Weekend Pass

Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people (Moreton Bay) and is Professor of Indigenous Research at RMIT University. She was appointed as Australia’s first Indigenous Distinguished Professor in 2016 and was a founding member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She is the author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (UQP); The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minnesota Press); and the editor of several books, including Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (The University of Arizona Press). In 2020 she was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first-ever Australian Indigenous scholar to be elected.

‘When you talk about a lack of “insert minority” into “insert any industry”, what you’re also saying is that you’re not willing to support the people who are actually there.’

Aminatou Sow is a writer and cultural commentator. She co-hosts with Ann Friedman the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, which tackles the intricacies of feminism, pop culture and politics. Together she and Friedman coined the term ‘Shine Theory’, a practice of mutual investment committed to collaborating with rather than competing against other people –especially other women. She is a member of the Sundance Institute Director's Advisory Group and previously led Social Impact Marketing at Google. Sow is also the founder of Tech LadyMafia, a group that increases opportunities for women in tech. She was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Tech.

In 2017, Aretha Brown delivered an impassioned speech at the Invasion Day Rally in Melbourne, fighting to make Indigenous history education mainstream. Her delivery and ideas led her to be elected as Prime Minister of the National Indigenous Youth Parliament, the youngest ever person — and the first woman — to hold this position. An accomplished artist, Brown is currently studying painting at the Victorian College of the Arts.

‘I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.’

While Ariel Levy’s writing effortlessly moves between hulking subjects like sex, love and loss, her most familiar theme is freedom. From her bestselling debut, Female Chauvinist Pigs, which chronicled the rise of raunch culture, to her National Magazine Award- winning piece ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’ in the New Yorker (where she’s been a staff writer since 2008), Levy’s work explores and subverts expectations around what a woman’s life should look like. These intentions were crystalised in her 2017 memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply.

‘I think if we’re talking about popular feminism’s inclusion of trans and gender-diverse people, non-binary people, we’re not even scratching the surface.’

Bhenji Ra is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice combines dance, choreography, video, installation and club events. She is the Mother of ‘Slé’, a young, Western Sydney-based Vogue house, where she hosts events and Balls at the intersection of community and performance.

Ra’s work is often concerned with the dissection of cultural theory and identity, centralising her own personal histories as a tool to reframe performance. Collaboration and consultation are key to her work, and the voices of her own community remain central to her critical practice.

‘The absolute strength and pride of who I am today comes from these strong and resilient arweet murni-gurrk (old wise women).’

Caroline Martin is a direct descendant of the Briggs family and Custodian of Boonwurrung Country. She has worked in management and senior policy across arts, culture and tourism. A former Manager of Bunjilaka Culture Centre at Melbourne Museum, Caroline is currently the Creative Director of YIRRAMBOI First Nations Festival and is the founder of Yalukit Marnang, a cultural strengthening and development consultancy business. She is currently working on Bagurrk, a production that gives voice to the strength and resilience of Boonwurrung Matriarchal Ancestor Louisa Briggs.

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.
Clare ...

‘I’m not your mother, I’m not your bitch.’

Since her debut album Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Courtney Barnett has been celebrated as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in rock, an artist who mixes insightful observations with devastating self-assessment. Her second solo record, Tell Me How You Really Feel, was released in 2018; a profoundly realised and politically astute rock-record which had both the Sunday Times and Rolling Stone hailing her as the ‘voice of a generation’.

She is the first female artist ever to win the ARIA for Best Rock Artist (she’s won five ARIAs now), she was APRA’s Australian Songwriter Of The Year in 2016. Barnett has also received the Australian Music Prize and Triple J’s Australian Album of the Year. In 2015 she was nominated for a Grammy Award. Barnett is the founder and owner of Milk! Records.

'Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they’re a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.'

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of five novels – the cult-classic Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland and Eligible – and one story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It.

Her books have been selected by the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly and People for their ‘Ten Best Books of the Year’ lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into 30 languages. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Esquire, and her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, Slate, and on This American Life.

PLAYLIST

Writing

• Jane Mayer's journalism, including her books Dark Money (Doubleday) and Strange Justice (Graymalkin Media)
• Alice Munro's short stories, especially Open Secrets (Penguin Random House)
• A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Serpent's Tail)
• Good Talk by Mira Jacob (One World)
• Make Your Home Among Strangers (fiction; Picador) and My Time Among the Whites (essays; Picador) by Jennine Capó Crucet

TV

• Queer Eye
• Shrill
• Crashing

Music

• Brandi Carlile

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was long listed for the ...

'Let me remind any women of any generation still worried by the tag ... feminism is about equality, political equality, economic equality, cultural equality, personal equality, social equality. That’s it, it’s as simple as that.'

Fran Kelly is one of Australia’s leading political interviewers and commentators. She has earned a reputation as an intelligent, informed and balanced journalist who has been a key contributor to the nation’s political and social debates for the past 25 years. In that time she’s been the ABC’s Europe Correspondent based in London, the political editor for The 7.30 Report and the political correspondent for the prestigious AM program. 

Fran is the Presenter of ABC RN Breakfast,  Australia’s leading national morning current affairs radio show.

She is currently hosting the  political panel programme, Insiders, on ABC TV on Sunday mornings.

'Whilst I’m aware that #notallfeminists are anti-sex work, there’s a pretty gaping chasm between "not being against" and being an ally.'

Gala Vanting is a writer, sex worker advocate living and working as a migrant settler on Gadigal land. Her work weaves through the brothel, the boardroom, screen, stage, and page, public health and sex education. She aims to create compassionate and justice-driven dialogue about gender and power, sexuality, technology, media and culture, and is a passionate advocate for the human rights of sex workers.

PLAYLIST

Books

• Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith (Verso)
• Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown (AK Press)
• Decolonizing Solidarity by Clare Land (Zed Books)
• Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant (Verso)
• Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin (Brow Books)

Podcasts

• The Heart
• How to Survive the End of the World
• Healing Justice
• The Oldest Profession
• Meat
• Silent Waves

Music

• Kelsey Lu
• Sampa the Great
• Foxtrott
• Young Fathers
• Moses Sumney

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction ...

‘Identifying myself as a feminist writer is still important and still a political stance, but I need to be constantly aware of the implications, power relations, and more importantly, the responsibility that comes with it.’

Intan Paramaditha is a fiction writer and an academic. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the author of a short story collection, Apple and Knife, and her upcoming novel, Gentayangan (The Wandering), received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN and PEN/Heim Translation Fund from PEN America.

‘The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful – in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.’

Jia Tolentino explores the intersections of feminism, the internet and pop culture in startlingly original ways. Her first book, Trick Mirror, a collection of essays, is a New York Times bestseller and has earned her comparisons to Joan Didion. She was recently described by Rebecca Solnit as ‘the best young essayist at work in the US’. A staff writer at the New Yorker, she was previously a contributing editor at The Hairpin and deputy editor at Jezebel. She also served in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps. 

Maria Tumarkin writes books, essays, reviews, and pieces for performance and radio; she collaborates with sound and visual artists and has had her work carved into dockside tiles. She is the author of four books of ideas. Her fourth ...

‘I see an unashamedly feminist country where the patriarchy is dismantled, where access to abortion is unambiguously legal, where the safety of women is of the utmost importance and violence against women is confronted as the crisis that it is.’

Mehreen Faruqi is the Greens’ Senator for New South Wales, and the first Muslim woman to become senator in Australia. Faruqi has been involved in feminist and anti-racist activism throughout her life. She introduced the first ever bill to decriminalise abortion while an MP in New South Wales Parliament and won the closure of pregnancy discrimination loopholes. Faruqi’s work for reproductive rights was recognised with the feminist Edna Ryan Grand Stirrer award in 2017 ‘for inciting others to challenge the status quo’. Her ‘Love Letters to Mehreen’ series has highlighted the online harassment, bullying and toxicity experienced by women of colour in public life.

Michelle Law is a writer and actor working across print, theatre and screen. Her work includes the play Single Asian Female and the SBS show Homecoming Queens, which she co-created, co-wrote and starred in. Her latest play, Miss Peony, will be staged at Belvoir St Theatre.

‘The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.’

No voice coming out of the Arab Spring was as urgent and essential as Mona Eltahawy’s. Her new book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, is an incendiary call to arms from a journalist defined by her wit and her power. She is also the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution and is a contributor to the New York Times opinion pages. Her commentaries have appeared in several other publications and she is a regular guest analyst on various television and radio shows.

'Sometimes they’ll say, "I went through this, but it’s nothing like what you went through." But I tell them that, if I drown in 60ft of water and you drown in 30ft, we both still drowned.'

Monica Lewinsky is a social activist, global public speaker, consultant and Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair. She advocates for a safer social media environment and addresses such topics as digital resilience, privacy, cultivating compassion, overcoming shame and equality for women. She was recently named as a producer on the upcoming season of American Crime Story.

‘Most cities are gender-blind and disregard women’s experiences. Engaging with the stories of women and girls is crucial for making cities safer.’

Nicole Kalms is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and founding director of the XYX Lab at Monash University. Examining the nexus of gender, urban spaces and advocacy, the XYX Lab brings together planners, policy-makers, local government and stakeholders to make tangible the experiences of underrepresented communities. In her role, Kalms is leading two significant research projects: ‘Urban Exposure: Interactively Mapping the Systems of Sexual Violence in Cities’; and ‘Understanding the Spaces of Sexual Harassment in Public Transport’. Kalms is the author of Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism.

‘We can’t get away from the fact that women with disabilities are vulnerable. Society is slowly changing, but as much as people hate hearing it women are already on the back foot and then you add a disability ... we’re so much further behind.’

Nicole Lee is a family violence survivor and passionate public advocate who has played a major role through her appointment to Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council. Lee, who also uses a wheelchair, focuses on family violence perpetrated against those who have a disability, or who depend on carers or family members for support. After suffering a decade of abuse at the hands of her former husband, Lee now uses her lived experience of family violence to speak out for those who don’t yet have a voice.

‘As we commit to each other to build this movement of resistance and liberation, no one can be an afterthought.’

Raquel Willis is a Black queer transgender activist, writer and speaker dedicated to inspiring and elevating marginalized individuals, particularly transgender women of color. She is currently the Executive Editor of Out Magazine. In 2018, she was named a Jack Jones Literary Arts Sylvia Rivera Fellow. She's also a part of Echoing Ida, a national Black women and nonbinary writers' collective. She is a former National Organizer for Transgender Law Center.

In 2018, she was also named an Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellow. She launched Black Trans Circles, a project focused on developing the leadership of Black trans women in the South and Midwest by creating healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma, incubating community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence and elevating nuanced narratives through a national storytelling campaign.

Born and raised in Augusta, GA, Raquel Willis has a loving mother who supports her in all of the work that she does. She is also the youngest child in her family and has a sister, a brother, two nieces and three nephews. She credits the passing of her late father as the catalyst for her transition and career. Raquel is a thought leader on gender, race and intersectionality.

‘That the voices of Women of Colour are getting louder and more influential is a testament less to the accommodations made by the dominant white culture and more to their own grit in a society that implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – wants them to fail.’

Ruby Hamad is an author and PhD candidate in media studies and post-colonial studies at UNSW, where she is researching media criticism and coverage of Arabs and the Middle East. In 2018, Hamad’s Guardian article – ‘How White Women Use Strategic Tears to Silence Women of Colour’  – became a global flash point for debate around feminism’s intersection with racial and colonial oppression. Her new book is White Tears/Brown Scars.

Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and author, whose work explores settler colonialism, slavery, and post-colonial migration in Australia. Chingaipe’s first book of non-fiction detailing the untold stories of convicts of ...

Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer , the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning and On Peter Carey. She holds a PhD in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in Australia and America. Her awards include the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for Non-Fiction and the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Sarah is a regular contributor to The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.

Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela: A biography of survival. She is a South African writer whose work is focussed on race, gender and democracy. She has written for a range of international publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Newsweek and Al Jazeera. Msimang is the curator of the literature and ideas program at Perth Festival.

Sophie Black is a writer, journalist and Crikey’s editor-in-chief. She has worked in senior management across cultural and media organisations, and has written for outlets such as The Guardian and The Monthly. As the Wheeler ...

‘Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. When I would not or could not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred.’

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her work has been recognised nationally and internationally for the urgency and depth of her incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race and gender. Her most recent book, THICK: And Other Essays, is a critically acclaimed Amazon bestseller that situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its centre. THICK won the 2019 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and is a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction. Along with Roxane Gay, she is the co-host of Hear To Slay, providing listeners with incisive reads on politics and popular culture: a self-styled ‘black feminist podcast of your dreams’.

‘The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.’

With five novels – White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time – and two collections of essays – Changing My Mind and Feel Free – Zadie Smith has attracted countless awards, critical acclaim and devoted fans. Grand Union is her first collection of short stories.