Melbourne event: Readings State Library, 9 July 2026

A free event hosted by Readings at the State Library of Victoria.

Date

6.30pm, Thursday 9 July, 2026

Location

Get directions
Readings State Library
Wurundjeri Country, State Library Victoria, 285-321 Russell St, Melbourne

We are delighted to invite you to hear a conversation between Cynthia Banham and Kate Halfpenny.

Cynthia Banham's Mother Shadow opens with the uncovering of a family secret. The author's great-grandmother was not an orphan, as she'd been told, but a foundling, relinquished at birth by a mother who 'did not consent to be named'. The discovery of the abandoned baby in her maternal line triggers a passionate and indignant reaction as she asks: what kind of a mother would relinquish her child? It also triggers a painful personal memory of the day she dropped her baby after falling backwards in her wheelchair and realised her worst fear. That her broken body, permanently injured in a plane crash in her early 30s, could not be trusted to protect her baby.

Mother Shadow is a meditation on what it means to be a 'good mother' where two women – separated by continents and time but connected by blood – each find themselves enchained by social and personal forces that seek to limit them.

Free, but bookings are essential.