very Diary Xmas and everything fabulous for 2024.
Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

In this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with poet, essayist and zine-maker Nadine Anne Hura about diaries, the narrative arc of a life, writing and drawing, and Dirty Dancing.

After reading at Bad Diaries Salon:RADICAL in Wellington in 2022, Nadine wrote about what it was like to prepare for and take part in the salon, in a piece titled ‘The narrative arc of your own life’. In this episode of the podcast, we use that as a jumping off point for a wide-ranging discussion of diaries and journals (keeping them, losing them, and giving them away), about writing and other ways of making art, and about responding to loss.

Nadine Anne Hura is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, of Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi whakapapa. Her writing weaves themes of language, identity, equity and climate justice – and it’s full of memory, and of family.

In 2023 Nadine published Narrating the Seasons of Grief, a chapbook adapted from her essay of the same title, about living in the aftermath of the death of her brother, Darren. A short documentary written and narrated by Nadine, ARO WAIRUA: Navigating the Seasons of Grief, was adapted from the essay (available on Māori TV).

At the 2023 Pikihuia Awards (biennial Māori writing awards), Nadine won the Non-fiction in English category for her essay ‘A Dangerous Country’, and her story ‘Affidavit in the Family Court: Ranginui vs Papatūānuku’ was a highly commended finalist in the Short Fiction in English category.

Both of Nadine’s Pikihuia-awarded stories are published in Huia Short Stories 15 (Huia, 2023), and her work has been widely published elsewhere. She writes regularly for online media outlet The Spinoff, she’s an active member of Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi (identifying, encouraging and promoting Māori writers), and is passionate about grassroots Māori writing and collective publishing.
Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

In this interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with curator, writer and art historian Emily McCulloch Childs. Emily loves diaries, life writing, and writers’ journals; her own earliest diary (velveteen-covered, horse-emblazoned) dates to when she was ten years old.

Jenny and Emily talk about how they first met as anonymous bloggers in the 2010s, the freedom of not having to be ‘writery’ on their blogs, the sense of liberation that anonymity gave, and how blogging could become a kind of online diary.

They discuss diaries as a cultural snapshot, and as revealing not only the inner life of the diarist, but of the other people around us while we are writing. They ask: do we write diaries to record, or to process, or both? And they consider the act of going back to the past and reading old diaries; how does it make us feel?

Emily McCulloch Childs is a curator, writer, art historian, researcher, gallerist, publisher, fundraiser and maker, co-author & publisher of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art and McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, and author of New Beginnings: Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection of 21st century Aboriginal Art.

Since 2003 she has been co-director of art company McCulloch & McCulloch with her mother, Susan McCulloch. They began exhibiting art in 2009, and established a home gallery at their family house ‘Whistlewood’ on the Mornington Peninsula, with a focus on Aboriginal art. In 2019 they opened Everywhen Artspace in Flinders, and now work with over 40 communities, 300 artists and 25 Aboriginal owned NFP art centres.

Since 2013 Emily has been the founding curator of The Indigenous Jewellery Project, Australia’s first national contemporary jewellery project working with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander jewellers.
Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

A mixed tape of an episode that takes in The Saints and New Order at the Seaview Ballroom in 1982 Melbourne, writes a song about a closed cemetery in rainy Paris in 1989, nicks a guitar pick from the INXS stage, and reads a lot of Dick Francis.

After the last two interview episodes with special guests, this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast brings Jenny and Tracy back together, to read from our own diaries, on the theme of NOTES.

We set the same theme for a Bad Diaries Salon in Melbourne in May this year – our first Melbourne salon since 2019 – and it got us thinking (as our salon themes always do) about the different ways to interpret NOTES. We riff on notes we write, notes to ourselves and to others, musical notes on the page and on the voice and in the ear. Love notes, lists (of books read, of spaghetti marinara eaten); notes that have fallen out of place, and notes that remain where they belong.

Both of our readings, though, focus on music. Tracy reads from her travel journals, from a few days in Paris in 1989 that she later turned into song lyrics. Jenny reads from 1982 and her music-soaked Melbourne, nights catching INXS and No Nonsense, The Saints and New Order, Night Moves on the telly.

To note is to observe, to notice, and we notice the value of notes, lists, ephemera. As Jenny says, “we might be thinking this is a podcast about diaries … all this other surrounding stuff – the notes, the scraps, the ticket stubs, the postcards … in some ways maybe gives more detail than the diaries themselves.”
Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

In our second guest interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with poet, essayist, reviewer and five-time Bad Diaries Salon reader Kate Camp about diaries, the slipperiness of memory, and noticing what you notice.

Kate and Tracy dig down into the experience of reading at, and returning to, Bad Diaries Salon – what that means, what it brings, and what it feels like. Kate very generously talks about and reads from the treasure that is the little red diary she kept every day in 1986, the year she turned 14, “the best possible year of your life”.

Kate Camp is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest and most loved poets, with awards and plaudits and seven collections of poetry to her name, from her 1998 debut Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars to 2020’s How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems.

Last year saw the publication of Kate’s sharp-edged and quietly magnificent memoir, a collection of disarming true stories titled You Probably Think This Song Is About You. The pieces in the memoir are familiar but unsettling, disturbing but also somehow joyful – qualities shared with Kate’s readings at five Bad Diaries Salons at Wellington’s Verb Festival since 2018.

Content warning: this episode includes brief mention of sexual assault and drug use, abortion, and negative self-talk.
Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.