Historical novelist and Jamaican Australian Sienna Brown discusses a series of podcast documentaries she has produced with scholar Ben Etherington that delve into the lives of two Caribbean-Australians.
The Caribbean presence in Australia dates to the First Fleet, yet the historical novelist and Jamaican Australian Sienna Brown assumed she was an outlier when she arrived in Australia three decades ago. For fifteen years Brown has sifted through archives and reached out to researchers across the world to piece together the stories of Caribbean arrivants, including writing her debut novel about the Jamaican rebel, convict, and bushranger William Buchanan. In this session she discusses a series of podcast documentaries she has produced with Caribbean literature scholar Ben Etherington that delve into the lives and stories of two major Caribbean-Australians the globally renowned pathbreaking nineteenth-century boxer and actor Peter Jackson and the beloved twentieth-century singer and cabaret star Nellie Small. In conversation with Etherington, she will talk about her creative process of working with actors Zahra Newman and Alpha Kargbo to explore the inner lives of these iconic Caribbean Australians.
