The Past is Always Personal

Yumiko is a medical doctor from Sydney. She resigned from public hospital work after experiencing burnout and now works in medical education and private health. Her story entered mainstream media after she blogged in February 2019 about her experiences as a trainee in the health system, opening with the words: ‘I never thought I would say this, but I broke. I give up. I am done. I am handing back my dream of becoming a surgeon.’ Nowadays she’s rebuilding herself, starting with her health. She blogs on wide range of topics that reflect her various interests; eco-warrior, yogi, book worm.

Emma A. Jane — formerly published as Emma Tom — is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. Her research specialties are eclectic, and include sex and gender, misogyny on the internet, the future of work, and the social and ethical impacts of emerging technology. In 2021, Stanford University ranked her as being in the top 2% of researchers in the world based on citations of her academic work. Emma has presented the findings of her research to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, and unsuspecting Uber drivers (sorry about that). Prior to her career in academia, she spent nearly 25 years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media, much of which was spent fielding burlesque electronic rape and death threats. Over the course of her working life, Emma has received multiple awards and prizes for her research, her teaching, her journalism, and her fiction. Diagnosis Normal is her eleventh book. On the weekends, she makes GIFs of her dogs, fools around with Excel macros, and reads books about how to read books by Wittgenstein. She was surprisednotsurprised when she was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

Christine Jackman began her career as a journalist with the Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Australia, in 1993. She has worked in New York as a foreign correspondent for NewsCorp, in the Canberra press gallery and as the Australian's social issues writer. After several years as a staff writer for the Weekend Australian Magazine, Christine embraced freelance journalism, with features published in Good Weekend, Vogue and the Australian Women's Weekly. She is also a communications consultant.