Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 18 September
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
In our backyards, balconies and beer gardens – Australians get along famously with booze. Drinking is an entrenched part of our national identity: it’s a recurrent theme in our pop culture, a scene-setter for friendship, a supposedly inherent part of work and play.
Lately, though, as the personal, social and public health costs of drinking become clear, many Australians are reconsidering our indulgent traditions. Some have even suggested that alcohol will go the way of the cigarette once its connection to chronic or life-threatening illnesses is fully acknowledged.
Writer Jenny Valentish’s book, Woman of Substances, tells her own story (as well as those found in rehab facilities, halfway houses and AA groups) as she explored the paths people take into and out of addiction. In the process, she discovered that women’s experiences of substance abuse and treatment differ greatly from those of men.
Valentish joins researcher Michael Bowen, broadcaster and author Wendy Harmer and host Kate Jinx for a fresh discussion about Australia’s changing relationship with alcohol, and how we can anticipate and deal with the side effects. Actor Nikki Shiels (The Rover) will perform a short piece to open the conversation.
Presented in partnership with Sydney Writers’ Festival and Belvoir.
Featuring
Jenny Valentish
Jenny Valentish’s fourth book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, explores the fine line between hedonism and endurance, including the feats of porn stars. It seemed like the natural follow-up to her Walkley-nominated book about addiction and impulsivity, Woman of Substances – in part a mea culpa, but also a heavily researched resource for the public, academics and clinicians alike. As a journalist, she writes for The Guardian, the ABC and The Age, but her time is most preferably spent bodybuilding and kickboxing. As a writing teacher, she also runs the free Facebook community Sundays We Write.
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Wendy Harmer
Wendy Harmer is one of Australia’s most versatile entertainers – broadcaster, author, journalist and stage performer – and is the editor-in-chief of The Hoopla, a daily online news and magazine website. She was a contestant in Celebrity Masterchef in 2009.
As a stand-up comedian she performed her one-woman shows at the Melbourne, Edinburgh, Montreal and Glasgow Mayfest Comedy Festivals, in London’s West End and the Sydney Theatre Company. Wendy enjoyed huge popularity leading Sydney radio station 2Day FM’s top-rating breakfastshow for 11 years. She has hosted, written and appeared in a variety of TV shows including ABC TV’s The Big Gig.
A former political journalist, Wendy is the author of eight books for adults, including her bestselling novel Farewell My Ovaries, Love and Punishment and Nagging for Beginners, a how-to guide for women. Her latest novel Friends Like These was published in April 2011.
Wendy still works as a radio broadcaster for the ABC. She has been a columnist for the Good Weekend, the Sunday Telegraph and many magazines.
Michael Bowen
Michael Bowen is a National Health and Medical Research Council Doherty Biomedical Fellow and Senior Lecturer based at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre.
Dr Bowen’s expertise is in applying cutting edge cellular and preclinical research techniques to central nervous system drug discovery and development. Some of his recent career highlights include winning the 2016 Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Researcher, the inaugural NSW Premier’s Prize for Early Career Researcher of the Year in 2015, the 2016 International Behavioral Neuroscience Society Early Career Award, and being inducted into the World Economic Forum’s Young Scientists Community of 50 of the top scientists under the age of 40 from around the world. He is one of the lead inventors of novel therapeutic drugs being developed for the treatment of substance use disorders.
Kate Jinx
Kate Jinx is a film curator, writer and broadcaster (mostly). She is a features & talks programmer at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), director of programming at Sydney’s Golden Age Cinema, and regularly appears in print and on TV talking about arts & words. She is the co–host of weekly culture podcast See Also.
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Nikki Shiels
Nikki Shiels made her Belvoir debut last year in Twelfth Night or What You Will. For Malthouse Theatre, she has appeared in Night on Bald Mountain, The Dragon, Elizabeth – Almost by Chance a Woman and Picnic at Hanging Rock, which subsequently toured to Edinburgh in early 2017 opening at the Royal Lyceum Theatre.
Later this year, Nikki will appear in Kip Williams’ production of Three Sisters for Sydney Theatre Company. Nikki’s film and television credits include Neighbours, Perfect Pair, Childhood’s End, The Greatest Love of All, Little Acorns, Rush IV and Fred Schepisi’s feature The Eye of the Storm.
Nikki’s other theatre credits include The Unspoken Word is ‘Joe’ (Griffin/La Mama); The Dream (Bell Shakespeare); The Cherry Orchard, True Minds, Top Girls, Don Parties On (Melbourne Theatre Company); Joan (The Rabble); M+M (Melbourne International Arts Festival); The Dollhouse, Peer Gynt (Daniel Schlusser Ensemble of which she is a core member); Madeleine (Black Sequin Productions/Arts House); Romeo and Juliet (ZLMD Shakespeare Company); and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Theatre Works/Dirty Pretty Theatre).