Matthew Ricketson was happily doing an arts degree when he read a feature story in 1980 about a then famous, now forgotten sports commentator that fairly leapt off the grey pages of type in his local newspaper. Even today he can still recall the thrill of feeling that the journalist, Geoff Slattery, was speaking directly to him, the reader.

That, as much as the shoe-leather reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, launched him on a career as a journalist, which he followed at newspapers, ("The Age", "The Australian"), magazines ("Time Australia"), and as a freelancer (for many years anyone who paid – yes, that would be "Australian Accountant" – but more recently, online publications like "Inside Story").

A love of true stories – finding them, writing them, talking about them to anyone who’ll listen – also brought him to teaching journalism which he has done at RMIT university in Melbourne, Australia, and at the University of Canberra in the nation’s capital.

Teaching, in turn, has brought him to researching and thinking about journalism, especially long-form journalism, and its continuing importance to the free flow of information, ideas, insight and imagination in society.

Caroline Graham has worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, and now teaches journalism at Bond University—a small university on Australia’s beautiful Gold Coast. Working as a reporter in regional Queensland meant hearing the “yarns” (as the locals say) of drovers and miners, prostitutes and politicians, and she turned to fiction as a way of telling all the stories that stuck with her years later, the ones that were too strange and magical to preserve in newsprint.

Which is not to say she doesn't love true stories, too. Honestly, pull up a barstool or grab yourself a coffee. If you've got a ghost story, a family secret, an embarrassing moment or a strange coincidence, she'd love to hear it. She might even write it down.

Caroline has a research master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Wollongong and is currently writing a novel as part of her PhD on the intersections between memory, history, and empathy.