Byron Writers Festival 2025

For the third year in a row I am privileged to be hosting sessions at the Byron Writers Festival with some incredible writers that I can't wait to introduce you to.

If you haven't yet met the phenomenal Gina Chick yet then I urge you to come along to our session on Matriarchs. Gina famously won SBS's reality TV show Alone Australia by surviving on her own in the Tasmanian wilderness for 69 days. She won the big $30k prize for her bush craft and won our deep empathy by sharing the heartbreaking story of the loss of her 3 year-old daughter to cancer.

In her autobiography We Are The Stars, the title a quote from her dying daughter, she re-tells this and many other captivating stories of a life lived to the hilt. As the granddaughter of acclaimed Australian writer Charmian Clift, who gave up her first born for adoption when she was just 19, Gina can talk about matrilineal lines like few others. Her mother Suzanne wrote her own amazing story in Searching For Charmian (1994, 1995 and 2025.)

Gina spoke as a guest of the BWF last October at the A&I Hall, Bangalow where she got 250 people (mostly women) united by singing in three part harmony.

Gina Chick conducting the audience in Bangalow

Also on the panel is British novelist Esther Freud whose first novel Hideous Kinky, based on her childhood memories, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. In her new book My Sister and Other Lovers, Freud continues to plunder the rich vein of her youth using prompts from her old notebooks. And some rich fiction.

Our third Matriarchs panelist is Nardi Simpson, a Yuwaalaraay writer, musician, composer and performer from the freshwater plains of north west New South Wales. A founding member of Indigenous duo Stiff Gins, Nardi has performed nationally and internationally for over two decades. She has also composed works for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia choirs, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and Sydney Chamber Orchestra.

Nardi Simpson

Her debut novel Song of the Crocodile (2020) won the ALS gold Medal and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award in 2021. Her second novel, The Belburd, tells tales of Sydney where she was born and lives. In an interview in The Guardian she said;

‘How can I show I’m a beneficiary of this saltwater place without telling [its story], without owning it – knowing that my name’s going to be in big fat letters on the top [of the book]? How can I ensure that the story is a way that I uplift others?'

Together we will explore mother figures, matrilineal lines, and the ways that women hold family narratives. My mother, the fabulous Anne, will be in the audience!

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On the opening day of the Festival I host a panel on Writing Biography. Max Dupain, Annette Kellerman and Beatrice Faust are the focus of our panelists Judith Brett,

Helen Ennis and Grantlee Kieza

Renowned as 'The Perfect Woman', Australia's Mermaid Annette Kellerman is the subject of Kieza latest biography. This remarkable woman overcame rickets to become a champion swimmer, braving the English Channel then turning to vaudeville where she exposed herself in a one piece swim suit, shocking the socks off society and liberating women to be free  and powerful in their bodies. Famously honoured in the Hollywood film Million Dollar Mermaid starring Esther Williams and produced by the master of over the top screen extravaganzas Busby Berkley, Kellerman is inspiring a new generation of women to live their lives to the max thanks to Grantlee Kieza's book, one of no less than 20 biographies to his name.

Award-winning biographer Judith Brett takes on a second wave feminist who founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. Beatrice Faust went to Melbourne University with Germaine Greer and had three abortions before the pill was made available. Faust's Catholic mother died giving birth to her after refusing an abortion and Brett points to this as defining moment in Beatrice's life. She writes;

'The pioneering political psychologist, Harold Lasswell, said of political activists that they try to solve for others what they cannot solve for themselves.There was nothing Faust could do about her mother’s death, but she could agitate to ensure other children were not born unwanted, as she felt herself to be. Repealing the laws that made abortion illegal, together with better sex education and easily available contraception, were her core political missions.'

Unbelievably, Helen Ennis's book is the first ever biography on the iconic Australian photographer Max Dupain. The Sunbather still serves as a touchstone in our national relationship with beaches. The book also contains reflections on lesser known images like Floating, a black and white sensual contemplation of his second wife Olive Cotton, herself an esteemed photographer.

Together with Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography, Ennis’s biography of Dupain forms a major study of what is arguably the most significant period of Australian photographic practice.' - Nigel Featherstone

Come along and discover the lives of brilliant figures who shaped our art, politics, and environment in Writing Biography - Friday 3.30pm August 9, Lilly Pilly stage

And meet the matrilineal line at Matriarchs - Saturday August 10 9am - 10am,

And hear from Artistic Director Jessica Alice in an interview I did with her on Roadtrip.