Judith Harley.
Harley was born Judith Deakin White in Melbourne in 1929, the daughter of Thomas W White and Vera Deakin White, whose father was Alfred Deakin. She completed a BA at the University of Melbourne, before moving to London in 1951 when her father was made Australian High Commissioner. Harley was President of the Women's Committee National Trust, and has a life-long interest and involvement with the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. She studied Australian History at Melbourne University in the 1970s, and at the Frank Werther Studio. She has had solo exhibitions of her work, and has had numerous articles and stories published.

The Hon Sir Anthony Mason AC, KBE
Sir Anthony was the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia from 1987 to 1995. Until recently he was the Chancellor of the University of NSW, National Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Fiji, and President of the Soloman Islands Court of Appeal. He also held the position of Commonwealth Solicitor-General and Justice of the NSW Court of Appeal. Sir Anthony is currently a non-permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal.

Professor Benedict R O'G Anderson
Benedict Anderson is Professor of International Studies and Director of the Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell University, New York. He is widely acknowledged with coining one of the most used theoretical definitions of Nationalism. His 1983 publication Imagined Communities has become a standard text on the subject.

More recently he has written extensively on the politics of the Southeast Asian region. He is also Editor of the journal Indonesia, has published numerous texts on the political culture of Indonesia and Thailand and, for twenty years, has regularly written commentaries on the internal politics of the Indonesian military. Within the field of comparative politics, he has focussed his research and teaching on nationalism and militarism in a world context, and on political culture and comparative colonialism in South-East Asia.

"The American investment in Cold War South-East Asia - which made possible the tyrannies of the Thai generals in the period 1948-77, the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and Suharto's endless Neues Ordnung - is no more. The American bases in the Philippines are gone, and the country matters very little to its former colonial master. Thailand is no longer seen as a bulwark against anything. Even Indonesia, with its 200 million people, is understood more as a worry than an ally. The anti-Western vociferations of Malaysia's durable Prime Minister barely earn him a shrug in Washington. Japan has long-term geo-political interests in the region, but it is likely that the country's 'historic moment', symbolised by the Plaza Accord of 1985, and the anti-Japanese scare that swept America in the Eighties, has passed....On the other hand, although China's political future is full of uncertainties, the chances are high that it will soon resume its historically central role in eastern and south-eastern Asia." - Benedict Anderson, From Miracle to Crash, , London Review of Books, Vol20, No 8.

Further Reading:
A good background on Anderson's work on nationalism is the Nationalism Project from the University of Wisconsin.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991).

The Hon Gareth Evans AO, QC
Former Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans is the President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG). One of Australia's longest serving foreign ministers (1988-1996), Evans is best-known internationally for his role in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, for which he was awarded the ANZAC Peace Prize and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. As Foreign Minister, he also helped bring to conclusion the International Chemical Weapons Convention, and initiated the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapon. He is also the author Co-operating for Peace, a text on UN reform.

His Excellency the Rt Hon Don McKinnon
Don McKinnon is Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations. Since being elected to New Zealand Parliament in 1978, His Excellency has held several senior posts within the government, including Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. As Foreign Minister, His Excellency served as Deputy Chairman of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, and is credited with enhancing economic opportunities for Commonwealth Member States through debt relief and technical assistance transfers. During his term as Foreign Minister in 1993/94, New Zealand, he was elected and served on the United Nations Security Council. His Excellency is widely credited with brokering a cease-fire and renewed political dialogue between the people of Bougainville and the Papua New Guinean Government.

Professor Lord Robert Winston
Lord Winston is well known to audiences throughout the world for his BBC television series The Human Body, Secret Life of Twins and Superhuman (broadcast in Australia on the ABC). The Professor of Fertility Studies at London University, Lord Winston is regarded as a world-renowned fertility expert, and has been credited for communicating often complex science to a wide public audience. He also heads the Department of Reproductive Medicine at the Hammersmith Hospital in London. As a researcher into human reproduction, Lord Winston helped develop gynaecological microsurgery in the 1970s and techniques for sterilisation reversal. The improvements he has developed in fertility medicine have subsequently been adopted world-wide. He currently researches transgenic technology, particularly for models of human disease and organ transplants.
Lord Winston is the author of many books, including Infertility - a sympathetic approach (1985); Getting Pregnant (1989); and Making Babies (1996).

Rodney Hall AM
Rodney Hall has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and has been nominated three times for the Booker Prize. A former Chairman of the Australia Council, he is also a member of the Australia-Korea Foundation, an advisory body to the Department of Foreign Affairs. He was a participant of the first Centenary of Federation Convention at the South Australian Parliament in 1997. In 1999 he published Abolish the States!, calling for a new Australian constitution. His latest novel is The Day We had Hitler Home.

Dr John Carroll
Dr Carroll is the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University, and holds degrees in mathematics, economics and sociology from the Universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. A writer and editor, his influential books on Western culture place him as one of Australia's most esteemed public intellectuals. Dr Carroll is the author of a number of books, notably Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive; Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture and The Western Dreaming, to be released later this year.

Dr Heinz Schurmann-Zeggel
Dr Schurmann-Zeggel is a senior staff member of Amnesty International's Australia -South Pacific Regional Program. Based in London at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, he has built-up a research base on the Australia-South Pacific region since 1995. Dr Schurmann-Zeggel has an academic interest in Australian history and literature, specialising in Aboriginal studies. In 1988 he co-managed a program of Aboriginal cultural projects in Germany with the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council, a prelude to Europe's first major exhibition of indigenous Australian art.

Dr Leroy Hood
Dr Hood is one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. The President and Director of Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Dr Hood is a key player in the Human Genome Project. He holds numerous patents and awards for his scientific breakthroughs, and is acknowledged for making science accessible and understandable to the general public, especially children. Dr Hood has published more than 500 papers and co-authored textbooks, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Arts and Sciences.

Marion Le Oam
Marion Le is a Human Rights Lawyer, a Registered Migration Agent, and a consultant with the Departments of Education and Ethnic Affairs, specialising in the areas of refugee and migration law, and Chinese and Indo-Chinese relations. She has consulted widely on cultural issues both within Australia and in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. An advocate for refugees in Australia, Le was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1990, and the Austcare Paul Cullen Award for Outstanding Contribution to Refugees in 1994.

Dr Jared Diamond
Dr Diamond is the author of seven books. He holds a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for his best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel, for which he also won Britain's Science Book Prize for contributing most to the public understanding of science. Other important works include The Third Chimpanzee, and Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality. He has led 19 scientific expeditions to New Guinea and nearby islands, his research contributing significantly to the areas of ecology, and evolutionary and conservation biology. Since 1977, Dr Diamond has devoted much time to popular science writing, covering a wide range of issues including human history, animal behaviour, molecular evolution, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology. He completed his PhD at Cambridge and is Professor at UCLA Medical School, Research Associate in Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Contributing Editor to Discover magazine, and Director of the World Wildlife Fund (USA).

Kim Scott
Kim Scott is the author of True Country, a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with cultural dislocation and the resonance of Aboriginal traditions in the present. His second novel, Benang, won the 1999 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards in Fiction and Overall categories and the 2000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and interrogates the assimilation policies administered by A O Neville, the Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940. For BBC Radio he wrote Native Title, and he has contributed articles to various Australian journals. Mr Scott is a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council.
Read the ABC Australia Talks Books forum discussion of Benang and listen in Real Audio to the talkback discussion of Benang on Australia Talks Books May 26th.

Professor Amartya Sen
Dr Sen is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is considered a world authority on globalisation and inequality, and on the possibilities of wealth creation in emerging economies. Professor Sen won the Nobel prize for Economics in 1998. Born in India in 1933, he has taught at Oxford, Delhi University and the London School of Economics.
Professor Sen has published widely on the subject of economics, philosophy, politics and decision theory. His latest book, Development as Freedom, views the enhancement of human freedom as both the principal end and the most effective means of achieving development.

Dr Peter Brain
Dr Brain is the Executive Director of the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research (NIEIR). One of Australia's best known economists in the development and application of macro-economic models, Dr Brain co-founded NIEIR in 1984 and has since participated in over 150 economic consulting projects in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He was one of the few economists to forecast the current economic crisis throughout the Asia region, and participates widely in debate on issues of general economic interest. The author of six books, Dr Brain's most recent is Beyond Meltdown - The Global Battle for Sustained Growth.

Professor Susan Greenfield CBE
Professor Susan Greenfield holds the Chair of Pharmacology at Oxford University, and is the Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the first woman appointed to the post. Britain's best-known neuro-scientist, Professor Greenfield's molecular study of the brain has been driven by her desire to find effective treatments for degenerative diseases, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Professor Greenfield is considered one of the world's most articulate science writers, and fiercely advocates making science comprehensible to the general public. She has developed an interest in the physical basis of the mind, and has published two books on her theory of consciousness: Journey to the Centres of the Mind; and The Private Life of the Brain. She has also written a book for the general reader entitled The Human Brain: A Guided Tour.

She was selected by London's The Guardian newspaper as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world, and was voted 'Woman of the Year 2000' by The Observer. Professor Greenfield received the Michael Faraday Medal from Britain's Royal Society for making the most significant contribution in 1998 to the public understanding of science. In March 1999 she was invited by the British Prime Minister to give a consultative seminar on 'The Future of Science' at Number 10 Downing Street. Professor Greenfield was awarded the CBE in the Millennium New Year's Honours List.

Kieren Perkins OAM
Kieren Perkins is regarded as not only a successful Olympic athlete but a national icon. A member of the Australian swimming team for eleven years before his recent retirement, Mr Perkins has enjoyed a hugely successful swimming career, notching up two Olympic gold medals, two silver medals, two world titles and eleven world records. He took part in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympics, and is the first swimmer in the world to hold Olympic, World, Commonwealth and Pan Pacific titles simultaneously.

Martin Flanagan
Martin Flanagan is the author of six books, including The Call, a novel based on the life of Tom Wills, the founder of Australian football. Other books include One of the Crowd (1990), a collection of his newspaper writing, and Tassie Boy, an odyssey to do with Australian identity in the age of reconciliation, to be published later this year. He also writes for The Age on sport, politics and the interaction between black and white culture.

Dr David Batstone
Dr Batstone is the Managing Director of NetCatalyst's Scandinavian office. A leader in the new economy, he was a founder and President of GlobalCafe.com, an innovative e-learning site. Dr Batstone is a tenured Professor of Social Ethics at the University of San Francisco, and was the founding editor of Business 2.0 magazine. The author of six books offering commentary on cultural trends, his latest book is The Good Citizen.

Professor Trevor Barr
Mr Barr is a Professor of Media and Telecommunications, School of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Swinburne University. The author of many books on telecommunications, he was voted by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of the 20 influential thinkers about major issues facing Australia. Professor Barr has been employed as a senior consultant by a number of government and industry bodies and is a regular national media commentator.

Associate Professor Isaac Balbin
Dr Balbin is Associate Professor of Computer Science at RMIT University. He has lectured in the area of Computer Science since the early 1980s, and has conducted a considerable amount of research and development into information technology education and training. He has written for and edited a number of computer-based publications as well as organising a number of international and local conferences on programming and future database systems.

Craig Kielburger
At the age of 12, Craig Kielburger started an organisation in Canada, (Kids Can) Free the Children, to fight the practice of child labour across the world. (Kids Can) Free the Children now boasts more than 100,000 members in 35 countries.
The formation by Mr Kielburger of (Kids Can) Free the Children was inspired when he read about the murder of a Pakistani child who had campaigned against his bondage as a carpet weaver. Now the world's largest network of children helping children, the organisation has initiated many projects over the world, including the building of rehabilitation and education centres for children freed from bonded labour, the distribution of $500,000 in medical supplies to poor children, and the construction of primary schools in rural areas of the developing world. In the past five years, Mr Kielburger has travelled to more than 35 countries, speaking in defence of children's rights. He was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and is the author of the book Free the Children.

The Most Reverend Dr Peter Carnley AO
His Grace is the Archbishop of Perth and the Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia. In 1998 he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his contributions to theology, ecumenism and social justice. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has lectured in theology at universities across the world.

Dr Edward Said
Edward Said is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York's Columbia University. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said and his family were dispossessed from Palestine and settled in Cairo. Said moved to America to attend university, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton, and his PhD from Harvard.

The author of twenty books which have been translated into 30 languages, most notably his seminal 1978 discourse on Western imperialism, Orientalism, Said also writes regularly for newspapers around the world, including The Guardian in London, Le Monde Diplomatique and the Arab-language daily a-Hayat and Al-Ahram. He is also the music critic for The Nation. A leading teacher, thinker and writer, Said is admired for his passionate intellectual voice on behalf of the voiceless, and his courage in speaking unpopular views. His considerable body of writing and teaching deals with the West's cultural domination of the East and South through intellectual dispossession. A member of the Palestine National Council and advocate for Palestinian self-determination, Said was not allowed to visit Palestine until several years ago.

Said's published works include Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World, The Text, and the Critic (1983); Culture and Imperialism (1993); Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996); The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000); and Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000).

Said has lectured at over 200 universities in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He has been awarded numerous prizes and honours, most recently Honorary Degrees from Haverford University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Exeter.
In November 1999 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. His memoir Out of Place was published in 1999.

Further Reading: Said, Edward. Orientalism. Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1995

Dr Graham Harris
Graham Harris is the Chief of CSIRO Land and Water, and is an eminent ecologist, freshwater and marine biologist. He has an international reputation for work in aquatic and terrestrial ecology, freshwater biology, pollution monitoring, biological oceanography and remote sensing, publishing more than 100 papers and four books. He has also done leading work in fisheries dynamics and the effects of climate variability. Harris joined the CSIRO after a distinguished career as a biology professor in Canada. He is currently Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide.

Don Blackmore
Don Blackmore has been the Chief Executive of the Murray Darling Basin since 1990, and was recently appointed to the World Commission on Dams, which has a mandate to review the effectiveness and future of reservoir systems. He was recently awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by La Trobe University.

Leith Boully
Leith Boully is the Chairman of the Community Advisory Committee of the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council, director of the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, an Accredited Agriculturalist, and a respected authority on landcare, and natural resource management. She runs a grazing property on the Lower Balonne Floodplain near Dirranbandi.

Professor Marcia Langton
Marcia Langton is the Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, and the Director of the Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management. An Aboriginal woman with 13 years experience as an anthropologist and 28 years experience in Aboriginal affairs, Langton is published widely, and is the author of a number of books including Burning Questions: emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Northern Australia.

Professor Robert Manne
Robert Manne depicts a nation that offered opportunities for European refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, including his own family, and which now faces the challenge of reconciling with its original inhabitants.
Manne is an author and historian, and the Associate Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. Manne was the Editor of Quadrant from 1990 to 1997, is a columnist for The Age, The Australian, and the Sydney Morning Herald, and is a regular commentator on ABC Radio and Television. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust, The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation; and The Petrov Affair.

The Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser
Malcolm Fraser was the Prime Minister of Australia from 1975 until 1983. In 1985 he chaired the United Nations hearings in New York on the role of multinationals in South Africa and Namibia. Since 1987 he has been Chairman of the international aid agency, CARE Australia. He was President of CARE International, and is currently Vice President. Fraser has had a long association with the rights of indigenous peoples in this country.

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