In The Titanic Story of Evelyn Lisa Wilkinson - one of Australia's most admired and respected media personalities - explores the life of the only Australian survivor of the sinking of the Titanic. She tells the story of a brave young nurse who wanted to see the world, fell in love, but then almost lost it all in one of the greatest maritime tragedies ever known.

Somehow, the courageous role Evelyn Marsden played in the hours after the ship hit an iceberg has been forgotten. In this fascinating book Wilkinson brings together the drama of that night with Evelyn’s own extraordinary story.

Lisa Wilkinson’s own story (told in the 2023 autobiography It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This) is also remarkable. Hired as a girl Friday for the teen magazine Dolly, within two years she became the editor - the youngest-ever of a national magazine - a position she used to triple the circulation before being head-hunted over to Cleo by Kerry Packer himself. Many years later she was inevitably drawn into the world of television, co-hosting the Nine Network’s Today Show, before, eventually, joining the Ten Network as host of its prime-time award-winning news and current affairs program The Project.

Currently focused on her writing, Lisa is married to journalist and bestselling author Peter FitzSimons. They have three children.

This is a book of great contemplation… inviting us into tricky and uncertain territory… places we generally shy away from. Its dual voices unfold along parallel and intersecting tracks, charting the complex dance steps of Father/Daughter, Mother/Son, as they try on different roles. Weaving memory, anecdote and reflection the book asks what it takes to live a meaningful life all the way to the finish line.

Witty, cutting, meaningful, delightful.

David Carlin’s previous books include Our Father Who Wasn’t There, The Abyssinian Contortionist, and The After-Normal. Peta Murray is known for plays Wallflowering, and Salt.

We are delighted - honoured in fact - to open our 2026 series of conversations with former journalist and State Premier, Bob Carr, speaking about his new memoir, Bring Back Yesterday.

In October 2023 Bob’s wife of more than fifty years, Helena, suddenly died .

In this memoir he records his attempt to deal with his grief, switching between the present moment - pacing the night-time streets of Sydney - and reflections on his shared past with Helena, including ruminations on travel, conversations and cultural curiosity.

Bob Carr was the longest serving Premier of NSW. A committed conservationist, he used his term in power to create literally hundreds of National Parks, preserving vast areas of wilderness. He later held the position of Foreign Minister under Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd. He is the author of four books, including The Diary of a Foreign Minister.

Maisie and Charlie meet at a life-drawing session as undergraduates: she’s the model, he’s an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family.

Emily Lighezzolo’s bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core: a woman’s body – seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed. Life Drawing is an award-winning and unflinching novel for our times.

Hypothetically, would you want to live forever but be invisible, or have a short life and be seen? Hypothetically, would you give up wine forever or sex for ten years?Hypothetically, would you show a friend someone else’s nude?

Emily Lighezzolo has worked in Australian publishing for nearly a decade. Life Drawing won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the Queensland Literary Awards and is her first book. She lives in Meanjin/Brisbane.

Hugh Mackay, social psychologist extraordinaire - ‘the man who explains us to ourselves’ has a new book.

Just Saying is a series of twenty-five essays that take as their starting points statements from writers and thinkers as varied as Susan Sontag and Bertrand Russell, from Samuel Johnson to Gloria Steinem, from Plato to Miles Franklin.

In these reflections Mackay explores themes ranging from kindness and humility to power and prejudice; from gender equality to ethnic diversity; from coping with change to the damage inflicted on ourselves by revenge, and the great gulf between propriety and virtue.

Hugh Mackay is the bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Way We Are and The Kindness Revolution. He had a sixty-year career in social research and was for thirty years a weekly newspaper columnist. In recognition of his pioneering work in social research, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by five Australian universities, as well as being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia

This is Hugh’s third visit to Maleny for Outspoken. Hugh, himself, requested to be included in our program, citing the openness and intelligence of the audience. We couldn’t be more delighted to have him return.

Hugh is in conversation with Steven Lang.

We are, tonight, discussing the new book written by Elaine Green, acclaimed local author of 14 books about community and local history. Unfortunately Elaine is unwell. In her absence Peter Stevens, President of Lake Baroon Catchment Care Group, and myself, will do our best to explain why it was important to have it written.

Lake Baroon, Caring for Catchment, is a history of both Baroon Pocket, the dam that came to be built there, and of how a community undertook to improve the quality of the water throughout the catchment (along with lots of photos!)

It shows how a different approach to catchment care - one that involved listening to those who live and farm in the region - delivered remarkable results. It explains how the group grew, over a period of 25 years, from having one person employed for half a day a week, to the single most successful catchment care group in Queensland, with four full-time and two part time staff and a frankly astonishing budget that matches their achievements.

In a world of environmental woe this is a great story, one that deserves to be celebrated (and recreated in other catchments).

How to begin to introduce Dr Bob Brown? I mean, clearly, you all know exactly who he is and so any introduction is redundant. But, at the same time, the sheer breadth of his achievements over the last six decades are probably not as well known as they should be, so, please, bear with me for a moment.

After graduating from medicine in 1968, Bob worked in general practice in Canberra, London, Sydney and Perth. He moved to Tasmania in 1972, with his involvement in local environmental politics beginning in 1973, when he became an activist against the damming of Lake Pedder. Although the blockade was not successful, it was this initial clash that led to the formation of the Wilderness Society.

Six years later he became the President and was responsible for organising the blockade of the dam-works on Tasmania’s Franklin River in 1982. During that blockade, 1500 people were arrested and 600 jailed, including Bob, who spent 19 days in Risdon Prison. On the day of his release from jail, he was elected as the first Green into Tasmania’s Parliament.

In 1983, the Federal Government decided to intervene and gave the Franklin River heritage protection.

As a State MP, Bob introduced a wide range of private member’s initiatives. These included his work towards Freedom of Information, Death with Dignity, and Gay Law Reform. In 1987 his bill to ban semi-automatic guns was voted down by both Liberal and Labor members of the House of Assembly, nine years before the Port Arthur massacre. Two years later the same legislation was proposed and passed by the Liberal Party.

In 1993 he resigned from the Tasmanian Parliament and in 1996 was elected as a Tasmanian Senator to the Federal Parliament where he remained until 2012. In the meantime he was at the centre of the formation of the Australian Greens. After retiring he set up the Bob Brown Foundation, with the specific aim of ‘defending wild places, protecting wildlife, and empowering people to act for nature.’

Throughout his career Bob has been a tireless campaigner for the environment, in particular for the protection of forests. He’s also written several books, most recently the one we’re going to speak about tonight, Defiance.

It is a few years now since Heather Rose came to Maleny to speak about her memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. The book revealed that, aside from being a best-selling, internationally-published, award-winning novelist, she had also managed to live a truly remarkable life, pushing the boundaries of the extraordinary in her search for meaning.

Now she has returned to the novel with A Great Act of Love, a story that begins in 1839 when a young woman ‘of means’, Caroline Douglas, arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. After leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, she discovers that, in order to not just survive but flourish in her new life, she will have to navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists. But Caroline is carrying a secret of great magnitude and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.

Moving from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and on to early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention, inspired by true events. It is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.