Category Archives: WRAP17

Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend 2017

Digging into book publishing

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Anne Vale’s Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend workshop will take place at Beechworth’s Mayday Hills, where Beechworth Treescape Group will lead a walk and readings ‘into the woods’ among Mayday’s National Trust-listed tree collection.

Anne Vale’s academic and practical interests in Australian design, influential women and gardening coalesced when she wrote a guidebook about ‘Durrol’, a significant garden near Mount Macedon.

The Allen family in 1932 commissioned Edna Walling – gardener, landscape designer, photographer and writer – to plan a small enclosed garden within the larger grounds laid out in the earlier years of the twentieth century. Walling became the subject of an entry Anne wrote, while a University of Melbourne lecturer in garden history and design, for The encyclopedia of women and leadership in twentieth century Australia, and demonstrates that Walling’s influence persists today, more than 40 years after her death.

Anne, in Walling’s footsteps, has written three books and the most recent of these, Influential Australian garden people and their stories, was self-published. The former Victorian branch chair of the Australian Garden History Society – and, like Walling, a skilled garden photographer – says it has been the most successful of her publishing experience.

Participants in Anne’s Beechworth Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend workshop on Sunday, February 12 will learn about writing and preparing a book for publication, negotiating a printing contract, and taking – profitably – a book to market.
Participation: $50 | book it | presenter information

Writing the new world

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AmalgaNations‘ author and travel writer Doug Hendrie. Image: University of Melbourne

Travel writing has a well-known skew towards exotica. That’s understandable – if everywhere is the same, why leave home?

But globalisation has brought cross-pollination – and Melbourne nonfiction writer, teacher and author Doug Hendrie reveals you can now go everywhere and see traces of home.

In his Beechworth Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend workshop on February 11, Doug explores the possibility and promise of writing travel in a globalised world.

His AmalgaNations: how globalisation is good found a series of unexpected – and bizarre – cultural mash-ups, from StarCraft videogame superstars of South Korea to the Clash-loving punks of Indonesia; from gay power in the Catholic Philippines to the street filmmakers of Ghana.

‘A whirlwind world tour through surprising subcultures told with subtle humour,’ said publisher Hardie Grant, ‘AmalgaNations picks up where Louis Theroux leaves off.’

 Doug has a longstanding interest in cross-cultural issues and emergent subcultures. He is working on his second book.

Saturday, February 11
Doug Hendrie workshop | George Kerferd Hotel, Beechworth | 10:00 – 11:30am
Participation: $50 | book it | presenter information

Beechworth-raised poet’s new work published

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A new collection of poetry by Beechworth-raised poet Eddie Paterson is to be published today by Whitmore Press

Beechworth-raised poet and Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend presenter Eddie Paterson will have a new title to his creative name when he returns to Beechworth for WRAP17 (February 10-12).

Independent Whitmore Press this evening (Feb 1) in Melbourne releases redactor – a new collection of poems by the University of Melbourne creative writing lecturer. Poet and novelist Amy Brown will launch the work for publisher Anthony Lynch, who says Eddie has used found texts from the everyday – emails, memos, notes, lyrics, text messages, tweets and webfeeds – as poetic material for redactor.

“Drawing on techniques from the visual arts and radical writing such as the ready-made, the cut-up and the concrete poem, Eddie Paterson reflects upon the ways in which the historical legacy of censorship intersects with contemporary surveillance technologies,” Anthony says.

Eddie will discuss redactor at Beechworth Books as part of the WRAP program on Saturday, Feb 11, at 9:30am. He will also sign copies. He will later host ‘Poets by post’, public, walk-up readings of poetry on the steps of Beechworth post office.

That evening, at George Kerferd Hotel, Eddie will host a post-dinner conversation with The Dressmaker author Rosalie Ham.

The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review wrote of Ham’s work: ‘…We sense that…once the camera closes in on the ‘tumbling brown house’ of Mad­ Molly, ‘leaning provocatively on the grassy curve’, it’s clear we’re visiting a small 1950s town not of history but as imagined by Tim Burton: the gothic, polarized world of Edward Scissorhands’.

Rosalie Ham was born and raised in Jerilderie in southern NSW and as a young adult ‘rushed to university because Gough Whitlam made it possible’. The Dressmaker has become a film starring Kate Winslett, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth and Hugo Weaving. Rosalie has since written Summer at Mount Hope and There should be more dancing.

WRAP dinner | Saturday, Feb 11 | Participation: $80, with wine available for purchase | book it | presenters’ information: Rosalie Ham and Eddie Paterson

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