Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 26 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
In the first event in our Dead Calm series, we’ll delve into the detail of the process of dying. Our panel of experts are people who witness, ease or facilitate the transition from life to death in a professional capacity.
They’ll discuss definitions of death, the best environments for death and how medical practitioners can work with spiritual and religious people to make deaths as peaceful as possible.
When is the moment of death? Is it about the body, or consciousness? Is death improving in Australia today? And how might we start thinking differently about death – from the way we plan for death to the language we use around dying?
Metropolis Books will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Hilary Harper
Hilary Harper has a degree in English Literature and Cultural Studies, a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing, and 30 years’ experience in radio. She’s been at the ABC since 2005. She has ...
Sarah Winch
Dr Sarah Winch is head of the discipline of Medical Ethics, Law and Professionalism at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Queensland, and CEO of Health Ethics Australia, a charity, aiming to improve death literacy for Australians and compassion safety for clinicians.
Sarah consults nationally and internationally to clinicians and government agencies on matters of ethical concern. A prolific author, her book The Best Death. How to Die Well (UQP), joins her other contributions to improving community death literacy: death cafes, death over dinner and wine and die. Her forthcoming novel is the first of a series based on her most compelling clinical cases. It also involves death.
Efterpi Soropos
Efterpi Soropos became passionate about creating space and artistic experiences for the dying and vulnerable after the personal experience of losing her mother to breast cancer in 1995.
The desire to manifest change for people at that stage of life was so strong that it remained with her for many years – eventually finding its way into Efterpi's Masters programme, and a four-year artist residency at McCulloch House Inpatient Palliative Care Unit at Monash Health between 2008–2012.
She uses her performing arts, design and community artist experience and training to use immaterial elements such as sound, lighting and video via interactive technology to allow patients, families and staff the opportunity to transform the rooms they inhabit – for an artistic experience not usually available in a palliative care context. This concept is known as Human Rooms.
Denise Love
Denise Love began her professional life as a registered nurse before quickly discovering that it wasn’t just the medicine she offered people – but the kindness that supported healing, or made death more tolerable.
Following that discovery, she began midwifery training, and again felt that 'being with someone' had a much greater impact on wellbeing that most 'treatments'. She set up an in-home palliative care service, where often one of the only 'tools' she had for comfort and care was herself. She eventually set up a full-time doula service for birthing and dying people.
For the past five years, Denise has been living and working in remote rural Cambodia as a registered nurse – using those skills in general health, and helping midwives who work unassisted and without medical back up.