‘The Rabbits’ reading

Image by Shaun Tan

Pack a picnic, round up the kids and join us for a live Sunday-lunchtime reading of John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s popular picture book The Rabbits—a partly allegorical fable about colonisation told through the eyes of the colonised, but with an unseen narrator. The fable describes the coming of ‘rabbits’—an encounter that is at first friendly and curious, but later darkens as it becomes apparent that the visitors are not who they once appeared to be. Following the reading, head on over to the Arts Centre’s Playhouse theatre—curtains open for an operatic Melbourne Festival matinee of The Rabbits at 2pm.

This is our first of two weekend readings presented by Melbourne Festival—Kate Mulvany joins us on Saturday 24 October to read Kit Williams’s Masquerade.