Congress, Naarm

Uncle Charles Pakana (born Keir Wells) is an Aboriginal man of Tasmanian descent, yet identifies strongly as an Aboriginal Victorian. He is the second of three successive generations of Aboriginal journalists and is the founder of Victorian Aboriginal News, a not for profit media company focused on producing Treaty, reconciliation, self-determination and truth-telling content for radio and the company’s own VAN Talks podcast. As Australia’s first full-time Treaty Correspondent, Charles has consistently covered the Victorian Treaty process.

Tina Hosseini is a passionate advocate for multiculturalism, human rights and social justice, with extensive experience within dispute resolution, public policy, research, governance and community leadership. She currently works in dispute resolution. Previously, she served as an adviser to a Federal Member of Parliament. Earlier in her career, she was a Research Fellow at Swinburne University, where her work focused on countering violent extremism and family violence, and a Research Fellow at Deakin University, where she contributed to prevention-based adolescent health research.

River Gammon is a writer, artist and proud trans Christian. Despite coming from a non-religious family, he has spent much of his twenties in Christian spaces. He has also spent a number of years volunteering with trans & gender diverse youth and adults. Living in these two worlds, he hopes to help others see faith in queerness and queerness in faith. He is currently studying theology while working at a cathedral, and is passionate about creating welcoming spaces for all.  His writing work has been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, and other places across cyberspace. 

Vera Kipp-Murray is ten years old and lives on a cattle farm in central Victoria. She attends Candlebark Primary School. She sings and plays violin in an ensemble that recently played The Final Countdownl. She loves listening to music, making Lego and climbing trees.

Nicolette Forte is an eclectic creative who makes music, theatre and brings together communities in a way that makes people know that they belong and that they are celebrated. For over 2 decades Nicolette has radiated generosity and heart through everything she does-creating engaging work that connects deeply to its recipients. Beyond the stage, you will find Nicolette barefoot in the dirt blissfully tending to her own garden. This big brown babe has a wealth of knowledge around growing food, homesteading practices and ecosystems all informed by her passion for permaculture and its principles.

Anna Pidgeon is a newly qualified midwife with a particular passion for bereavement care. She is also the Editor of the podcast Pregnancy Uncut. She is also an arts facilitator, passionate about creating environments where the work of others can flourish. She has a degree in philosophy and has worked in Radio, the Arts and the Emergency Services as a firefighter all of which feed into her love of talking, problem solving and making things happen in fast-paced, unexpected environments. She loves a late-night heated debate about just about anything and is always prepared to go all in (often with little information).

Geoffrey Lim is the Executive Director and co-founder of Cypher Culture, a street dance community organisation bridging Melbourne’s grassroots dance scenes with the institutions that have long overlooked them. A bboying practitioner and former banker, Geoffrey left corporate life in 2021 to build an organisation now shaping policy conversations at the City of Melbourne, Arts Access Victoria, and the University of Melbourne’s Social Equity Institute. He is also deafblind, a label he didn’t fully claim until a few years ago, after a lifetime of feeling ‘not disabled enough’. That tension between visibility and invisibility, between being unheard and being asked to perform your story for others, sits at the heart of his speech for CONGRESS: a call for the city to make room for the people it wasn’t designed around.

Tony Cattafi migrated from Messina, Sicily to Melbourne in 1965, arriving with little more than a suitcase and no English. Together with his wife Giovanna, he founded the iconic La Spaghettata on Lygon Street in 1981, creating a place centred on food, family, culture and community. More than four decades later, the Cattafi family continues Tony’s legacy of generous Italian hospitality in the heart of Carlton.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the critically acclaimed bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the UK’s Kate Greenaway medal, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd), which won the 2019 Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book.  Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people, which won the 2024 ABIA for Book of the Year for Younger Readers, Stuff I’m (NOT) Sorry For: 99 more poems for young people, and Beautiful Changelings. Her latest novel for children is Sagittarius Rising. Maxine was the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne (2023-2025).

Skye Cusack is a Dulgubarra Yidinji and Asian writer, journalist and accidental comedian living in Naarm (Melbourne). Skye shares stories that make you laugh, cry, and call your therapist. Common themes in her writing include mental health, disability, fatphobia, existential Blak crises, and people generally making fools of themselves. Skye is publishing two comedy fiction novels: Queer romcom ‘Checked Out’ with Penguin Random House Australia in 2027 and sapphic New Adult novel ‘The Dangers of Just One Person’ with Magabala Books in 2028.

Willoh Weiland is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer. She is passionate about the social role of art and a leader and advocate for the role of experimental arts practice in Australia. Currently she is a Creative Associate of the MONA FOMA Festival at the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania and an Honorary Fellow and first artist in residence at the Microsoft Centre for Social NUI, University of Melbourne, School of Engineering and Computer Science. Currently she works to deliver an Audience & Innovation strategy for live performance in Tasmania and writing and directing Cake, a large-scale performance work commissioned by ATQM.

Roger Monk is a screenwriter for film and TV. His feature film, Walking on Water won multiple writing awards and the Teddy at Berlinale in 2002. Currently Roger is in development for TV series, Mortal Coil with Magpie Pictures, Bavaria (Germany) and OWL (Athens Film Office), SLAY with Endemol Shine and Clubbing with Magpie Pictures. Roger is big fan of ATQM and has collaborated with speakers for all previous Congress presentations. Other TV credits include The Unusual Suspects, Mr. Midnight, Nowhere Boys, Dance Academy, Doctor Blake Mysteries, East of Everything and Secret Life of Us.

Isabella Eichler-Onus is a proud Gunditjmara writer living in Naarm. She is currently studying a Bachelor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She has published poetry with Red Room Poetry and Voiceworks, and has been involved in events with the Melbourne Writers Festival, YIRRAMBOI, and the Wheeler Centre. Most recently, she received runners-up for the Nakata Brophy Short Fiction Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. Her work explores themes of identity, cultural connection and the intricate relationship between land and body.

Beau Windon is a neurodivergent author of Wiradyuri heritage based in Naarm. Unable to settle on just one genre of writing, he wields them all with wreckless abandon. His creative non-fiction led to him being a winner of Griffith Review’s 2023 Emerging Voices competition, being a finalist for the Writers Prize in the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature, and winning a Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award in 2022. In 2025, Beau’s poetry project was a finalist for the David Unaipon Award and he won the Daisy Utemorrah Award for his children’s manuscript “Jax Paperweight and the Neon Starway”. Beau is doing his PhD in the Aesthetic Form of Neurodivergent Literary Memoir at RMIT University – which is WILD because he flunked his high school English classes. If Beau could be any animal, he would be a chocolate egg – the kind with a toy hidden inside.

Fatima Measham is a nature writer with a visual practice. Her writing has appeared in Meanjin, Liminal and other publications. Her essay, Path Integration was shortlisted in the 2023 KYD Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She has been on non-fiction assessment panels for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her essay No Shit was the provocation for new work by other artists through Wunder Gym programs supported by Wyndham City. She held her debut solo exhibition Sanctuary in 2023, and was a participating artist in Wunder Gym x Melbourne Fringe Festival exhibitions in 2023 and 2025, as well as Nature is a Home at Louis Joel Gallery. Her perspective is drawn from Filipino revolutionary history and Catholic liberation theory.

CQ Quinan is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. CQ’s research and teaching expertise lies in trans studies and queer theory, and they are the author of the book Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and its Postcolonial Legacies and co-editor of the volume Homonationalism, Femonationalism, Ablenationalism. They have also authored numerous articles, including, most recently, ‘From Criminalization to Erasure: Project 2025 and Anti-Trans Legislation in the US’, ‘The Future of Nonbinary’, and ‘Skin in the Game: Notes on Pronouns and Nonbinary Experience.’ CQ is also a key investigator on an EU-based research project that brings together academics, practitioners, NGOs, policymakers, and other stakeholders to assess lived experiences of trans and nonbinary legal gender recognition.