Join historian Mark McKenna for a compelling exploration of his latest book, The Shortest History of Australia. In this powerful and deeply humane history, McKenna offers a new version of our national story: a modern Australia permeated by First Nations history; a multicultural society with an island mindset; a continent of epic beauty and extreme natural events; a country obsessed by war abroad but blind to its founding war at home; and a thriving nation-state still to realise its political independence.

McKenna’s wise and humane history reveals the surprising in the familiar, reframing the past so we can see the present more clearly.
Hosted by writer and journalist, Jack Latimore (Birpai-Thungutti).

Free event. Suitable for ages 15 and up.

Join us at Avid Reader Bookshop for Anna Goldsworthy in conversation with John Birmingham, to discuss Anna's new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made.

Quarterly Essay 102, Anna Goldsworthy explores the implications of AI for art, culture and the self – how it forces a confrontation with what it means to be human, raising questions about human connection, learning and how we live our lives; and bringing new existential and ethical risks. 

In The Ruin of Magic, award-winning writer Kate Holden meditates on her instinctive yearning for a long-ago Europe against the natural belonging she feels to the Australian landscape, and asks, What is a home? The strongest shelter or the most lethal trap? A museum of ourselves or a showcase of fashions? 

Kate Holden is the author of The Winter Road, winner of the 2021 Walkley Book Award and the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction, as well as the two memoirs, In My Skin and The Romantic.

We are delighted to welcome her back to Maleny.

Kate Holden will be in conversation with Steven Lang.