Meaghan Wilson Anastasios spent her early years hanging around her parents’ farm in South Gippsland, riding horses and escorting stud cattle to agricultural shows around Australia. After scraping the animal dung from the cleats of her work-boots, she headed off to the University of Melbourne where she had a go at studying law. She hated it. Instead, she followed the siren’s call of history and pursued an honours degree in archaeology, classical studies and art history.
After a period working as an archaeologist in the Mediterranean and Middle East, Meaghan returned to the halls of academia and got herself a Master of Art Curatorship and a PhD in art history and cultural economics. Kitted out with all the requisite degrees, she joined the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne and began shaping impressionable young minds as a lecturer and subject coordinator. Thinking her PhD thesis would most likely end up as little more than a dust receptacle, nobody was more surprised than she was when it inspired a Four Corners program for ABC TV that looked at questionable practices in the Australian art auction market, and led to industry reform.
Underlying Meaghan’s areas of academic expertise is extensive real-world experience acquired during her time working at major public institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria and Artbank, and in management-level positions at commercial art businesses, including Leonard Joel Australia, where she also had a stab at auctioneering.
Nowadays she applies her peculiar skill set and knowledge base to her work in the entertainment industry and as an author and journalist. Meaghan is a scriptwriter and researcher for film and TV and an accredited member of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA). She was also a finalist for the 2022 AACTA Reg Grundy Award. Loot, a documentary series Meaghan created, wrote and produced, was screened worldwide in 2022 and 2023. She has a feature documentary in development with Film Victoria funding and is working on a second series she created and produced, to be screened in 2024.
Meaghan has written many hours of television, including the Logie-nominated series, The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook with Sam Neill for Fox, Building Modern Australia for ABC TV, Hitler’s Secret Sex Life for Netflix, Shane Delia’s Spice Journey: Turkey and Gourmet Farmer Afloat. She also works extensively as a researcher on a diverse range of other major film and television productions including the AACTA-winning The Water Diviner with Russell Crowe, the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade broadcast for SBS, Adam Liaw’s Destination Flavour: China, Australia: The Story of Us, and Doctor Doctor. She also writes regularly for The Guardian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Saturday Paper, and has been the Australia/NZ correspondent for the UK-based publication, Research Professional News.
Meaghan’s first novel was an adaptation of the script for Russell Crowe’s feature, The Water Diviner, which was published by Pan Macmillan and sold over 45,000 copies in Australia and internationally. The audiobook version was a finalist in the Audie Audiobook of the Year award. She is represented by Curtis Brown Australia, and in 2018, her novel The Honourable Thief, was published by Pan Macmillan, with the sequel, The Emerald Tablet, published in 2019. In 2018, Harper Collins published Meaghan’s non-fiction book, The Pacific: In the Footsteps of Captain Cook with Sam Neill. Her latest novel will be published in 2024.
Meaghan lives in inner-city Melbourne with her screenwriter husband, their two children, a dog, two cats, and an indoor plant collection that’s at risk of swallowing them all.
Meaghan Wilson Anastasios 