Thirroul Readers & Writers Festival

YOUR essential pull-out guide

Thirroul Communit Centre y 7-8 March 2015

BOOK AT thirroulreadersandwritersfestival.org

PROGRAM OF EVENTS The first Thirroul Readers and Writers Festival will be held at the Thirroul Community Centre on March 7 and 8.

Tickets $20/$10 per morning or afternoon session; $50/$20 for all sessions. Tickets on sale at the Thirroul Community Centre from 8.30am on Saturday, March 7. To book tickets, go to thirroulreadersandwritersfestival.org.

Any profits will be donated to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Friday, March 6

6pm Picnic on the Point (Sandon Point, Bulli near picnic tables.) Bring a little food.

Saturday, March 7 SESSION 1

8.30am Registration.

9.30-9.45 Welcome to country: Carol Speechley.

Denise Russell welcomes participants.

9.45-10.20 Opening talk by Noel Beddoe. Chair: Rick Mohr.

10.20-10. 50 Diana Wood Conroy interviews Adrian Newstead on The Dealer is the Devil.

10.50-11.10 Morning tea.

11.10-11.40 Dr Auntie Barbara Nicholson to read her poems, talk about the Junee prison project and read from their book. Chair: Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis.

11.40-noon Dianne Bates: Writing for children.

Chair: Chloe Higgins.

Noon-12.30 Paul Sharrad ‘Reading the World: A life in books’. Chair: Anne Collett.

12.30-1.30 Lunch.

SESSION 2

1.30-2pm Lesley Head talking about her new book on climate change, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene. Chair: Helen Wilson.

2.00-2.15 Patricia Baillie: A talk about reading, with photographic illustrations. Chair: Lois Hagan.

2.15-2.30 Poetry reading: Ali Smith. Chair: Yasmin Mobayad.

2.30-2.50 Caroline Baum interviews Shady Cosgrove on her book What the Ground Can’t Hold.

2.50-3.00 Afternoon tea.

3.00-3.35 Captured: The animal within culture.

Melissa Boyde (lion), Graham Barwell (albatross) and Anne Collett (dogs). Interview panel with co-ordinator Alison Moore.

3.35-4.30 Play reading and writing for the theatre.

(Tim Allen and Zac Linford). Chair: Karine Shellshear.

4.30-5.00 Beach Walk, led by Helen Wilson 5.00-6.30 Literary Quiz, run by Tim Douglas and Michele Moore. At the Thirroul Community Centre foyer.

6.30pm Festival Dinner, with Noel and Vivienne Beddoe, The Deck, Ryans Hotel.

Sunday, March 8 SESSION 3

9.30-9.50am International Women’s Day talk:

Dorothy Jones: ‘Living with Literature.’ Chair: Jane Lymer.

9.50-10.10 Readings from memoirs (Karine Shellshear and Alison Haynes). Co-ordinator: Jenny Jones.

10.10-10.25 Joe Davis: ‘A brief history of the sex life of Frieda Lawrence’. Chair: Denise Russell.

10.25-10.35 Film by Rick Mohr with introduction: ‘Responding to Place: Culture & Colonialism.’

Pictures and music about D.H. Lawrence and Thirroul (Dharawal). Chair: Zac Linford.

10.35-10.55 Morning tea.

10.55-11.20 Panel on citizen journalism: Rob Carr, Chloe Higgins and Helen Wilson. Chair: Ann Collaery.

11.20-11.40 Anne Collett, ‘Love and vision: seeing Australian wildflowers through Kathleen McArthur’s painting and prose.’ Chair: Michele Moore.

11.40-12.30 The Great Debate: Is the printed book doomed? Chair: Josie Castle.

Affirmative: Noel Beddoe and Nadia Szimhart.

Negative: Liz Jacka and Jane Lymer.

Judges: Jenny Jones, Ann Collaery, Rob Castle, Daisy Loomes and two students from Smith’s Hill School.

Drawing of raffles.

Finish: 12.30pm

On-going

Photographic exhibition on reading by Patricia Baillie.

Drawing exhibition on the Lawrences in Thirroul by local artists.

MEET THE PRESENTERS Noel Beddoe

published his first work in the 1960s, as a student of Sydney University. In those days, his writing consisted of pulp fiction short stories and paperback westerns. Since then his published work includes poetry, journalism and a series of five novels for adolescents. His recent adult literary novel, On Cringila Hill, has been nominated for the Miles Franklin Award and the NSW Premier’s Prize for fiction. The sequel, Luz’s Song, is due for publication in 2015. His work in progress is Leaving the River, set against the background of the dock wars in Fremantle in 1919.

Denise Russell is

the director of the inaugural Thirroul Readers and Writers Festival. She is the author of two non-fiction books: Women, Madness and Medicine and Who Rules the Waves: piracy, overfishing and mining the oceans, many articles in philosophy journals, and one short story about her cat, Tom. She edited the journal Animal Issues for many years and now runs a website on alternatives to animal experimentation.

Tim Allen trained at the Drama

Centre, London and completed his honours degree in English in 1998 at Wollongong University, where he is enrolled in a masters of special education. He lives with his partner in Mangerton, supports Arsenal Football Club and directs Shakespeare for fun.

Patricia Baillie’s first career was as a lecturer in philosophy. More recently she has been a book dealer (Da Capo Music). In semi-retirement she has turned to street photography, and her photos are in the National Library and various state libraries.

Graham Barwell recently published a book on albatrosses and human cultures. He works in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong.

Dianne 'Di’ Bates has

published over 120 books, mostly for young readers, over the past 30 years. She writes for a living and lives with her award-winning husband, young persons author Bill Condon, at

Cordeaux Heights. Their website is www.enterprisingwords.com.au.

Caroline Baum is the

editorial director of Booktopia. She was the founding editor of Good Reading magazine, writes about books for The Sydney Morning Herald and interviews writers at the Sydney Writers Festival and other events. In 2013 she contributed to the memoir anthology My Mother My Father - On Losing A Parent.

Melissa Boyde is a senior research

fellow in the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong. Melissa is the chairperson of the Australian Animal Studies Group and founder and editor of Animal Studies Journal.

Robert Carr is a

politics academic and journalist. He was the founding editor of Illawarra News Blogspot in 2012. This is a citizen journalism website specialising in local government analysis, the arts and community stories.

Josie Castle is a retired Wollongong

University history academic with publications on women in nursing and factories and the history of UOW. Her interests are reading, opera and dressage.

Rob Castle is a retired economics professor from the University of Wollongong with publications on economic history and the employment of disadvantaged groups. His interests are travel, opera and horse racing.

Ann Collaery moved to Bulli recently

after 40 years in Canberra, where she taught English at Narrabundah College and Telopea Park School. She also taught French, having lived in France for four years in the 1970s. She has now found a great book club and says that she plays bridge too much.

Anne Collett teaches English Literature at the University of Wollongong. She has a particular interest in poetry, women’s writing, visual art and the post-colonial world, editing Kunapipi (a journal of creative and scholarly work from post-colonial cultures) for the last 13 years.

Diana Wood Conroy is an artist and

writer with a background in archaeology. Her art explores relationships between classical, Aboriginal and personal worlds in tapestry and drawing, and has been shown nationally in Australia, and internationally. She is emeritus professor, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, UOW.

Shady Cosgrove lives in the Illawarra and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. Her novel What the Ground Can’t Hold was published in 2013 (Picador) and her memoir She Played Elvis (Allen & Unwin, 2009) was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel award.

Joseph Davis’s first book, D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul, was published in 1989 and his most recent is John Brown of Brownsville (2012). His doctorate was in English Literature but he writes mostly about art, history and the environment.

Tim Douglas edits The Weekend Australian Review. He has written widely on the arts and culture during his 15-year career as a journalist in Australia and Scotland. He lives in Thirroul with his wife and children.

Alison Haynes has worked as a journalist and editor, and is the author of seven books. She studied law at the universities of London and Paris and after working in magazine and book publishing returned to university to study conservation biology.

Lesley Head is a

geographer and the Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong. Her recent writing focuses on the cultural dimensions of sustainability and climate change issues; in books, academic papers, essays for general readers, blogs and on twitter.

Chloe Higgins is the Wollongong Writers Festival Coordinator and South Coast Writers Centre project management and admin assistant.

In 2013 she was the co-editor of UOW’s student magazine, Tertangala.

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Liz Jacka is a former communications academic at UTS. She is the author or co-author of several books on Australian film and television. In retirement she has been a keen participant in book groups and sees little sign of the demise of the book.

Dorothy Jones is an

expatriate New Zealander who has been reading since the age of four. She considers herself fortunate that her entire working life involved reading and studying literature which she taught to students at the universities of Adelaide, NSW and Wollongong. Books have continued to enrich her in retirement.

Jennifer Jones is a retired Illawarra

education academic who loves reading and travel.

Friederike KrishnabhakdiVasilakis is the director of the South

Coast Writers Centre, editor, publisher and author of fiction and non-fiction.

She taught in Creative Arts and Indigenous Studies at the UOW. She published Dreaming Inside – Voices From Junee Correctional Centre, Volume 1 (2013) and 2 (2014), including writing by Indigenous inmates and the Black Wallaby Indigenous Writers and guests.

Zac Linford is a

Geelong-based writer.

He was a participant in the 4x4 playwriting mentorship of 2013 and a finalist in the ATYP National Studio into the production of Bite Me. He recently graduated from Deakin University with a degree in professional and creative writing. He is a board member for Courthouse Arts.

Jane Lymer is a research fellow at the University of Wollongong and an academic program co-ordinator at the UOW College. Her main area of research is French philosophy, which she applies primarily to contemporary feminist concerns.

Yasmin Mobayad is a Geelong-based writer and perpetual student. She

produced this guide for the Thirroul Readers and Writers Festival. See 2515mag.com.au studied professional and creative writing and literary studies at Deakin University and began her PhD in 2014.

She is working towards a study on magical realism and the human condition that focuses on existentialist and feminist theory as taboo.

Richard Mohr has been an academic,

co-ordinator of a community health service and a social policy consultant.

He has lived in Wollongong for 20 years, and is a member of the Red Point Artists Association at Port Kembla, and the Scarborough Wombarra Surf Club. With Nadir Hosen, he edited Law and Religion in Public Life: The Contemporary Debate.

Alison Moore is a functional linguist who has mostly written about interaction in health care, including HIV medicine, psychotherapy, and surgical teamwork, but recently she has also begun working on animal issues. She says there is a link between these topics.

Michele Moore studied fine arts, then horticulture and for two decades managed Sydney Wildflower Nursery at Heathcote. She then worked for the National Parks and Wildlife Service at Audley and Botany Bay. She also enjoyed her work as an art tutor in mental health. Michele continues to pursue her interest in art and gardens.

Adrian Newstead

established Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Australia’s oldest continuously operating Aboriginal art gallery, in 1981. An Aboriginal art consultant, dealer and art commentator based in Bondi, he has 30 years’ experience working in Aboriginal and Australian contemporary art. Adrian is a widely published arts commentator and author.

Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson is a senior

Wadi Wadi Woman from the Illawarra.

Primarily a poet, Barbara has also published academic writing. She worked as a lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at UNSW and UOW

and has been active across the spectrum of Aboriginal disadvantage.

In 2014 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Wollongong University.

Paul Sharrad has recently retired. He taught literature at Flinders University, the National University of Singapore and Wollongong University. He has published books on Indian and Pacific writers and a host of articles. Paul is also known to sing and write poems.

Karine Shellshear

was born in the 1950s, raised by the sea at Bronte. Karine dedicated a great part of her life to the creation of a viable community housing sector in NSW as both activist and advocate, assisting the growth of a co-operative housing movement. She now writes about her own unusual story of mixed heritage and being brought up in a house of language, music, history and the sea.

Ali Jane Smith is a poet and critic.

She is the author of the chapbook Gala (Five Islands Press 2006). She lives in Wollongong.

Carol Speechley is a local Aboriginal elder and a local historian. She is a published author and has worked in the field of Aboriginal education for over 30 years. She currently works at Kemblawarra Public School as the full-time permanent Aboriginal Education Officer. She also teaches the local language, Wadi Wadi, at the school.

Nadia Szimhart was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1977. She studied at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. She has taught modern history, ancient history and extension history in NSW from 2003 and currently teaches at Smith’s Hill High School.

Helen Wilson is a former media studies academic who has become an environmentalist, completing a Masters degree at UOW in 2012 on environmental politics. She was a Greens candidate in the 2013 federal election and writes occasional pieces on cultural and environmental issues for Illawarra News Blogspot.

THANKS to festival supporters: Sharon Bird MP, DH Lawrence Society of Australia, Ryan Park MP and Friends of the Wollongong Library, Austi Beach Café, Cucina Café, Thirroul Cellars. In kind: 2515 Coast News, Destination Wollongong, Sydney Writers Festival, Ali Smith, Dianne Bates, University of Wollongong, Deborah De Santis, Queensland University Press, Susan Barnett, Josie Castle, Patricia Baillee, Lesley Head, Tim Douglas, Lois Hagan, Michele Moore, Diana Wood-Conroy, Jenny Jones, Kathe Robinson, Marion Jacka, Yasmin Mobayad and Zac Linford. COVER ILLUSTRATION by Hal Pratt