Journalists aren't used to being interviewed - they're usually on the other side of the fence - but it's not every day academics take an interest in your work.
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The Breaking Silences project is investigating how the media responded to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and Ballarat has provided a key case study for local reporting.
For one part of the project, a detailed analysis of more than 1000 articles published by The Courier, between 2011 and 2019, was completed, with interviews conducted with current and former journalists and editors.
These include some of the paper's brightest reporters, who were at the frontlines of both the Victorian commission of inquiry, and the brutal Royal Commission hearings in Ballarat.
Their conversations with survivors, and the attitude the paper took publishing them and changing the conversation around acknowledging and healing from horrific sexual abuse in the city, form the core of the research project.
The project is funded through the Australian Research Council, and will also examine several other aspects, including the ABC's coverage and how the Royal Commission itself used the media, as well as how other stories, like the experiences of care leavers, the Jewish community, and sexual assault in the military.
Researcher professor Lisa Waller, from the RMIT School of Media and Communications, said while the Royal Commission was covered comprehensively in the national media at the time, the stories on the ground at one of the "epicentres" of abuse were just as important.
"Ballarat's a really big part of a national story, but we were interested to see what role The Courier had in the local community, and we wanted to understand that," she said.
"What comes through in interviews with journalists is after that 2011 inquiry, The Courier took an absolutely explicit editorial position, positioning survivors and victims at the centre and putting them first, and that allowed The Courier, as far as we can see from studying all the more than 1000 articles, to play this role of bearing witness for its community.
"In scholarship, there's this warm and fuzzy idea that the journalists are community champions, that local journalism's more advocacy than just objective, but what we see in The Courier's coverage, it's not that there's this advocacy here, it goes further - it's saying we've all made mistakes and we've all got responsibility."
Professor Waller has conducted interviews with several reporters who covered the stories at the time, like Tom McIlroy, Fiona Henderson, and Melissa Cunningham, among many others.
Mr McIlroy, who was at the paper from 2011 to 2013, said the partnership with the community, and particularly survivors, still stood out to him years later.
"Back then, as someone who came to Ballarat to work at The Courier, I understood people there had this knowledge and experience of many years of abuse and the aftermath, but I'd never fully understood having never lived through it myself," he said.
"There were very generous victim-survivors, family members, and advocates, who were willing to speak out about, and correctly understood something so terrible that had happened, it needed to be talked about, and part of the healing process was an open discussion and reckoning with what had happened in that community.
"As a journalist looking to cover things in the news and reveal things, it was a powerful thing to be part of."
Ms Henderson, a Courier veteran, said covering the Royal Commission was "at once the best and worst two weeks of my career".
"Information was coming to light, people were being held accountable, people were telling their stories, but it was also pretty horrific hearing the stories as well - I did it for three and a half years, over 100 stories, which I didn't realise," she said.
"I always had the focus on the victims - the stories were horrific, the perpetrators were the scum of the earth, but we always had the victims in mind, we always gave them hope for the future and making Ballarat safer going forward."
She noted many of the survivors remained friends - reporters being part of the community made a huge difference.
"It was a different focus to a lot of the other media," she said,
"They're not only the people we were writing about, but they became friends and people we want to look after and care for, it's a different approach in regional rather than metro journalism."
Ms Cunningham, who travelled to Rome with a group of Ballarat survivors and was in the room when Cardinal George Pell gave his testimony to the Royal Commission, said it was important to provide a space for them in the paper.
This helped change how sexual abuse was approached in all media, she added.
"(For this research), usually the focus is on the subjects of a story, as it should be, so it was a strange experience to be interviewed about coverage I'd given to a story - it was almost like the roles are reversed, and reflecting back on that time, it was quite an extraordinary time," she said.
"If I think back to that time, and I look at how sexual abuse and assault was talked about at that time, and how far it's come since - we've had an Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, a sexual assault survivor, and you look at Brittany Higgins, this huge flow-on effect at a federal government level - we've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go to give survivors a voice.
"A front page story, a survivor talking about their own abuse, that compels others to come forward, then Loud Fence was really one of the most extraordinary vessels for people to tell their own stories, it provided a safe and supportive place for people to do that, it was all community grassroots."
An interim presentation on the research was given to its subjects and other community advocates during the week - researchers noted the significance of the paper allocating significant resources to cover the issues over a period of years, which is unusual considering the local news industry's contraction at the time.
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"One of the things the journalists said, survivors would ring up or come into the office, and the journalists spoke sensitively about the need to check it out, telling them they'd have to verify everything," Professor Waller said.
"All the great skills of research and critical thinking are brought to bear, but you don't lose sight of empathy, and thinking about your work in terms of social good.
"I think a word that was used a couple of times, empathic - it's not been that warm fuzzy community champion, it's about journalists not being afraid to go hard on an issue, and to work with the issue in an empathic way."
More information about the Breaking Silences project is available online.
Affected by this story? There is help available.
You can phone the Ballarat Centre Against Sexual Assault, in Sebastopol, on 5320 3933, or free-call the crisis care line 24 hours on 1800 806 292.
Or phone Lifeline on 13 11 14, the Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380, or Relationships Australia on 1300 364 277.
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