Twilight Talks 2024, Season 3 | Life So Full of Promise: vivid, compelling stories about Australia’s lost generation.

October 23 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Bar open at 5pm

$8 – $12

Humffray Room

Subject - Life So Full of Promise: vivid, compelling stories about Australia's lost generation.

Award-winning historian, biographer and storyteller Ross McMullin returns to the BMI for a talk about his latest book. His multi-biographies about Australia’s lost generation of World War I have been widely acclaimed. Life So Full of Promise won the 2024 Age Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Nib Literary Award. It follows Farewell Dear People, which won The Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the National Cultural Award.

In Life So Full of Promise Ross has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in a collection of interwoven family stories about forgotten Australians who had radiant potential. The rich cast of characters includes a popular doctor, a brilliant cricketer, and a potential prime minister, with a fervent
love story in the mix.

Don’t miss this one. You’ll be enlightened, entertained and moved as Ross brings these extraordinary yet unknown Australians back to life.

Barry Jones reviewed Life So Full of Promise in The Age: “His scholarship is impeccable, he writes like an angel … and his narrative gift is Blaineyesque”.

Speaker: Ross McMullin

Ross McMullin is an award-winning historian, a renowned storyteller and an
entertaining speaker.
He has written two books about Ballarat’s own Pompey Elliott. His biography
Pompey Elliott won multiple awards. Ross also wrote the biographical plaques
surrounding Ballarat’s statue of Pompey in Sturt Street.

His biography of a remarkable Ballarat-born artist and writer, Will Dyson:
Australia’s Radical Genius, was highly commended by the judges of the National
Biography Award. Ross’s political histories include the commissioned ALP
centenary history The Light on the Hill together with So Monstrous a Travesty:
Chris Watson and The World’s First National Labour Government.