True Story festival is brought to you by Life Sentences, the Illawarra Flame & the South Coast Writers Centre. With funding from Culture Bank Wollongong & support from Coledale RSL and Collins Booksellers Thirroul.
Book tickets online via the South Coast Writers Centre.
SATURDAY, 18 NOVEMBER
11.30 AM-1.30 PM – Think Global, Write Local
Workshop with Alan Sunderland
What is the news? Who can you trust? We all need access to reliable news, but disinformation is everywhere and opinion is easier to find than facts.
Join respected journalist, author of The Ten Rules of Reporting and former ABC Editorial Director Alan Sunderland to learn key principles of telling local stories for local readers.
Drawing on a lifetime of experience in public interest news, Alan Sunderland will guide you through the dangers of fake news and spin and help you deliver the kind of news that builds trust.
This invaluable workshop will appeal to all those interested in writing narrative factual content, including podcasters and issue-driven activists as well as those with a special interest in being part of the regional journalism renaissance.
2:15 HALL DOORS OPEN
2.30-2.40 PM Welcome to Country
Dr Jodi Edwards
2.40-3.40 PM Keynote Address: Afterburn
Bronwyn Adcock
Bronwyn Adcock won the Walkley Book Award for Currowan, her extraordinary moment-by-moment account of the mega fire that ripped through the South Coast. We are thrilled that she has agreed to deliver an exclusive, specially commissioned keynote address and speak about the tensions that have arisen as affected communities strive for recovery and resilience. What are the lessons we can learn from that tragedy? An unmissable, once-only event.
4-5 PM Dharawal Language
Dr Jodi Edwards with David Roach
Following her hugely popular introduction to the Dharawal language at last year’s festival, join Yuin woman with Dharawal kinship Dr Jodi Edwards as she teaches us words for food from her most recent book, an illustrated collection of recipes, Dharawal Bush Tucker: Bawa Dhanjma.
5.15-6.15 PM Laughing and Crying
Wendy Harmer with Caroline Baum
Best known as a stand-up comedian and radio broadcaster, in Lies My Mirror Told Me, Wendy Harmer has written a startlingly candid memoir about her disfigurement at birth and a childhood that made no allowance for self-pity, as well as her rise to the top of the international comedy scene and as the most highly paid woman on radio. Behind the scenes, things were not always as jaunty as they seemed. Unique, brave, uninhibited and fearless, Wendy Harmer has a story to tell unlike any other.
SUNDAY, 19 NOVEMBER
10-11 AM Truth Teller
Chris Masters with Margaret Throsby
A titan of investigative journalism, multi award-winning journalist and author Chris Masters talks to one of Australia’s most loved interviewers, Margaret Throsby, about his childhood on the far south coast, his remarkable career investigating the powerful and the corrupt and the personal toll of uncovering the truth. This promises to be an eye-opening conversation.
11.15 AM-12.15 PM Belonging and Other Challenges
Eda Gunaydin with Sarah Ayoub
Turkish Australian writer Eda Gunaydin won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her fiery debut collection of essays, Root and Branch, in which she combines personal memoir with her thoughts on class, capital, inherited trauma and what it means to belong. A modern-day millennial, Eda combines raw honesty with fierce analysis and humour in her writing – the result is bracing, confronting, and offers a powerful insight into often uncomfortable topics.
12.15-1 PM Lunch Session: Hunger Games
Fiona Weir Walmsley with Nick Rheinberger
In a mouthwatering session, Gerringong cheesemaker and farmer Fiona Weir Walmsley shares the story of running Buena Vista Farm with ABC Illawarra broadcaster Nick Rheinberger. She tells him about learning to ferment foods, grow coffee, run a cooking school and what prompted her to write From Scratch, a user-friendly, money-wise, un-preachy collection of simple recipes including pantry staples and basics.
To go with this session, you can order a specially prepared lunchbox from our friends at Earthwalker Cafe in collaboration with Buena Vista Farm. Earthwalker Lunchbox includes ancient grain pilaf with organic kale, nuts, currant and saltbush, mat rush crumbed and bulgar falafel, Davidson plum roasted pumpkin, zesty finger lime hummus, kelp salted flatbread and Buena Vista beetroot relish. It can be ordered with the addition of Buena Vista cheese, or gluten-free.
1-2 PM Constellations and Consolations
Indira Naidoo with Caroline Baum
When much-loved edible gardener and broadcaster Indira Naidoo lost her sister, her grief led her to find consolation and a new appreciation of life in the most unexpected places. The result was her best-selling memoir, The Space Between the Stars. Today, she shares some of the personal insights she gained from looking more closely at the world around her.
2.15-3 PM Show Me The Money
Jack Manning Bancroft with Jeremy Lasek
In the newly released Hoodie Economics, inspirational CEO and founder of AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience), local social entrepreneur and Bunjalung man Jack Manning Bancroft embraces Indigenous thinking to offer transformational solutions to our current crises. If you want to be part of the solution, come and listen to a mind-expanding thinker who offers refreshingly optimistic alternatives of how we can be more inclusive, share knowledge and do things better.
3.15-4.15 PM. My Funny Failures (and other stories)
Siobhan McHugh & Jackie Dent with Malika Reese
Wrapping up the festival, two very game authors confess to unexpected moments of hilarity, humiliation and horror in the line of duty. Join podcast guru, Walkley award-winner and local author Siobhan McHugh, (The Power of Podcasting, The Snowy: A History) and author Jackie Dent (The Great Dead Body Teachers) as they share moments they would rather forget with Malika Reese.
True Story will be at Coledale Community Hall on November 18 & 19.
Book tickets at southcoastwriters.org/true-story-festival
Download a program here