More about Diana

Diana Plater is a journalist, writer, playwright and media consultant based in Sydney and Foxground, NSW, Australia.

Diana has been working in the media for more than 35 years.

She writes and edits articles covering travel, politics, arts and profiles. She's travelled all over the world - she's been to more than 30 countries as well as most parts of Australia and New Zealand. Her articles are published widely, in newspapers, magazines and online including Australian House and Garden, The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Newcastle Herald, The Canberra Times, Alumni (the University of Sydney magazine), Signature, Holidays with Kids and Five Star Kids.

During her career, Diana's been Travel Editor for Australian Associated Press, The Age and USA Today's stringer in Central America , covered Aboriginal affairs and other issues for the Sydney Morning Herald's Canberra Press Gallery bureau, a producer and trainer of indigenous journalists on the ground-breaking SBS TV program, First in Line, and a university lecturer, most recently at the University of Sydney. She is also a course module author for Backpack Journalism at the Open School of Journalism - www.openschoolofjournalism.com.

Following her time as AAP's West Australian Bureau Chief she based herself in Nicaragua in the mid '80s, covering Central America for a number of outlets. Later she was based in New York, where she freelanced for Australian and American publications. Returning to Sydney she covered the arts, indigenous and other issues for the Age, the Canberra Times and the West Australian as well as other local and international media, including the Montreal Gazette and the Toronto Star and WIN, an international internet magazine for women, read in 90 countries.

Diana is the co-author with Ollie Smith of Raging Partners: Two Worlds, One Friendship, published by Magabala Books in 2000. The book documents Diana and Ollie's 20-year cross-cultural friendship to a background of reporting indigenous issues, particularly in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Raging Partners was short-listed for the Community Relations Commission Award of the 2001 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

She is also the author/editor of four books and three chapters in other books related to the media and indigenous and multicultural issues, including a guide for international media on Aboriginal issues published for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Diana's chapter on the Cootamundra Girls Home forms part of the official oral history of the stolen generations - Many Voices: Reflections on experiences of indigenous child separation published in 2002 by the National Library.

Her respected book about coping with difficult pregnancies, Taking Control How to Aim for a Successful Pregnancy After Miscarriage, Stillbirth or Neonatal Loss, was published in 1997 by Doubleday (Transworld Publishers).

Diana was an inaugural Writer in Residence at the New Theatre in Newtown for 2002, working on a play, Lady Macbeth and the Last Revolutionary, which had a residency at the 2004 National Playwrights conference in Adelaide. Her play, Havana, Harlem, which was workshopped at the 2003 International Women's Playwrights Conference in the Philippines, had its world premiere as part of the Sydney Fringe, in September 2010. (See blog The Woman Behind Castro and Havana, Harlem facebook page.)

In the mid 1990s Diana ran her own media consultancy business, specialising in the arts, indigenous and community issues - Diana Plater Media. She helped co-ordinate publicity for The Festival of the Dreaming - the first Olympic Arts Festival - and was also a publicist with A Sea Change, the second Olympic Arts Festival. For 10years she co-ordinated the publicity for first Sorry Day and then for the Journey of Healing on behalf of the National Sorry Day Committee and the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. 

Diana is available for freelance writing, research, television production and speaking engagements.