Good Reading Podcast

Dame Nellie Melba was Australia's first international superstar, taking Europe and America by storm with a voice that thrilled the world. Most Australians imagine an imperious Dame dressed in furs and large hats, but behind the public facade lies a story of a young woman struggling to overcome social expectations in pursuit of a dream. After surviving an abusive marriage she found true love w...

Pip doesn't like going home anymore. Her Mum isn't the same since her new boyfriend moved in and to cap it off her best friend Mika has moved away. When she finds an injured baby dragon that needs her care she starts to believe anything is possible. In this charming story of love, loss and survival, Karen Foxlee weaves a magical tale exploring what it really means to love and nurture whi...

Born evil or simply mad? Frederick Bailey Deeming was known and reviled across three continents. He spent years travelling under various aliases, preying on the innocent, the gullible and the desperate. The Devil's Work raises fresh questions about Deeming's role in the Whitechapel murders and the identity of Jack the Ripper. In an era when spiritualism and a fascination with the afterli...

In this series of interconnected essays Delia Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer and a lover of nature in a era of unprecedented change. From an 'unnatural' history of coal to the effect of a seal turning up in a park just below her apartment Delia embarks on a searching and poetic examination about the meaning we can find in the change that is all around us. In...

As a child growing up in country Queensland Lisa Millar dreamed of having a big life. Now with years on the road as an ABC Foreign Correspondent behind her, she shares her moments of joy among the reporting on grief and tragedy. Lisa battled a debilitating fear of flying that threatened her life and career but only now has she been able to reflect on a joyful childhood, the journey that brought he...

Back after suspension, Detective Sergeant Robert Cardilini is immediately tasked with solving domestic violence cases. To complicate matters, his new partner is the eager and idealistic young Detective Lorraine Spencer. When a young woman is found bleeding and tied to a chair it leads to a sinister game of exploitation reaching the highest echelons of society. When Spencer goes out on a limb to un...

Josie de Bray was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. This immensely readable social history uses the life of Josie de Bray as conduit into the lives of her friends and competitors – the many women who paraded in their petticoats on the verandas of Roe Street, and who were kept from the public view and were secret keepers themselves in the seamier side of...

Australia has been directly involved in the nuclear industry for decades: from the establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to the secret tests at Maralinga and the decision to export uranium in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether we like it or not we are part of the global nuclear industry and bear a moral obligation as guardian of around 30% of the world's uranium deposits....

Three housemates. One dead, one missing and one accused of murder. Melbourne journalist Olive 'Oli' Groves is obsessed with the 'Housemate Homicides' a story that set career in motion nine years earlier. When the one missing housemate suddenly turns up dead the whole story comes flooding back for Oli. Paired with enthusiastic and tech-savvy millennial Cooper Ng to reinvestigate...

Tori Swyft wakes up in a Barcelona hotel room to a gruesome murder scene. With a splitting headache and no memory of the night before, her world is in turmoil. Could she really have done such a thing? If she didn't then who did? A man known only as The Voice phones her with revelations of a shocking video proving Tori is the murderer. Set within the seedy world of global politics and counter-...

Battle scarred investigative journalist and former war correspondent John Bailey is picking up the pieces of his life after the death of the one woman who helped him hold it all together. He's got a new job, he's given up the drink and he's somehow even acquired a four-legged companion. When Federal Police raid his home armed with a warrant granting unprecedented powers, Bailey is d...

In this deeply personal reflection on women's lives and creative desires Nikki Gemmell explores the struggle she experienced in finding her own creative space. Dissolve is a meditation on those difficult times in establishing herself as a writer, but also a conversation with all young women who are seeking to fulfil their own creative desires. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Nikki Gemm...

It's 1967 in Lithgow (the 'arsehole of the universe') and a young Roy Slaven is a promising student at the De La Salle Academy. He is already demonstrating early evidence as a sporting savant. Blessed with uncanny abilities with the ball, Roy experiences a moment of religious enlightenment when Uncle Baz presents him with an Australian Rugby League team jersey. John Doyle was right...

Tim Richards is a freelance travel writer and Lonely Planet guidebook contributor who loves chasing down a story with an historical angle. He decided to shake up his life by embarking on an epic train journey across Australia. Covering some 7,000 kilometres, his train journey began in far north Queensland and boarding iconic trains like the Indian Pacific, Overland and Spirit of Queensland. Along...

Scarlett Jacques is the girl everyone wants to be – charismatic, wealthy and desirable but also dangerous and manipulative. She's the coolest kid at Maypole House, a secondary college for the offspring of the wealthy. When she befriends teenage mother Talullah Murray, things get weird. When Talullah suddenly goes missing, her mother Kim is thrown into a panic. Meanwhile Sophie Beck, an author...

Dianne O'Brien (Auntie Di) grew up believing her Irish adoptive mother Val was her birth mother. When Val died while Dianne was still a teenager her whole life changed. Raped at the age of 15 and sentenced to time at the notorious Parramatta Girls Home, Auntie Di suffered years of horrific domestic abuse and a cruel betrayal. At the age of 36 Auntie Di discovered she was a victim of the &apos...

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine takes her mother Della on an historical tour of the UK's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will heal old wounds and help them reconcile their past. While Jasmine immerses herself in her literary idols, Della rediscovers the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. As both women grapple with their place in others' lives, a powerful reminder of...

For over three decades Dr Norman Swan has been answering the questions Australians have been asking about the medical and lifestyles issues that concern all of us. With his trademark honest, straightforward approach Dr Norman Swan brings it all together in this one-stop handbook that helps us get to the truth. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Dr Norman Swan about the real Mediterranean diet,...

It's not easy to maintain grace and good humour through the peaks and troughs of modern living. Throw in a pandemic, political upheaval and environmental disaster and you've got a recipe for a life of endless worry. In a time when mental health is more important than ever, Brigid Lowry offers thoughts on living simply and learning how to nourish yourself and those around you. Informed by...

In 1942 Eve Langley published her first novel The Pea Pickers to critical acclaim. Hailed as a tour de force, it tells the story of two feisty sisters who wander the Australian countryside dressed as men. In Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers, Helen Vines deftly unravels the threads of a life story that became curiously entangled with the author's works of fiction. This compelling new biography...

Most of us fail to confront the reality facing our ageing parents. Our inclination is to wait and see what happens but when a simple thing like a fall occurs, it can precipitate a crisis which can be devastating both for parents and the whole family. Avoiding the Ageing Parent Trap is an essential guide for all families as their elders approach the years of inevitable physical and mental decline....

From searches for serial killers and missing persons to the persecution of migrants and Aboriginal people, David Price takes us back to a time when the line between lawmakers and criminals was lightly drawn. Based on a wide array of contemporaneous accounts of life in the Gascoyne, these sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing true crime stories depict an era when Australia’s laws served to maint...

Sinéad Stubbins has always known that there was a better version of herself lying just outside of her grasp. That if she listened to the right song or won the right (any) award or knew about whisky or followed the right Instagram psychologist or drank kombucha, ever, or enacted the correct 70-step Korean skincare regime, she would become her ‘best self’.In My Defence, I Have No Defence raises the...

In an atmosphere of chaos where social structures and the environment have been shattered by the effects of climate change, Li is tracking her lost daughter Matti across a disintegrating country. Resourceful and determined but alone and on foot, Li will need to draw on every instinct just to survive. In this relentless and utterly terrifying psychological thriller, Unsheltered poses questions we a...

July 2014, a lonely road at twilight outside Croppa Creek, New South Wales: 80-year-old farmer Ian Turnbull takes out a .22 and shoots environmental officer Glen Turner in the back. On one side, a farmer hoping to secure his family’s wealth on the richest agricultural soil in the country. On the other, his obsession: the government man trying to apply environmental laws. The brutal killing of Glen...