WRAP17 Programme – Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend | Beechworth, Victoria | February 10-12, 2017
Round-the-clock
Street WRAP | Ford and Camp streets’ store windows | February 6-12
Explore Beechworth Secondary College students’ interpretation of the world through a window-show of short, sharp poetry – a highlight that always draws eager eyes.
Words under foot | 28a Camp Street | February 10-12
Wooragee Primary School and Beechworth Montessori students create pavement poetry in front Beechworth’s Post Office. Exploring ‘trees’, these word-works promise insight into the creative minds of budding writers.
Friday, February 10
Unwrapped | George Kerferd Hotel | 5:30pm
Federal parliamentarian Cathy McGowan AO MP, Independent Member for Indi, opens Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend 2017 and talks of the sparks for an Indi-wide arts and cultural development strategy.
Into the woods | George Kerferd Hotel forecourt | 6:00 – 6:45pm
Beechworth Treescape Group leads an enchanting walk with readings among Mayday Hills’ extraordinary trees and gardens. Amble through sections of the largest collection of trees ever listed by the National Trust (Victoria) for its state, regional and local significance. Puck may appear. Treescape Group volunteers identified and catalogued the trees for inclusion in the trust’s register, with the listing made in 2014.
Open cans of wor…ds | George Kerferd Hotel | 7:15pm onwards
If you have a lovely, lively letter, prescient poem, stylish speech, furious fiction, bit of biography or blast of bosh, open others’ ears by reading it – three minutes only – to an eager audience. You can also partake of a light dinner and enjoy wine and cheese or tea and cake from the hands of the Kerferd chefs (who don’t mince words).
Saturday, February 11
Poets by post | 28a Camp Street | 10:00 – 11:30am
Walk up and try your tongue at live poetry – hosted by poet Eddie Paterson – on the steps of Beechworth’s heritage-listed, 1864-built Post Office, or listen-up.
Perhaps bring a chair
Participation: free
Bookends | Indigo Library, 101 Ford Street | 10:30am – 12:00pm
Beechworth singer-songwriter Marisa Quigley and Woolshed Valley poet Paddy Dewan pair up again and encourage children to dive into a fascinating world of stories and music.
Participation: free
Signature books | Beechworth Books, 1 / 73 Ford Street | times as listed
Join Diane Ingwersen as Beechworth Books hosts back-to-back 30-minute talks and book signings by some of WRAP17’s key authors.
09:30am: Eddie Paterson – redactor [Whitmore Press new release]
10:00am: Peter Rose – Rose Boys [Allen & Unwin] and Australian Book Review
10:30am: Paul Mitchell – We. Are. Family. [Midnight Sun Publishing]
11:00am: Anne Vale – Influential Australian Garden People [Heriscapes]
11:30am: Doug Hendrie – AmalgaNations: how globalisation is good [Hardie Grant]
ǁ see information about each of these authors elsewhere in this program
Participation: free
High road to reading | Indigo Shire Library, 101 Ford Street | 2:30 – 3:30pm
Frock up in high 1950s style and take afternoon tea with The Dressmaker’s Rosalie Ham. The Jerilderie-born author – with her tale of love, hate and haute couture in a small town – is visiting Indigo Shire’s Beechworth library as part of the State Library of Victoria’s ‘High road to reading program’ during WRAP17. If you don’t already own the highly-regarded book which Jocelyn Moorhouse transformed into a film of the same title and released in spring 2015, copies will be available for purchase from Beechworth Books at the library afternoon tea.
Participation: free
Discussions and workshops
Doug Hendrie | George Kerferd Hotel | 10:00 – 11:30am
Doug Hendrie is a Melbourne-based nonfiction writer, teacher and author of AmalgaNations: how globalisation is good. He has a longstanding interest in cross-cultural issues and emergent subcultures. He is working on his second book. Travel writing has a well-known skew towards exotica. That’s understandable – if everywhere is the same, why leave home? But globalisation means that many cultures are now cross-pollinating. Everywhere you go you can see traces of home. In this workshop, Doug explores the possibility and promise of writing travel in a globalised world.
Participation: $50
Hayley Louise Singer | George Kerferd Hotel | 11:00am – 12:30pm
Distinguished Australian historian Inga Clendinnen once asked: ‘Who owns the past?’ She argued that in a free society it belongs to everyone. History is made up of remembered stories, acknowledged events and celebrated lives. But it is also made up of lives that remain unspoken and unacknowledged. Hayley Louise Singer, who explores the intersections of feminism and ecology at the sharp edge of writing, has been inspired by the Stanley community’s fight to keep its extraordinary landscape free of water mining. Drawing from the Stanley Athenaeum collection, Hayley’s workshop delves into stories of women from the past who have lived and worked as environmentalists, farmers, landscapers, land- and waterscape painters and diarists in the Indigo hills. Participants will be guided through writing exercises to start, or continue, writing the biographies of women of personal significance. There will also be talk of tactics. If everyone owns the past, telling the stories of those past and present becomes a community event. This workshop seeks to celebrate that idea and put it into practice.
Participation: $50
What to bring: letters, diaries, photographs and newspaper clippings relevant to women who have understood the beauties, complexities and importance of Indigo’s diverse ecologies.
Chris Febvre | George Kerferd Hotel | 11:00am – 12:30pm
Chris Febvre is a North East graphic artist and writer who is developing a new augmented reality, digital children’s story. Combining classic fairy-tale and fantasy elements with contemporary characters that aim to engage and entertain today’s youth (and those young at heart), Chris wants to redefine and reimagine the time-honoured picture storybook for a new generation of readers. In this workshop, Chris details the processes he uses to create his story and artwork, demonstrate the wonders of augmented reality, and tasks participants with creating an archetypical fantasy character with a quirky and fun twist.
Participation: $50
Chinwag | George Kerferd Hotel | 12:15 – 12:45pm
Hear Beechworth Arts Council president, journalist and gardener Jamie Kronborg and vice president, fine arts student and raconteur Daren John Pope in conversation over lunch about the Arts Council’s aspirations – guided tours to regional and metropolitan galleries and exhibitions, art workshops, concerts, an artists’ directory, collaboration with Beechworth Film Society, Arts Yackandandah and Stanley Athenaeum, and the continuing development of Writers, Readers and Poets’ Weekend and the Spring Arts Show series in the years ahead.
Participation: free
Peter Rose | George Kerferd Hotel | 1:00 – 2:30pm
It’s a brimming mix. Wangaratta-born writer, poet and Australian Book Review editor Peter Rose was raised in a family in which the talk, tactic and play of Australian Rules football was the stuff of daily life. His father was a legendary Collingwood coach, his brother a rare talent with a promising sporting career felled by misfortune. This intimate knowledge of ambition, joy, tragedy and grace is explored in Peter’s compelling and National Biography Award-winning Rose Boys. Such insight informs his thinking, too, as one of Australia’s leading opera performance critics. In this presentation he explores gender and diversity, feminism and power in the libretti of the key works of composers Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi – and how these nineteenth century men interpreted the women of their imagined worlds: Brünnehilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Violetta in La Traviata.
Participation: $50

The way of the world | George Kerferd Hotel | 1:00 – 2:30pm
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 Human Rights Commission’s 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 discussed by 10 young adults who share the stories of their journeys and the ‘the way of the world’ and of their search for asylum and opportunity in Australia. 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
Beyond the grave: Kate Rotherham, Brendan Hogan, Beverley Lello, Peter Denahy and Lisa Mason | George Kerferd Hotel | 3:00 – 4:30pm
In Holy Trinity churchyard last November Yackandandah Theatre Company presented From here to there – an extraordinary recreation of the lives of six people from the past whose remains lie in Yackandandah cemetery. Local writers Kate Rotherham, Brendan Hogan, Beverley Lello and Lisa Mason and singer-songwriter Pete Denahy each drew on an idea proposed by Yackandandah Cemetery Trust and supported by the district Historical Society to interpret the stories of diverse people – from the sickly mother of six young children incarcerated for neglect to the town’s German-born first doctor who diagnosed his impending death, from the young English woman who married a Chinese-born storekeeper to the undertaker who buried them. In this discussion the playwrights reconnoiter the art of the monologue, character reconstruction and the warp and weft of community and continuity across 160 years.
Participation: $20
Dinner WRAP | George Kerferd Hotel | 6:00pm drinks and canapés, 7:00pm dinner
Come to dinner and hear The Dressmaker’s Rosalie Ham in conversation with poet Eddie Paterson about the work of which the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review wrote: ‘…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.
Participation: $80, with wine available for purchase
Sunday, February 12
Cereal words | George Kerferd Hotel, oven precinct | 9:00 – 11:00am
Join our guest writers for bonhomie and breakfast and hear them read from their works.
Participation: $30
Workshops

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 her 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 her workshop will learn about writing and preparing a book for publication, negotiating a printing contract, and taking – profitably – a book to market.
Participation: $50
Potholes | George Kerferd Hotel | 12:45pm – 1:45pm
Yackandandah writer Kate Rotherham and filmmaker Helen Newman discuss and show the work-in-progress that is Potholes, a short story by Kate adapted for the screen with Brendan Hogan.
Participation: $10
Quercus clubbing | Quercus, 30 Ford Street | 2:00 – 3:00pm
Beechworth’s much loved community bookshop – Quercus – invites you to afternoon tea to meet and chat with the well-read members of its three book clubs.
Participation: free
Sound. words. uncorked. | 13 Pennyweight Lane, off Diffey Road | 3:00 – 4:30pm
Pennyweight Winery’s Elizabeth and Stephen Morris continue a generous tradition by opening their garden for WRAP participants to enjoy biodynamic wines, live music by Lara Stevens and Bella Li and readings by featured writers and poets.
Participation: free – with wine available for purchase
Art WRAP
Drawn-out tweet | George Kerferd Hotel | February 10 – 12
Twitter limits a tweet to 140 characters, but daughter-mother conversationalists Natalie and Olga Evans have found a way to add to the string. Living far apart, the pair often uses Nat’s love of words and Olga’s habit of sketching to keep in touch. Natalie tweets an observation and Olga responds with a drawing. Two years in the making, Drawn-out tweet becomes an exhibition displayed for all at WRAP17 to ponder and enjoy.
Flash card poetry
Beechworth artist Inga Hanover invites WRAP17 participants to write a single word on a card and then to step into her photo booth and hold up the card for a snapshot. From these impromptu portraits a surreal, automatic poem appears on the walls. Later these images will be bound in a book – testament to the wonder of one word, one image and a flash imagination. Singer Bob Dylan made an art-form of this style of songwriting.
NOTE: Participants will be asked to sign a publication release form.
Sponsors
Indigo Shire Council
WAW Credit Union
George Kerferd Hotel
Pennyweight Winery
State Library of Victoria
University of Melbourne School of Culture and Communication
Acknowledgements
Australia Post Beechworth and Wendy Christian
Beechworth Arts Council volunteers
Beechworth Books and Diane Ingwersen
Beechworth Montessori School
Beechworth Secondary College
Beechworth Treescape Group
Eddie Paterson
Estelle Paterson
Chris Nuck and George Kerferd Hotel staff
Indigo Library and Astrid Kriening
Jenny O’Connor, Indigo Mayor
Quercus Beechworth – Beechworth Neighbourhood House
Wooragee Primary School
WRAP17 planning group – Michael Bink, Jude Doughty, Olga Evans, Inga Hanover, Jamie Kronborg, Helen McIntyre, Helen Murray, Lesley Milne, Annie Nichols and Darren John Pope
Beechworth Arts Council Membership details (click here)