A. Frances Johnson

A. Frances Johnson is a writer and painter from Melbourne. She has taught creative writing at the University of Melbourne in the Department of English with Cultural Studies. She has completed her first novel, a burlesque and post-colonial retelling of the life of German migrant and colonial painter Eugen von Guerard. Chapter one of this project was published in Westerly. She spent several years retracing the painter’s wilderness journeys to civic wilderness and shopping centre sites around the country.She has previously published short fiction in Westerly, Southerly and Strange Cities/Shapes and written many reviews, curatorial and non-fictional pieces for magazines and galleries including Craft Victoria, Westspace, Dialogue, Arena Magazine and others. She is currently completing a PHD on the representation and construction of indigenous voices in contemporary historical fiction. She was the recipient of the 2001 Felix Meyer Scholarship from the Melbourne University for her writing project on the painter Eugen von Guerard, and has also travelled to Indonesia as an Asialink resident in 1998, where she ran a series of workshops on comparative colonial imaging of nature and the city. In 2003 She was awarded the Faculty of Arts Amy Gaye Cowper Tennant Memorial Fellowship to pursue her writing projects. In 2005 undertook a writing/painting residency for the Arthur Boyd Trust in Bundanon, NSW.