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