Ladies Who Lunch

B/W Chair Susan Diver * TV news reader Natarsha Belling * Mem Fox * Julia Baird * Dame Marie Bashir * Kate Carnell

 The Black and White Charity Committee raises funds for Vision Australia to provide support services for children and their families.  Each year they hold the Women Of Achievement lunch at the Four Season's Hotel at Circular Quay.
This is a great event: every penny raised goes to the charity as the ladies on the B/W Committee, cajole, beg, borrow and steal every aspect of the day. They are all unpaid volunteers and it's a pretty good achievement in itself to be able to draw over 500 attendees as they did this year, to pack the hotel ballroom.
Three distinguished ladies of "achievement" give a speech outlining their career and how they got there. Most started from humble beginnings This years speakers were Mem Fox who is married to the billionaire trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, ABC TV presenter Julia Baird and Kate Carnell former Chief Minister of the ACT and currently the Ombudsman for Small Business.
Among the guests, Gina Rinehart arguably the world's richest woman with a mining fortune and Dame Marie Bashir former NSW Governor, Professor Ross Steele, one of world's great experts on the French language and Olympian Jessica Gallagher.

Judith Crawley * Daniel Trelease * Maria Finlay * Professor Steele* Jessica Gallagher * Mike Levendi

Tara Moss : The Fictional Woman

Best selling author Tara Moss has published her first non-fiction book : The Fictional Woman. Tara is pictured here at the launch (centre) with Julia Baird and Anne Summers (check out Anne's superb website by clicking on the link at the left). Beneath our snap is the book's blurb (we haven't read it yet!)

"In the accessible style of Caitlin Moran's HOW TO BE A WOMAN comes bestselling author Tara Moss's first exciting non-fiction book - a fascinating mix of memoir and social comment. Tara Moss has worn many labels in her time, including 'author', 'model', 'gold-digger', 'commentator', 'inspiration', 'dumb blonde', 'feminist' and 'mother', among many others. Now, in her first work of non-fiction, she blends memoir and social analysis to examine the common fictions about women. She traces key moments in her life - from small-town tomboy in Canada, to international fashion model in the 90s, to bestselling author taking a polygraph test in 2002 to prove she writes her own work"