Kelvin Templeton - Collision
About
6pm for 6.30pm Monday 7th SeptemberKelvin Templeton in conversation with former ABC radio current affairs reporter Peter White
Kelvin Templeton’s AFL career comes full circle in an event exploring concussion, disability and the game’s unfinished reckoning.
Templeton won a Brownlow medal before moving into coaching and onto C.E.O. of the Sydney Swans. Across all three, he’s watched the same pattern repeat: the athletes who struggle most after retirement are those whose identity was most bound up in performance — and once the adulation and structure disappear, some are left exposed to those who exploit their inexperience of life outside sport.
He’s turned this into fiction with his debut novel, Collision. Its central character, Joshua Shamrock, leaves AFL early — not by choice, but after a head-high blow leaves him permanently disabled, with no compensation and no support from the game that shaped him.
The novel draws on tragedy Templeton witnessed firsthand: players from his own era — John Greening, Stephen Boyle, Neil Sachse — whose injuries forever changed their lives. It isn’t just history: ABC’s Four Corners has since reported that former footballers Nick Lowden and Adam Hunter are among 33 former footballers found on post-mortem to have had CTE ( Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).
This event around Collision offers not just a discussion on a novel but a live conversation about a problem the AFL still hasn’t solved.
'The narrative is lean and beautifully orchestrated. I couldn't put the novel down, reading it from cover to cover.' - John Carroll, The Australian
'It is outrageous that a Brownlow Medallist should write a novel as good as this one.' - Don Watson.
Kelvin Templeton is much more than just another former AFL champion penning another ‘footy’ book to add to the bookshelves. After a football career where he won a Brownlow Medal, Two Coleman Medals and elevation to the AFL’s Hall of Fame, Kelvin pursued new challenges in business and through post-graduate studies in Australia and the USA. During his business career he lived and worked overseas in the Middle East for 15 years. Kelvin now lives in Melbourne. He has been an avid reader of fiction all of his life. Collision is his first novel
Date
Monday 7 September 2026 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC+10)Location
Upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe NSW 2037
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Kelvin Templeton - Collision
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