Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 15 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
It’s cold outside, but in the cosy surrounds of the Moat, we’re gathering for four consecutive Mondays of Indigenous storytelling.
Oral storytelling is almost a lost art in these days of blogs, high-speed broadband and e-books. But it’s a rare pleasure to pause in our busy lives and immerse ourselves in the magic and power of the spoken word. Australia has a rich oral tradition, which we’ll rekindle in these evenings, with the crackling atmosphere of fireside tales.
Bunjilaka curator Genevieve Grieves and Miles Franklin shortlisted writer Tony Birch will curate – and co-host – a series of intimate evenings around the themes of Country, Sky, Water and Fire.
These elements are rich sources for creating meaningful stories that engage with the Australian landscape, either personally or politically. The stories will be a mix of traditional and contemporary, reflecting the diversity of concerns and inspirations for Indigenous writers today.
Our hosts will be joined by a hand-picked selection of superb storytellers, including both performers and writers.
For Fire, we’ll be joined by Ellen van Neerven-Currie, Mandy Nicholson and Lionel Fogarty.
Fire
Hearth fire heart¨
smoke rises, pain unfurls¨
Carried. Maintained. Everlasting.
Genevieve Grieves
Featuring
Ellen van Neerven
Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. They have written two poetry collections: Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which was shortlisted in 2021 for the Queensland Literary Awards and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Ellen also won the Queensland Literary Awards – Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre Literary Awards – Peter Blazey Fellowship in 2019.
View ProfileGenevieve Grieves
Genevieve Grieves is an Indigenous educator, curator, filmmaker, artist, oral historian, researcher and writer who has accumulated nearly 20 years experience in the arts and culture industries. She is Worimi – traditionally from mid-north coast New South Wales – but has lived and worked on Kulin Country for many years.
Genevieve has a role as a public intellectual and speaker and teaches at the University of Melbourne, where she is also undertaking her PhD.She was the lead curator of the First Peoples exhibition, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at the Melbourne Museum, which opened in November 2013.
Genevieve has previously worked with the Koorie Heritage Trust as an oral historian, and then on both the Mission Voices website for the ABC and as a field producer on First Australians for SBS television. She has produced a documentary called Lani’s Story.
Lionel Fogarty
Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958, Cherbourg, Australia) is a Murri man, born on Wakka Wakka land at Cherbourg mission. In his writing he demonstrates that he is a poet of language as much as of politics, repurposing both traditional poetics and the speech of his people to delineate current circumstances of oppression alongside a vision of independent Aboriginal identity. His books have won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry in 2012 and the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2015. In 2017, Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017 (edited by Philip Morrissey & Tyne Dale) was published by Re-press, covering nearly forty years of his writing. A self-proscribed street-activist, Fogarty has never fallen short of living a life of justice and poetics. Today, Fogarty lives on his own country at Undullah (Mulinjari country). In 2022 he released a new collection of poetry through Giramondo Press, “Harvest Lingo”.
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