Lunch Hour Talks
Lunch Hour Talk 24 November 2022
24 November Lunch Hour Talk
Speakers: Dr Kerith Power & Dale Dengate
Topic: The First Australian Women’s Songbook
A treat for the last Lunch Hour Talk of 2022.
It was the brainwave of Dr Kerith Power and has become the work of half a lifetime. After the International decade of Women, she started collecting songs that women had written about their experiences of life. This book is a collection of women’s songs from the 1970s through the 1990s about living and working in Australia.
Kerith and Dale Dengate, both volunteers at JSNWL, have been involved in song writing, singing, organizing festivals and performing with women’s groups. The Songbook is now an online archive of 50 Australian women. There are profiles about the women with audio files of their singing as well as lyrics and music.
Hear about the challenges of putting the book together, tracing the writers, and producing a concert to launch the book.
Kerith and Dale invite you to listen to a few extracts of songs which break through the stereotypes of women in Australia.
Where The meeting room at the Customs House Library, at Circular Quay.
When The talk will begin at 12.15, The room is open from 11.30 for tea/coffee/sandwiches
Entry $16 JSNWL members $22 non-members
PLEASE BOOK BY NOON Monday 21 November
LUNCH HOUR TALK 21 JULY 2022
21 July Lunch Hour Talk
Speakers: Meredith Burgmann & Nadia Wheatley
Topic: Radicals
In the exhilarating decade of the Sixties these two were arrested in campaigns against the Vietnam War and Apartheid, and in support of Aboriginal Land Rights, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, and ‘workers’ control’. In Radicals they share their own memories of that time and showcase the stories of eighteen fellow radicals who, either in reaction to a particular issue or simply in response to the zeitgeist, rejected the political views and values of their family, school, church and class. Like other members of their generation, they were determined to change the world – and they did.
In this discussion, Meredith and Nadia will be joined by Jozefa Sobski, whose journey of education and radicalisation in one of the stories told in this book.
Meredith Burgmann is a former academic who also served as a (Labor) president of the NSW Upper House. She is the co-author, with Verity Burgmann, of Green Bans, Red Union: The saving of a city and the editor of Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files.
Nadia Wheatley is an Australian writer whose books include The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift and the memoir Her Mother’s Daughter. Awards include the NSW Premier’s History Award (in 2002 and 2014) and the Age Book of the Year, Non-fiction (2001).
Jozefa Sobski AM was part of Sydney Women’s Liberation, NSW Women in Education and on the collective which produced the last issues of MeJane. She is Chair of JSNWL Board.
