Co-Conveners
Clare Wright.
Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.
Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy. Clare’s essays, opeds and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Guardian Weekly, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Overland, The Conversation, The Age/SMH, The Australian and her academic articles have been published in leading international and national scholarly journals.
Clare hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the La Trobe Uni podcast Archive Fever. She has appeared on Q&A, The Drum, The Project and Behind the News giving an historical perspective on current affairs. She is popular public speaker, panellist and interviewer and makes frequent appearances at literary festivals, in television documentaries, on radio talk shows, in other people’s podcasts and generally anywhere someone will pass her a microphone.
In 2020, Clare was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for “services to literature and to historical research”. In 2022, Clare was a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on the Albanese Government’s National Cultural Policy and she co-wrote the NCP’s Vision Statement (with author Christos Tsiolkas). In 2022, Clare was appointed as a Council member of the National Museum of Australia and she is a past Board Director of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
Clare lives on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia.
Kristine Ziwica.
Kristine Ziwica is a Melbourne based columnist and consultant who is a regular contributor to Women's Agenda, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News and The Guardian.
She has over twenty-years’ experience as a feminist writer and activist in a career that has taken her from New York to Munich, Berlin, London and now Australia.
Kristine started her journalism career at Ms. Magazine in New York in 1997. She then went on to hold editorial positions at several NY-based magazines, including Travel & Leisure. In 2002, Kristine was a Burns Journalism Fellowship recipient from the International Centre for Journalists, spending three months in Munich working for the weekend magazine of one of Germany’s largest newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Kristine then stayed on in Germany, moving to Berlin where she worked for Germany’s public broadcaster Deutsche Welle while completing her master’s degree in European politics at Humboldt University and freelancing for various US-based publications.
More recently, Kristine lived in London where she led media and campaigns for the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission and served as an advisor to the UK’s End Violence Against Women Coalition. In 2012 she moved to Australia to take up a role with Our Watch, Australia's national foundation to prevent violence against women, where she established the national media engagement program.
She is a proud member of the Women in Media steering committee and an Ambassador for the Honour a Woman campaign.
Kristine tweets @KZiwica