Ruby Entertainment option dramatic film/TV rights in The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

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Ruby Entertainment option dramatic film/TV rights in
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

Jacinta di Mase Management is pleased to announce that Ruby Entertainment has optioned the dramatic film and television rights for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Stella Prize-winning historian Clare Wright.

Ruby Entertainment produced The Secret River as a two-part mini series based on the acclaimed novel by Kate Grenville, and won the 2015 Screen Producers Australia Award for Telemovie/Mini Series Production of the Year. The Secret River is nominated for 8 AACTA Awards.

“We are delighted to have won the rights for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and to be able to develop it for the screen. This is the perfect project to follow our mini-series, The Secret River and I am sure it will resonate profoundly with audiences here and round the world. This wonderful book is rich in stories that take audiences on an amazing journey with characters who were part of forming Australia as a nation, moulding the Australian character and shaping the new world. The experiences and perspectives of the women of this time were pivotal in making us what we are and their stories have never been properly told. Now is the time.” Ruby principals Stephen Luby and Mark Ruse.

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is the most talked-about work of Australian history in recent years. Clare Wright’s groundbreaking, award-winning study was ten years in the research and writing. Irrepressibly bold, entertaining, and often irreverent in style, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat—women who made Eureka a story for us all. The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, won the 2014 Stella Prize and the 2014 NIB Award for Literature, was a finalist for the Walkely Book Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s, WA Premier’s and Queensland Literary Awards, the NSW Premier’s History Awards, and the Victorian Community History Awards. The book has recently been published in a Young Adult edition as We Are The Rebels.

Dr Clare Wright is a historian who has worked as an academic, political speechwriter, historical consultant and radio and television broadcaster.

Clare’s essays and journalism have been published in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Overland, The Age, The Guardian, The Conversation, Crikey and Women’s Agenda. She wrote and presented the ABC TV documentary Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote and created and co-wrote the ABC TV series The War That Changed Us, which was nominated for a Logie in 2015 for Most Outstanding Factual Program and an ATOM Award for Best Docudrama.

Clare is currently an Associate Professor in History at La Trobe University, where she holds an ARC Future Fellowship to research a new history of mining in Australia. Clare lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.

Praise for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka:

“I found The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka an astonishing book, not just for the until-now mostly unknown story it told, or the creative research techniques that unearthed such rewarding material but most of all for the rollicking tone of the book. Clare Wright has shown that history can be popular without sacrificing research standards but more than that she has shown us that the people of our past can come alive as real people in the hands of a skilled researcher and writer in ways that we have rarely seen before.” Anne Summers AO, journalist, editor, publisher, and author of Damned Whores and God’s Police and The Misogyny Factor.

“Clare Wright’s book Forgotten Rebels is one of those rare, penny-dropping, revelatory reads. She takes the Eureka story we’ve all heard and replaces the parts we never knew were missing. A vivacious, funny, tragic, page-turning, almost-beyond-belief tale. I love this book and I bloody well want to see the movie.”
Annabel Crabb, journalist, broadcaster, ABC chief online political writer, and author of The Wife Drought.

“This book will do for Eureka in the North American market what The Fatal Shore did for our convict period. The acclaimed US series Deadwood shows us how the nineteenth-century gold rush towns can be brought to life, with all their complexities of gender and class, theatre and entertainment, childbirth and sickness. Characters such as Calamity Jane, a woman dressed as a man, have their equivalents in the Ballarat of 20 years earlier as told here by Clare Wright.” Robert Pascoe Dean Laureate and Professor of History
Victoria University.

Forgotten Rebels is more than a history of women at Eureka; it is the best account we have of social life on the gold fields, men and women in families, at work and at play, in communal and political life.”
John Hirst, Emeritus Scholar at La Trobe University and Honorary Professor of History at Sydney University.

We Are The Rebels is … invaluable for the secondary school market.” Children’s Book Council of Australia

Literary agent Jacinta di Mase said, “Amid a wide field of interest in the dramatic rights to this book, Ruby Entertainment presented a compelling and ultimately convincing pitch for Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. I was impressed by the optimism and creativity of the Ruby team and I’m looking forward to working with them to ensure the success of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka on the screen.”

Clare Wright said, “I’m thrilled and humbled that a production company of Ruby’s calibre and accomplishments has shown such faith in my book. I’m excited to be working with Mark Ruse and Stephen Luby in developing a drama series that brings this key foundation story and the gold rush era to life in all its historically authentic, fascinating colour and rebellious intensity.”

For more information contact:
Jacinta di Mase Management
Tel: 0424505608
jacintadimase@ozemail.com.au

Author: Clare Wright, OAM

Ruby Entertainment option dramatic film/TV rights in The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka