Debate: Art and Politics Cannot Be Separated

Leah Garrett is the Loti Smorgon Research Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University. She has published numerous books and articles on contemporary Jewish literature and culture and has lectured around the world on modern Jewish life.

Her most recent book is a study of the relationship between Richard Wagner and Jewish Culture entitled: A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser.

Peter Tregear is a musician, author, and academic. Melbourne-born, he completed a doctorate at Cambridge University, and was later appointed a Fellow. He subsequently held teaching posts in the UK and Australia and worked as a singer and conductor. In 2012 he was appointed Head of the ANU School of Music, Canberra.

Peter co-founded the opera company IOpera and the Consort of Melbourne. His particular academic interest is in the musical culture of the Weimar republic, and the generation of musicians whose careers and lives were ruined by the rise of fascism in Europe. Peter is also a regular music correspondent for the Melbourne Review. His second book, Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style, was recently published by Scarecrow Press (USA).

Stella Young is a comedian, disability advocate and editor of ABC’s Ramp Up website, the online space for news, discussion and opinion about disability in Australia.

Born in Stawell in Western Victoria, Stella cut her activist teeth at the age of 14 by conducting an access audit of shops on the local main street. It didn’t take long – it was a pretty short street.

Since then she has been active in the disability community in a variety of roles, including membership of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council, Ministerial Advisory Council for the Department of Victorian communities and Women With Disabilities Victoria. Stella was a two-time state finalist in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Raw Comedy competition; and has hosted eight seasons of Australia’s first disability culture program No Limits, aired on Channel 31 and community stations across the country.

With a strong interest in issues facing women and young people with disabilities, Stella has worked with the Youth Disability Advocacy Service to establish the LiveAccess project, advocating for better access to live music venues. She holds a degree in journalism from Deakin University and a diploma of secondary education from the University of Melbourne. Prior to joining the ABC, Stella worked in public programs at Melbourne Museum, where she taught kids about bugs, dinosaurs and other weird and wonderful things.

Her writing regularly appears in Frankie magazine, Daily Life and The Drum, and her face on ABC TV’s Q&A.

If she could get away with it, she’d spend a very large percentage of her spare time knitting.

Christopher Cordner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely in philosophy, where his main area of interest is ethics, including its classical Greek and Christian tributaries, and its overlap with art and aesthetics.

Lyndon Terracini is the artistic director of Opera Australia.

In July 2000 he was appointed artistic director and CEO of the Queensland Music Festival and directed the 2001, 2003 and 2005 festivals. He was appointed artistic director/CEO of Brisbane Festival in 2005 and artistic director/CEO of Major Brisbane Festivals in November 2007.

Terracini has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Music Theatre by Central Queensland Universityand a a fellowship by the Music Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2001, he was awarded an Honorary D. Univ. from Southern Cross University and in July 2005 he was awarded the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Cultural Leadership Award by Australian Business Arts Foundation.

He was also a member of the international jury for the Venice Biennale for Music and Savonlinna Opera Festival, and delivered the 2011 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address.

Dr Leslie Cannold’s expertise is gender and inspirational leadership. Her public contributions in these areas have earned her awards for Australian Humanist of the Year and multiple notices as one of Australia’s most influential public intellectuals and women.

Leslie is a nonfiction and fiction writer. Her latest book is the historical novel, The Book of Rachael.

Hannie Rayson is a playwright and screenwriter best known for Hotel Sorrento.

Hannie Rayson has established a reputation for topical, complex dramas written with wit and insight. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University.

Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. They include Mary, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Scenes from a Separation (co-written with Andrew Bovell), Competitive Tenderness, Life After George, Inheritance, Two Brothers, The Glass Soldier and The Swimming Club. She has been awarded two Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award and The Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.

For television she has written Sloth (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange. A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia’s Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine.

Hannie made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 and 2009 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.

She has recently completed a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Her new play is called Extinction.