Art and Story in Urgent Times: A Panel Discussion at The Lock-Up

We live in urgent times of overlapping crises: environmental destruction, rising inequity, and the corrosion of truth, to name only a few. In such times, art and story are refusals. They refuse silence. They refuse forgetting. They refuse resignation.

Art and story cannot stop crisis, but they can bear witness. They testify, they confront, and in doing so they propose repair, connection, and an imagining of what might yet be possible.

Hunter Writers’ Centre in association with The Lock-Up, presents Art and Story in Urgent Times. Shellie Smith, Awabakal artist and curator, joins novelists Dominic Hoey (1985, Penguin) and Natalia Figueroa Barroso (Hailstones Fell without Rain, UQP) in conversation with Trisha Pender. Together they explore how truth-telling through art and story confronts the urgencies of our time.

WHEN: Thursday October 23rd, 6-8pm

Doors open from 5.30pm for bar and exhibition viewing

WHERE: The Lock-Up

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Shellie Smith is a proud Awabakal descendant and Associate Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Newcastle. She integrates teaching, making, and research as acts of colonial resistance. Her creative practice reawakens Awabakal cultural making and engages in archival interrogation and re-contextualisation, positioning art as activism to foreground Awabakal self-determination, challenge colonial narratives, and shape Country-led, inclusive futures.

Natalia Figueroa Barroso is a writer of Uruguayan descent with Charrúa, Yoruba and Iberian origins. She was born on Dharug Ngura and was raised between her birthland and her homeland. A member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, her essays, poems and short stories have been published widely in Meanjin, Red Room Poetry, Povo, Overland and Griffith Review. Hailstones Fell without Rain is her debut work of fiction.

Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland, New Zealand. He’s released two best-selling novels and written a million love poems. Through his Learn To Write Good programme, Dominic has taught thousands of writing students how to think dyslexic. He also works with young people through the Atawhai program, teaching art, yoga and meditation to help them with their mental health and self-esteem. He dreams of one day starting a rescue farm for wayward animals.

Trisha Pender is an Associate Professor of English and Writing who has published widely on women’s literary history and feminist cultural studies. For the last decade, she has coordinated the Gender Research Network and, in 2025, established the Writing for Social Change speakers series with her students at the University of Newcastle.

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