Sydney Writers' Festival

Major Australian literary figures and important developing writers discuss the major influences on their literary education. Helen Garner, Luke Davies, Christos Tsiolkas and Samuel Wagan Watson discuss the works and writers who inspired and influenced them, shaping their style, themes and careers as ... (more)writers. Hosted by Mary Kostakidis and introduced by Imre Salusinszky.

The colonising project is often marked by paradisical yearning. Kathy Marks and James Boyce discuss the utopian dreams that marked the settlers of Pitcairn Island and Tasmania, and what became of them.

Part of the Sydney Writers' festival

Pitcairn Island – where Fletcher Christian’s descendants live – was until recently a rarely visited British outpost perched in the South Pacific; a tropical paradise.

In 2000, British police, alerted by unsettling reports of rape, descended on the island, one of the most isolated places on Earth ... (more)and home to just 47 people, mostly related. Their investigation developed into a major inquiry that uncovered widespread child sexual abuse dating back generations. Scarcely a Pitcairn man was untainted by the allegations, and almost none of the women had escaped. Yet most residents, including victims’ mothers, feigned ignorance, claiming that the abuse – perpetrated on girls as young as three – was part of their “way of life”. Pitcairn, it transpired, was a real-life Lord of the Flies story of a place without rules, a society gone badly astray.

Kathy Marks was one of a handful of journalists permitted to live on the island while she reported on the ensuing trials and witnessed Pitcairn's domestic workings first hand. In Pitcairn: Paradise Lost she documents a society gone badly astray, leaving lives shattered, codes broken and a paradise truly lost.

Cost $145, to book phone 131302

Five Western Sydney emerging artists weave in and out of stories from Bankstown’s heart