Chris Hammer is best known for writing crime thrillers set within vividly rendered Australian landscapes. A former journalist with more than 30 years’ experience, Hammer worked as a political correspondent and foreign affairs reporter for such august instutions as The Age,  The Bulletin, and SBS’s  Dateline, before turning to crime fiction.

His debut novel,  Scrublands, became an international bestseller, going on to win the prestigious UK Crime Writers Association John Creasey Award (and being turned into two successful television series). Since then Chris has written six more novels, including Silver,  Trust, The Tilt and  The Seven. His stories centre around the characters of either Martin Scarsden or the team of Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan.

The novels are renowned for their sense of place and layered plots, their morally complex characters. Hammer has now established himself as a major force in Australian crime fiction.

The Legacy is a continuation of the Martin Scarsden series. In Legacy, Martin finds the tables have been turned – instead of the hunter, he finds himself the hunted. He flees into the outback, only to find that nowhere is safe, the killers are closing in and it’s all he can do to survive.

But who wants to kill him and why? And how how is his fate linked to the disgraced ex-wife of a football star, a fugitive wanted for a decades old murder, and two nineteenth-century explorers from a legendary expedition?

Chris Hammer will be in conversation wtih Steven Lang

Heather Rose grew up in Tasmania where she developed a profound love of nature, being, by her own description, a wild barefoot girl, born for adventure. But, as a result of a tragedy that occurred when she was twelve, she set out on a journey to explore life’s mysteries, travelling widely in Asia, Europe and the USA, seeking out different ways of being, including becoming initiated into ancient rituals.

Returning to Australia she took up a career in advertising, eventually starting her own agency, an enterprise that did so well she was chosen as a Telstra Businesswomen of the year. In the meantime she started writing novels, producing, so far, eight; many internationally published and much awarded. Both Bruny and The Museum of Modern Love are presently being adapted for film.

Her new novel, A Great Act of Love, begins in 1839 when a young woman of means, Caroline Douglas, arrives in Hobart with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, she discovers that in order to create a new life she will have to navigate this insular colony of exiles and opportunists. But Caroline is carrying a secret of great magnitude and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light. 

Moving from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and on to early colonial Australia,  A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of passion and reinvention, inspired by true events. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood. It is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.

Heather  will be speaking with Steven Lang about her new novel .

What to say?

Only that it is an immense privilege to have Bob Brown come to Maleny for a conversation!

For half a century, Bob has been standing up to the powerful interests who would put profit before planet. In this new collection of stories, Defiance, he draws on this experience to inspire a new generation of individual and collective action.

He reflects on the people and places that have shaped him, celebrates the irreplaceable beauty and value of nature and shares what motivates him to keep fighting. He considers the challenges facing nature’s defenders – hostile corporate lobbyists, vilification in the press, the powerful pull of consumerism – and shows how courage, persistence and community can defeat them all.

Told with Brown’s trademark warmth and humour, these stories will galvanise, uplift and inspire.

Bob Brown is an environmental and social justice campaigner and former senator. A founding member of the Wilderness Society, from 1978 he led the successful campaign against the construction of the Franklin Dam. He served in Tasmanian state parliament for a decade, was leader of the Australian Greens, and in 1996 was elected to the federal Senate. His books include Memo for a Saner World and Optimism. After retiring from the Senate in 2012, he established the Bob Brown Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation supporting environmental causes.

He will be in conversation with Steven Lang

Hugh Mackay has been described as ‘the man who explains us to ourselves’. He is the social psychologist par excellence and the bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Way We Are and The Kindness Revolution, both of which he came to Maleny to speak about previously. He had a sixty-year career in social research and was for thirty years a weekly newspaper columnist. 

In recognition of his pioneering work, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by five Australian universities. In 2016 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.   

His new book, Just Saying, contains a series of highly personal reflections on twenty-five quotations from some of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers, from Confucius and Plato to Susan Sontag and Miles Franklin; from Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft to Bertrand Russell and Gloria Steinem.

Interpreting our world and inspiring us to do better, Mackay explores themes ranging from kindness and humility to power and prejudice; from gender equality to ethnic diversity; from coping with change to the damage inflicted on ourselves by revenge, and the great gulf between propriety and virtue.

He will be in conversation with Steven Lang.