Taking place over the two weekends of The City Speaks, a series of one-off walking tours by Melbourne-based artists and writers will lead the audience through the streets, arcades and laneways of Melbourne’s CBD, revealing their own relationships with language and the city.
David Astle
Time: Saturday 12 November, 3–4pm, $10, Bookings essential Book here »
Location: Meet at Burke and Wills monument, corner of Collins St and Swanston St.
Come for a walk on the wordy side with dictionary addict, David Astle. Discover how monuments and monsters are cousins. Why cities are female. Where to find a crossword arcade. Or how a bizarre Italian sport gave us a word that’s central to Melbourne. The walk will begin with Burke and Wills on the corner of Collins and Swanston, and slowly meander through the lanes and byroads of English, ending up at Flinders Street Station with a pleasant sense of vertigo.
David Astle is a full-time word nerd, writer, broadcaster and puzzle-maker. Regular crossword solvers will recognise his initials every Friday in The Age, short for Don’t Attempt. David was also the dictionary man on SBS’s Letters & Numbers, and a regular locum on 774 ABC Melbourne. He’s the author of such verbal titles as Puzzled, Riddledom and Cluetopia, plus the kids’ book, Wordburger (How To Be A Champion Puzzler in 20 Quick Bites).
Sophie Cunningham
Time: Sunday 13 November, 3–4pm, $10, Bookings essential Book here »
Location: meet at Flinders Street Station underpass, at corner of Elizabeth St and Flinders St.
Beginning outside Flinders Street Station, Sophie’s walk will be a stroll up Elizabeth Street and an imagining of that street as it once was: a creek, a lake and a swamp, with the occasional foray into less watery moments in Elizabeth Street’s history. The walk will end at the entrance to Victoria Market.
Sophie Cunningham is the author of four books, including Melbourne (2011), a ‘biography’ of her hometown, and the critically acclaimed Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy (2014). Her recent essay on walking New York, ‘Staying with the Trouble’, was the winner of the 2015 Calibre Essay Prize. She is currently writing, walking and talking about ‘Boundaries’ as apart of an arts project for the City of Melbourne. She is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University (non/fiction Lab), in the School Media and Communication in the College of Design and Social Context.
Christos Tsiolkas
Time: Saturday 19 November, 3–4pm, $10, Bookings essential Book here »
Location: meet outside Forum Theatre, corner of Russell St and Flinders St.
Christos Tsiolkas is a Melbourne based prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, essays, plays and scripts. His novels include Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap and Barracuda. He has co-authored the dialogue Jump Cuts: An Autobiography, with Sasha Soldatow. His short story collection, Merciless Gods, was published last year. Many of Christos’s work has been adapted to both stage and screen as well as having been translated in over twenty languages. Over the last fifteen years he has often collaborated with photographer, Zoe Ali, on projects that examine migration, asylum, exile, longing and faith, including a project called A New Jerusalem that documented sites of worship and communion in the city of Melbourne.
Alia Gabres
Time: Sunday 20 November, 3–4pm, $10, Bookings essential Book here »
Location: Details to follow
Alia Gabres is a Melbourne-based poet, storyteller and creative producer. She is a CACD practitioner with a focus on arts facilitation using storytelling as a tool for knowledge generation and cultural transmission. Alia currently works as a Creative Producer at Footscray Community Arts Centre and completing a Masters in Community and Cultural development at the Victorian College of the Arts.
