Outspoken Maleny

Anthony is a BAFTA and AWGIE award-winning screen-writer. His first short film STOP! was selected for Official Competition at Cannes, and one of his first television gigs was writing webisodes for the ground-breaking US television series LOST. Anthony has been a script producer and script editor on numerous award-winning shows, including Safe Harbour – which won the 2019 International Emmy for bes...

Ian Lowe AO is a bona fide Australian treasure. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society (and former Head of Science) at Griffith University; the author of ten books and uncounted articles; a former President of the Aust Conservation Society and the recipient of the Konrad Lorenz Gold Medal, awarded by the International Academy of Sciences. Just to begin with. His new...

Luke Stegemann is an award-winning Australian Hispanist, author of The Beautiful Obscure, recipient of the Malaspina Award for his outstanding contribution to the development of cultural relations between Australia and Spain. His new book, Amnesia Road - winner of the Queensland Literary award for non-fiction this year - is a compelling literary examination of historic violence in rural areas of A...

Hugh Mackay is probably Australia’s best-known ‘social psychologist’. He’s written twenty-two books, including Advance Australia… where?, The Art of Belonging, and Beyond Belief. He appears regularly on television, radio and newspapers as a commentator. Being multi-talented he doesn’t stop there, he’s also published seven novels. His new book, however, is The Kindness Revolution, in which he exami...

Melanie is a Brisbane-based writer, editor, academic and occasional actor. She is a graduate of QUT’s nationally acclaimed acting program and has a Doctorate in Creative Writing. In 2018, she won the Qld Literary Awards Glendower for an Emerging Writer for her manuscript 'Garrison Town', which was published as Meet Me at Lennon’s by UQP in 2019. Meet Me at Lennon's was shortlisted for the 2020 Qld...

Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of history at James Cook University in Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal people. His other research interests are in Australian nationalism and environmental history. Here he speaks about his biography of Alec Chisholm, Idling In Green Places. Alec Chisholm was a naturalist, journalist,...

While he’s best known for his radio and television work Karl also has degrees in Physics and Maths, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery. He has worked as a physicist, tutor, film-maker, car mechanic, labourer, and as a medical doctor at the Kids’ Hospital in Sydney. He is the present Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at Sydney University, where his ‘mission’ is to spread the good word about sci...

Marian Wilkinson is regarded as one of the most distinguished journalists in Australia. She has won two Walkley Awards and was the first executive producer of Four Corners. She was a senior journalist for many years with The Sydney Morning Herald, was the Washington correspondent for The National Times and The Age and a senior reporter for The Australian. She is the author of three books of invest...

We're delighted to introduce debut novelist Katie McMahon, talking about her novel, out in March, The Mistake. While Bec and Kate are sisters, they couldn’t be less alike. Bec is living the domestic dream with her surgeon husband Stuart and three perfect children. So why does she find herself so attracted to free-spirited Ryan? Kate’s life is hardly a dream. But when she meets Adam – tall, kind, f...

Leigh Robshaw is a journalist, free-lance writer, copywriter, business blogger and sub-editor. She writes for a remarkable range of magazines and publications. Now she has written a fast-paced, colourful and sometimes shocking memoir, You Had Me at Hola, set in South America and Mexico. A young Australian woman meets a beautiful Peruvian artisan in a market in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. Sensing a de...

Clare Bowditch is a musician, an actor, radio presenter, educator and now author (on her website she calls herself music maker/story baker/educator). She visited Maleny to talk about her memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl, a revealing story of a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, a story that tells how these forces shaped her life for better and for worse. It is a heartbreaking, wis...

Mary Garden was born and raised in New Zealand, but has lived in Australia for much of her adult life. She also spent several years in India, on a spiritual quest. Her experiences in that country were the subject of her first memoir The Serpent Rising: a journey of spiritual seduction. She moved to Maleny in 1989 and has had strong connections to the town ever since. Her new book, Sundowner of the...

Before turning to writing full-time in the late 1990’s, Anna Funder worked as an international lawyer for the Australian Government, focusing on human rights, constitutional law, and treaty negotiation. After jettisoning her legal career to write Stasiland, she jobbed for a time as a radio and television documentary producer at the ABC. Stasiland describes the period Anna spent in the former East...

For all who know Brisbane, McWhirters, a once celebrated department store in Fortitude Valley, is an icon. For Melissa Fagan it is also the starting point for a remarkable exploration of her mother and grandmother’s lives, a poignant reminder of the ways in which retail stores and fashion have connected women’s lives across the decades. Behind the dusty shop counters of an Art Deco treasure, Melis...

I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged. I defied all of those expectations and so have millions of women like me.’ Anne Summers has been prominent in Australian media, politics and feminist activism for more th...

In his intimate ground-breaking memoir, told with wit and insight, Kerry O’Brien reflects on the big events he has observed, on lessons learned and ignored, on the foibles and strengths of the public figures who construct our world. The end result is an engrossing study of a life lived in the public eye, a life intrinsically bound up in nearly three-quarters of a century of social and political hi...

Shelley discusses her recently published memoir Shadow Sisters. During the terrifying years of Apartheid in South Africa, Shelley Davidow’s family was a crime. At a time when it was illegal for black and white people to live together, Shelley’s social activist parents took in Rosie, an abandoned black three-year-old. Rosie grew up as a beloved daughter and sister in a white household. Against the...

Patrick Nunn is here to talk about his recently published book The Edge of Memory, Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. Patrick is the author of several other books, including the popular Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific. He is, at present, Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast but is well known for the work he undertook in the P...

Gillian Triggs has had a long and diverse career in International Law. Born in London she migrated along with her parents to Australia in 1958, when she was thirteen. She attended school in Melbourne and studied law at Melbourne University, then went to Texas to do a Masters in Law, working with the Dallas Police Force on the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. She completed a doctorate a deca...

We begin with Josepha Dietrich whose memoir In Danger was published by UQP earlier this year. By way of introduction I’m going to take the unusual step of reading the author note from the front of her book as a way of describing her because, honestly, I can’t think of a better description: Josie Dietrich is an English immigrant to Australia. She lives in Brisbane in the home she and her partner bu...

Kristina Olsson is a Brisbane-based writer. She worked as a journalist for many years, writing for The Australian, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written both novels and memoirs, including The China Garden and Boy, Lost, the memoir about her mother and about Kristina’s missing brother, which won the 2014 NSW Premier's Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Stella Priz...

Gareth Evans was a representative for the Australian Labor Party in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for twenty-one years, from 1978 to 1999. During that time he served as a member of Cabinet for fourteen years in the Hawke and Keating governments, including seven and a half as Foreign Minister, a role in which, it is univerally acknowledged, he excelled. After leaving politics he...

In this podcast Outspoken organiser and interviewer swaps chairs and is interviewed by Kate Evans from ABC Radio National about his new novel, Hinterland, which is set in the fictional town of Winderran. Kate came to Maleny for the occasion.

Shelley Davidow is the author of Whisperings in the Blood, a memoir in which immigrant voyages, repeated from one generation to the next, form the basis of an extraordinary story that explores the heartache and emotional legacies created by those who leave their homelands forever. It tells the story of her grandfather, Jacob Frank, who leaves his village in Lithuania to sail to America, of her mot...

A C Grayling is a genuine example of that much bandied about thing, a most remarkable man. Born in Rhodesia, raised in Nyasaland, he discovered a love for philosophy at the age of twelve, going on to study at ever more prestigious institutions, culminating in Magdelene College, Oxford. Apart from being the author of thirty books he writes widely on contemporary issues, including war crimes, euthen...