What's Fair?

Sat 7 May 2022

slq Auditorium 1, level 2, State Library

Main Festival

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But Covid has definitively exposed shocking inequalities in wealth and access. Race, gender, class, disability and geography are all factors. So what’s fair in the land of the (apparent) fair go?

Panel: Anita Heiss, Bri Lee, Rick Morton
Chair: Yves Rees

Event Sponsor

#Artists

Rick Morton

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.

Yves Rees

Dr Yves Rees (they/them) is a writer and historian based on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are a Lecturer in History at La Trobe University, the co-host of Archive Fever history podcast, and the author of All About Yves: Notes from a Transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021). Rees was awarded the 2020 ABR Calibre Essay Prize and a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship. Their writing has featured in the Guardian, The Age, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, Meanjin and Overland, among other publications.