Conversations

Urzila Carlson grew up in South Africa. Her father threatened the family with a gun when she was 6, and he walked out on the family soon afterwards. Urzila's mum, who she describes as a 'warrior woman', raised Urzila and her sister. When she was in primary school, one of Urzila's teachers taught her a big lesson about regret, which has stayed with her for life. Urzila moved to New Zealand in 2006...

The singer-songwriter on her early introduction to musicals in Port Moresby, how singing became a form of speech therapy for her stutter and also a path into her life’s work. Meg Washington was born in a musical home in Port Moresby, where her parents had met as Australian expats. Meg and her sister spent a lot of their time watching classic Hollywood musicals and also down at the local yacht club...

Louise Adler has been one of the biggest and most controversial names in Australian publishing for decades. This is the story of how she fell in love with the world of books.⁠An asthmatic child, she spent most of Melbourne’s winters in bed with nothing else to do but read novels. But it wasn't until her parents intervened in Louise's obsession with Enid Blyton’s boarding school series that her dee...

Acclaimed poet and philosopher David Whyte has come to believe a single line of poetry is enough to change your life.  David grew up amongst the moors and fields of West Yorkshire, with an English father and an Irish mother who had a gift for lyricism and language. He started writing poems at just seven years old, but it wasn't until he was working as a guide in the Galapagos Islands that David tr...

Why were 400 civilians allowed to fly into a war zone as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? What really happened to them when they were held as hostages? And why has the British government fought for so long to keep it all a secret? Stephen Davis is an investigative journalist who has been following a story, within a story, within a story for more than 30 years. It starts on 2 August, 1990 when a Brit...

Historian Katja Hoyer was born in 1985, under the old regime of the GDR and grew up in the 1990s, watching many former East Germans struggle in the years after reunification. Learning about the Nazi era was a big part of her education but Katja left school feeling unsatisfied about what she’d been taught about the period when the Nazis rose to power. She knew about all the big political moments, b...

Journalist Hedley Thomas grew up knowing that his grandmother Gladys had vanished in the sea off Sydney in the 1950s. The mystery of what happened to Gladys helped to inspire his hit podcast 'The Teacher's Pet'. Hedley has had a storied career in journalism which has seen him win many Walkley Awards and expose a lot of corruption and dodgy dealings. But it has also placed Hedley and his family in...

Millie Robinson’s family had been through enough as it was before her devoted dad Jim Rogers received his diagnosis in 2021. Today they navigate the unknown together and stay in the moment to enjoy their tight-knit community. Millie is a celebrant, mum and author living in Brisbane. She also supports her dad, Jim, who has younger-onset Alzheimer’s.  Millie started life in the UK, in a very tight-k...

British writer Ben Macintyre on the eerie history of Colditz Castle which the Germans used as a prisoner of war camp during World War II. Since the Middle Ages, Colditz Castle has existed in some form, perched on the edge of a cliff in eastern Germany. Colditz has served as a royal hunting lodge, a madhouse, and most famously as a prisoner of war camp during World War II. It was said to be inescap...

Author Tess Woods had always dreamed of her big day, growing up watching her beloved Nana create in-demand bridal gowns. The stories of these dresses became a way for Tess to understand her family’s origins in North Africa, which she left in the late 1970s. (Warning: This episode references the loss of a child.) Tess moved to Melbourne from Egypt when she was five years old. At large family gather...

Who are the Kennedys, really? And what has made the legacy of America's political dynasty so famous, divisive and enduring?  The Kennedys are often described as the closest thing the United States has to a royal family, with fiercely competitive and divisive figures taking up space in American political and public life for generations. Even now, the influence of the Kennedy family continues to per...

After Pauline McGrath's husband David was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he chose to use Voluntary Assisted Dying. Pauline supported him through the journey as he took the steps to end his life. A few years ago, Pauline came home from work and found the lights on and the dog already fed. This was something which had never happened in her 30-year marriage to David, a director of paediatric medicin...

Monday Morning Cooking Club's Merelyn Chalmers her family's story of survival, and piecing together hundreds of treasured family recipes from Jewish communities around the world, including her mother's top-secret yellow cake recipe. Merelyn grew up tied to the apron strings of her mother, an Hungarian Jew who had survived Auschwitz and eventually ended up in Western Australia. In Perth, she met a...

Author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching a university class on Homer's The Odyssey, when his elderly father decided to enrol in it. Daniel became fascinated by the stories of the ancient world as a child and grew up to study the classics and then write books and essays to share his knowledge with the wider world. Eventually he began teaching the Ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, to firs...

For writer Richard Flanagan, the political belief that white Australians do not belong in this land is wrong and it's damaging any progress we might hope to make as a collective people. Richard has spent the last 30 years writing award-winning pieces of fiction and non-fiction, tackling the climate crisis, the meaning of art, free speech and the stubborn necessity of hope. Threaded through all of...

Micaela Sahhar grew up hearing stories of her Palestinian family's life in Jerusalem before 1948, and what happened when they had to leave. There was her grandfather’s tourism business, her grandmother’s wedding necklace, and the dramatic circumstances of her father’s birth. Most of all there was the house, built by her grandfather for his extended family, at 8 Asa Street Jerusalem. This was the h...

Raising girls in an age of smartphones and early sexualisation is tough and in this complex arena, parenting educator Maggie Dent says we can't leave these lessons to chance. Growing up Maggie was a tomboy and noticed when she was treated differently from little boys, who were allowed to be their exuberant selves when she was not. She can clearly recall her indignation at being made to wear a dres...

Political journalist, George Megalogenis has mapped key areas in our population, workforce and geopolitical standing in recent decades, and looks at how these shifts are impacting our collective political future. For the first time since Federation, Australia’s population is mostly made up of migrants and their children.  Professional women have now replaced men doing blue collar jobs as the large...

Melissa Redsell was in Year 12 when her doctor told her she was going to have a baby.  After her baby was born, she was told she had 'ruined her life'. Then she set out to prove all her doubters wrong. When Mel broke the news to her parents, they were disappointed and at school, the Principal instructed her to not expect any special treatment. At 7 months pregnant, Mel graduated, and a little whil...

Paul E Mullen has spent decades interviewing and studying men who have committed unthinkable acts of violence and says these tragic events represent the endpoint of a slow-building private narrative of resentment, isolation and rage. (CW: descriptions of violence) Now retired, Paul dedicated much of his life's work to the extreme end of the human condition. First focusing on victims, researching t...

Guitarist and engineer Josie Scott battled crippling gender dysphoria for decades before finally deciding to live openly as a trans woman in her 60s. In 1984 in Adelaide, two brothers formed a pioneering alternative rock band called The Mark of Cain. They wanted to make music that was heavy and intense with lyrics about war, and death, and being misunderstood. Over the years the band gained an int...

Former Detective Sergeant, Deb Wallace on policing the heroin hotspot of Cabramatta in the 1990s and how Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' gave her new ideas for clamping down on illegal gang activity. When Deb joined the NSW Police Force in 1983, there were very few women on the front line.  She quickly discovered she had the cool-headed resilience ideal for police work, and she was determined to make a...

Mark Woodland is an unexpected CEO — he started his career in the Army as a tribute to his late brother, then went on to revolutionise his mum's paper-based childcare company. As a young man Mark Woodland was at a loss with what to do with his life. After years of moving around, the family — headed by Mark's single mum — settled in Ipswich, Queensland, where Mark showed himself to be a playful and...

Mary Li was a star ballerina when she fell in love with her dance partner Li Cunxin.  When their daughter Sophie was born profoundly deaf, Mary walked away from dance for many years. Mary says she was the least likely girl to grow up to be a ballerina, She grew up in a family of eight kids in the rough and tumble of the Queensland country town of Rockhampton. But in a little timber hall, with catt...

After a catastrophic car crash in the parking lot of her hospital, Dr Olivia Ong became a paraplegic. But her obsession with learning how to walk again was stronger than her incomplete spinal cord injury. When Olivia Ong was 28 years old, she had the world at her feet. She had recently qualified as a doctor, something she had dreamed of since she was a child growing up in Malaysia. She had married...