ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author series
Steve Vizard will be in conversation with Frank Bongiorno on Nation, Memory, Myth. Gallipoli and the Australian Imaginary, a book in which Steve Vizard brings an original perspective to the foundational myth of Gallipoli as a sacred bearer of Australian national values and identity.
Thursday 8 May, 6:00-7:00pm
Kambri Cinema (Lowitja O'Donoghue Cultural Centre)
ANU Cultural Centre, Kambri Precinct
Acton, ACT, 2601
Free Event: Registration is required
In this scrupulously researched close reading of the Gallipoli mythology, Vizard dissects the elements common to all national myths that transform them into compelling symbolic performances of cultural memory and kinship, unpicking the tensions and explaining the ambiguities embodied within.
Nation, Memory, Myth offers the reader a challenging new look at the extraordinary vitality of myth as a unifying force that generates meaning for a nation and its citizens. Only by understanding myth's evolution across time and by disentangling it from history, memory and forgetting, can we begin to sense what an Australia in the twenty-first century may mean.
Steve Vizard is a prizewinning writer, broadcaster, lawyer and research professor at Monash University and the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide. He has written and edited books on topics ranging from Australia’s Constitutional Convention to Australia’s population challenge and Australian humour. He has helped create, write and produce numerous groundbreaking television shows, including Fast Forward, Big Girls Blouse, The Micallef Program and Seachange, and hosted his own Gold Logie-awarded TV Show Tonight Live.
Frank Bongiorno AM, Professor of History ANU, is currently President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Whitlam Institute Distinguished Fellow at Western Sydney University. His most recent book is Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia.
The vote of thanks will be given by award-winning historian Professor Christina Twomey, Chief Research Officer of the Australian Research Council.
Books are available for signing from 5.30pm and again after the event.
'Whether you are an Anzacophile or an Anzacophobe, Steve Vizard has provided a fascinating framework for understanding Anzac's imaginative stronghold over the Australian nation.' Clare Wright
'As a political and military event Gallipoli might well have been absurd. Vizard shows that it is only as a myth that it achieves a grandeur which endures.' Thomas Kenneally