Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt.

 

Now a TV adaptation, directed by acclaimed First Nations director Wayne Blair, and written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, tells the Goolagong story on screen in a dramatization based on her memoir. But a biopic is constrained by budget and other issues such as casting that mean the story has to be told differently. So what gets left out?

Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt.
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Now a TV adaptation, directed by acclaimed First Nations director Wayne Blair, and written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, tells the Goolagong story on screen in a dramatization based on her memoir. But a biopic is constrained by budget and other issues such as casting that mean the story has to be told differently. So what gets left out?

What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person’s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised or
unauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.

What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person&rsquo;s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised or unauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.

Life Sentences Podcast

What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person’s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised or unauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.

What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person&rsquo;s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised or unauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.