In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Tim Dobbyn chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Black, White + Colour: A Biography of Mervyn Bishop Australia's First Indigenous Professional Photographer

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Mervyn Bishop joined the Sydney Morning Herald at 17, becoming Australia’s first Indigenous press photographer and, soon after, the first Indigenous journalist on a metropolitan daily newspaper.
• Tim Dobbyn’s family has known Mervyn since 1962; their friendship deepened over decades before evolving into a nine-year biography project, completed largely during pandemic lockdowns.
• Dobbyn discusses the unusual position of writing about a living, close friend, using journalistic standards, corroborating witnesses and news archives to keep the account truthful rather than reverential.
• Mervyn’s mother, Marjorie, was a talented amateur photographer whose influence sparked his early interest, reflecting a broader, lesser-known tradition of photography within First Nations families as a way of preserving connection.
• The death of Mervyn’s wife Elizabeth on the day of his first solo exhibition profoundly altered Mervyn’s life and parenting, with Dobbyn noting she had been his crucial organising force.
• Mervyn developed a distinctive ethical practice around photographing people in dire circumstances, using humour, empathy and consent to disarm subjects rather than exploit them.
• Dobbyn faced years of publishing rejection as a first-time author before Ginninderra Press took on the richly illustrated book, timed serendipitously with a State Library exhibition of Mervyn’s photographs.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Anna Thomasson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Why Anna Thomasson chose a collective biography to reveal the chemistry and interconnected lives of nine surrealists.
• How a 1937 summer at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon became the book’s narrative and symbolic starting point.
• What photographs reveal about historical lives and why their apparent intimacy can never yield the whole truth.
• How letters, diaries, poems and artworks became ‘wormholes’ into her subjects’ experiences.
• Why Anna Thomasson preserves archival silences and honours Ady Fidelin’s right to opacity rather than speculating.
• How short chapters, juxtaposition and a collage of fragments sustain momentum across nine intersecting lives.
• Why contradictions, omissions and self-mythologising belong inside biography instead of being smoothed into certainty.
• Thomasson’s advice to biographers: set research boundaries, trust your instincts and accept that every life remains provisional.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sonia Orchard chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Groomed.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• How Sonia’s daughter approaching the age Sonia was when the abuse occurred, prompted her to reconsider the relationship and pursue justice for herself and the next generation.
• Why Sonia used the police investigation and court case as the memoir’s narrative spine, beginning with the question: ‘Had a crime been committed?’
• How writing the unfolding legal process in real time without knowing its outcome created immediacy, uncertainty and suspense.
• Why Sonia interwove memoir with neuroscience, psychology, cultural history and legal research, using research as both a means of understanding and a source of emotional distance.
• How Sonia’s teenage diaries and adult perspective reveal competing narratives of love and abuse—and helped her reclaim her story through narrative justice.
• What Groomed reveals about grooming, gaslighting and coercive control, and the cultural narratives that allow child abuse to be mistaken for romance.
• Why Sonia’s search for accountability became a wider critique of a legal system that can retraumatise survivors while failing to provide recognition, care and communal healing.
• How her cancer diagnosis illuminated society’s contrasting responses to physical and emotional trauma, and why she advises trauma writers to seek support, trust their instincts and write only when ready.