Seventh edition | Beechworth, Victoria | February 10-12, 2017

Rosalie Ham: The Dressmaker | Eddie Paterson: poets by post | Hayley Louise Singer: women, activism and water | Peter Rose: libretto and liberation | Doug Hendrie: cultural mash | Kate Rotherham, Lisa Mason, Pete Denahy, Brendan Hogan and Beverley Lello: beyond the grave | Chris Febvre: world-building and altered reality | Anne Vale: book to market | 10 refugees: the way of the world | Kate Rotherham and Helen Newman Potholes | Inga Hanover: flash card poetry | Natalie and Olga Evans: drawn-out tweet | Bärbel Ullrich: artists’ books | Lara Stevens and Bella Li: sound words uncorked | Marisa Quigley and Paddy Dewan: bookends | Beechworth Treescape Group: into the woods | 

Author Rosalie Ham discusses ‘The Dressmaker’.

In 1953 a young writer named Nicolas Bouvier set out from Geneva in a Fiat Topolino to meet his friend, artist Thierry Vernet, in Belgrade. Without much money the pair was to journey for the next nineteen months – through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan – to the Khyber Pass.

‘From aged ten to thirteen,’ Bouvier wrote, ‘I had stretched out on the rug, silently contemplating the atlas, and that makes one want to travel. I had dreamed of regions such as the Banat, the Caspian, Kashmir, of their music, of the glances one might meet there, of the ideas that lay in waiting…

‘We really don’t know what to call this inner compulsion. Something grows, and loses its moorings, so that the day comes when, none too sure of ourselves, we nevertheless leave for good. Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.’

Such is The way of the world – the title of the masterpiece that Bouvier later wrote of the experience he shared with Vernet. His crisp, contemplative observations inspire this seventh Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend. We hope you’ll be enticed into a journey among ideas and, along the way, hear of fresh things, make friends, and become intrigued and challenged by the diverse ways of the world.

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