Kate Hannah Paynter

Australian histories seem to lack the female voice or perspective; Charlotte Wood’s novel ‘The Natural Way of Things’ (2015) brings Australian female histories to the foreground using semiotic timescapes. A term recently coined within the field of Linguistic Semiotic Landscapes (LSL), semiotic timescapes grapple with the meaning-making process concerning time, space, and place (Lazar, 2022). This research narrows the field from Australia to the Northern Territory. The Northern Territory’s cyclone of domestic violence (DV) has arrived in the wake of the coroner's investigation, with “rigid masculinity” blamed at the root cause. The creative evidence in Australia and the Northern Territory lacks a feminine perspective on the effect of the aftermath of psychological torment, such as the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Charlotte Wood’s novel ‘The Natural Way of Thing’ cannot be read as a woman in a hysterical mode of anger, but an inciteful piece of creative evidence into the female bodies sphere of reaction to gendered-based violence. This research proposal takes an innovative approach to interdisciplinary qualitative research. Separated into three components aimed at triangulation, the research moves from narrative analysis to a creative component and a self-reflection exegesis.