Judith Lanigan
In between investigations I focus on Creative Thinking as a Researcher, Published Author, and Illustrator.
GIRL REPORTERS SECRET SPIES!
My current Creative project is about the female journalists in the wild years of Australian Secret Intelligence history 1938-1945.
Using my training in Investigation and Geo-political Intelligence Analysis, I took the tiny pieces of found facts of two Girl Reporters and their work for Secret Intelligence, followed their paths through old newspaper articles, cracked their real identities which led to surviving papers, and hunted through declassified files to fill in the missing pieces.
The non-fiction book is the biographies of three extraordinary women braided into a chronological storyline of dangerous missions, love lost, found and lost again, and the Bond-like secret organisations covertly driving WW2. Bringing the three women together in one story allows us to meet the reporter as agent on a covert mission into the epicentre of Nazi secret intelligence in 1938 in the escalation to war, the agent on the run with a price on her head staying just one step ahead of the swift brutal invasion of the Pacific, and Australia's first female Intelligence officer and the "temperamental, unconvential tools of warfare –saboteurs, secret agents..." (Colonel Allison Ind, Spy Ring Pacific, 1958) that she worked with, and her time in a jungle camp on a Pacific island on the edge of Occupied territories just months before War's end.
These women's stories take us into Australian Secret Intelligence history through the female lens. There is an unexpected glamour to the grittiness of their secret world. From them we learn about courage, resilience and survival.
To be notified when GIRL REPORTERS SECRET SPIES will be published, please contact me via email.
While the centrepoint is Australian Secret Intelligence, this story leaps around the world, so I created a series of pictorial maps. To allow detail of journeys, modes of transport, contemporaneous portraits, and the astonishing variety of aeroplanes that appear so constantly in the story, I drew the maps large scale on artist's 10 oz canvas, supported by wooden battens top and bottom in the style of old maps, so that the series could travel as a touring exhibition.
If you are interested in hosting an exhibition of the maps and author talk, please email me here.
