Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 26 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
How do we conceive of justice in Australia today? What do we do when our legal institutions are imperfect at best, inherently biased at worst? In this panel discussion, we’ll speak with three women whose work is concerned with the fallibility of our legal, political and justice systems.
Bri Lee is a qualified lawyer and the author of Eggshell Skull, a memoir of sexism in the courts. Kate Wild is a Walkley-winning journalist and the author of Waiting for Elijah, an investigation into the shooting of a mentally ill man by police in country New South Wales. Shireen Morris is a constitutional lawyer and the author of Radical Heart, an account of the campaign by activists and Indigenous leaders towards the Uluru Statement of the Heart.
All three have written about personal encounters, and painful struggles, with state institutions. They’ll discuss bias, blind spots and some promising new initiatives in the pursuit of justice in Australia today.
Note: This event may include discussion of sexual assault.
Metropolis will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Sonia Nair
Sonia Nair is Program Manager at the Melbourne Writers Festival as well as a writer and critic whose literary criticism and social commentary have been published by the Wheeler Centre, Kill Your Darlings, the Big Issue, Eureka Street and the Lifted Brow, among others. She has chaired conversations and interviews at the Emerging Writers' Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival and Footscray Community Arts Centre.
Shireen Morris
Shireen Morris is a lawyer, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School, and a senior adviser on constitutional reform to Cape York Institute. She is the author of Radical Heart (MUP, 2018), the co-editor of The Forgotten People: Liberal and Conservative Approaches to Recognising Indigenous Peoples with Damien Freeman (MUP, 2016) and the editor of A Rightful Place: A Roadmap to Recognition (Black Inc, 2017). Shireen is a regular commentator on TV, radio and print media.
Bri Lee
Bri Lee is an author and freelance writer. Her journalism has appeared in publications such as The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia and Crikey. Her first book, Eggshell Skull, won Biography of the Year at the ABIA Awards, the People's Choice Award at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and was longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize. She is also a non-practicing lawyer and continues to engage in legal research and issues-based advocacy.
Kate Wild
Kate Wild is an investigative journalist whose work with distinguished teams at the ABC has been recognised with three Walkley Awards and a Logie. Her reports from Darwin, where she lived from 2010 to 2016, laid the groundwork for a Four Corners story on juvenile detention that prompted the calling of a Royal Commission. Like Elijah Holcombe, Kate grew up in country New South Wales; she now lives and works in Sydney. Waiting for Elijah is her first book.