Stephanie Alexander AO is regarded as one of Australia’s great food educators. Her reputation was earned through her thirty years as an owner-chef in several restaurants, as the author of seventeen books and hundreds of articles about food matters, and for her groundbreaking work in creating the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation. Stephanie believes there is no greater joy than sharing food, conversation and laughter around a table.
Maggie Beer was born in 1945. Maggie is not just an Australian food icon, but an important part of any discussion about food and flavour. Maggie’s husband, Colin, daughters, Saskia and Elli, and especially their six grandchildren are vital ingredients in her life, as are music, reading, gardening and spending time with friends.
Judith Brett is Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and a political historian who has written extensively on the non-labour side of Australian politics. The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, her biography of Alfred Deakin, won the 2018 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting. She has three daughters and a granddaughter.
Jane Caro AM was born in London in 1957. She is a Walkley Award-winning columnist, author, feminist and novelist. She has two children and two grandchildren. Both her parents are still alive, so she has high hopes of also being a great-grandmother one day.
Elizabeth Chong AM was born in 1931 in Guangzhou, China, and came to Australia when she was three. She is the daughter of William Wing Young, who, with Wing Lee, commercialised the recipe of the dim sim. She is well known for her television appearances on Good Morning Australia. As a result of her Chinese Cooking School (1960–2016), she is a loved and admired teacher. She has four children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Cresside Collette was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in 1950 and is a tapestry artist. She was a foundation weaver of the Australian Tapestry Workshop. She has taught tapestry weaving and drawing at RMIT University and regularly takes tapestry tours to France and the UK. She has two sons and is the delighted grandmother of a two-year-old granddaughter.
Ali Cobby Eckermann is an award-winning writer of poetry, memoir and fiction. Her poetry collections include little bit long time, Kami and her most recent, Inside My Mother. Her verse novel Ruby Moonlight won the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and Book of the Year Award. Ali was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University in 2017.
Helen Elliott was born in Melbourne in 1947. She is a journalist and literary critic. She has two children and four granddaughters. She also has a large garden.
Helen Garner has written novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. Among her many awards are the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, Stories, True Stories, The Children’s Bach and Yellow Notebook. She has a daughter and three grandchildren.
Anastasia Gonis is a passionate book lover, writer, reviewer and interviewer. She loves the smell and feel of printed books, and also loves cooking and baking, trees, the sound of the rain and wind, and loyal friends. She has four grandchildren and one on the way.
Glenda Guest won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book for Siddon Rock, and her highly acclaimed second novel, A Week in the Life of Cassandra Aberline, was published in 2018. After growing up in Western Australia, she has moved way too often, and now lives in Merimbula, NSW, for the third time. Glenda has a daughter and a granddaughter she sees rather less often than she would like.
Katherine Hattam was born in Melbourne in 1950. She has three children and two grandchildren. She is also an artist.
Yvette Holt was born in Brisbane in 1971. She is a multi-awardwinning poet, essayist, editor, stand-up comedienne, and femin_artist photographer of erotic desert landscape and queer votive imagery. Mother of one and grandmother of three, Yvette has lived in the Central Australian desert for more than ten years.
Cheryl Kernot is one of Australia’s 100 National Living Treasures and was a senator and leader of the Australian Democrats in the 1990s. She was one of Australia’s first female cricket umpires and patron of the Australian Women’s Cricket Team. Post-politics, she taught at the University of Oxford and then at UNSW’s Centre for Social Impact. She has one daughter, two grandchildren and was birth partner for Olivia Mirembe and her three Ugandan sons.
Ramona Koval is a writer and journalist. She is an honorary fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. Her recent books include Bloodhound: Searching for My Father and By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life. She is working on a new book about what it means to be human. Mother of two daughters and grandmother of five granddaughters and a grandson, she spends her days writing and cooking diverse meals for picky young eaters.
Alison Lester writes and illustrates books for children. She travels often to remote Indigenous communities, where she helps people turn their stories into books.
Joan London was named a Western Australian State Living Treasure in 2015. Her collected stories are published as The New Dark Age. Her first novel, Gilgamesh, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002, and The Good Parents won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2009. Her third novel, The Golden Age, won many prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2015. She has two children and four grandchildren.
Jenny Macklin was the longest-serving woman in the Australian House of Representatives and the first woman to be elected deputy leader of a major political party. She has delivered many important social reforms, including our first national paid parental leave scheme. She’s a feminist, a mother of three and a grandmother of two (so far).
Auntie Daphne Milward was born in Mooroopna, near Shepparton, Victoria. Auntie Daphne is a Yorta Yorta Elder, an artist and a cultural teacher. Throughout her working life, she had many senior roles in private and public life, including her work with a range of Aboriginal advocacy and support organisations. She has two daughters and three grandsons.
Mona Mobarek is a retired schoolteacher of Islamic Studies. She was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1962 and migrated to Australia in the late sixties. She and her husband, also Egyptian, live in the leafy suburb of Lower Plenty in Melbourne and enjoy travelling. Mona also enjoys sewing and playing music for her family. She has two children and two grandchildren.
Carol Raye was forty-one when she first arrived in Australia from England on the SS Oriana, with her husband and their three children. She is ninety-seven and has three grandchildren and a lifetime of memories of a happy marriage and a very rewarding career as a ballerina, theatre and film actress and television producer. She now enjoys watching the changes in the world through the eyes of her grandchildren.
Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs is the Assistant High Commissioner for International Protection with UNHCR. She was the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2012 to 2017 and president of the Asian Development Bank Administrative Tribunal prior to accepting her position with UNHCR. Now living in Geneva, Gillian is able to spend more time with her grandchildren, who live in Paris.
Célestine Hitiura Vaite is a Tahitian grandmother. She has written three successful novels, has four children, two grandsons and another one on the way. She lives on the South Coast of NSW and loves teaching her grandchildren about nature.