Announcement of the 2022 SCWC + Wollongong Botanic Garden Writers-in-Residence

With thanks to our partner Wollongong Botanic Garden, we are excited to announce the recipients of the 2022 SCWC + Wollongong Botanic Garden Writers Residencies.

Congratulations to Rebekah Lambert, Karen Cummings, Elizabeth Walton, Katarina Mikac and Jessica Raschke.

The writers will each work for a period on their respective projects in the Garden’s Cratloe Cottage over the next few months. They will also be publicly presenting or teaching from their work in the Garden, or at Coledale Community Hall. Look out for their workshops!

Rebekah Lambert

Rebekah Lambert makes her living through encouraging freelancers that stress has a productivity cost and that mental health comes first through distinct narrative prose and marketing meanders. She is a content marketing freelancer and community and culture specialist by trade and a freelance advocate in her (somewhat mythical) spare time.

As founder of Unashamedly Creative, Rebekah helps businesses large and small create communities of adoring customers through great communication and well-designed culture. As the founder of The Freelance Jungle, she spreads a message of community support and stress reduction through focusing on ending the isolation inherent in sole employment, raising the knowledge bar, and sharing support.

Karen Cummings

Karen Cummings is a performer with over 30 years experience in opera, music theatre and the performance of song. She has an abiding interest in the many ways the voice can colour words and the relationship of the sounds of words and the human voice. She is currently a lecturer in voice at the University of Wollongong and the Conservatorium of Music (Sydney). She has a particular interest in the ways that voice and words can empower communities who are the voices we most need to hear from.

She is a member of the Short Black Opera Company which toured Australia telling the story of the first walk off from an Aboriginal Mission in Echeuca. The piece was written by Deborah Cheetham and workshopped on country with elders who knew the story. She is currently part of Creation, a text based music theatre work responding to the climate crisis. Karen has composed a work for this piece. Karen is interested in exploring further the interaction between psycho-geography and the resonance of space.

Elizabeth Walton

Elizabeth Walton is a freelance writer and photographer who has contributed regular feature stories and photographs to The Australian, HuffPost, Penguin Books, The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Ozarts Magazine, Reuters and Timber and Steel as well as newspapers and magazines in Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. Elizabeth was part of the 2022 SCWC/ Bundanon Group Writers Residency.

Katarina Mikac

Katarina is an ecologist and as such a firm believer that we are not apart from nature, rather a part of nature. Katarina identifies as a CALD writer. She has written over 50 scientific manuscripts on nature in Australia and internationally, focusing on threats to a species home and therefore its survival. She has written numerous popular science articles for children, and has taught scientific communication and writing to international students for over 15 years. She is currently working on several works of fiction in the nature writing genre, mostly for young teenagers.

Jessica Raschke

Jessica is a writer, multidisciplinary artist and trainee psychotherapist. Her work typically considers the beautiful questions about the human soul, mortality, existence, and the protean nature of meaning.

Over the years, she has undertaken residences at Varuna (Katoomba), The CORRIDOR Project (Cowra) and Arteles (Finland). Her writing has been published in Dumbo Feather, Pip Magazine, The Big Issue, and more. Her public art installations often place words in vulnerable positions. Her latest poetry collection, Lightning Shades, was published in 2021.