Australian Festival of the Book

Program of Events

Book Now for the First Event of the Festival - Limited Places!

You are invited to breakfast
With Bundanoon writers
David and Gerda Foster

A Year of Slow Food

at the Manning Hotel, Bowral
on Friday 26th April 2002
at 8.30am

Tickets $25.00

Co-authors, David & Gerda Foster from Bundanoon, will be guest speakers at our Literary Breakfast. Their recently published book, A Year of Slow Food is a seasonal diary of their authentic way of life, and is rapidly being acclaimed for the simplicity and appeal of its message.

Going slow is no easy thing to do. It's a waiting game - waiting for spuds to sprout, for cream to sour, for bees to make honey, for dough to rise, for blossoms to form, for fruit to ripen on the vine. The waiting can be like living in reverse gear, or swimming against the tide of haste and the current of progress.

As David Foster, our own Miles Franklin award-winning author says, "there is no financial sense to it." There are frequent moments when he would rather quit. Defying the odds can be tiring work. The repetition of digging, chopping, carting, weeding, watering and keeping one's fingers crossed, season after season, takes the shimmer off the dream. There's little support either to sweeten the blow. If you want to shake the logical foundations of our society just try watching things grow, or make what can be bought off a shelf, or worse still, simply take time with whatever it is you do.

What the Fosters have cultivated on one acre at Bundanoon is pure inspiration to anyone. No space is wasted and no soil left unturned in producing a bountiful harvest which includes milk and honey.

Read the book and hear the Fosters at the breakfast because you'll sample something which is bound to become rarer still. "We're "brownies" and to be this you have to be resourceful," proclaims Gerda. "In contrast the slow food movement is very sophisticated and rotates around the palate, so if this is your interpretation, find yourself a peasant or try your hand at slow food in a small way such as growing a pumpkin vine from seeds."

Tickets - $25 each - and copies of A Year of Slow Food are available at The Brown Bookshop in Bowral or through the South Coast Writers' Centre.
There's no need to bring a spade.
The Brown Bookshop, 311 Bong Bong Street, Bowral. PH: 02 4861 3447
The South Coast Writers' Centre (SCWC), PO Box 32, Wollongong. 2520
PH/FX : 02 4228 0151 or scwc@1earth.net

Tourism Southern Highlands 02 4871 2888