Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute

Day Tours of the Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute - Each Tuesday
2026-04-28 14:00 - 2026-11-24 15:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Library Ground Floor, Sturt Street, Ballarat Central, VIC, 3350, Australia
In Conversation with Irma Gold | This event has now been CANCELLED due to low ticket sales

July 16

@

6:00 pm

-

7:30 pm

$11.78

Humffray Room

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Shift

Irma Gold

‘Unforgettable’ – Nigel Featherstone.

‘Evocative, propulsive and heartbreaking, Shift is a novel that can change the way you think.’ – Rochelle Siemienowicz, Double Happiness

‘Seductive, superbly atmospheric and beautifully narrated with a painterly, cinemascope feel, Shift will make your heart race.’ – Niq Mhlongo, The City is Mine

In the year of the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter – which outlined the principles of democracy and freedom in South Africa – comes a novel set in the township where it was signed. Shift asks us to examine both the world around us…and ourselves. Arlie is a moderately successful thirty-something photographer who can’t seem to get his shit together. He can’t hold onto a girlfriend, or much else, and his relationship with his parents is complicated. His agoraphobic mother, Dellie, has long drawn silence over her South African upbringing. The more she refuses to illuminate, the more Arlie wants to know. After another break-up, Arlie needs to get away, and there’s only one place he’s drawn to. In Kliptown, he meets choirmaster Rufaro, singer Glory and her younger brother Samson. Amidst the poverty, violence and beauty of this neglected South African township, Arlie begins exploring ideas for an exhibition, and courting the possibility of happiness. But then his father unexpectedly turns up, and a catastrophic event changes everything. Gusty and gripping, tender and deeply compassionate, Shift is a compulsively readable story about the messy process of art-making, and the mess of love and family. It is an unflinching, insightful and immersive novel that takes the reader inside the inner life of one township, beyond the hyperbole of newspaper headlines, to offer bold, big-hearted hope.

Shift | Irma Gold

About the author

Irma Gold is an Australian author, editor and reader. Her debut novel, The Breaking, won the NSW Writers Centre Varuna Fellowship and was awarded development grants by artsACT and CAPO. It won a Canberra Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted (then Highly Commended) in the ACT Notable Awards.Irma’s critically acclaimed debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward (Affirm Press), was shortlisted for or won a number of awards. Irma’s short fiction has been widely published in journals, including Meanjin, Westerly, Island, Review of Australian Fiction and Going Down Swinging, and in anthologies like Australian Love Stories edited by Cate Kennedy, and the tenth anniversary edition of Award Winning Australian Writing 2017.Irma is also the author of five picture books for children, most recently Where the Heart Is, featured on Sarah Ferguson’s Storytime channel, and Seree’s Story.For 24 years Irma has worked as an editor, and for a decade she was Convener of Editing at the University of Canberra. She is the commissioning editor of a number of anthologies, including The Sound of Silence, winner of the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards for Nonfiction, and The Invisible Thread, an official publication of the National Year of Reading 2012 and the Centenary of Canberra 2013 which anthologises a century of literature by writers who have called Canberra home, including Alex Miller, Marion Halligan, Roger McDonald, Kate Grenville, Omar Musa, Judith Wright and Les Murray.Irma spent her childhood living in a beautiful old Tudor house in south-east England just down the road from Roald Dahl, and now lives by the beach in Naarm/Melbourne with two boys and a little black cat.She is just a bit keen on travel, elephants, beaches, good coffee, jumping castles and sunshiny days. She is not at all keen on extreme heights, spiders and zoos. She is Co-host with Karen Viggers of the writing podcast, Secrets from the Green Room. Her name is pronounced Ear-ma.

$11.78 per person includes booking fee & gst, also includes light refreshment. All proceeds go to the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute to support the staging of our author events. Book on-line or contact Rosemary at the Libary via email library@ballaratmi.org.au or phone (03) 5331 3042

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This event is part of Ballarat Winter Festival

This event takes place on Wadawurrung Country. Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute acknowledges the Wadawurrung People of the Kulin Nation as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we work, learn and create. Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.
