No Filter

Emma Jane Holmes grew up knowing she wanted to work in the funeral industry and be a dancer. Little did she know she’d end up doing both of things, simultaneously. In her 20s and 30s, Emma Jane worked as a mortician and an adult dancer, and on this No Filter she answers all of Mia’s questions.  So what does a mortician do? And how does she deal with death? Here’s Emma Jane H...

Introducing our new show Extraordinary Stories. If you like what you hear, head to mamamia.com.au/mplus In a chaotic Sydney share-house in the Spring of 1972, a disheveled actor was lying naked on the fraying couch of an inner-city living room. The woman who had paid Jack Thompson $400 was wondering if the actor’s left hand was really big enough to cover his modesty and get her history-makin...

Nene King is one of Australia’s most successful Magazine Queens. She’s been the Editor and Editor-In-Chief of Woman’s Day, Australian Woman’s Weekly and the Deputy Editor of New Idea. She has had an extraordinary life, but it hasn’t always been easy. In 1996, Nene’s beloved husband Patrick disappeared in a diving accident. His body was never recovered. And Nene...

In part 1 of Kyle Sandilands' No Filter interview, Australia’s highest-paid breakfast radio host spoke about his traumatic childhood, how he became homeless as a teenager, and his relationship with women. You can listen to that episode here: https://omny.fm/shows/no-filter/kyle-sandilands   In this episode, Kyle talks to Mia Freedman about feminism, fatherhood, body image, his relations...

Kyle Sandilands has lived a lot of different lives over the past 50 years. He’s been a survivor of family abuse, a scared homeless kid, a grasping regional radio presenter, a multi-millionaire celebrity, a heartbroken divorcee, a nightclub king, and someone who has nearly lost his job several times at the peak of his career.  Kyle is also - along with his breakfast radio co-host, Jackie...

When sex columnist Nadia Bokody decided to open up her relationship with her current partner, she set some ground rules. One-night stands only. No emotional connections. And not at home.  Nadia doesn’t identify as polyamorous. She identifies as monogamish. Why? Because she didn’t open her relationship up for love, it was for the sexual variety.  On this episode she talks to M...

Before exchanging “I do’s”, there was something important documentary-maker, Ollie Lucks and his fiancee Zoe felt they needed to do. Have sex with other people and film it. Using their iPhones, the pair recorded their six-month exploration of polyamorous love for the world to see in the HBO Max documentary, There Is No "I" In Threesome. Ollie chats to Mia about navigating polygam...

The past few weeks in Australia have been tumultuous...especially if you're a woman. Women are angry, we're sad and we want change. Tanya Plibersek MP is the Shadow Minister for Women and the Shadow Minister for Education and Training, and she has been crucial in the conversation about violence against women. Last week, she walked out of Parliament house to join the March4Justice, and the next day...

For the past year, Josh Frydenberg has had arguably one of the toughest jobs in Australia. When thousands of people lost their jobs due to the pandemic, they turned to the Treasurer like they never had before.  But Josh never planned on being a politician.  He talks to Mia about life before parliament and the question at the back of everyone's minds...what he thinks about the current par...

Resilience is one of the biggest self-development buzzwords. Everybody wants to be more resilient yet anxiety and depression in young children has hit an all time high. Daisy Turnbull knows this all too well. The author, mother of two, and director of wellbeing at St Catherine's School has researched different parenting styles extensively and one thing is clear. The rise of helicopter parents, who...

18 years ago, Ronni Kahn's life looked very different. She was the owner of a successful events company and was in a relationship with a man who she thought was her second shot at love. But one conversation changed the direction of her life forever. Unable to turn a blind eye to the vast amounts of food she was throwing away at the end of each work day, Ronni began delivering the untouched food to...

In 1999, Sierra Leone was in the midst of a brutal civil war. Citizens would wake up everyday and face relentless violence. Rebel soldiers would viciously amputate civilians and enslave women, raping them repeatedly during captivity. Aminata Conteh-Biger was one of those women. Snatched from her father’s arms when she was 18-years-olds, Aminata was held captive for months before her captors...

In 2016, 37-year-old Ally Collier was living the dream. An accomplished playwright in New York, she shared an apartment with her boyfriend of five-years and was ready to start a family. But her boyfriend didn’t feel the same.  What followed was a tumultuous few years. From dating to find a prospective father to dealing with her parent's fears about her becoming a solo mum, Ally chats wi...

In 2013, Sam Bloom was on holidays in Thailand when the balcony she was standing on collapsed. Sam fell twenty feet and crashed onto the blue tiles below. Her three young sons saw the whole thing. Sam survived but for a while, she wished she hadn’t. Paralysed from the chest down, Sam and her family had to adjust to a new life. One without surfing, running and independence. But then an injure...

This interview was originally published in 2016... In 2013, mother-of-three Sam Bloom’s world changed. A freak accident on a family holiday in Thailand left her paralysed from the chest down. Her three young sons and her husband Cameron rallied around her. But it wasn’t until the family found a baby magpie who had fallen from his tree that things started looking up for the Blooms....

How do you make a TV show during a pandemic?  Where do you film when all the hospitals are full up?  How do you find a newborn baby?  Claudia Karvan never thought she'd be creating during COVID-19, but that's exactly what happened when she started making Stan's hit new original series,  Bump. She tells Mia how she pulled off the impossible...and where she finds three-month-old...

She's the woman we all grew up with. From Love My Way , to The Secret Life Of Us , Claudia Karvan has earned a special place in our hearts. With a career beginning at age 10, the actress and producer has seen it all. Now she joins Mia to talk about everything from the evolution of sex scenes to becoming a stepmother in her early 20s. THE END BITS: Watch the Stan original series,  Bump https:/...

State Premiers. They're the rockstars of the COVID era. We wait for their updates and we hang on every word. We cheer their great decisions and endlessly debate their controversial calls. But one in particular has spent more time in the spotlight than her peers.  From the bushfires to COVID-19, to a dodgy boyfriend, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has been through a lot this past year. And she...

Broadcaster Jacinta Parsons was 22 when she started feeling unwell. The kind of unwell that….well, lingered. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. Other days she couldn’t eat. But one thing remained the same, every day she woke up feeling like crap. And her Doctors? They had no answers. Since her early 20s, Jacinta has been living with an invisible illness. It’s one that...

This week on No Filter, we’re proud to introduce Narelda Jacobs as our guest host.  Narelda is a proud Whadjuk Noongar woman. She’s also the host of Ten News First and co-host of Studio 10, and last year she joined Mia for her very own No Filter chat. But today, in a No Filter first, Narelda is sitting in Mia’s hosting chair.  January 26th means different things to diff...

A reason, a season or a lifetime. They say friendships only fall into three categories, and these tend to be them.  Mia Freedman and Bec Sparrow's friendship started for a reason.  They met 10 years ago, bonding over the grief of the daughters they had both lost via miscarriage or stillbirth. And over the years, their friendship continued to grow. Through work, an interstate move, more c...

Big Little Lies, Queen America , Nine Perfect Strangers and The Dry . These TV shows and movies have been some of the biggest created over the past couple of years. You know their names, and chances are you've seen a few of them, but what you might not know is they were all created by a very special Aussie sisterhood in Hollywood. And at the centre of that sisterhood, is a woman called Bruna Papan...

Over the next 3 weeks on No Filter, we'll be bringing you a special series on sisterhood, made possible by Frozen The Musical. Clare and Jessie Stephens are twin sisters, who both work at Mamamia. Clare is the Editor in Chief of the website, and Jessie is one of the hosts of Mamamia Out Loud, host of True Crime Conversations, and the Assistant Head of Content. She's also dating Mia's son. In this...

Have you ever wondered what goes on in a strip club? How lap dances actually work? How the women who strip and dance for a living in these clubs feel about their customers and their own bodies? Today's guest is a woman by the name of Samantha C. Ross. But, if you ran into Samantha in a strip club up until about 5 years ago, you would've known her as Sunshine.  That was her stripper name and t...

We're dropping into your feed to reshare a special episode of No Filter with you. Earlier this week on No Filter you heard from Rick Morton, all about money. Well, if you’d like to hear more about Rick’s back story, here’s a chat Mia had with him a few years ago about his remarkable life… Rick Morton was born the son of a cattle baron in far western Queensland. His backyar...