Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 04 July
12:45 PM - 1:15 PM
Bill Garner – historian, playwright and television writer – is just an ordinary camper with perhaps an unusually dogged curiosity. A casual conversation at Wilson’s Promontory several years ago started him down the track of researching the history of camping in Australia. Ten years later, he has finished a PhD on the subject and written a book about it.
Born in a Tent takes the story from the campfire to the gas bottle, from a tarp slung on saplings to polymer tents and aluminium poles. It reveals how deeply our camping holidays connect us to the land, to the past, and to one another.
Lunchbox/Soapbox
Sometimes there’s nothing better than a good rant. Every Thursday, the Wheeler Centre hosts an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, where writers and thinkers can have their say on the topics that won’t let them sleep at night.
Featuring some of our most compelling voices across just about every sector of human endeavour you can imagine, the themes dominating Lunchbox/Soapbox are proudly idiosyncratic. BYO lunch. Ideas provided.
Featuring
Bill Garner
Bill Garner is a camper who is also a historian, playwright, and television writer. He is the author of Born in a Tent, a radical history of Australian camping.
In the 1970s, as an actor he was a founding member of the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory in Carlton.
With Sue Gore he is co-writer of several highly acclaimed plays including The Ishmael Club and The Future Australian Race. His PhD thesis Land of Camps: The Ephemeral Settlement of Australia won both the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award and the Dennis-Wettenhall Prize from the University of Melbourne. His dramatisation of the Heidelberg School, the ABCTV mini-series, One Summer Again, won the Australian Writers Guild Award for Original Work for Television.
He is a research fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University.