Julie’s workshops and coaching sessions combine performance and memory skills with intuitive listening.

Julie has taught at the University of Melbourne, in TAFE colleges, and in numerous adult-learning contexts. Her workshops are particularly tailored to the not-for-profit sector. Julie has worked with interns returning from overseas aid work, refugees, classroom teachers, outdoor education specialists and social justice activists.

Story is always selective, but there is an integrity in people telling their experience. I love the release of laughter, the gasp of recognition and the freedom of people finding their voice.

telling lived experience

In these workshops you will locate and tell stories from your own experience, hone the telling in pairs and small groups and practise the reciprocal arts of telling and listening.

the translation from written to spoken

Have you ever lost your audience as you read from a carefully prepared script? Julie offers individual or small group sessions to coach you through the translation from complex written material to clear and memorable speech.

This is a great way to engage people and forge new understandings, Julie’s workshops skilfully address a range of settings

Tim Costello CEO World Vision Australia

Julie welcomes both the novice and the proficient She listens keenly…her feedback is always worthwhile. I use stories teaching at uni, presenting at conferences, informally with my kids, at family gatherings.

Lil Deverell Lecturer La Trobe University

Julie’s leadership was outstanding. Her engagement in story and her giftedness in establishing an atmosphere which was secure, creative and full of enjoyment were all evident.

Jill Manton Wellspring Centre

The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word.

Walter Ong Orality and Literacy, 1982

…speaking a text, prepared or improvised, and listening to it constitute a relationship…a connection of present contemporaries, people breathing together.

Ursula Le Guin Always Coming Home, 1986

We really like it that you get who we are as an organisation

Samara Pitt Schools Team, Urban Seed, 2008

Thanks again for your gifts and support, we thought of you often as we told the stories.

Caz Coleman Refugee and displaced people program, National Council of Churches

These skills are endlessly useful for leaders and teachers or anyone who has to present in front of an audience.

the hidden skills of memory

Julie teaches simple aural, visual and gestural prompts to memory. Once you know your way around some of the tricks of memory embedded in folktales, you can work with them in retelling without scripts and in crafting your own stories.

interested? contact Julie
fee structure? Email for details

The task of the storyteller is to make a place where wisdom, who is like a shy animal, can come out and graze.

Jewish saying

For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others…

Barbara Hardy in The Cool Web, 1978

The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which we initially have no words. Myth…looks into the heart of a great silence.

Karen Armstrong A short history of myth, 2005

We are on the cusp of the recovery of storytelling.

Cesar Benalcazar 2008