In this interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with curator, writer and art historian Emily McCulloch Childs. Emily loves diaries, life writing, and writers’ journals; her own earliest diary (velveteen-covered, horse-emblazoned) dates to when she was ten years old.

Jenny and Emily talk about how they first met as anonymous bloggers in the 2010s, the freedom of not having to be ‘writery’ on their blogs, the sense of liberation that anonymity gave, and how blogging could become a kind of online diary.

They discuss diaries as a cultural snapshot, and as revealing not only the inner life of the diarist, but of the other people around us while we are writing. They ask: do we write diaries to record, or to process, or both? And they consider the act of going back to the past and reading old diaries; how does it make us feel?

Emily McCulloch Childs is a curator, writer, art historian, researcher, gallerist, publisher, fundraiser and maker, co-author & publisher of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art and McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, and author of New Beginnings: Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection of 21st century Aboriginal Art.

Since 2003 she has been co-director of art company McCulloch & McCulloch with her mother, Susan McCulloch. They began exhibiting art in 2009, and established a home gallery at their family house ‘Whistlewood’ on the Mornington Peninsula, with a focus on Aboriginal art. In 2019 they opened Everywhen Artspace in Flinders, and now work with over 40 communities, 300 artists and 25 Aboriginal owned NFP art centres.

Since 2013 Emily has been the founding curator of The Indigenous Jewellery Project, Australia’s first national contemporary jewellery project working with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander jewellers.

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.