2026 Festival
Speaker Profile
Santilla Chingaipe
Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and writer, whose work explores settler colonialism, slavery, and post-colonial migration in Australia. Santilla’s first book of non-fiction Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia (2024), has received many accolades including being shortlisted for The Stella Prize and longlisted for the Cundill History Prize. Santilla is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and a columnist for The Monthly.
In Conversation: Wesley Enoch
Wesley Enoch with Santilla Chingaipe
At a time when Australian culture is under siege from governments, protest groups and funding bodies, we chat with Wesley Enoch AM, playwright, director and Chair of the Australia Council Board of Creative Australia about the importance of maintaining a healthy arts ecology.
Australian History: Reframing the past, realising the future
Rachel Perkins and Henry Reynolds with Santilla Chingaipe
Through dedicated research, books and documentary making, Rachel Perkins and Henry Reynolds have changed forever the story of our nation. They discuss their shared quest for facts-based evidence and truth telling, and what positive impact a shared and acknowledged history might have on black and white Australia.
How My Past Inspired My Fiction
Shokoofeh Azar and Heather Rose with Santilla Chingaipe