Anne Bartlett – April 25 2021

Anne is a South Australian writer best known for her novel Knitting. Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2006, it was written as part of her creative writing PhD at the University of Adelaide, where she is currently an Honorary Research Fellow. Anne has worked as an editor, ghost writer, biographer, feature writer, children’s writer and has knitted original creations for clothing designers. Her children’s book, The Aboriginal Peoples of Australia, is part of the First People’s Series and has been on the Premier’s Reading Lists of SA, Victoria and NSW, and the Minister’s Reading List, ACT. Her other non-fiction includes the brief history written for the education market, Daisy Bates: Keeper of Totems, about the amateur researcher who documented the cultures and languages of some of Australia’s Indigenous peoples in the early 1900s. Anne is currently working on a new novel, The Tiger Game, set in the fictitious Murray Mallee town of Harveston.

The Chairman: the story of Garnett Ian Wilson OAM
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004; ISBN 9781740970488
Ngarrindjeri elder Garnett Wilson was born at Raukkan, South Australia, in 1928. At the age of twelve he suffered a serious injury which developed into a painful and personal disability. Tough family love turned him away from bitterness and self-pity towards a lifetime of achievement and service. Garnett Wilson was the first Aboriginal wool classer in South Australia. He was an inaugural member and long-standing chair of the State’s Aboriginal Lands Trust, the first Aboriginal land-holding body in Australia. He served as an executive member and acting chair of the National Aboriginal Conference. He also chaired the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Committee. In fact, he chaired so many committees, he came to be known simply as ‘The Chairman’. The Chairman is Garnett Wilson’s autobiography. Colleagues, friends and family have added their voices to the telling, setting the story of a remarkable elder statesman in its wider social context.

Knitting: A Novel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005; ISBN 97806184992677
“Spinning, weaving, knitting, all part of the long tradition of women’s work, skills that had survived even the efficiency of the industrial revolution. Why did people still do it?” It’s been ten months since Jack died. For his widow, Sandra, a tightly wound teacher who thinks long and hard about such questions, the months have tested her belief that she can continue her ordered life without Jack. She meets her polar opposite on a sidewalk when they both stop to help a man in distress. While Sandra’s grief has constrained her spirit, Martha – who lost her husband years before – appears to wear her grief lightly. Sandra’s talent for the domestic arts lies in studying them; Martha is a brilliantly gifted knitter, a self-educated artist. What begins as a professional collaboration when they decide to mount an exhibition becomes something transformative and deeply personal.