The Case Against Fragrance/Anaethesia

Sat 8 Sep 2018

Kate Cole-Adams + Kate Grenville

Queensland Terrace, State Library of Queensland

Ethics / Health

345

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

What's in fragrance? Who tests it for safety? What does it do to people? The more Grenville investigated, the more she felt this was a story that should be told.

How does the unconscious mind deal with the body’s experience of being cut open and ransacked? And how can we help ourselves through it?

Chair: Scott Stephens

Copies of The Case Against Fragrance are available for purchase HERE.

#Artists

Kate Cole-Adams

Kate Cole-Adams is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. Her 2017 book Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness, won the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (non-fiction category) and longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize. It is a personal, journalistic and philosophical exploration of what happens when we go under. Her 2008 novel, Walking to the Moon, was short-listed in the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (Unpublished Manuscript).

She is fascinated by unconscious processes and other things she can’t understand.

Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her bestselling novel The Secret River received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Lilian’s Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History.

In 2015 she published One Life, an acclaimed account of her mother. Her most recent book is a non-fiction book called The Case Against Fragrance.

#Moderator

Scott Stephens

Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He and Waleed Aly are also the authors of Uncivil Wars: How contempt is corroding democracy (Quarterly Essay 87) (2022). He is editor of Justice and Hope: Essays, lectures and other writings by Raimond Gaita (2023), and the co-editor and translator of two volumes of the selected writings of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (2005) and The Universal Exception (2006).