The next meeting is on Friday 6 September 7.30 pm
featuring Dr Carol Lefevre
Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery
Like all old burial grounds, Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery is a liminal space – not quite in the world, but not quite out of it, either. Walking its roads and paths with only the birds, trees, and plants for company, the author traces the lives of many of its little-known inhabitants, recovering stories that time and weather threaten to obliterate.
Caroline Carleton composed the lyrics for ‘The Song of Australia’ while living in its curator’s cottage. There is the story of the man who fatally turned his back on a tiger. The excavated remains of Australia’s oldest crematorium can still be seen, and its quietest corner shelters the country’s first dedicated military cemetery. Planned by Colonel William Light, the site has unique botanical interest, with areas of protected native vegetation that date back to before white settlement. Quiet City is a talk for everyone who has ever wandered through an old graveyard and wished its stones could speak.
Carol Lefevre holds both an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her novel Nights in the Asylum, Picador (UK) and Vintage (Australia) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and won the 2008 Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers. Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery was published in 2016 by Wakefield Press and was shortlisted in the 2018 Non-fiction Adelaide Festival Award for Literature. Her latest book is The Happiness Glass, Spinifex Press 2018. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.
The full programme for the year can be found at: