The Byron Society in Australia

It has been established as a tradition of the Byron Society in Australia to begin its activities for the year with a celebration of Lord Byron’s Birthday marked by a traditional Greek feast. The 2012 function was held on 21 January at our chosen venue – an elegant Greek restaurant ‘The Athenian’. Notwithstanding a heatwave of forty degrees, a large number of the Society’s members attended the event.

The main feature of the meeting, held on 12 May was the presentation of the final cantos of Lord Byron’s Don Juan read by Will Christie and Elaine Hudson. The meeting was held courtesy of the Greek National Tourism Organisation and its Director Christina Kalogera.

The Annual General Meeting was held on Saturday, 10 November. Our guest-speaker for the afternoon – Elias Greig from The University of Sydney – presented a talk entitled ‘My inheritance of storms: Wordsworth, Byron, and the revolutionary self-portrait’. The talk was followed by the discussion of the personalities of Byron and Wordsworth and their perspectives of one another’s works. The meeting ended with refreshments and a book raffle.