Outspoken Maleny

In  The Titanic Story of Evelyn  Lisa Wilkinson - one of Australia's most admired and respected media personalities - explores the life of the only Australian survivor of the sinking of the Titanic. She tells the story of a brave young nurse who wanted to see the world, fell in love, but then almost lost it all in one of the greatest maritime tragedies ever known. Somehow, the...

This is a book of great contemplation… inviting us into tricky and uncertain territory… places we generally shy away from. Its dual voices unfold along parallel and intersecting tracks, charting the complex dance steps of Father/Daughter, Mother/Son, as they try on different roles. Weaving memory, anecdote and reflection the book asks what it takes to live a meaningful life all the way to the fini...

We are delighted - honoured in fact - to open our 2026 series of conversations with former journalist and State Premier, Bob Carr, speaking about his new memoir,   Bring Back Yesterday . In October 2023 Bob’s wife of more than fifty years, Helena, suddenly died .  In this memoir  he records his attempt to deal with his grief, switching between the present moment...

Maisie and Charlie meet at a life-drawing session as undergraduates: she’s the model, he’s an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family. Emily Lighezzolo’s bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core: a woman’...

Hugh Mackay, social psychologist   extraordinaire  - ‘the man who explains us to ourselves’ has a new book. Just Saying  is a series of twenty-five essays that take as their starting points statements from writers and thinkers as varied as Susan Sontag and Bertrand Russell, from Samuel Johnson to Gloria Steinem, from Plato to Miles Franklin. In these reflections Macka...

We are, tonight, discussing the new book written by Elaine Green, acclaimed local author of 14 books about community and local history. Unfortunately Elaine is unwell. In her absence Peter Stevens, President of Lake Baroon Catchment Care Group, and myself, will do our best to explain why it was important to have it written.   Lake Baroon, Caring for Catchment, is a history of both Baroon...

How to begin to introduce Dr Bob Brown? I mean, clearly, you all know exactly who he is and so any introduction is redundant. But, at the same time, the sheer breadth of his achievements over the last six decades are probably not as well known as they should be, so, please, bear with me for a moment. After graduating from medicine in 1968, Bob worked in general practice in Canberra, London, Sydney...

It is a few years now since Heather Rose came to Maleny to speak about her memoir   Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here . The book revealed that, aside from being a best-selling, internationally-published, award-winning novelist, she had also managed to live a truly remarkable life, pushing the boundaries of the extraordinary in her search for meaning. Now she has returned to the novel wi...

These days Chris Hammer is best known for his ‘bush noir’ novels - a category which might even have been created to describe his books. They unravel in far-flung parts of Australia: in the opal fields of Lightning Ridge, out in north-western Victoria, in marginal country. They’re incredibly popular, selling several million to date, all over the world, and two of them have been adapted for televisi...

Hugh White argues that, right now, we confront the world's most dangerous crisis in generations, with the old global order facing a direct challenge in three crucial regions: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. And then there’s Donald Trump, under whose leadership America's retreat from any kind of coherence has been both swift and dramatic.  For Outspoken Hugh will be discussing h...

Our ‘introducing author’ is the wonderful  Joanna Jenkins. Her first novel  How To Kill a Client, became a massive best-seller. In her new novel, The Bluff,  her focus moves from big-city legal firms to a small country town - but we’re still amongst the legal fraternity.   I've now read   The Bluff  and can confirm it's a clever, rich, dynamic novel. So many...

Jane Rawson has an interesting backstory (see below) and much of her recent output has been fiction. In the case of  Human/Nature, however, she presents a series of linked essays that delve, in a very idiosyncratic and personal way, into the many ways we interact with Nature. In deceptively simple language she prises open the faultlines between what we hope or wish those relationships might be, an...

Our introducing speaker tonight is Dr Barry Traill AM, (BJ). Barry is a long-term resident of Maleny, and is one of Australia’s most successful environmental advocates. He is the former Director of Pew Charitable Trusts’ Australian Outback Program and now leads the Solutions for Climate Australia project, part of the Climate Action Network, working towards creating enduring bi-partisanship in fede...

Our featured author tonight is Debra Oswald. Debra came to prominence, or maybe the right word is fame, with the production of the immensely popular television series Offspring in 2010, for which she was the Creator and Lead Writer. But Debra had already been immersed in theatre and television for many many years before that - we might come to that in a minute - writing several successful plays an...

Our first guest tonight is the fascinating Steve MinOn. Steve’s debut novel is First Name Second Name, which won the Glendower Award for an emerging Queensland writer at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. He has also been a recipient of the 2021 Queensland Writers Centre’s Publishible program for emerging writers and his articles and short stories have appeared SBS Voices, Mamamia, Nightmare Fue...

I'm going out on a limb here. I think Rick Morton’s Mean Streak is an important book. Its description of the creation, implementation and eventual dismantling of Robodebt reveals a long slow-motion train wreck – one mendacious cruel scheming carriage after another inevitably, inexorably, piling into the one before it. But it’s also necessary. If we want to live in a society which works (and after...

Siang Lu is the author of two novels, The Whitewash and Ghost Cities. The latter, which we'll be discussing, was inspired by the existence of several vacant uninhabited megacities of China. It follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and h...

Gina Chick has written a memoir. It’s titled we are the stars, and it follows her life from when she was almost seven years old, all the way through until she’s fifty, and there’s hardly a page you might choose to describe as conventional. Gina – with all that literary royalty in her blood – made her own way, a path which took her on a dance through the hidden world of 90s Sydney nightlife (right...

Andrew Stafford’s book Pig City, about Brisbane music from the 70s through to the millennium, has been re-released for its twentieth anniversary. It is, in itself, a major Brisbane icon. Bernard Fanning wrote of it: ‘Twenty years on, Pig City reminds us of how deeply the political undercurrents (Joe Bjelke Peterson’s government) impacted the cultural output of Brisbane’s artists, and how the pione...

Mark Newman was born and raised in South Africa. As a young man he completed a post-graduate philosophy degree at Johannesburg University (University of the Witwatersrand). This was during the time of Apartheid in South Africa, a regime that had a profound affect on him. As soon as he could he arranged to leave, being awarded a scholarship from the French Government to study film-making at the Fre...

Dr Norman Swan was born and raised in Glasgow, but he did his medical training at Aberdeen University, eventually going on to specialise in pediatrics. After he emigrated to Australia in the early 80s, however, he made the move into radio and television broadcasting, mainly with the ABC, and in this role, through a series of programs, including Life Matters, The 7.30 Report, Catalyst, Quantum, Fou...

In the autumn of 2023 Simon undertook to follow the course of the Brisbane River from its source to the sea, in the hope that, by walking its length he might better understand the power and impact of this immense waterway on the environment and communities who rely on it. In Everything is Water, Cleary takes us along on his journey, made both alone and with companions, and explores the way rivers...

Hugh Mackay has long been recognised as Australia’s leading social psychologist. In The Way We Are, his self-described ‘final book’, he presents a compelling portrait of the country as it stands today. Hugh argues that we have entered a critical period in our social evolution. He identifies several major issues: the unfinished march towards gender equality combined with the concurrent persistence...

Bri Lee writes investigative journalism, opinion, essays and art criticism. Her work has appeared in, amongst other places, The Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, The Saturday Paper, Crikey and The Guardian. She is the author of three non-fiction works, the memoir, Eggshell Skull, and the two more journalistic works, Beauty and Who Gets to Be Smart. Just nine days ago she launched her marvellous debut nove...

Tyyni and I have now read Carly's memoir, Breath, and are furiously recommending it to everyone we meet. It really is an extraordinary book, telling the story of a remarkable, and some might say difficult, life, but Carly brings to the story a profound sense of humour, combined with a close grasp of something most of us find difficult to deal with, that is, in a word, death. She strikes me as utte...