Monday

October 12

A conversation with

Richard Glover

Maleny Community Centre

6 for 6.30pm,

Tickets $30 and $20 for students

Bookings essential

with,

Joanna Jenkins

The evening will begin with

Joanna Jenkins

speaking about her new novel

Bad Neighbours.

Ruth Dawson finds her ideal living space in an Art Deco building in Potts Point, The Lumen. A twenty-minute walk from her office in the city, the apartment boasts parquetry flooring, a wall of books and Harbour Bridge views from the sofa.

It's perfect until Ben, the homeless guy, dies under the corrugated iron lean-to in the garden where he lived.

The residents of The Lumen do little to hide their relief. They can cease their half-hearted attempts to find an acceptable solution to 'the Ben problem', and return to more important issues. 

They're not happy when Ruth brings in a detective. But she's certain Ben was poisoned, and one of her neighbours knows it too. 

'Come for the murder, stay for the almost-too-close-to-the-bone social satire. I loved it, but don't tell my neighbours I said so.' JACK HEATH, author of Kill Your Husbands

A journey into the alarming, hilarious and ever-changing advice given to Australian parents.

Behind every generation of Australian parents stood an army of advisors – magazine columnists, expert authors, nurses, priests, and government agencies. Most of those experts were very certain about their own rules. Any deviation would produce a dire result: you’d ruin a child.

Yet, over time, the advice kept changing.

Each generation was told that the last generation had it all wrong.

How peculiar that most of the experts did not have children of their own.

But, for the current generation of parents, history offers a consolation. When relatives, and other critics, tell young parents that they are ‘doing it all wrong’, and that different (usually stricter) methods would make everything go smoothly, the experience of Australian parents over time is wonderfully reassuring. Parenting is tough, however you do it, and the outcome, however you do it, is usually a perfectly fine human.

We are delighted to welcome Richard to Maleny.

He will be in conversation with Steven Lang

Joanna is the author of three novels. They’re promoted as being crime (and sell very well under that label) but really they are social commentary at their best, clever, witty, propulsive. She lives in Brisbane. We’re delighted to welcome her back to Maleny.

While Inga is the acclaimed author of seven works of fiction - Once We Were Wildlife, The Thinning, Willowman, The Last Woman in the World, Where the Trees Were, Nest and Mr Wigg - ​she is also recognised as one of the strongest voices in Australian Nature writing, with her wonderful book Understory, a Life with Trees.  

Now she has undertaken a passion project, A Tree-Lovers Guide to Australia, for which she travelled all over the continent, taking her own photographs and researching the stories of remarkable trees.

The book is exquisite, a sensational tour of beautiful, historic, rare and special trees.   

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Inga was born in central west NSW. After living in Canberra, Brisbane, and the Sunshine Coast hinterland, she has settled on the far south coast of NSW. She began her career as a professional writer for government before gaining a PhD in creative writing and then, another one (Doctor Doctor in the German parlance) in English Literature, examining the history of nature writing on this continent.

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