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Wednesday 24 August 2022
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A time to tell, and play, stories
LOVER of the written word, Corri Perkin, is organising a writers’ festival at Sorrento.
WORDS, narrative and music will take precedence in April next year at Sorrento when more than 45 authors, playwrights, journalists, academics and musicians attend the inaugural Sorrento Writers’ Festival. The four-day festival is planned by journalist, podcaster, former bookshop owner Corrie Perkin “to celebrate literature in Australia, inspire big ideas and encourage bold thinking”. The not-for-profit event is predicted to “encourage deep thinking and compelling conversations” through meet the author events, speeches, panel discussions, a business seminar, readings, musical performances, children’s programs, and a book club. “The Sorrento Writers Festival will be a time for open minds and open hearts. It will be a time for laughter and listening. It will be a time for debate, discussion and intellectual prodding. And it’s an opportunity to celebrate this beautiful peninsula with our local friends, and with our visitors,” Perkin said. Perkin closed her Hawksburn bookshop after 12 years mid-last year as a result of lockdowns and fruitless rental negotiations. Most events in next year’s writers’ festival will be held at the newly renovated Continental Sorrento. Perkin says she saw a boom in the peninsula’s permanent and visitor populations during the COVID-19 crisis and decided the festival would provide “an additional cultural offering”. “It’s time to hear the stories of friends from other places, to listen to their ideas, and to learn more about ourselves and the world around us via the written and spoken word,” Perkin said. “We all love stories and it is time to tell the story of our beautiful coastal region to a wider audience. “The magnificent Sorrento and Portsea environment is the hero of our festival. Despite 150 years of visitor influx and development, it retains its natural beauty thanks to a caring and vigilant nature-loving community,” she said. “We want our festival to celebrate this beautiful part of the world, the special ecology of the Mornington Peninsula, its ancient history and its European settler beginnings, and we want to encourage visitors to experience as much as they can during their festival visit.” Keith Platt
‘Turf war’ splits peninsula Liberals Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au ACCUSATIONS of a takeover by “the Mornington faction of the religious far right” have split sections of the Liberal Party on the Mornington Peninsula. The scheduled annual general meeting of the party’s Dunkley Federal Electoral Conference ended within 10 minutes of its start on Wednesday 27 July, and was rescheduled and held last week by the party’s state secretariat. The former chair of the conference,
Mornington Peninsula Shire councillor and Liberal Party member for 10 years, Steve Holland, refused to attend because “the behaviour was so poor the first time around that I didn’t want to witness that again…” Holland said he ended the first AGM because “a small group of unruly members began interjecting and heckling from their seats”. He has now warned that “good people will continue to be driven away from the Liberal Party”. “What is happening within the Liberal Party at the moment can be described as a turf war on a sinking continent,” Holland told The News.
“Successive state and federal election results in Victoria have highlighted the dire situation the party is in when it comes to appealing to the electorate.” Stephen Batty, elected chair of the Dunkley conference at last week’s rescheduled AGM, has written to party members saying he has attempted to contact “a small number of disgruntled members” in a bid to discuss their concerns “and move forward as one entity”. A Liberal Party member who has asked not to be identified, said the election results at the second AGM “clearly show it has been taken over
by the Mornington faction of the religious far right”. The Liberal insider believes the moves within the local party branches have been made “so the religious right could control the finances of the Dunkley FEC to bolster the Mornington finances to elect Chris Crewther at the coming state election”. The party member “understood” up to $50,000 remained “in the kitty” following the unsuccessful federal campaign of the Liberals’ Dunkley candidate, Sharn Coombes. In his letter to Liberal Party members after being elected to chair the Dunkley conference, Batty invited
them to visit Crewther’s campaign office in Main Street, Mornington. “During the next few months, we will be organising some small boardroom luncheons and events involving special guests,” Batty said. Not mentioned in the letter was the cancellation of an event titled A change in direction, a new horizon, originally advertised as being held in Crewther’s Main Street campaign office on Tuesday 23 August. Invitations to the event were sent out by, among others, party activist Ivan Stratov, a Mormon and former Family First candidate. Continued Page 10
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