Writing Lives with Bernadette Brennan
Workshop
A Canberra Writers Festival event sponsored by the National Centre of Biography. For a biography to sing it needs to be written with energy and passion. The biographer, driven by curiosity and the desire to understand what makes their subject tick, or in Helen Vendler’s words, ‘the inner dynamic…
A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia
Seminar
Ethel May (Monte) Punshon’s 106-year life spanned crucial events in modern Australian history. Born in 1882, she witnessed Melbourne’s 1888 Centennial Exhibition, Federation, two great depressions and two world wars. She lived to see the demise of the White Australia policy and the social…
Asia-Pacific Lives exhibition
Exhibition
In collaboration with the School of Culture, History & Language (CHL), the National Centre of Biography presents the free exhibition Asia-Pacific Lives as part of CHL's annual flagship multicultural festival and showcase program, Immersia. Drawing on the many volumes…
Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron
Seminar
In this Biography Workshop Nick Hordern explores the hitherto unknown life of Australian woman Lorraine Murray (1910–2000). Arriving in Shanghai in 1933, Lorraine found herself in the sex industry. In 1936 she quit the industry, but struggled to find a new path, until the American author…
Tom Wills: The Insubordinate Life of an Australian Sporting Legend
Seminar
There are many versions of the origins of our Australian game of football, but all of them include T.W. Wills in some way. A champion cricketer, he had been exposed to the game of rugby when he was at Rugby School in England. In Melbourne in 1858, with several other men, he organised the first…
‘The name of the product I tested is Life’: The Life and Poetry of Peter Porter - ‘Duelling with diffidence’
Seminar
In a time of debased international politics and media manipulation of truth, the spin-and-cant-skewering precision of poetry is more important than ever. This talk argues for a new look at Peter Porter (1929-2010), lauded Australian poet whose broad international span (poems on subjects as diverse…
The peripatetic life of landscape artist Eugene von Guérard: discovering the man behind the art
Seminar
The peripatetic life of 19th century landscape artist Eugene von Guérard spanned both hemispheres of the globe and most of the 19th century. The ‘facts’ that scaffold his life are frequently reiterated in commentaries about his art, but the man behind the public persona has been largely ignored.…