Jo loves the stories waiting to be uncovered- from the history that is all around us, the greatest stories ever written and the amazing people who created them.  Now she captivates her audiences by revealing these hidden stories.

Choose from one of her existing presentations or talk to Jo about creating something for your specific interests.

These can all be presented live or online.
The response from the delegates to your presentation was very enthusiastic. You are an excellent presenter and your presentation was very engaging. You have given us all hope for telling other peoples’ stories.
             
Patrick Watt Vice President IMTAL Asia Pacific

History

Events
  • The Rum Rebellion
  • First Contact
  • Unsolved Australian Murder Mysteries
  • Australian Silent Films
  • Ten Plagues of Sydney
  • Batavia: a gory story
  • The History of Sex in Australia
  • Entertaining Australia: theatre, film, radio, and television to 2000
  • Australian films  
People
  • Australian Childhood over the generations
  • Invisibilising the Orphans
  • Bushrangers Beyond Ned
  • Harris and Macarthur, and the Kings who came between
  • Some Aboriginal Heroes
  • Crooks:  frauds, thieves and con artists
  • Australian Women’s History
  • The History of Chinese people in Australia
  • Juicy governors of NSW
  • The French Connection
  • Waves of Migration
  • The Michaelis family of Elizabeth Bay House
  • William Dampier: pirate, explorer, writer
  • Love, loss, and Laperouse
Places
  • Places of incarceration: prisons, quarantine, asylums and orphanages

Literature

Picture
Writers
  • Three generations of Alexandre Dumas
  • Louisa May Alcott: the Marches and the Alcotts
  • Arthur Conan Doyle: body and soul
  • Robert Louis Stevenson: master of genres
  • Georgette Heyer: mother of the Regency novel
  • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: friends, family, Frankenstein
  • Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel
  • Elizabeth Gaskell (how to be subversive and remain a lady)
  • L. M. Montgomery:  Anne and other literary orphans
  • Hans Christian Andersen
  • Literary Love Stories: Heloise and Abelard, Barrett and Browning, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Darcy Niland and Ruth Park
  • Literary Friendships:  Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Shelley and Byron, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, Vera Britain and Winifred Holtby
  • Seven Little Australian Writers
  • Gumnuts and Carrot Patches:  imagining nature in children’s classics
  • Seeking Treasure in Secret Gardens:  Nesbit, Burnett and Webster
  • Ethel, Maud, Edith and Jean: some authors of children’s classics
  • Literary Scotland
  • Literary England
 
Epics
  • The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • The Iliad and The Odyssey
  • Beowulf
  • The Mabinogion
  • Icelandic sagas
  • The Shanameh
  • The 1001 Arabian Nights
  • The Kalevala and The Nibelungenlied:  Norse epics
 
 
Genres
  • The history of the historical: Scott, Stevenson, and Heyer
  • Gothic Novels
  • Swashbucklers on page and screen
  • The history of the mystery (as a literary genre)
  • The Australian Yarn
  • Orphans in fact and fiction

Intangible culture

Picture
  • Storytelling around the world: historical and contemporary
  • Fears and Powers in Disguise: the History of Fairy Tales
  • Robin Hood Around the World
  • King Arthur, the ideal king
  • The Scarlet Pimpernel: the double identity in literature
  • St Nicholas Around the World
  • Protocols of non indigenous storytellers telling indigenous stories
  • Chinese New Year