The (Un)seasonal Beat: Longform, Climate Crisis and the Deep Dive of Oral History

This article draws from a study of disaster journalism and a subgenre of reportage that has emerged in response to climate crisis in Australia. Therein, we have detected a pattern of women writers taking a literary and personal approach to reporting social-environmental disasters, across a decade earmarked by climate scientists as critical for action on climate change. Largely eschewing the conventional ideal of dispassionate coverage, their work directs attention to the communicative capacity of longform to evoke, and unpack, conditions of precarity. Through oral historical accounts with women working in and beyond the newsroom, we engage further with their positionality and practice—with their attempts to bridge personal experience with public needs and political action. By way of example, the article homes in on the lived experience of one Guardian journalist who bears witness to, and creates a moral imaginary of, the threatened ecology of the Great Barrier Reef. The article thus argues for the power and application of oral history as a means to apprehend journalists as agents and critics of change, reminding us of the ways journalism practice has its own materiality of life experience.