About Kate Lawrence
In 1987 I drove from Canberra to Adelaide, with a few other radical, leftie, feminist students, to attend a conference to establish a new student union.
Somewhere between Gundagai and Wagga Wagga we tuned in to a country radio station, and as the conservative gender roles dripped from every word, I was suddenly gripped by a fantasy to own one, a radio station, as a means of influencing the world towards equality.
Instead I spent over 20 years communicating as a lawyer, writing like the Wizard of Oz, as if there was no-one behind the paper screen. It has taken me a long time to deconstruct my communication style, to be able to speak like… me.
I needed to nurture my imagination, become a student of story, get over a tiny, repetitive and powerful voice saying ‘You can’t do that’. I needed to let go of the printed page, and really make sense of who I am, what I have experienced, what I believe and what I want to say.
My practise with Story began with performance storytelling. Initially I apprenticed myself to folk tales and myths, messages from the ancestors. I crafted and told, reimagined and staged, experimented and copied. Then I expanded my skills into true personal stories, and I studied story theory so I could understand and explain story crafting to others, and so grow a love and capacity for oral story in community.
I’ve listened, coached and taught countless people to love and think about and tell stories. I’ve created safe space and hosted, I’ve won the Moth story slam twice and given a TEDx talk once. I’ve felt the embodied impact of story as we sit in circle and share, or listen, bear witness and feel moved.
Story is my passion and tool of choice to change the world.
Five years ago I began circling around the notion of audio storytelling - tentatively at first and now with gay abandon. I began with a simple podcast of stories recorded live at the community events I hosted in the country town of Woodend, 70 km north of Melbourne.
When Covid hit, like plenty of other people, I threw myself into a steep learning curve and made two seasons (with financial support from my local Council) of a podcast called The Covid Crossing. It was one of the most intense, frightening and exhilarating things I’ve ever done. I was hooked.
I then began working on a project to create ‘Coming Home’ a podcast in conjunction with Juno, a women’s homelessness service, which was published in late 2021, and named in the top 100 Australian podcasts of the year.
For 6 months in 2022 I published ‘Tide the Moon’, a personal podcast about yearning, and learning, to dance with the rhythms of nature. I am now working on a podcast about Democracy & Disasters while also studying a Graduate Diploma in Radio and Podcasting at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
I still love oral storytelling, it is so organic, place based and relational, but podcasting allows me to showcase others stories, weave sense making and advocacy, tell bigger, multi-part historical and political stories, and play with sound and music. While the time and effort is enormous, once it’s done, it can be heard anywhere by anyone. That is amazing.
I now have the equivalent of a radio station. We all do.
