Conversations

The legendary actress Jane Fonda on her activism, her hair epiphanies and why older women are often fearless. Jane has lived her entire life in the public eye, as the daughter of acting aristocracy. Her father Henry Fonda was a Hollywood legend by the time she was born. Jane grew up to study acting with Lee Strasberg, and Marilyn Monroe was a classmate. But behind the public adoration, Jane was ba...

Iconic Australian musician, actor, youth advocate and charity ambassador Angry Anderson has died at the age of 79. Angry spent 50 years in the music industry with his legendary rock band, Rose Tattoo, and the band was due to return to the stage this month for another Australian tour. But Angry was much more than a raging rock n' roll animal. He was an incurable romantic, despite his violent childh...

Alison Hoddinot was one of the first Australian women to study at Oxford University, but one of her lecturers, J.R.R Tolkein, refused to take on a woman PhD student.  Alison was born in Tasmania in 1931. As a young woman she won a scholarship to study at Oxford University. But when she arrived, none of the male professors including J.R.R Tolkien, would take on a woman PhD student. Back in Tasmania...

Elizabeth Chong didn't cook her first meal until she was a newlywed. Six decades later, the owner of a cooking school specialising in Chinese cuisine, she had taught more than 37,000 people how to cook. Chef, author and teacher Elizabeth Chong was born in China's Guangdong Province in 1931. When her heavily pregnant mother was expelled from Victoria under the White Australia Policy in the 1920s, t...

Bryan Brown has played more than 80 roles on stage and screen. Raised in working-class Sydney, his talent, hard work, and unmistakable presence have been his ticket to the world. In our week of stories from our elders, we begin with the life of Bryan Brown. Now aged 79, Bryan has had more film and television acting roles than he’s had birthdays, and is an instantly recognisable figure on screens a...

Mel Huang Buntine on how computers started entering our homes, and the beige box of a machine that changed her own life. Personal computers are so ubiquitous now, it's hard to imagine a time when computers were inaccessible to everyday people. For decades, computers were the size of rooms, and they were used for specialist tasks like processing large data sets for researchers, or sending men to th...

Prisoner advocate Vickie Roach spent decades in and out of jail but after studying for her masters degree, she helped change the story for thousands of other prisoners. When Vicki was just two years old, she was given a police record, which enabled authorities to place her into the custody of a family she didn't know. She grew up under the strict religious rule of her adoptive mother, whom she cla...

Growing up Lisa Henson and her siblings spent a lot of time in their father's workshop and studio, watching puppets get drawn, sculpted and brought to life. Jim Henson first started messing around with puppets as a teenager, and not long afterwards he began collaborating with his wife Jane.  Together they founded Muppets Incorporated. Puppets became a way for Jim to share his extraordinary imagina...

Author Rebecca Huntley used supervised MDMA therapy to help her with complex PTSD and the legacy of childhood trauma. Rebecca's public life as a broadcaster, an author and a social researcher made her well-known to many Australians. But in private, Rebecca spent years grappling with complex PTSD and childhood trauma. At 50, while walking the Camino, she realised that despite decades of therapy, sh...

Catrine Clay with the story of the children of Nazi perpetrators and Holocaust survivors came together under extraordinary circumstances to come to terms with their dark past. In the early 1990s, historian and author Catrine Clay was working at the BBC, making a documentary about a woman named Renate. Renate had been born in Germany in 1941, and grew up in the postwar years as the sole child of a...

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...