Alice Miriam Olivia Garner is an Australian actor, author, musician, teacher and historian. She is the daughter of Australian novelist and screenwriter Helen Garner and playwright, historian and actor Bill Garner.
Acting life and career
Garner's acting career began as a child in the 1982 film Monkey Grip adapted from her mother's 1977 novel of the same name, which Alice featured in as a character, under the name of Gracie. She was nominated for an AFI Award for her role. She starred in Love And Other Catastrophes in 1996, winning the Film Critics Circle of Australia award for best supporting actress, and played the role of Carmen in the popular ABC TV series SeaChange. Other credits include films Jindabyne, Strange Planet and award-winning short film Maidenhead, and on television, the role of Caitlin in Secret Life of Us. In September 2001 she and Kate Atkinson founded Actors for Refugees, to counter negative stereotyping of refugees and asylum seekers through public readings by volunteer performers around Australia. In 2014, she joined a team of presenters on three series of a television documentary series about the Australian coastline, , hosted by archaeologist Neil Oliver. Garner presented stories about social and cultural history.
Academic life and career
Garner speaks French fluently and in 2001 gained a Ph.D. in French history from the University of Melbourne for her study of representations of sea and shore in south-western France. Garner held an ARC Linkage postdoctoral research fellowship at La Trobe University from 2009 to 2012, researching the history of the Australian-American Fulbright Program. As part of this project, Garner recorded 23 whole-of-life for the National Library of Australia's Oral history and folklore collection. She has also begun to research the history of hitchhiking. She has published three books: The Student Chronicles, a memoir of her undergraduate years at Melbourne University, and ', which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's General History Prize in the year it was published. With historian Diane Kirkby, she co-authored '. Since January 2020 she has been based in the Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, researching the history of trade union training in Australia for an , bringing together historians, vocational educationalists and industrial law experts.
Teaching
Garner became involved in community actions to support her local government secondary school and this inspired her to train in secondary teaching at Victoria University. She worked as a French and History teacher at Albert Park College from 2015 to 2019 and co-led the Languages curriculum team with colleague Tasha Brown.
Music life
She has been playing cello since the age of ten, and was a long-time member of the . The ensemble, led by Giorgos Xylouris on Laouto, performed contemporary, original and traditional Cretan music and released several studio albums. Garner currently plays in a trio, , with David Bowers and Dee Hannan, and has also played with euphonia with and Dee Hannan.
2005 – shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's History Awards General History Prize for A Shifting Shore: locals, outsiders and the transformation of a French fishing town, 1823–2000
2015 – Victoria University Medal for Excellence in Postgraduate Studies
