In my previous post, I shared about the three workshops heading into the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival in Sydney in 2025. This post moves on to focus on the main program, held over two days, June 27 and 28, and focuses on day one.
Festival Opening Lunch: Suzanne and Gina Chick in conversation with Jane Palfreyman
The Festival opened with a lunch gathering and an opportunity to witness Suzanne Chick, Gina Chick and Jane Palfreyman in conversation on women writers and stories across generations.
Gina Chick is a rewilding facilitator, adventurer, writer and speaker and the winner of Alone Australia in 2023. She was the second woman to win an Alone solo challenge and author of the bestselling book, We Are the Stars. Suzanne Chick, Gina’s mother, is an artist and teacher, and discovered at age 48 that her mother was iconic Australian author, Charmian Clift.
The experience prompted deep ancestral searching and further unleashed Suzanne’s creativity for both painting and writing. Thirty years ago, Suzanne wrote a best-selling memoir, Searching for Charmian, and this was re-released in May 2025 with a new foreword by Gina Chick and afterword by Suzanne Chick.
This opening Festival lunch was an opportunity to hear from these two incredible women about their relationship and creativity, and the impact of discovering their lineage with Charmian Clift. We heard about life growing up in the Chick household and how wild, authentic, creative living was encouraged. Searching for Charmian and learning more about her explained so much as Gina shares in this Guardian excerpt of her foreword. It was an honour to hear these women’s personal experiences and a reminder of how creativity can find us through our ancestry and life stories.
Festivals also offer the opportunity to buy authors’ books and to meet authors. It was a pleasure to buy both Gina and Suzanne’s books, to meet them and have them sign their books. Gina said that she would write a poem for us if we purchased one of her books. Not a very good one necessarily, she said, but a poem. We had to choose a word for the poem.
For my poem, I chose the word ALIVE, my word for 2025 and chatted with Gina about why this word and what it meant to me. I admired Gina’s courage in free-writing a poem instantaneously and inscribing it in a fresh new book! Out came these words swiftly and so apt for the time:
A fabulous start to the Women Writers Festival main program, I look forward to reading both books soon and learning more about these remarkable women and their stories.
Pride & Prejudice & Hormone Therapy: Austen for our Times
In this session, Sophie Gee, Amanda Hooton and Collett Smart riffed on how Jane Austen’s work largely featured outsiders and non-conforming characters. It was a fascinating discussion that yielded new perspectives on the characters, especially female ones.
I had not thought about Austen’s novels from this perspective before. It makes you appreciate the true genius of Jane Austen. Not only was Austen non-conforming as an author in 19th century England, breaking many barriers and stereotypes. Her characters were also portrayals of outsiders, people on the edge for different reasons – psychologically and socially.
Women out of place in Regency England largely feature in Austen’s work. They are marginal figures, not beautiful heroines. Examples that were mentioned in the discussion were: Mrs Bennett and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice), Mary Elliot (Persuasion), Mrs Norris (Mansfield Park) and the Dashwood sisters (Sense and Sensibility).
We explored the genius of Jane Austen in portraying female characters and aspects like menopause, hormonal shifts of adolescence and neurodivergence. These women were often seen as dangerous or feared, with people afraid of difference. A few examples of ‘winner’ characters, strategically navigating the times, were also identified. This included: Charlotte Lucas (Pride and Prejudice), Anne Elliot (Persuasion) and Mary Crawford (Mansfield Park).
This lively discussion about Austen’s work playing with representations of women who don’t fit in was illuminating.
Reboot the Narrative: AI, Authorship, and the Future of Literature
This session featured Tracey Spicer AM, Paula Bray, Lucy Hayward and Ally Burnham was on AI, authorship and the future of literature. Specifically, the session addressed:
- How do we protect the rights of creatives in the new frontier?
- What happens when machines become storytellers?
There were so many thought-provoking insights from this session that looked at different AI systems: Large Language Models (LLM) eg ChatGPT; Generative AI which leverages LLMs to create new content; and Agentic AI, an autonomous, agent-driven system that uses LLMs to plan, structure, act.
The speakers all had extensive experience in this space. Tracey Spicer is the author of Man-Made: how the bias of the past is being built into the future‘. Paula Bray is Chief Digital Officer at State Library Victoria, and set up the first innovation lab in a cultural heritage setting. Lucy Hayward is the CEO of the Australian Society of Authors.
Here are a few key insights from this session:
- AI is skewed to men, has a hetero narrative, and has significant bias and ethical issues. The content is narrower, flatter and more homogenised.
- LLMs ‘hallucinate’ to provide examples because they don’t like to say they don’t know. As they become more sophisticated, they hallucinate more.
- AI provides the statistically most likely answer, hence the bias aspect. They are ‘probability machines’.
- There are significant energy demands created by the use of AI.
- Who will miss out? It will mostly be younger and older people with the effects of medical bias and ageism.
- We need: audits/inclusive design; cultural heritage/emerging technology and humans in the loop. We need the creative oversight of people.
- Research shows cognitive decline aspects of using the tools. What happens to creative thinking?
This is a big, important topic!
This podcast chat, AI and Publishing, Tracey Spicer and Sandie Docker with Pamela Cook on the Writes4Women Podcast offers further insight.
The energy footprint of AI is also an issue being discussed more and more. Here’s some recent research from MIT: We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
Hannah Kent in conversation with Nicole Abadee
This was my favourite session of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival. The focus was Hannah’s latest book, a memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick. To sit and listen to Hannah Kent’s beautiful voice as she spoke with Nicole Abadee and read from her book, reflecting on her experiences in Iceland and of writing Burial Rites was a special experience.
I have since read this exceptional memoir. It was a fabulous read, tenderly written and infused with Hannah’s rich relationship with Iceland. Hannah recounts her experiences in Iceland from arriving as a teenage exchange student. She shares how she connected deeply with the country, culture and language.
The story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person along with Friðrik Sigurðsson, to be executed in Iceland captured Hannah’s fascination and imagination. We are taken inside the cultural research and writing process of Burial Rites with insights on historical fiction. This includes the limits of factual understanding and ‘honouring what is not known.’ Structured in lyrical chapters accompanied by photos, this was a gentle, wise, instructive read. Hannah’s grace and calmness is woven throughout this memoir. I look forward to rereading Burial Rites now after learning more about its genesis and creation! A highly recommended read.
Read more:
Hannah Kent’s new memoir is a love letter to Iceland and an ‘enthralling’ murderer
Thanks for reading, and I hope these insights from day one of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival main program are helpful. The next post [to come] covers day two of the main festival program.
