Annual Fundraising Luncheon
Since 1995, an Annual Luncheon has been held in September at the Strangers’ Dining Room, NSW Parliament House, Sydney with a prestigious woman guest speaker. This Luncheon is the major fundraiser for the Library. All are welcome at the Annual Luncheon and the Library is proud that students from public and private schools across the state attend.
Last year’s guest speaker was Professor Verity Firth AM. She spoke about the ongoing challenges to Higher Education and the need for governments to see universities as public assets essential to the country’s wellbeing.
Join us for a stimulating and entertaining afternoon. Please contact the Library for further information or any special requests.
ANNUAL LUNCHEON SPEAKER 2026
Speaker: Debra Oswald
Date and place: Monday 7 September, 11.45 am for 12.20 pm, Strangers’ Room, NSW Parliament
Curious, dogged, optimistic: 50 years as a feminist writer in Australia.
We are delighted to welcome Debra Oswald, acclaimed Australian writer and two times winner of the NSW Premier’s Literature Award, as our 2026 speaker. She has forged her writing career across every literary genre: novels, television and film scripts, theatre and children’s literature. Her talent was recognised at the young age of 17 when she wrote her first play, Our Hopeful Youth which was workshopped at the 1977 Australian National Playwright’s Conference and broadcast on ABC radio. She went on to study at the Australian National University and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Her plays have been produced widely in Australia and overseas. For example, Dags has been performed in Britain and the United States. Mr Bailey’s Minder and The Peach Season premiered at the Griffin Theatre Company; Mr Bailey’s Minder later premiered in the United States at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, earning her the Seaborn Playwright’s Prize. Gary’s House was staged in Japanese in Tokyo by Rakutendan Theatre in 2008. In 2021, she made her on-stage debut with her one-woman show Is There Something Wrong With That Lady at the Griffin Theatre.
She has written four plays for teenage audiences including House on Fire, performed by the Australian Theatre for Young People in 2010. Of her two previous plays,Skate toured in the Belfast Festival and Stories in the Dark won the NSW Literary Award. The judges commented on the latter: ‘By engaging us with dark tales, paradoxically told as a distraction in a time of war, Oswald probes the role of imagination in survival, with insight and sureness of craft … [her] clear-eyed, compassionate play shows us the role of story in making sense, and thus its place in the persistence of hope.’
For television, she was the creator and head writer for the successful series Offspring, for which she won the Australian Academy for Cinema and Television Arts Award for best TV Screenplay in 2014, and which ran for seven series. Among her other TV credits are Police Rescue, Wildside, Magic Mountain, The Secret Life of Us and Bananas in Pyjamas.
Debra has also acquired many credits in the genre of children’s literature. Her novels include Me and Barry Terrific, The Return of the Baked Bean, The Redback Leftovers, Getting Air and Blue Noise, a story about teenagers who establish a blues band.
She has written four adult novels: House on Fire, The Whole Bright Year and The Family Doctor. Her latest novel, published in 2025, is One Hundred Years of Betty. The main protagonist Betty is looking back over her life from where she is now. Debra described her as ‘… a spirited woman doing the best with what is available to her – experiencing and responding to the major events through which she has lived.’ Elsewhere Debra said: ‘I’m writing the old woman I hope I will be’.
In an interview with journalist Jenny Tabakoff in 2002 Debra shared her insight into why people may choose to be a writer: ‘I think part of the impulse to become a writer is that you want to live a hundred different lives but … this terrible realisation hits you that you’re not, you’re only going to live one. And even if it’s a good one, by going down through this door there are other doors you can never go to. I love my life. I just want to have more. I’m greedy.’
Please join us in welcoming Debra Oswald to our Annual Fundraising Luncheon, celebrating 50 years of feminist writing!
Annual Luncheon archive
The Annual Luncheon archive shows the guest speakers and their topics since 1995.
