What inner strength is required when your working day is filled with injury, death and despair? Rachael Mead and Benjamin Gilmour can tell us. In The Application of Pressure, novelist Rachael Mead introduces us to paramedics Tash and Joel as they traverse the streets of Adelaide in their ambulance, saving lives and lost souls. Benjamin Gilmour documents his own experience as a paramedic on the frontline, first at infamous Sydney suicide spot The Gap: A Paramedic’s Summer on the Edge, and then further afield in Paramedico: Around the World by Ambulance.

Chaired by Victoria Purman