Wellmania: Australian Museum x Vivid Ideas

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Event: 5 - 9pm

Talk: 6:30 - 7:45pm

Ages: Recommended for ages 16+

Wellness. Healthy aspiration or sickening obsession? From activated almonds to coffee colonics, this engrossing talk examines the lengths we’ll go to achieve wellness, and asks if there’s more money than sense in this US$1.5 trillion global industry. Featuring Guardian columnist and author of Wellmania Brigid Delaney and broadcaster Benjamin Law in conversation with writer Jenny Valentish.

After the talk, stay for live poetry by Bankstown Poetry Slam responding to the theme. Top off the night with music, drinks and the chance to explore the Museum’s incredible permanent collections after hours.

In this series of FREE talks curated by Vivid Ideas and the Australian Museum, we reflect on what makes great cities, the joys and the pitfalls of city-living, and we will hear personal stories of belonging.

Jenny Valentish writes for The Guardian, The Age, the ABC and The Monthly, but has a particular love of immersion journalism in the form of her books. The latest, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else: Why Some of Us Push Our Bodies to Extremes, saw her having a live-streamed kickboxing fight, being flogged by a BDSM dom and trying performance-enhancing drugs – all in the name of research.

Benjamin Law is a writer and broadcaster. He is best known for his memoir The Family Law, The Quarterly Essay ‘Moral Panic 101’, as editor of Growing Up Queer and host of ABC TV’s ‘Waltzing the Dragon’ and co-host of Radio National’s ‘Stop Everything’. As a gay and Asian-Australian man, he has thought a lot about standards of conventional beauty. And as co-executive producer, co-creator and co-writer of Wellmania for Netflix, he is able to share his philosophy on the true meaning of wellness.

Brigid Delaney is a senior writer at Guardian Australia, and weekly columnist. She is the author of four books including Wellmania, and an upcoming book of Stoic philosophy to be published in August 2023.

She is also the co-creator (with Benjamin Law), a script writer and associate producer of the new Netflix comedy series, Wellmania. The show starring Celeste Barber is currently filming in Sydney.

Bankstown Poetry Slam (BPS) is Australia's largest regular poetry slam, and has been dubbed the largest poetry slam in the Southern Hemisphere. BPS' award-winning events and projects drive change by empowering young people and people from diverse backgrounds to express themselves through the medium of spoken word poetry.