Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Sunday 28 August
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Location
The Edge, Fed Square
The Atrium Flinders Street Federation Square Melbourne Victoria 3000
Get directions
The Brexit result, the ascendance of anti-establishment figures like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the rise of minor parties ... across the Western world we’re seeing signs of growing frustration with the status quo. How, exactly, did we get here? What can we learn from past mistakes? What can we learn from past successes?
In a sweeping discussion, presented in partnership with Melbourne Writers Festival, we’ll hear from two writers who favour the long, broad view in their writing about economics: New Yorker staff writer George Packer and veteran Australian journalist George Megalogenis. In their recent books, The Unwinding (Packer) and Australia’s Second Chance (Megalogenis), both Georges have considered the slow, tectonic shifts in society driven by economics, politics and history. Packer’s book describes how economic upheavals in the past three decades have impacted on the lives of individual Americans, while Megalogenis’s looks all the way back to 1788 to trace Australia’s economic and demographic history.
In conversation with Sally Warhaft, join two outstanding Georges for a conversation about the bigger economic picture.
Featuring
George Megalogenis
George Megalogenis has thirty years’ experience in the media, including over a decade in the federal parliamentary press gallery. His book The Australian Moment won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction ...
George Packer
George Packer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003, covering the Iraq war, American foreign policy, domestic politics, and books. He is the author, most recently, of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013), a New York Times bestseller, which won the National Book Award for non-fiction. He has published four other works of non-fiction, including The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), which received several prizes and was named one of the year’s ten best books by The New York Times Book Review.
Packer is also the author of two novels and a play, Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, which ran five months Off Broadway in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. He is the editor of a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays. Packer’s New Yorker articles have won three Overseas Press Club awards.
Sally Warhaft
Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer. She is the host of The Fifth Estate, the Wheeler Centre’s live series focusing on journalism, politics, media, and international relations, and The Leap Year ...