An Afternoon with Brenda Niall - you're invited

When reading Brenda Niall’s biography, “My Accidental Career” I was struck by how many connections we shared through people and places. My own mother was in Brenda’s Grade 5 and 6 class at Genazzano. Brenda observed Gen was then a place for compliance and obedience, so my mother’s naughty spark was regularly doused. She later became President of the GMA (1976) so her school spirit was never extinguished despite her occasional “boldness”.

On 2 September we will celebrate Brenda’s achievements and the fact that today she is regarded as Australia’s pre-eminent biographer. Prior to this more personal publication, Friends and Rivals was Brenda’s most recent book, an interrogation of the lives and connections of four Australian writers, Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer and Henry Handel Richardson. A couple of years ago she told her own grandmother Aggie’s story in “Can You Hear The Sea?” In 2007, she wrote “Life Class”, a first foray into the making of a biographer which we see fleshed out in “My Accidental Career”.

Michael Mc Girr recently wrote in The Australian: I never leave a book by Brenda Niall without feeling I have been guided somewhere special and her autobiographical My Accidental Career is no exception. Here we get an inside look at her education at Genazzano, her friends and family life in Kew (The Kew Junction tram stop sorted us out. We were colour-coded by our school uniform, p.14) her intellectual talent and her first steps at university. We follow her as she works for Bob Santamaria, interviews Archbishop Mannix for a later book and travels overseas to connect with her extended family. We are privy to the letters she wrote home and her acute observations. She tells of the Irish, so proud of “Cardinal” Mannix, their man in Australia! We learn of her appointments to the ANU and Monash University, the support and generosity of her peers, her time at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, her academic career tutoring in Australian and American literature, the beginning of her writing career.

How proud we are to have Brenda as a member of the Genazzano family and to honour her wonderful “accidental” career in the world of Australian literature.

We would be delighted for you to join us to celebrate this special event, please see the details below. As light refreshments will be provided, please RSVP through Trybooking.