Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 16 August
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Iconic Australian literature doesn’t come much more iconic than For the Term of His Natural Life, the quintessential convict tale. We remember its author: journalist, poet and novelist Marcus Clarke, and reflect on the urban bohemian writer in all his glory, and the historical impulses behind Australia’s definitive ‘ripping yarn’.
Featuring
Tony Moore
Dr Tony Moore is a writer, historian, academic and Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University.
Tony’s career has spanned political activism, documentary production for the ABC, journalism and book publishing. Tony is writing a history of Australian bohemians to be published in 2012, that opens with Marcus Clarke’s Melbourne bohemianism. Tony was recently awarded a State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship (Honorary) to write the script for An Unnatural Life, a TV documentary he will direct on the life of Clarke. He writes regularly on Australian culture, history and politics and his latest book, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788 to 1868, brings together the stories of the political prisoners sent as convicts to Australia from all parts of the British Empire, spanning the early days of the penal settlement at Sydney Cove until transportation ended in 1868.
Robyn Annear
Best known for her books Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne and A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne, Robyn Annear is also the author of an unpublishable novel set in the city in 1893.
Des Cowley
Des Cowley is the Rare Printed Collections Manager at the State Library of Victoria, and has more than twenty years experience working with rare books.
Des was a judge for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2010. He is the book reviewer for music magazine Rhythms. He previously edited the literary broadside Overland Extra, and is on the editorial panel of Script & Print and the La Trobe Journal. Des is co-curator of the State Library of Victoria’s permanent exhibition Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas and co-author of The World of the Book, published by Melbourne University Press in 2007.