Event #15

Jock Serong: A Suitable Man

Thu 8 Oct 2026

Jock Serong + Phil Brown

Powerhouse Theatre

Regular Program

#Performances

Thu 8 Oct 2026 - 3:15pm

Powerhouse Theatre

Book Now

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

Jock Serong: A Suitable Man

In conversation with Phil Brown
3:15–4:15pm, Thursday 8 October, Powerhouse Theatre

For more than 100 years, Fletcher Jones was a hallmark of Australian fashion – but the man behind the brand was cut from extraordinary cloth. An autodidact who left school at 13 and survived the horrors of World War I, David Fletcher Jones went on to open a factory in Warrnambool that would become a retail empire founded on profit-sharing and staff ownership. In this warm and inspiring biography, Jock Serong tells the riveting story of an entrepreneur whose vision revolutionised Australian menswear and whose life reflected the social progress of the twentieth century.

#Artists

Jock Serong

Jock Serong is the author of Quota, winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction; The Rules of Backyard Cricket, shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, finalist of the 2017 MWA Edgar Awards for Best Paperback Original, and finalist of the 2017 Indie Book Awards Adult Mystery Book of the Year; and On the Java Ridge, which won the Colin Roderick Award and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK), and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Awards. He has won praise for his trilogy of historical novels Preservation; The Burning Island, which earned him the ARA Historical Novel Prize and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France); and The Settlement, which was shortlisted for the Voss Prize and the ARA Historical Novel Prize. His most recent novel, Cherrywood, was shortlisted for both the 2025 Indie Book Awards and the 2025 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year.

Phil Brown

Phil Brown is a journalist, poet, author and editor of the independent arts website InReview Queensland which features on the website indailyqld.com.au. His most recent book is Confessions of a Minor Poet (Transit Lounge, 2025).