Two days at Melbourne Writers Festival 2014
Oh, It’s that time of year again! Melbourne Writers Festival 2014. Twice a year (Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) in August, and Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) in May) I like to take a couple of days to stuff my mind full of literary thoughts, intriguing ideas and challenging concepts. (You can see all the previous years’ reports from both cities here.)
This past weekend was my designated MWF weekend. It was a glorious spring-like weekend, with blue skies and sunshine – so it almost seemed a shame to be indoors, but I forced myself!
I’m often asked which Festival I prefer, given I have attended both SWF and MWF each year for many years now. To start with, I have to admit, it’s not nearly as much fun attending solo as it is when I am accompanied by my partner-in-crime, M in Sydney. So, that colours my view of Melbourne a bit. But there are other aspects which I feel are lacking in the MWF.
MWF just doesn’t have the same ‘festival’ atmosphere as SWF does. The organisation seems a bit lacklustre too (no daily programs, many unannounced venue changes, session facilitators who don’t introduce themselves, a user-unfriendly printed program, and a challenging website…)
Plus of course, the biggest difference is the lack of big-ticket free events. SWF runs multiple free sessions in the Walsh Bay wharf venues each day. It’s always a gamble whether you’re far enough forward in the queue to make it into one…but that just adds to the fun and spontaneity of the day (and often the packed-out ones will be broadcast outside so you can sit in the sun on the wharf and listen).
My impression of MWF is that we are expected to diarise and lock into sessions, making special trips to attend individual events rather than stay for a day and take pot-luck. Perhaps this is a reflection of the Sydney and Melbourne populations – spontaneous and devil-may-care vs sober and calculated? 😉
Anyway, despite all this, I still enjoy my time at MWF each year and always walk away with too many new titles to add to my TBR list and lots of ideas to mull over.
Some of the highlights of my two days at Melbourne Writers Festival 2014:
Over the course of the two days I went to 6 sessions (I used a 5-Pack Festival Pass which gives you an additional free Friday session). My approach to choosing the sessions was the same as in previous years – choose one I really wanted to go to each day, then build the rest of the program around it, so that I end up with a back-to-back run of sessions. It’s a form of literary-lotto.
I started with a session called Words that Heal, which included GP and novelist Jacinta Halloran (Dissection and Pilgrimage) and academic Susan McLaine (in conversation with Jane Sullivan) discussing the concept of ‘bibliotherapy’. There are many definitions of bibliotherapy, but they essentially all contain a common element of using literature to assist people with psychological, social or emotional problems.
McLaine told how the word ‘bibliotherapy’ was inscribed above ancient Greek libraries and meant ‘healing (or medicine) for the soul’, and reported on some of the evidence that bibliotherapy is effective in the treatment of mild/medium anxiety or depression. This article: “The Reading Cure” by Blake Morrison was referred to as a good summary of the concept and its uses.
McLaine recounted some of the work she has done with bibliotherapy within the prison system, including the use of extracts from Mandela’s The Long Walk to Freedom and various poems and short stories. Halloran described her experiences teaching a course for 4th year medical students in developing empathetic skills though literature, as well as her experiences in general as a GP. A couple of the titles Halloran mentioned that she has ‘prescribed’ to patients included: Kate Richards, Madness: A Memoir and Sian Prior, Shy: A Memoir.
The very next session, Molly Oldfield: Secret Museum was my favourite of the two days. Molly Oldfield is one of the ‘elves’ for the BBC television show QI, presented by Stephen Fry and she also writes a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph and researches for the Radio 4 programme, The Museum of Curiosity. Her book, The Secret Museum grew out of her discovery that most of the world’s museums held incredibly interesting items in their backrooms, never to be seen by the public. In this book, she tells the stories of 60 of these objects (one from each museum). Oldfield was in conversation with David Astle (DA of crossword puzzle fame) and the discussion was wide-ranging, illustrated with a fabulous prezi presentation, and totally entertaining.
On Saturday, I kicked off with the session Sophie Cunningham: Cyclone Tracy. In her latest book, Warning: Cyclone Tracy, Cunningham shares the stories of those who survived Cyclone Tracy, which destroyed Darwin at Christmas 1974. During question time, it became evident that there was at least one of those survivors in the audience, and his personal story added to those that Cunningham had described. She said that she attempted in this book to tell the details of what happened to people on and following that day, by working from accounts held by the Northern Territory archives – which have been collected from 1975 onwards. She described the social and political implications of the evacuation and the clean-up, and the psychological aftermath of the event itself.
I vividly remember the days following Cyclone Tracy, as we had family members living in Darwin, plus I have a friend who survived it with his family. This is one I will definitely be adding to the TBR pile.
My final session was also a highlight. It was Reading Fashion, a discussion centred around the National Gallery of Victoria’s current exhibition Fashion Detective which takes a selection of miscellaneous garments and accessories as the starting point for a series of investigations. It combines both material evidence, forensics and conservational techniques with commissioned fictions to examine and explain a number of unattributed or mysterious items in the NGV textiles collection.
The session brought together the exhibition curator Danielle Whitfield, conservator Bronwyn Cosgrove and crime author Sulari Gentill (Gentlemen Formerly Dressed, the fifth Rowland Sinclair Mystery), to discuss how both forensics and fictions can inform our interpretation of an object and its past. Fascinating stuff. And I must try to pop in and see the exhibition before it closes this Sunday (31 August).
Overall
Now that I’ve written up my highlights and had a chance to reflect on them, I’ve realised that, once again, I enjoyed the non-fiction sessions the most. I did see two novelists speak (Paddy O’Reilly (The Wonders) and Gerald Murnane (A Million Windows). While they were also both fascinating, because I hadn’t read either of the books being discussed, it was more difficult to be fully engaged in those sessions.
I’ve certainly taken away a lot to think about, and hopefully, I can entice M back ‘over east’ again for next year’s MWF!
NB…in some cases, I’ve added the most recent book by writers mentioned in italics but do click through to the MWF website for more extensive bios.
