Monthly Archives: January 2017

ABC talks writers’ refugee panel

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Lesley Milne with Afghan Hazara refugee students in Beechworth in 2016.

Beechworth’s Leslie Milne tomorrow (Wed, Feb 1) talks with 106.5FM ABC Goulburn-Murray’s Joseph Thomsen at 7:15am about the refugee panel discussion to take place at Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend in Beechworth on February 11.

Wars, conflict and persecution have forced more people than at any other time to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ Global trends 2015 reported that almost 60 million people were forcibly displaced by the end of 2014 – up by nearly 14m in a single year. One in every 122 of the world’s people is a refugee, displaced in their own country, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a single nation it would rank twenty-fourth in the world.

The stark realities of displacement are to be discussed at WRAP with young adults who want to share the stories of their journeys and the ‘the way of the world’ and of their search for asylum and opportunity in Australia. The panel will be convened at George Kerferd Hotel at 1:00pm on Sat, Feb 11.

Last winter Border Refugee and Asylum Seeker Support (BRASS) group members and families in Beechworth and nearby North East communities opened their homes for one weekend to 24 students from St Joseph’s Flexible Learning Centre in North Melbourne – each of them a refugee. Some of them are returning to participate in this panel discussion about our shared time and place in the wider world.

Participation: $20 – proceeds shared with BRASS | book it | presenters’ information

Write into the ways of the world

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Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend will explore gender, diversity, feminism and power in great opera, with Richard Wagner’s Brynhildr examined by Australian Book Review editor and opera performance critic Peter Rose.

Beechworth’s seventh annual Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend is just 15 days away.

Street works and readings, discussions and workshops, together with word-directed art projects, will be staged February 10-12 in Beechworth’s heritage-listed main streets and at George Kerferd Hotel in the grounds of the 1864-built Mayday Hills former lunatic asylum and its extraordinary gardens.

Headline participants include Jerilderie-born Rosalie Ham, author of The Dressmaker – the source of a major Australian film released in 2015, Melbourne-based activist poet and writer Hayley Louise Singer, who will delve into women’s histories, journalist and author Doug Hendrie, poet Eddie Paterson, Australian Book Review editor and opera performance critic Peter Rose and garden historian and writer Anne Vale, a former chair of the Australian Garden History Society Victorian branch.

WRAP is also building awareness of North East established writers, including Yackandandah’s Kate Rotherham and Beverley Lello, and emerging writers, such as Wangaratta world-building and fantasy writer and graphic designer Chris Febvre. Challenge yourself by helping to create a new fairytale and develop an anthropomorphic creature with a twist – like a crocodile whose dream is simply to bake bread?

Poet and surgeon Paddy Dewan and singer-songwriter Marisa Quigley will host ‘Bookends’, a words and music workshop for children, and Beechworth Arts Council president Jamie Kronborg and vice president Daren John Pope will bite into lively ideas about North East artistic and cultural endeavour over lunch.

The program also features ‘Cereal words’, a writers’ breakfast at which all participating writers can take the opportunity to read from their own works, and a work-in-progress screening of ‘Potholes’, a collaboration between Kate Rotherham and Brendan Hogan to turn a short story into a short film.

See full program information and booking opportunities. Tickets sell fast.

Enquiries: Jamie Kronborg 0409 912 967 or email