"It seems that every generation needs to be told why Black Lives Matter. Here we are again." Professor Marcia Langton

Byron Writers' Festival is going online for the first time this year from August 6-8, and this week features a powerful keynote address from Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton.

Prof Langton, will deliver the Byron Writers Festival 2020 Thea Astley Address, which will be made available by podcast tomorrow, August 5.

Professor Langton said "I hope Thea Astley in the other world has watched the last few weeks of the Black Lives Movement and pondered on the history of Palm Island".

"When she wrote The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, published in 1996, she could not have imagined that the injustices meted out to the Palm Islanders from 1918 when the settlement was established, to 1957 when the Palm Island strike was savagely put down, and which she fictionalised in her second last novel, would result in a telling instance of how Black Lives Matter in history, in the present and for our future," Prof Langdon said.

"She passed on in 2004, the same year as Mulrunji (or Cameron) Doomadgee who died in a police cell on Friday 19 November in an encounter with Sergeant Chris Hurley. Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man, published in 2009, is an account of the events that followed.

"It seems that every generation needs to be told why Black Lives Matter. Here we are again."

Prof Langton’s Thea Astley Address will be released together with a series of free podcasts and video presentations to mark what would have been the 24th annual Festival, regrettably cancelled due to Covid restrictions.

Festival Director Edwina Johnson said "ordinarily at this time, we would all be gathering on Bundjalung Country in beautiful Byron Bay for three days of storytelling, conversation and ideas," said . "But of course these are not ordinary times and sadly we will not be able to gather together until August 2021.” 

Byron Writers Festival's free digital program also includes new Conversations from Byron podcasts to add to those already released over the past couple of months, featuring interviews with writers who would have attended the 2020 Festival.

Writer, director and performer Maeve Marsden has curated a special compilation of Queerstories, a national LGBTQI+ storytelling project she has been curating for nearly five years. The Byron edition features tales from local writer Hayley Katzen, activist and Executive Director of change.org Sally Rugg, journalist and Junkee cultural editor Michael Sun, and award-winning author, playwright and poet Ellen van Neerven.  

Also in Conversations from Byron, guest curator Sunil Badami talks with playwright S. Shakthidharan about his acclaimed play Counting and Cracking, which swept the prestigious Helpmann Awards in 2019, as well as winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

He also talks with political correspondent Annika Smethurst about her book On Secrets, which details her terrifying ordeal of being raided by the AFP and charged under obscure national security laws, and what this might mean for all of us.

The digital program also features comedians and writers Jean Kittson and Mandy Nolan discussing Kittson's latest book: We Need To Talk About Mum And Dad.

These podcasts are available along with previously released Conversations from Byron podcasts featuring authors Evie Wyld (The Bass Rock), Chris Flynn (Mammoth), Yumna Kassab (The House of Youssef) and Christos Tsiolkas (Damascus) amongst many others.

The Festival, in partnership with Southern Cross University is making its popular Secondary and Primary Schools Programs publicly available for the first time. In a series of entertaining sessions filmed for the Festival, audiences can explore talks with Clare Bowditch, Craig Foster, Matt Okine, Vivian Pham, Sally Rugg, Christos Tsiolkas and Ellen van Neerven.

The Byron Writers Festival 2020 Thea Astley address by Professor Langton is supported by The Conversation and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. It will be available via podcast on http://wwwbyronwritersfestival.com/digital and the full transcript will be published by The Conversation at theconversation.com. 

The new Conversations from Byron podcasts will be available from Wednesday 5 August. The Schools Programs content is available to the public on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 August only.

Visit http://wwwbyronwritersfestival.com/digital to access the full program.