Byron Writers Festival 2025

For the third year in a row I am 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 beat all the other contestants on the SBS reality TV show Alone Australia by surviving on her own in the Tasmanian wilderness for 67 days. She won the $250k prize for her bush craft and our won our hearts with the story of the loss of her 3 year-old daughter to cancer.

The title of her autobiography We Are The Stars is a quote from her dying daughter Blaise. Gina re-tells this and other captivating stories in the book about 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, first published in 1994, 1995 and again in 2025.

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

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 colourful fiction too.

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 using as inspiration the daughter of Barangaroo and Bennelong who died a few months after being born. There is an Eel Mother who features prominently in the book. She is a creation being to behold in prose full of dynamism, spreading sprites among human mothers since deep time as her matrilineal duty. Together we will explore mother figures and the ways that women hold family narratives.

On the opening day of the Festival I host another panel on Writing Biography.

Max Dupain, Annette Kellerman and Beatrice Faust are the focus of our panelists Judith Brett, Helen Ennis and Grantlee Kieza

Kieza latest biography (one of no less than 20), takes as its subject 'The Perfect Woman' - Australia's Mermaid Annette Kellerman. This remarkable human overcame rickets to become a champion swimmer, braving the English Channel. She then turned to vaudeville exposing herself in a one-piece swim suit and thereafter liberating women to be free and powerful in their own healthy bodies. Famously honoured in the Hollywood film Million Dollar Mermaid starring Esther Williams and choreographed by the master of over-the-top screen extravaganzas, Busby Berkley, Kellerman will no doubt inspire a new generation of women to live their lives to the max thanks to this book

Award-winning biographer Judith Brett takes on another ground breaking woman in her book The Fearless Beatrice Faust - Sex Feminism and the Body Politic. This complex feminist famously founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. She went to Melbourne University with Germaine Greer, had three abortions before the pill was made available, and championed abortion rights for women. Faust's Catholic mother died giving birth to Beatrice 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.'

Incredibly, Helen Ennis's book is the first ever biography on the iconic Australian photographer Max Dupain whose image The Sunbaker still serves as a touchstone for our national relationship with beaches. This biography also contains reflections on lesser known images like Floating, a black and white contemplation of Dupain's 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

Recently an old interview I did with Max's son Rex at the Art Gallery of NSW for the Art and About series popped up the other day which I uploaded here.

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

And meet the mother load at Matriarchs - Saturday August 10 9am - 10am,

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