Growing Up In Country Australia

Lech Blaine is a writer from country Queensland. He is the author of the memoir Car Crash and the Quarterly Essay Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power. Lech regularly contributes essays to The Monthly.

Rick Morton is an award-winning journalist and the author of three non-fiction books. His latest My Year of Living Vulnerably launched on 17 March, 2021.

Morton is also the author of One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP, 2018) and the extended essay On Money (Hachette, 2020).

Dirt is part family memoir, part book of essays about growing up on the outside in Australia. It explores intergenerational trauma, poverty, addiction and mental health and the role of a mother who tried to love enough for the failures of everyone else around her. He is the Senior Reporter for The Saturday Paper. Originally from Queensland, Rick worked in Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra as the social affairs writer for The Australian with a particular focus on social policy including the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, the welfare system, religion and employment services. Rick is the winner of the 2013 Kennedy Award for Young Journalist of the Year and the 2017 Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist. He appears regularly on television, radio and panels discussing politics, the media, writing and social policy.

One Hundred Years of Dirt was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, longlisted for the 2018 Walkley Book of the Year, and longlisted for both Biography Book of the Year and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year for the 2019 ABIA Awards. Dirt was also shortlisted for the National Biography Award.

Emma A. Jane — formerly published as Emma Tom — is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. Her research specialties are eclectic, and include sex and gender, misogyny on the internet, the future of work, and the social and ethical impacts of emerging technology. In 2021, Stanford University ranked her as being in the top 2% of researchers in the world based on citations of her academic work. Emma has presented the findings of her research to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, and unsuspecting Uber drivers (sorry about that). Prior to her career in academia, she spent nearly 25 years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media, much of which was spent fielding burlesque electronic rape and death threats. Over the course of her working life, Emma has received multiple awards and prizes for her research, her teaching, her journalism, and her fiction. Diagnosis Normal is her eleventh book. On the weekends, she makes GIFs of her dogs, fools around with Excel macros, and reads books about how to read books by Wittgenstein. She was surprisednotsurprised when she was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.