Estelle Blackburn meet-the-author visit

Estelle Blackburn is the award winning author of Broken Lives six years of painstaking research brought about the exoneration of John Button for the killing of his girlfriend in the 1960's. Estelle received journalism's highest honour, the Walkley Award and an Order of Australia Medal. Broken Lives won the Ned Kelly Award for Australia's Best True Crime book, the WA Premier's Book Award for non-fiction, the Perth Press Club Award and Western Australia's highest journalism honour, the Clarion Award. Estelle Blackburn started at The West Australian thirty-two years ago. She went on to Perth's ABC for five years, then to Government Media, before leaving full-time work to research and write Broken Lives. She is now freelancing while turning the book into a PhD with a grant from Murdoch University.

Estelle Blackburn visited Bunbury Public Library on 22 of July. The meet-the-author session was booked out early with more people turning up than there were bookings. The forty-nine audience members was made up of ages ranging from teenage to seniors. Almost half the audience were men. Estelle spoke for approximately one and a half hours about her book Broken Lives and answered questions from the audience. At the end of the session, refreshments were served and Estelle stayed to sign books and talk with audience members, many of whom talked about their own personal recollections of the events of the 1960s. Estelle's lively and engaging talk really did captivate the audience. Comments I received after the session were very positive and audience members appreciated that our library invited an author of Estelle's calibre.

Angela Ghisla
Bunbury Public Library

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