The Emerging Writers’ Festival work, learn and play largely on the land of the Kulin nation, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.

EWF celebrates the history and creativity of the world’s oldest living culture.

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Ethers & Panel

Written Out: How Australian Media Is Failing Disability Representation

Disability representation in Australian media has a long way to go. Over the past five years, Australian media has included only a handful of characters, a fraction of the stories, and almost none of the diversity of the disability community.  

This panel brings together artists working in various pockets of the creative industries to share their stories, perspectives and lived experience. Together they’ll celebrate how far we’ve come, reckon with how far we haven’t, and dream up the future that disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people deserve. 

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Wednesday 16 September, 7.30pm-8.30pm AEST

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Featuring...

Jarni Blakkarly

Jarni Blakkarly is an award-winning investigative journalist and writer. His journalism work has appeared in outlets such as Al Jazeera English, BBC, ABC, SBS News and CHOICE, where he now works. His creative writing explores issues and complexities of race, identity and living with bipolar disorder and has been published in the Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and Overland.

Brandon Fairley

Brandon Fairley is an actor, writer, singer, producer, spokesperson, and proud Indigenous Australian with an invisible disability. He’s spent more than eight years in community theatre, film, and screen. His theatre credits include Bonnie and Clyde: The Musical, Cannibal! The Musical. His screen work includes roles as a Stand-In for Josh Gad for Spaceballs 2 and Prefer not to Say screening at the ACMI on May 30th in which he starred, wrote and produced. Brandon was a panelist at the First Nations & Disability Driving Change Employment Summit and proudly serves as the Bus Stop Films Program Ambassador for Wollongong.

Maddy Ruskin

Maddy Ruskin is a disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writer and editor. She has worked in the screen industry for many years and recently hosted ‘No Spoons to Give’, a podcast celebrating the vibrant disability community. Maddy was awarded Varuna’s The Writer’s Space Online Fellowship and and the Victorian Screen Development Internship in 2022. She was shortlisted for the Lesley Hall Arts and Disability Scholarship in 2025 and 2022, and longlisted for the Australian Writer’s Guild and Audible ‘On Air Audio Originals Writing Competition’ in 2020.

Zoe Simmons

Storyteller. Content creator. Changemaker. Zoe Simmons is an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and fierce disability advocate who uses the raw power of storytelling and lived experience to smash stigma and create change. She’s been published hundreds of times around the globe, and candidly shares her experience as a chronically ill, multiply disabled, autistic LGBTQIA+ person.

Zoe has been published in 10 books as a poet and author, and works regularly in media, now co-hosting her second season of Laneway: CTV News. Zoe is also working on her first solo TV show, which will launch at the end of 2026/beginning of 2027.

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