Throwing Down The Gauntlet
To 'throw down the gauntlet’ is to issue a challenge.
In The Unmoderated Series, we will be challenging you to respond to (and digest) the ideas of three big-picture thinkers who will address Money, Power and Sex with wit, humour and intellectual rigor.
Think about this as an anti-TED Talk: more time, more space, bigger ideas.
We’ve given each author one topic and one hour to talk about the most pressing issues of our times.
Come along to find out what they will say and how they will use that hour.
But who have we entrusted to guide these big topics?
Check out who is running the show on Saturday 22 February.
Unmoderated: Rick Morton on MONEY
Rick is an award-winning Australian writer and a columnist for The Saturday Paper, known for his outspoken views on journalism, editorial standards and popular culture.
In his memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, he writes eloquently about growing up on a remote cattle station in far-west Queensland, before his family was thrown into a hand-to-mouth existence. Growing up a poor, rural, white kid shaped Rick's sense of humour, as well as his perspective on society.
Join him in a conversation about Money, class and growing up on the wrong side of the tracks at 11am on Sat 22 Feb.
Unmoderated: Maria Tumarkin on POWER
Maria Tumarkin is an Australian historian, essayist and novelist whose latest offering Axiomatic was listed in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2019 and was short-listed for the Stella Prize.
In Axiomatic Maria's writing is both beautiful and direct in a collection of essays that explores five axioms - cliches we hear everyday. Phrases like "time heals all wounds", "history repeats itself" and "you can't enter the same river twice" serve as prompts for Maria's explorations of the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.
Helen Garner says "Nobody can write like Maria Tumarkin. She charges headlong into the worst and best of us with an iron refusal to soften or decorate; sentences bare of artifice, stripped back to the bone, to the nerve; fired by raging grief and love."
Join us in an unmissable session with one of Australia's most remarkable and surprising minds, as she explores Power in the everyday on Sat 22 Feb at 12.30pm.
Unmoderated: Sanam Maher on SEX
Sanam Maher is one of the most important feminist voices of our generation. She is a Pakistani journalist whose searing first book chronicles the life and death of a social media celebrity - a woman who has been referred to as Pakistan's version of Kim Kardashian.
A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch is an investigation into a murder, but it is also a portrait of a society grappling with women's role, place, power and sexuality.
This session is for anyone who is thinking about popular culture, gender and the future of women.
As a side-note, to get to know her a little better ahead of her time on the west coast, check out her brilliant Instagram we recommend you follow @topbastard.
Join her from 2pm as she challenges us to move beyond our expectations on Sat 22 Feb.