Killing for Country: David Marr in conversation with Fiona Foley

Hear from acclaimed author David Marr in conversation with Badtjala artist Dr Fiona Foley in the historic Maryborough Bond Store.

David Marr is the author of Killing for Country, a gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia's frontier wars.

In Killing for Country Marr brings his experience as an investigative journalist, an award-winning biographer, and political analyst to the story of a colonial family that seized hundreds of thousands of acres of land and led Aboriginal troopers into bloody massacres in the most violent years of the Native Police. 

In this conversation between David Marr and Fiona Foley, uncover the history of Maryborough and other frontier towns across the country within the evocative surrounds of the Bond Store, built in 1864.

This event is presented by Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, the Bond Store and Fraser Coast Libraries, as part of the Lines in the Sand program. It is supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and Fraser Coast Regional Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
 

About Killing for Country

David Marr was shocked to discover his forebears served with the Native Police, the most brutal force in Australian history. Killing for Country is the result – a personal history of the Frontier Wars.

It is a unique history of the making of Australia – a richly detailed and gripping family saga of fortunes made and lost, of politics and power in the colonial world, and the violence let loose by squatters and their London bankers as they began their long war for the possession of this country – a contest still unresolved in today's Australia.

About David Marr

David Marr has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and The Monthly, and has served as editor of The National Times, reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch. His books include Patrick White: A Life, The High Price of Heaven, Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson), Panic and six bestselling Quarterly Essays: His Master's Voice, Power Trip, Political Animal, The Prince, Faction Man and The White Queen.

About Fiona Foley

Dr Fiona Foley is an Aboriginal artist, Badtjala woman and provocateur, part of a highly influential generation of urban Indigenous artists. Over a career now spanning thirty years she has consistently asked questions about hidden histories, the Frontier Wars waged against Aboriginal peoples, and brought the massacres and dispossession into galleries, public spaces and to a broader, society-wide debate.

Retrospective exhibitions include Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise at QUT Art Museum, McClelland Gallery and Hervey Bay Regional Gallery in 2022-2023; Who are these strangers and where are they going? in Ballarat and Sydney in 2019-2020; and Fiona Foley: Forbidden at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane in 2009. Her work is in every major institutional collection in Australia, many private collections, and occupies public spaces all over Australia, including in the State Library of Queensland.