For two electrifying weeks, Studio One at UNSW’s Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab transforms into Sydney's hottest incubator for artistic innovation.

Step into the mesmerizing First Nations contemporary movement piece Sitting Ganaay; experience the profound physical and spatial storytelling of Tell Distance; dive into the hauntingly atmospheric, sound-heavy musical world of Plain Bad Heroine; and cap it all off with The Sleepover, a highly immersive encounter that tests the boundaries of interactive space.

Kens Goodsell Level 2, Room 228 

In a contemporary moment shaped by overlapping and intertwined crises (political, environmental, social, and technological), the role of public scholarship has never been more vital. Public institutions such as universities are increasingly called upon to demonstrate public value; stakeholders seek evidence‑based insights that can inform policy and practice; and communities look to researchers for clarity, accountability, and ethical engagement. Public scholarship offers a way to bridge these domains, enabling researchers to translate their work into accessible, meaningful contributions that support democratic dialogue, analytical commentary, and informed decision‑making.

For early‑career researchers, navigating this landscape can be both an opportunity and a challenge. Public‑facing work requires careful consideration of ethics, cultural safety, digital risk, and institutional alignment. It also demands strategic thinking about voice, visibility, and impact. This session will explore how ECRs working in media, migration, and social justice can engage in public scholarship in ways that are safe, sustainable, and responsive.

Speakers include Dr Fan Yang, Dr Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, Dr Leah Williams Veazey, and Dr Kurt Sengul.  

RSVP to s.khorana@unsw.edu.au by 20 August for catering purposes.

FRIDAY 16 OCT  |  6PM  |  IO MYERS STUDIO

Cape Hawke is a creative reconstruction of an unfinished play by the late Brian Syron - Aboriginal theatre maker, actor, writer and cultural activist. Written in 1985 and hidden away in family archives for decades, the manuscript was unearthed in 2022, opening the door to a remarkable journey of discovery bringing archival research, theatre-making, and Indigenous cultural knowledge into dialogue.

A work of historical fiction, Cape Hawke unfolds on Worrimay clan lands in the Minimbah (Forster) region of the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Set across two time frames - 1943 and the late 1890s - the play draws audiences into a hidden family history and reimagines the lives of Aboriginal people navigating the complex social, political and cultural forces of their time. At its heart, Cape Hawke is a story of love, hope, and belonging, shaped by the pressures of history and the consequences of forces beyond the lives of its characters.

The Hill They Climb: Contemporary English Poetry from Northeast India | Jaydeep Sarangi 

Northeast India is a term for the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, and Sikkim. The roots of poets from this region in their land, people, culture, tradition, oral culture, and myths are found deep in their poetry, as a free form of expression. In the English-language poetry of the Northeast, with its emphasis on myth and oral traditions, we find an alternative to the poetry pioneered by the metropolitan poets of the 1960s and their present-day descendants. We may read this ethnopoetics as a non-western "decentered" poetics representing the aesthetics of Indigenous people. Some of the most important of these contemporary poets are Mamang Dai, Robin S. Ngangom, Nabina Das,  Achingliu Kamei, Namrata Pathak, T. Keditsu, Jharna Choudhury, and Malsawmi Jacob. In the spectrum of complex historical identities and marginalizations offered by their work, an intense awareness of cultural loss and recovery accompanies a negotiation with other cultural contacts. Poetry from this region chronicles both the past and a present experiencing change and transition, and we witness zorami  of individuals' desires for freedom from multiple levels  of social and political oppression.

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

Hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub, the 31st Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference will be held in-person at the UNSW Kensington campus, situated on unceded Bidjigal lands. The conference is a cross-institutional collaboration between UNSW Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and Western Sydney University. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voicing Our Worlds”.

In our contemporary world, the multifaceted terms, “voices”, “voicing” and their many conjugations and articulations are intertwined with key considerations in our discipline of Creative Writing. First Nations writers have been leading discussions about the real-life consequences of the amplification of some writerly voices and the silencing of others. We hear writers say that they are “giving voice to the voiceless” in their work, a formulation famously critiqued by the writer Arundhati Roy who said “There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”