Coming events at Vision Australia Library

00:09 UU (Program theme)

Take a look. You take a look inside the book. Take a look. You.

00:24 S1

Hello and welcome to Hear This. I'm Frances Keyland, and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, where we discuss books in the Vision Australia collection. But not only books, we also have events. The library has wonderful events and today we have a newcomer to Hear This. It's Maureen O'Reilly who's filling in for Leeanne Surjadi, and she has a wide range of events coming up that you can either attend in person or on Zoom. So without further ado, let's hear from Maureen. 

Hello again. I'm here with Maureen O'Reilly. Now Maureen is taking over from Leeanne Surjadi. How wonderful. A library community engagement coordinator, and Maureen is taking on the role and also just filling in for Leeanne for the next year while Leanne's on maternity leave. Good luck to Leanne. Hi, Maureen.

01:21 S2

Hey, Frances. How are you today?

01:22 S1

I'm well, thank you yourself.

01:24 S2

I am very, very good. Thank you. 

01:26 S1

Oh, good. It's lovely to have you here. And I've met you a couple of times. So we're not new to each other?

01:32 S2

No, it's very exciting. I have heard this program for the last two and a bit months that I've been with the Vision Australia library, so actually being on air, I feel like quite the celebrity.

01:43 S1

Oh, that's so kind. So yeah, we're going to start off today. Can you launch us into what you want to talk about today?

01:50 S2

Oh, we have so many things to talk about. We have what we have been doing, what we've got coming up. But I thought we could start with a fun thing, which is what we've been reading, because we are library and we do love our books. So, Francis, what have you been reading?

02:05 S1

Oh my gosh. Now, I've been reading something about The Haunting of the Borley Rectory, which is this place in England that's supposed to be the most haunted place ever. And it's just a bit of fun reading. It's fiction, but I quite like a chilling ghost story. What about you?

02:22 S2

I'm reading a book that's actually very, very close to my heart. My son bought it for me for Mother's Day, and it's really the first book that any of my children have chosen for me, as distinct from being kind of told what mother would like to read. So it's Radio Hours by Victoria Pearman, and it's really interesting. It's about the women that were doing the radio plays and working on air all the way through the World War Two, while the men were off at war. And then what happened post war when the men came back? And it's quite comedic in some ways, but it's really, really interesting and it's a load of fun. So it's a bit special that it was a gift. 

But I do have another book that's sitting very, very high on my must read list at the moment. So it's from the lovely Alexis Wright, who we had at the Virgin Australia Library back in March for our in Conversation, and I have been wanting to read Praiseworthy ever since, and Praiseworthy has just won the Stella Prize for 2024, so that's really just inspired me that I do have to read it. Any of our listeners who are interested in Alexis Wright and her book Praiseworthy is in the Vision Australia library. But probably more importantly, you can go back to the catalogue where the podcasts are for In Conversation, and you can retrospectively listen to Alexis Wright's In Conversation, which was really very, very fascinating. So I encourage everyone to listen to Alexis. And then if they have time to also read Praiseworthy.

03:53 S1

What else have you got for us, Maureen?

03:55 S2

Oh well, we've had a very busy month or so. We have just finished our writing for wellbeing programme and that was an amazing programme that we ran with a number of our very talented writers, from the Vision Australia Library that was facilitated by Sian Prior. We got fabulous feedback on that. It's a program that we've run previously, so quite confident we'll be running that again next year for anyone that missed out. And along a similar vein, we are about to start our reading for wellbeing program. So that is commencing on the 19th of August. And that is essentially a bibliotherapy. 

So that is where we have a wonderful facilitator who reads a number of short stories or short pieces of writing, and then as a group, you get to reflect on them and talk about the emotions that it may bring up within you. Memories. Some of our attendees will be quite vocal, others may just prefer to join the group and listen to reflect privately as well.

05:02 S1

You get reflective anyway. Sometimes in winter time I find a lot of people, but that's a lovely thing.

05:06 S2

Yeah, it is lovely. And also a lot of the programs we do are about writing. So it means that people who aren't into writing so much as reading other people's writing, have a lovely opportunity to join us as well.

05:20 S1

Sounds great. And that's starting again, the 19th of August. It is indeed.

05:25 S2

Right. OK, so that will be a monthly series that people can join us online via Zoom. 

05:30 S1

Fantastic. And there's yet more.

05:32 S2

Oh, there's always more. So we had a wonderful treat yourself. It was two weeks ago now, and a nice cold winter's evening, where we spoke about If I Could Talk to the Animals. So all books that were animal related. And it was so much fun. There was a lot of recollections of children's books, but also a lot of adult books as well. So we went from what I would describe as very meaningful Winnie the Pooh stories to some personal favorites of... Wind in the Willows. We had Black Beauty. We then went all the way through to other animal stories, including Animal Farm, that were a lot more metaphorical and I suppose a more adult audience as well. 

So our next Treat Yourself is coming up on the 27th of August. So that's a daytime one. And that is upending the hourglass. So looking at historical fiction. So it's not all bonnets and ladies and... hoity-toity-ness, but a whole gamut of anything that falls under the historical fiction realm. 

06:39 S1

Oh, that sounds fascinating. Yeah, I love historical fiction.

06:41 S2

Oh, well, you can join us.

06:43 S1

I might just do that. Thank you. 

06:45 S2

You did for our sci-fi one, which was very, very helpful because it's not a genre that I'm a big reader in. So it was good to have other people helping.

06:54 S1

Yeah. What's next?

06:55 S2

We have just commenced our short story writing course, and that's with Amanda O'Callaghan, who's from the Queensland Writers Centre, and that has been fantastic. So we have one more week left in that course, and that course has attracted a lot of new library members actually, who don't normally participate in our programs, and that always makes me really happy. It's good seeing familiar faces and hearing familiar voices, but we like to have a big wide group of people that have different experiences, and it's just nice to mix it up.

07:30 S1

Read more, read this. There's still some more.

07:32 S2

Oh, there are we have we have one that I'm very, very excited about. We spoke just before about Alexis Wright's In Conversation that we had back in March. So we have an upcoming in conversation on the 24th of July. And that is with the incredibly talented Les Poggi. So Les is or was a journalist. He was an editor of newspapers across Sydney, Queensland, Brisbane. Very talented journalist who, once he retired, moved on to writing and published a number of books. And then unfortunately, Les lost vision progressively through both eyes and ultimately ended at the point that he thought his writing career was over and he wouldn't be able to write any more books. 

But he had this one, one little spark that was sitting inside him that wouldn't go away. "I have this idea for a book" - so he has published with the aid of his very talented children, which include Ben Pobjie, who's also a journalist and a writer and a comedian, and Emily McGuire, who's a very talented writer. And they have self-published his latest book, and that involved Les dictating 78,000 words. So it is just phenomenal to hear him talk about it. So Les' most recent book is Whispers in Empty Rooms and that's in the Vision Australia library, and I really encourage everyone to join us on one of our wonderful radio people. Dave Tredinnick is going to be doing the interview as well. So a lot of our listeners will recognise Dave's voice, and Dave is very excited about it. Yep.

09:21 S1

I'm looking forward to that. What date was that again?

09:23 S2

That is on the 24th of July. And that's at 1 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time. 

09:31 S1

Okay. And to register?

09:32 S2

To register, if you go to the Vision Australia Library website and you go down to our events page and all the details are there and it will be on Zoom, so you can sit in the comfort of your own home with a nice warm cup of tea or coffee, and we encourage everyone to put questions into the chat as well. And Les is very open to answering any questions that come through and really having quite the interactive experience.

09:59 S1

Oh fantastic. Maureen, that sounds great. Yeah. And is there anything else?

10:04 S2

That is because you cannot do enough things. Really know what we also have coming up, which is a first for the library. And we're actually incredibly... overwhelmed with the response that we've been getting to this. We have our Writing Tools and Technology workshop, I suppose you'd call it. So it's accessible writing tools and technology, and that's a hybrid event. So it will be online. So again, all of our Vision Australia clients are there carers people that work with or study alongside people who are vision impaired can all join us online in Zoom, but it's also going to be in person in Kopuru in Queensland, our Parramatta office in New South Wales and our Kooyong office in Victoria. 

So we will have a webinar that goes through a plethora of writing tools and technology that people can utilise to help them continue with their writing as their vision has deteriorated. After the session, people who actually come on site can then have a demonstration of all of these tools with our very talented accessibility team and Vision Store team, and they can look at what would be best suited for them and their particular condition. Sometimes people have got an amazing tool and they think that this is great, this has just revolutionised my world, and their eyesight may have deteriorated, and they don't realise that there could be something that is actually even better for them, or even if their eyesight has remained at a consistent level. 

Technology has improved. So something that they purchased five, ten, 15 years ago and they think is actually meeting their needs. There may be actually something better on the market now. So I think it's just a really good opportunity for people to be able to access the best possible tools that are out there.

12:03 S1

Fantastic. Maureen. Yeah, I agree, yeah. So anything else?

12:07 S2

We have one more. But this is for our younger, younger members of Vision Australia Library and our Vision Australia community. We have coming up the Children's Book Week. I have to think what we call it Children's Book Week. And we are very, very privileged to have Sally Rippon joining us. So Sally is a current Australian Children's Laureate Foundation member for 24 and 25, and she's going to spend a full day at the Vision Australia Kooyong offices with our youngest members, and they are incredibly fortunate to have access to such a wonderful author.

12:50 S1

What day is she coming in?

12:51 S2

Sally is coming in on the 20th of August, and in the morning she's going to work with our younger clients, and they're going to create fantastical worlds and amazing characters and incredible journeys and stories that these characters will take part in. And then she's going to mold all these ideas together into a book. And this book will be published in large print, braille and also audio format in the Vision Australia radio. So there'll be wonderful tactile books, and it will really just be a melting pot of ideas from everyone that Sally's going to pull together.

13:32 S1

So there's a lot going on. And congratulations to you for getting through this. Um, talking on the radio. This is your first time on radio, though. You've done a lot of public speaking, so. And you've been wonderful. I thank you. Yeah. So we'll hear again from you next month.

13:49 S2

And you will indeed. I'll be back and I'll be able to tell you how a lot of our events that we've had have gone, and how much everyone enjoyed them, and some new events that we have coming up as well. Very busy in the Vision Australia library.

14:01 S1

You certainly are. Thank you so much Maureen.

14:04 S2

Oh thank you Frances.

14:10 S1

And a big thanks to Maureen O'Reilly for coming in to tell us about the exciting things that have happened and also happening in Vision Australia Library. One of the events that Maureen mentioned is the Treat Your Shelf, and that's going to be on the 27th of August, treat your shelf. And in this session, uh, the topic is historical fiction, which covers such a wide range of books. Really. And I thought I would have a sample of a reader recommended title. This is called Northwoods, and it's by Daniel Mason. 

When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little did they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. An English soldier destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war, famine, envy, and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, only to discover that the ancient trees refused to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle. As each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realise that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. Let's hear a sample of Northwoods by Danielle Mason. It's got multiple narrators and very beautifully narrated as well.

15:35 S3

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves and the quaking bogs. Fast. They ran steam rose from the fens and meadows. Bramble tore at their clothing, shredding it to rags that hung about their shoulders. They crashed through thickets, hid in tree hollows and bare caves, rattling sticks before they slipped inside. They fled as if it were a child's game, as if they had made off with plunder. My plunder, he whispered as he touched her lips. They laughed with the glee of it. They could not be found. Solemn men marched past them with harquebuses cocked in their elbows, peered into the undergrowth, stuffed greasy pinches of tobacco into their pipes. 

The world had closed over them. Gone was England gone. The colony. They were nature's wards. Now, he told her they had crossed into a realm lying beneath him in the leaves, in the low hollow of an oak. She arched her neck to watch the belted boots and leather scabbards swinging across the wormy ceiling of the world. So close, she thought, biting his hand to stifle her joy and twined. They watched the stalking dogs and met their eyes, saw recognition, crossed their dog faces, the conspiring shiver of their tails as they continued on. They ran in open fields. They hid within the shadows of the bird flocks and in the rivers below the silver veil of fish, their souls peeled from their shoes. They bound them with their rags with bark, then lost them in the sucking fens.

17:33 S1

And that was a sample of Northwoods by Danielle Mason. Daniel is [spells name], and I have started reading this book and it is absolutely beautiful. Yes. Beautiful descriptions of nature and wonderful characters. I would recommend this book as well and thank you to Bob for recommending it. It puts me in mind very much of Geraldine Brooke and what she writes about, in People of the Book or other books that take a geographical point or an object and explore the history of that object over years or even centuries. I just love that sort of historical fiction. 

People may be familiar... there is another book in the collection by Danielle Mason called The Piano Tuner. Again, historical fiction. In 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake leaves his wife and quiet business in London for the jungles of Burma. He has been asked to repair a rare grand piano belonging to a controversial British Army officer, who uses the piano and music to help keep the peace among warring local Burmese princes. The author was born in 1976. He's a physician as well as a novelist. His first novel was The Piano Tuner, and he wrote it while he was still a medical student. There is a second novel which we don't have in the collection A Far Country, published in 2007, Northwoods is a fairly recent book, well, very recent, published in 2023. Thank you for that recommendation. 

The next novel is... one we don't often have this genre of. There's lots in the library, but I don't often recommend them. But I know that there are passionate Western readers out there, and this is definitely a Western, though not your old fashioned Western. This is part one of the Walt Longmire series. Award winning author Craig Johnson's critically acclaimed debut Western Mystery takes listeners to the breathtaking mountains of Wyoming for a tale of cold blooded vengeance. Two years earlier, four high school boys were given suspended sentences for assaulting a Cheyenne girl. Now, two of the boys have been killed, and only Sheriff Walt Longmire can keep the other two safe. Let's hear a sample of The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson. It's narrated by George Guidall.

19:54 S4

I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. Tell Katie I said hello and for her to call me. This was suspicious. Why? She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it. I jumped in the silver bullet and rolled through the drive through a torrent liquor to pick up a sixer of Rainier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes's bad habits with a full six pack. 

So I screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah. Mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be. So I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria moretti. Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana border. When he accepted the new position a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job. 

She didn't look like a cop, at least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps.

22:00 S1

And that was a sample of The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson, number one in the Walt Longmire Western Mysteries. That book goes for 13 hours and 19 minutes. Craig is spelt [spells name]. And there's quite a few in that series. A good strong western sheriff there taking on the crimes in the local area. He's written 20 of the Walt Longmire mystery series, the latest one being released in 2020 4th May 2024. And it's also a hit Netflix series, Longmire. And if you want to explore what Vision Australia Library has in Westerns, there's the traditional Westerns of Louis L'Amour. 

But there are a lot of more modern Western writers out there. So perhaps ring the library or do a bit of exploration on the catalog because it is a wonderfully rich genre and again, using characters in wonderful ways and using the landscape, often the dry, dusty, outback blocks of America. The next one is an unusual one. It's also reader recommended as well. So thanks again, Bob, for this one. The dressmakers of Yerranderie Prison or Narrandera Prison by Meredith Jaffe. 

Derek's daughter, Debbie, is getting married. He's desperate to be there, but he's banged up in a correctional centre for embezzling funds from the golf club. And thanks to his ex-wife, Lorraine, he hasn't spoken to Debbie in years. He wants to make a grand gesture to show her how much he loves her. But what inspiration strikes while he's embroidering a cushion at his weekly prison sewing circle? He'll make her a wedding dress, his fellow stitches rally around, and soon this motley gang of crims is immersed in a joyous whirl of silks, satins and covered buttons. But as time runs out and tensions rise both inside and outside the prison, the wedding dress project takes on a greater significance. With lives at stake, Derek feels his chance to reconcile with Debbie is slipping through his fingers. 

Let's hear a sample of the dressmakers of Yerranderie Prison. It's narrated by Simone Gessert.

24:20 S5

When Sharon enters the room, Derek doesn't know where to look. It's been five years since his sentencing hearing him standing in the dock, hands clasped to prevent the trembling. He expects. She's changed since then. Haven't they all? Though looking at her now, it's still easy to see that Sharon is his ex-wife's sister. They don't look the same. Exactly, but there's something about the general heft of her that declares a shared gene pool. The clusters of chairs and tables populating the visitor's room slow Sharon's progress. She gives the family, sweethearts and men in prison green a wide berth, as if being poor or a criminal is contagious. Even so, Derek admires her bravery, for that's what the force of her walk says I am here. Here is where Sharon has never been until now. 

Five years. He served five years with only the rare visit from his lawyer. Last time was to advise Derek. His final appeal had failed. And he'll serve every day of his seven year sentence. You'd get less for murder. Some bright spark had joked at the fancy doo they'd splashed out on at the golf club for Lorraine and Derek's 15th wedding anniversary. How right they were. Plenty of men in here are serving less time for crimes more serious than his murder might be. Diabolical rape, a terrible violence. Whereas stealing, or in Derek's case, embezzlement, is a crime against another person's property. And people value their property highly. 

Still, he's more than halfway through now. Every day he wakes up with less time ahead than the day before. It's what gets him out of bed in the mornings. Derek, Sharon says by way of greeting, plunking herself down on a plastic chair screwed to the floor.

26:21 S1

And that was The Dressmakers of Yerranderie Prison... by Meredith Jaffe. That book goes for 11.5 hours. Meredith is spelt [spells name] and it sounds like a lot of fun. That's Australian humor, literature and fiction, the categories that that comes under - and that goes for 11.5 hours. 

Thank you for joining us on Hear This today. I'm Frances Gilliland. Thank you to Maureen O'Reilly for her for her inaugural what's happening in the library segment and lots of wonderful events coming up If you would like to give feedback on one of the events to that's always welcome. Or if you would like to give feedback about the books, very, very welcome. And if you would like to just find out what's available in the library, if it could suit you, just call 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email library@visionaustralia.org - that's library at Vision Australia dot org. 

Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week for NAIDOC week. So just a heads up about NAIDOC week happening next week. We're going to have some wonderful samples of some books that again Maureen has created a bit of a list for. So join us next week on Hear This.