Novelist, filmmaker and academic Tracy Sorensen passed away in Bathurst Hospital on May 5, with her mother Yvonne, partner Steve and sister Deb by her side.
Tracy grew up in the Western Australian town of Carnarvon. After high school she moved to Boorloo/Perth, where she studied journalism at Curtin University between 1981–1986, deferring for a bit to work in a clothing factory for at least a year.
There she also joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP, which subsequently became a part of present-day Socialist Alliance) and its youth wing, becoming the organiser of Resistance’s Perth branch.
It was Tracy with whom I first spoke when I joined Resistance, after getting a copy of its newspaper Direct Action at a Palm Sunday anti-nuclear rally in 1986. It was also Tracy who drove myself and a couple of other young comrades across the Nullarbor to Gadigal Country/Sydney for my first national conference of the SWP at the end of that year.
Neither myself nor the other two comrades had our licences yet, so Tracy did the whole four long days of driving. We slept outside in parks and truck stops along the way.
Following the conference, Tracy stayed in Gadigal Country and became a journalist for Direct Action and then for its successor publication Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly.
After moving to the Blue Mountains in the late 1990s, Tracy met her partner Steve, a national parks ranger from Bathurst. In 2003, she moved in with Steve in Bathurst.
There she worked as a journalist at the local newspaper and at Charles Sturt University as a journalism tutor and lecturer. Tracy was awarded a Doctorate in Creative Practice by the university in 2024, researching the role of handicrafts, such as crochet in climate change communication. She was also a central figure in the Bathurst Community Climate Action Network, which formed in 2007.
In 2014, Tracy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was told she had a less than 50% chance of surviving more than five years. Nonetheless, after a long period of treatment, she survived.
For some years she had harboured the intention of writing a novel. She credited her cancer scare with giving her the motivation to get on with writing the novel, having been putting it off to another day and then being faced with the possibility that that day might never arrive.
The Lucky Galah was published in 2018. It is largely told from the perspective of Lucky, a galah with clipped wings, unable to fly. It is set in the costal WA town of Port Badminton — a fictional version of the Carnarvon where Tracy grew up — and weaves in issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, unionism and politics.
The novel was short-listed or long-listed for several awards, including the prestigious Miles Franklin Award.
Cancer also led Tracy to an interest in our bodily organs — what they are and how they work. She combined this with her interest in handicrafts, spending time during her cancer treatment crocheting a life-size model of her abdominal organs.
She later made another crocheted model of her abdominal organs for a 2020 Creative Practice Circle exhibition.
In 2019, Tracy was selected for the Judy Harris Writer in Residence fellowship at the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre. The fellowship is for writers exploring health-related themes. This enabled her to interact with health scientists and expand her interest in the body.
The result was her second novel, The Vitals, published in 2023 — an originally whimsical cancer memoir. The novel is narrated from the perspective of various characters — all anthropomorphised bodily organs and an anthropomorphised tumour.
Unfortunately, just before the release of the book she received the news that her cancer had returned.
Tracy is missed by many who knew her over the years through her work at Â鶹´«Ã½ and in left-wing politics, and those who knew her through her academic and creative work.