Anne Summers - Witness

6pm for 6.30pm Tuesday 1st December
Anne Summers – trailblazing feminist, journalist, commentator and author – has often been the nation’s conscience with her insightful and powerful writing on the past 50 years of Australian and American society and politics.

In Witness, an illuminating first-ever collection of Summers’ reportage, essays, interviews and articles, we meet Cate Blanchett and Robert Caro, Germaine Greer and Monica Lewinsky, Faith Bandler and Rosie Batty. Summers revisits the vindictive politics of the Julia Gillard era, the unexpected legacy of Malcolm Fraser and the way John Howard upended the agenda for women’s equality. She explores the Mexican patron saint of drug runners, the terrorist bombing of an Ariana Grande concert and the women who marched against rape in war on ANZAC Day. And she reflects on the death of her mother, finally providing a headstone for a violent grandfather, sharing her name with a chain of sex shops and why she couldn’t throw out her swinging '60s wedding dress.

In a collection as varied and deeply considered as her own life, Summers tells the stories of the people, issues and moments that have shaped our past and are key to understanding today’s tumultuous world.


Dr Anne Summers AO is a journalist, commentator and best-selling author of ten books. She is currently an Honorary Professor of Domestic and Family Violence at UTS. Previously, she was an advisor for Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, ran the Office of the Status of Women, was Canberra Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review, editor of Good Weekend. Anne was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for her services to journalism and to women in 1989; had her image on a postage stamp as an Australian Legend in 2011 and in 2017 was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame. In 2026 Australian readers voted Anne’s seminal work Dead Whores and God’s Police into the top 100 Australian books of all time.

Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am and Wifedom. Anna’s books have won many prestigious awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Miles Franklin Prize and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. A former human rights lawyer, Anna’s literary work illuminates with great intimacy the courage and conscience of people trying to hold onto their humanity in the face of tyrannical power structures. In 2025 the Australian public voted all three of her major works as among the top 100 books of the 21st century.