Doug Hendrie's Blog: Author blog - Posts Tagged "nonfiction"
New nonfiction
Here are two features I’ve been plugging away at for a while.
The joke that bombed
I met the now-notorious Jalals about a month before their arrest for their public shooting prank that turned out to be mocked-up. Savvy creators willing to mix truth and fiction to get big, fast.
Intro para:
You’ve most likely seen one of the Jalals’ viral videos on your Facebook news feed. Grainy shots of night-time suburbia. Three men in Arab dress cruise slowly down the street in a 4WD. One lifts an AK-47 rifle and takes aim at a man and his young daughter using a payphone, causing them to flee. The sound of tinny gunshots echo through the car’s speakers.
The man bolts, leaving his terrified daughter in his wake. In earlier clips, a man in Arab dress and beard appears, toting a suspicious bag. He tosses it into donut shops, car windows, the open doors of a lift. He throws it over the door of a closed toilet cubicle. He throws it at basketballers, kids playing on wharves, tradies on a lunch break, at a man descending an escalator.
The rest in The Age/SMH here: http://bit.ly/1XQym52
The secret lives of international students
There she stood in the frenzied mosh pit, amid flailing arms, flying beads of sweat and the growling ecstasy of the mob, threshing like trawler bycatch. As a teenager in Jakarta, Dea Arida was never allowed to go to hardcore punk gigs, her protective, strict parents considering them dangerous and corrupting. But Australia is a long way from home. Here, for the first time, Dea could immerse herself in the punk band scene. For the first few years, she methodically removed her Blu-Tacked ticket stubs from her bedroom wall each time her parents came to visit. By 2014, when her 14-year-old sister visited, Dea was ready to come out as a hardcore fan. “I took my sister [to the mosh pit] to prove a point to my parents,” Dea says. “Gigs here are safe.” And Dea’s boyfriend came, too. New country, new rules.
As Dea was leaving to study at Melbourne University five years ago, her worried parents showered her with advice. Don’t let guys stay over. Maintain your Catholic faith amid Australia’s secularism. Avoiding alcohol didn’t even need to be said. Dea listened. But she was nursing a secret. “It wasn’t something I told my parents, but the liberal nature of Australia was a reason I came,” she says. “Here, you don’t have to conform to your peers as much. There’s a lot of freedom.”
The rest in Good Weekend here: http://bit.ly/1RuiYsB
The joke that bombed
I met the now-notorious Jalals about a month before their arrest for their public shooting prank that turned out to be mocked-up. Savvy creators willing to mix truth and fiction to get big, fast.
Intro para:
You’ve most likely seen one of the Jalals’ viral videos on your Facebook news feed. Grainy shots of night-time suburbia. Three men in Arab dress cruise slowly down the street in a 4WD. One lifts an AK-47 rifle and takes aim at a man and his young daughter using a payphone, causing them to flee. The sound of tinny gunshots echo through the car’s speakers.
The man bolts, leaving his terrified daughter in his wake. In earlier clips, a man in Arab dress and beard appears, toting a suspicious bag. He tosses it into donut shops, car windows, the open doors of a lift. He throws it over the door of a closed toilet cubicle. He throws it at basketballers, kids playing on wharves, tradies on a lunch break, at a man descending an escalator.
The rest in The Age/SMH here: http://bit.ly/1XQym52
The secret lives of international students
There she stood in the frenzied mosh pit, amid flailing arms, flying beads of sweat and the growling ecstasy of the mob, threshing like trawler bycatch. As a teenager in Jakarta, Dea Arida was never allowed to go to hardcore punk gigs, her protective, strict parents considering them dangerous and corrupting. But Australia is a long way from home. Here, for the first time, Dea could immerse herself in the punk band scene. For the first few years, she methodically removed her Blu-Tacked ticket stubs from her bedroom wall each time her parents came to visit. By 2014, when her 14-year-old sister visited, Dea was ready to come out as a hardcore fan. “I took my sister [to the mosh pit] to prove a point to my parents,” Dea says. “Gigs here are safe.” And Dea’s boyfriend came, too. New country, new rules.
As Dea was leaving to study at Melbourne University five years ago, her worried parents showered her with advice. Don’t let guys stay over. Maintain your Catholic faith amid Australia’s secularism. Avoiding alcohol didn’t even need to be said. Dea listened. But she was nursing a secret. “It wasn’t something I told my parents, but the liberal nature of Australia was a reason I came,” she says. “Here, you don’t have to conform to your peers as much. There’s a lot of freedom.”
The rest in Good Weekend here: http://bit.ly/1RuiYsB
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