Ann Clancy is an inquisitive and intrepid traveller who has made her way through much of Australia and more than 45 countries around the world. Her home town is Adelaide, but Adnyamathanha country – the Ikara-Flinders Ranges – is where her family hails from.

Her forbears settled on Adnyamathanha country in the 1860s and as a child she enjoyed many family camping holidays exploring the places they had lived.

In her adult life Ann hiked extensively through both the Ikara-Flinders and Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges, following the Heysen trail and the pathways taken by the Akurra . A week-long field trip with Adnyamathanha cultural interpreter Cliff Coulthard and his family in the 1980s triggered an enduring fascination with Adnyamathanha culture and history. In the 1990s she formed a strong friendship with the then oldest Adnyamathanha woman and her family and learned about moiety, courtship, marriage, childbirth and child-rearing in the Adnyamathanha ways.

As a result of these friendships, her plan to write a novel about the Flinders Ranges developed into The Wild Colonial Girl, a popular fiction novel about first contact, the role of narrative in sustaining culture and the connections between the Adnyamathanha, the Yura Muda stories and their country.  It has sold more than 100,000 copies in English and German.

Ann has a BA and a post-graduate Bachelor of Social Administration. She has studied fine arts and architecture, English literature and the social sciences. Ann also won a Centenary Medal for creating and directing a historical commemoration of the Overland Telegraph, which attracted more than 10,000 visitors in person and one million people online to commemorate the vital telecommunications line that traversed the Ikara-Flinders Ranges – along the ochre trade route – on its way from Adelaide to Darwin.

Read more about On the Trail of the Akurra

An experienced and popular opera and concert tour leader, Dr Robert Mitchell has a background in both performance and education. He is a veteran of almost 5,000 performances in over 120 operas, mostly with Opera Australia, and is the only opera singer to have sung every year at the Sydney Opera House since its opening in 1973. Robert has sung with operatic greats including Sutherland, Pavarotti, Te Kanawa, Milnes and Kaufmann. Notable among his recent roles is The Captain in the world premiere seasons of Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits.

Before joining OA, Robert taught in NSW high schools and has since lectured at Western Sydney and Macquarie Universities. For his Master of Creative Arts (Wollongong) he researched and performed French mélodie and for his PhD (Sydney) Robert created a critical edition of Offenbach’s La vie parisienne at the behest of conductor Richard Bonynge. He also regularly writes program notes for OA and the state symphony orchestras.

Christina Sumner is Vice President of The Asian Arts Society of Australia, and formerly Principal Curator of Design and Society at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Christina has a background in Middle Eastern archaeology; she is, primarily, a textile historian whose research interests span the arts of West, Central, South and Southeast Asia. She has curated numerous exhibitions for the Powerhouse Museum, co-authored their associated publications and lectured widely.

Dr John Tidmarsh was previously Tutor and then Part-Time Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney and is currently President of the Near Eastern Archaeology Foundation of that University. He is a Co-Director of the University of Sydney’s excavations at Pella in Jordan and is also the co-director of the ANU/University of Melbourne excavations at Jebel Khalid in Syria.

He has previously excavated in Greece and Cyprus. His main areas of interest are the archaeology of Alexander the Great’s conquests, as well as the Hellenistic and Islamic Periods in the Near East and Asia. He has led numerous tours to Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Oman and other countries in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

Michael Newton was bitten by the archaeology bug when studying for his first degree, in Ancient and Medieval History, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His travels and study took him regularly to the Eastern Mediterranean at that time, and he then worked in the Middle East for several years.

He joined the University of Sydney in 1984, working towards his post graduate qualifications in archaeology. He has excavated widely with Sydney University and other teams in Jordan, Syria, Greece and Italy. He began lecturing with the Centre of Continuing Education at Sydney University in 1988, and continues to do so with many institutions, including WEA Sydney and ADFAS.

He has led many study tours around the Mediterranean, introducing the history and culture of countries such as Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Morocco and Tunisia to travellers and students. Michael is currently Executive Director of WEA Sydney.

Len Amadio AO has had a distinguished career in music administration in the ABC and subsequently in senior arts positions in the South Australian Government. He has served on many National Boards and Committees including the Adelaide Festival, Opera Australia, Australian Youth Orchestra and the ABC. He has travelled extensively in Europe, North America and South and East Asia, and led nineteen tours for Alumni Travel including sixteen in Europe.