Orange City Library is hosting a guest speaker from the Black Dog Institute on Wednesday 7 October at 2pm for a free talk. The Black Dog Institute is a not-for-profit, educational, research, clinical and community-oriented facility offering specialist expertise in depression and bipolar disorder. The event is part of 2009 Mental Health Week which has the theme Building Resilience  Sign Up, Link In, Get Involved. Information about the Black Dog Institute's 2010 writing and photographic competition will also be available at the talk. So come along.

Please join us at Orange City Library
Monday 28 September 2009, from 10.10am for fantastic morning of new things to learn followed by a sausage sizzle to celebrate Adult Learners Week.

First there will be an official welcome & hear about the experience of adult learners … then
Join in with Information sessions including:
10.30  11.30am – Making a will and power of attorney and from 11.45am
” Making your own worm farm
” Learning opportunities for adults
” How to use a digital camera
” Using online government and banking
” Restoring and preserving photographs
” Have you thought about becoming a writer?
” Making a porcelain doll. These are drop in sessions and run all morning.
Stay and enjoy some lunch, tea & coffee. It all finishes around 1pm. The event is free but bookings are essential by telephoning 6393 8132. See you there.

Arts Minister Peter Garrett has announced the 15 Australian books shortlisted for the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Minister Garrett said the Awards, now in their second year, have again recognised an outstanding collection of must-read Australian titles.
Fiction shortlist:
The Pages – Murray Bail,
People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks,
Wanting – Richard Flanagan,
Everything I Knew – Peter Goldsworthy,
One Foot Wrong – Sofie Laguna,
The Boat – Nam Le, The Good Parents – Joan London,
Non-Fiction shortlist:
Van Diemen's Land – James Boyce,
Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley – Brian Dibble,
Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History – Jenny Hocking,
The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island – Chloe Hooper,
House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann – Evelyn Juers,
Drawing the Global Colour Line – Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds,
The Henson Case – David Marr,
American Journeys – Don Watson.
Visit www.arts.gov.au/pmliteraryawards for details of the shortlisted books.
More than 250 entries were received for the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Winners receive a tax free prize of $100,000 each in the fiction and non-fiction categories.

Prepare to be amazed as we link Dracula and Dorian Gray to Jane Austen. True. Our Classics Book Club readers are enjoying catching up with Thomas Hardy novels and some gothic horror by revisiting Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Did you know that Bram Stoker attended dinner parties hosted by Oscar Wilde's mother Lady Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde at the family's chicly bohemian salon. And guess which star from the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice is to star is a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray? Yes that's the Austen connection  would you believe Colin Firth? as Lord Henry alongside Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray(pictured). Sounds all good so far.

And the next Classics Book Club meetings are:

Blayney Library on Tuesday 22 September from 11am – 12 noon to talk about Under the Greenwood Tree and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

Orange Daytime Group on Thursday 24 September 12.30pm – 1.30pm to discuss Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Orange Evening Group on Thursday 24 September 5.30pm – 7pm to discuss Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Cowra Library on Tuesday 29 September from 12.30pm – 1.30pm to talk about Bram Stoker and Dracula.

PS. If you want to see a combined storyline with Frankenstein and Dracula then check out the film Van Helsing  stars Richard Roxburgh, Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale  great for the special effects and Brides of Dracula.

Photographer – author Trisha Dixon will be the special guest at the opening of the Orange Blossoms Exhibition at Orange Regional Gallery on Saturday 19 September at 2pm and will give an illustrated talk at Borrodell Vineyard, Orange on Sunday 20 September at 2pm, cost $15. She is the author of a number of garden books, including two on the plans and gardens of Edna Walling, and is columnist for Gardening Australia and Outback magazines.
Trisha will talk about the landscapes and properties that have inspired some of our leading writers and artists including architecture, gardens, social and cultural history, art and design. People such as our Nobel Prize winning laureate for literature, Patrick White, who jackerooed on a high country property, Bolaro Station and wrote his first novel there. He subsequently bought and burnt every copy he could find of it. Poet Banjo Paterson wrote his last poem in memory of this property as well. To book your place for the garden talk please call Borrodell on 6365 3425 or visit www.borrodell.com.au