From Thursday 13 November through to Saturday 15 November, the Readings team pulled together a celebration of community filled with authors, friends, musicians, readers, poets, commentators and one glorious cheese maker.
Over the duration of A Day in Carlton, close to 2,000 people joined us in acknowledging the importance of storytelling and all its glorious heart-rending ways.
Readings neighbours took part: Brunetti, La Mama, Cinema Nova, CO.AS.IT., Church of All Nations, Carlton Courthouse, Bottega Tasca Wine, Donati’s Fine Meats, The Torch Gallery, the University of Melbourne, The Wheeler Centre, the City of Literature and Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar. We are grateful to them all for being part of our Readings family!
We’re thankful to Charlie’s Cookies for supplying delicious biscuits for our speakers, to the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for opening the celebration, to the local woman’s group who cooked cakes and made coffee for us, to those that volunteered their time, to our extraordinary staff and of course to Readings’ own Mark Rubbo for making the wine for authors to drink when everything was quiet.
We hosted well over 60 creative, wonderful people during the madness; a special call-out to a few of those that helped in ways that not everyone can immediately see:
- Tim Loveday for pulling together a night of poetry, music and joy.
- Michael Williams for making Readings staff laugh.
- Toni Jordan for her enormous, compassionate heart.
- Richard Denniss for making us question every politician’s motives.
- Maxine Beneba Clarke for making an entire audience sob.
The very last event was Bedtime Stories at Jimmy Watson’s. Cramped upstairs at Jimmy Watson’s, Christos Tsiolkas, Toni Jordan, Sophie Cunningham and Trent Dalton spun stories that made the audience laugh, weep and exclaim aloud. It was the sort of night that is only possible at Carlton. Carlton, that little pocket in Melbourne that continues to be fuelled with story makers that celebrate one of the great truths of humanity:
We listen to other people’s stories to make sense of our own.
