This episode I am joined by Leonee Derr, who, for the last 20 years has dedicated her work-life to serving and supporting community - particularly those under-served, under-represented and those most experiencing marginalisation. She has worked in public libraries for the last 14 years with the majority of her advocacy focussed on amplifying voices of youth and young adults. In 2012 she received a scholarship to travel the world gathering evidence, doing research and participating in work placements. Her research...
This episode I am joined by Leonee Derr, who, for the last 20 years has dedicated her work-life to serving and supporting community - particularly those under-served, under-represented and those most experiencing marginalisation. She has worked in public libraries for the last 14 years with the majority of her advocacy focussed on amplifying voices of youth and young adults. In 2012 she received a scholarship to travel the world gathering evidence, doing research and participating in work placements. Her research explored how physical space and place, architecture and its design, create an atmosphere that signifies inclusion or exclusion to young people.
Leonee has used her passion and voice to share important and crucial ideas about radical librarianship, social justice having a place in libraries, the myth of neutrality and safety amongst many other topics around the world presenting at conferences and publishing papers. Most recently, she and 4 other library leaders wrote the paper Who Do We Think We Are? Understanding Diversity in the Victorian Public Library Workforce.
Leonee is currently on a sabbatical from public libraries focussing on writing and storytelling to build community in her role as a content producer for a fortune 500 company.
Leonee and I talk about issues such as stigma, breaking down barriers and amplifying voices of marginalised groups, uplifiting humanity and reading to understand our past, inform our present and support our future.
There is a little passionate swearing involved ...!
The pairings:
One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A landmark 1967 novel that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia. It chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."
The Yield by Tara June Winch
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind.
August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.
Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.
