Conversations

Historian William Dalrymple had a rarefied childhood on the windswept coast of Scotland. As an adult he fell in love with India, and later discovered his family's own deep ties to the country. Born into the Scottish aristocracy, William followed his three older brothers and left for boarding school at just 8 years old.  While still an university William set off to follow Marco Polo's journey acros...

Ten years ago, Michelle Payne became the first woman to win The Melbourne Cup but in the years since she's had to face many challenges, including a life threatening injury and family heartbreak.  Fortunately if there is one thing Michelle knows a lot about, it's how to get back up. Michelle Payne grew up on a farm, the youngest of ten kids, in a family were everyone was mad about horses and horse...

Writer, Ianto Ware on growing up in the suburbs of Adelaide in a single-parent, single-child family, when such an experience was rare. (R) Ianto Ware was raised in the suburbs of Adelaide in a house surrounded by a tangled garden of oak trees and vegetables, and furniture foraged from hard rubbish. Aside from the family pets, it was just Ianto and Dimity at home. His family was different to most i...

Kate Reid inherited her love of Formula 1 from her dad. She put her heart and soul into qualifying for a job with the renowned racing team, Williams, but her dream job turned out very differently to what she expected. Then, a public library turned out to be a bridge to Kate's recovery. Growing up in Melbourne, Kate was an asthmatic child who developed an extremely close bond with her dad. He would...

Walter Marsh with the surreal tale of Colin Wyatt, the ski champion, mountaineer, wartime camouflage expert, artist, and naturalist who committed one of the world's biggest-ever museum heists in the 1940s. In January 1947, by chance, it was found that over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.  Alarmingly, the missing insects...

Katie Treble grew up crying at about how all the king's horses and men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. It was that compassion that made her the perfect candidate for doctoring during war as an adult. When Dr Katie Treble decided to swap the good vibes and beautiful beaches of Byron Bay for work with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) she knew she would be in for a shock.  Nothing could have...

Aaron was living on the tip of Cape York when he borrowed his uncle’s dinghy to make it to his first acting audition on nearby Thursday Island. He won the role that day in a TV show called Remote Area Nurse, and many other TV series followed, including the crime dramas The Straits and East West 101. He also presented the Torres Strait Island Cooking show, Strait to the Plate, and he was one of the...

The singer, podcaster, writer and comedian on living big with neurodivergence, and owning her manic, creative energy. Growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s, Em was a serious young athlete, focused on hurdles, when a high kick up-ended her ambitions.   She was a creative, energetic child who seemed to always be busier than everyone else.  As a young, stay-at-home mum, Em appeared on Australian Idol,...

From fairground palmistry to the science of fingerprinting, historian Alison Bashford explores the secrets, history and psychology of the hand. Alison was in a London library when she discovered a ginormous palm print of a gorilla, taken two days after it died at London Zoo in the 1930s. She had no idea whatsoever about why someone had made this mysterious print, or why it had been kept in pristin...

Helen Goh's life story began with a complicated childhood — and blossomed into one about culture, cake and the meaning of life. Helen was born in Malaysia in the year of the Fire Horse. This zodiac birth year was a big threat to the Gohs, and her parents had to make a heartbreaking decision that would affect the family for a generation. The Gohs eventually immigrated to Australia, and Helen went o...

Wendy Harmer has enjoyed huge success over four decades as a comedian, tv host and as a radio presenter.  A long way from her origins in country Victoria, where she was born with a facial disfigurement, into a struggling family. When her mother left, Wendy often had to look after her young siblings. After her talent for writing was spotted by a lecturer at Deakin University, Wendy became a cadet j...

Historian and bookseller Edmund Goldrick on the hair-raising, forgotten tale of the escaped Australian prisoners of war who stumbled into another, hidden genocide, and tried to stop it. Early in the World War Two, Australian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans escaped by leaping from a moving train. They found themselves in unfamiliar territory, in the lands of Yugoslavia. The Australian...

Journalist Ariel Bogle takes us inside the rallies, homes, courtrooms, secret chat rooms and $2000 Byron Bay luxury retreats where Australia’s conspiracy theories spread. Ariel has been investigating conspiracy theories and those who follow them for her new book. When things feel wrong and unfair, sometimes people look for answers in some of the more febrile corners of the internet. Add political...

Griffin Dunne's acting career was just taking off when his sister was brutally attacked by an ex-boyfriend, and the outcome of the infamous murder trial that followed was devastating for his family. As a child his parents threw legendary parties, including one where Sean Connery saved him from drowning in the family pool in Beverly Hills and when he was a teenager, he hung out with famous actors a...

Ben Lee on life as a teen rock prodigy, Hollywood fame, living in an Ashram in India, and exploring his subconscious through ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic from the Amazon (R). Ben Lee grew up in Bondi in the 1980s when it was a place of bikie gangs, Yiddish-speaking grandmas and tribes of kids living next to one of the world's most beautiful beaches.  He was educated at a local Jewish school where h...

Historian Tom Trumble tells the story of the cunning World War II Australian sabotage mission known as Operation Jaywick, and how two survivors outsmarted the Imperial Japanese Army police, the Kempeh Tai. Deep in the years of World War II, Australian commandos in the Pacific theatre executed a cunning plan to sneak up on Japanese warships in the occupied Singapore Harbour. They managed to get awa...

Fran Harding was a stay-at-home mother of eight children when her pharmacist husband came home one night with the news that the family were moving to Charleville in Western Queensland to run a pub. Gordan had spontaneously leased a pub, and Fran was to be its new publican. So, with their kids in tow (including a little baby), they set off. Fran set up her sewing machine behind the bar and did her...

Dr Todd Bond is marine ecologist who goes where very few humans have ever been: the underworld, or the deep ocean. There, he studies the strange, scary and often cute creatures who call the deepest parts of our oceans home. This part of the ocean starts at 6000 metres deep, and is known as the 'Hadal Zone'. Todd travels there in a small titanium submersible, not much bigger than his own 6'4'' fram...

Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist and pioneer of groundbreaking chimpanzee field research, has died of natural causes at the age of 91. Jane lived an utterly remarkable life, and her discoveries revolutionised science. She was only 26 years old when she first visited Tanzania to begin her research on chimpanzees in the wild Before Jane went to Africa we knew very little about chimpanzees,...

Lawyer Paula Gerber on the human rights of the most endangered group of people in any community - its children. They are open to the most predatory forms of exploitation simply because they don't have the worldliness of adults, and must rely on trust and goodwill.  When Paula Gerber was growing up in suburban Brisbane, she didn’t spend her weekends at the pool or playing cricket with her dad. Qual...

Musician Paul Field on grieving the death of his baby girl, Bernadette, and how she inspired his family band, The Wiggles, to bring joy into the lives of millions of children. CW: This episode of Conversations discusses the death of a child. Paul Field was on tour in Queensland with his band, the Cockroaches, when he received a call that would alter his life forever. His 7-month-old baby daughter,...

When Brad Guy went skydiving in his early 20s, his whole family was there to watch.  But when Brad jumped out of the plane strapped to his instructor, the parachute, and the backup chute both failed to open. The pair plunged to the ground at 80km an hour, and miraculously both survived. The fall was terrifying, but recovery is what scared Brad the most. Despite hitting the ground at around 80kmph,...

Phillipa Perry grew in England and as a teenager went to a finishing school in Switzerland where she learnt to ski and speak in a posh accent.  But instead of joining the aristocracy she worked as debt collector, a manager at McDonalds and eventually a psychotherapist. Later she married the celebrated artist Grayson Perry, who is famous for his cross-dressing. Philippa says the key to raising chil...

Bronnie Ware was recovering from burnout when she wrote a blog post reflecting on years working as a palliative carer and the epiphanies patients shared with her as they faced death.  It was read by millions and became the basis of her best-selling book, The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying. And the lessons Bronnie learnt from her dying patients also helped her confront some darker elements of her child...

To Australia he was a genius adman and best-selling author but behind closed doors Bryce Courtenay was a deeply flawed husband and father. His son, Adam, has tried to make sense of the lies, the ego and the heartbreak. When Adam Courtenay was growing up, he saw his dad Bryce as a hero. Bryce worked in advertising so he knew all the latest, coolest trends, and at bedtime, Bryce told Adam and his br...