Writing the Australian Landscape - Speakers

Murray Bail

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941, and lives in Sydney. He has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Eucalyptus. His most recent novel The Voyage was published in 2012.

Matthew Condon

Journalist and writer, Matthew Condon was born in Brisbane and has lived in the UK, Germany and France. His first book, The Motorcycle Cafe, was widely reviewed and praised. Usher and The Ancient Guild of Tycoons were both shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Award for Fiction. A Night at the Pink Poodle and The Lulu Magnet won back-to-back Steele Rudd Awards for Short Fiction. His bestseller, The Trout Opera was shortlisted for the Qld Premier's Prize for Fiction.

Adrian Hyland

Adrian Hyland is the award-winning author of Diamond Dove and Gunshot Road. He lives in St Andrews, north-east of Melbourne, and teaches at LaTrobe University.

Anna Rose

Anna Rose is an author, freelance writer, environmentalist and lecturer. She teaches Leadership & Influence at the Australian National University. Anna is the author of the book Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic, a non-fiction work based on her trip around the world with former finance Minister Nick Minchin to change his help him accept the science of climate change (the journey was filmed for an ABC documentary). Anna is a Churchill Fellow, a former Young Environmentalist of the Year, a former fellow of the International Youth Foundation and this year was recognised by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of Australia's 30 Most Influential Women Under 30.

Anna is a Director of the Bob Brown Foundation and Green Music Australia. Anna lives on the south side of Canberra with her husband, ACT Greens Senate candidate Simon Sheikh.

Geoff Page

Geoff Page has published twenty collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. He’s also won the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award. His recent books are A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (Extempore 2011), Coda for Shirley (Interactive Press 2011), Cloudy Nouns (Picaro Press 2012) and 1953 (University of Queensland Press 2013).

Matthew Higgins

Matthew has been a Canberra professional historian for 30 years, working with the Australian War Memorial, the Australian Heritage Commission, and the National Museum of Australia. His many freelance projects include oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia, and he is the author of numerous articles and a number of books. Matthew's Rugged beyond imagination: stories from an Australian mountain region (NMA Press 2009) was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year Award. Matthew is passionate about the Australian high country and he skis and bushwalks as often as opportunity allows.

Paul Daley

Paul Daley is a Canberra-based author, journalist and essayist. His most recent book is "Canberra", part of the acclaimed NewSouth Books "City Series". He is currently writing a novel that is set largely in Canberra.

Sue Woolfe

Sue Woolfe is the author of four novels: Leaning Towards Infinity, Painted Woman, The Secret Cure and The Oldest Song in the World, as well as a book about her research into creativity: The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience.

Ros Moriarty

Ros Moriarty is Managing Director and co-founder of both the Jumbana Group and the not-for-profit Nangala Project. Ros' memoir, Listening to Country, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2010 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year. Ros published two children's picture books with A&U in 2012.

Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland. She went to Sydney in the late 60’s, then returned to study in Brisbane before going to Alice Springs. Since then she has travelled extensively and has lived in London, New York and India. In the early 1990’s she migrated with and wrote about nomads in north-west India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas. A feature film adaptation of Tracks, scheduled for a 2013 release, starring the internationally acclaimed Australian actress Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre, The Kids Are Alright, Alice in Wonderland) as Robyn Davidson and rapidly rising star Adam Driver (HBO’s Emmy nominated Girls, Frances Ha, Lincoln, Inside Llewyn Davis) as Rick Smolan. The film is directed by the esteemed John Curran (The Painted Veil, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Praise), produced by Oscar® winners Emile Sherman and Iain Canning of See-Saw Films (The King’s Speech, Shame, Oranges and Sunshine) and co-produced by AFI award-winning producer Julie Ryan (Red Dog, Ten Canoes).

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage is a historian and adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is best known as author of the ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War.

Lesley Harding

Lesley Harding joined Heide Museum of Modern Art as Curator in 2005. She is co-author with Kendrah Morgan of Sunday’s Kitchen: Food and Living at Heide (2010), Sunday’s Garden: Growing Heide (2012), and the forthcoming double biography of Heide founders John and Sunday Reed for Melbourne University Publishing.

Kendrah Morgan

Kendrah Morgan is a curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. She co-authored Sunday’s Kitchen: Food and Living at Heide (2010) and Sunday’s Garden: Growing Heide (2012) with Lesley Harding. They are currently writing a double biography of Heide founders John and Sunday Reed, due for publication in 2015.

Charles Massy

Charles Massy manages a 2,000 ha. sheep and cattle property on the Monaro grasslands, southern NSW. He recently submitted a PhD at the Fenner School, ANU, on innovation in regenerative agriculture. Charles has published a number of books on the wool industry’s politics and history of the Merino sheep, along with published poetry, fiction and non-fiction writing across a range of subjects.

Jennifer Harrison

Jennifer Harrison has written five poetry collections, the most recent being Colombine: New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper 2010), shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Prize. Among other awards, she has won the Anne Elder Poetry Prize, and the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal. She co-edited Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann 2009), a highly praised anthology about mothering and mother-experience. She holds Honorary Fellowships at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, and is currently curating poetry for the Dax Centre, the Australian collection of mental health art housed at the University of Melbourne. In 2012 she was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in Australian poetry. In 2013, supported by an established writer’s grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, she will be completing her sixth poetry collection, Phrenology Poems.

Deborah Burrows

Deborah Burrows lives in Perth. She is a lawyer who specialises in medical law, and also has several history degrees, including a post-graduate degree in Medical History from Oxford University. Her novels, A Stranger in my Street and Taking a Chance, are set in WW2 Perth and incorporate her mother's stories about life at that time.

Steven Carroll

Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne and grew up in Glenroy. He went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for The Sunday Age. He has recently given up his lecturing post at RMIT to write full time and lives in Brunswick, Victoria. His novels The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2008 The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, South-East Asia and South Pacific region as well as the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, Australia′s most prestigious literary prize.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Kerryn Goldsworthy, the 2013 winner of the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, is an author, critic and reviewer whose book Adelaide is part of the NewSouth ‘Cities’ series. She has written a regular column on local tourism, and her PhD thesis was on representations of place in Australian fiction.

Patrick Allington

Patrick Allington’s novel Figurehead (Black Inc. 2009) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His short fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Melbourne Review, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue, Southerly and in anthologies. His non-fiction and critical writings appear widely in newspapers, magazines and journals.

Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from South-west New south Wales. A Doctorate in literature and Aboriginal representation followed a long teaching career at secondary and Tertiary level. Formerly a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Studies, she currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at ANU. In 2010, Jeanine’s first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: AD 1887-1961 won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry from the Australian Poets’ Union and her manuscript, Purple Threads won the David Unaipon Award at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and is shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Jeanine is the recipient of an Australian Research Council grant for a proposal called Reading the Nation: A critical study of Aboriginal/Settler representation in the contemporary Australian Literary Landscape.

Jane Gleeson-White

Jane Gleeson-White is a writer with degrees in literature and economics. She’s the author of the internationally acclaimed award-winning Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world, Australian Classics and Classics. Jane’s edited Australian fiction, including Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Dead Europe, and blogs at bookishgirl.com.au.