Conversations

During her two terms as PM, Jacinda gained global attention for her response to the terror attack in Christchurch and for giving birth at the same time as running the country. Jacinda grew up as a good Mormon girl who planned on making a difference behind the scenes. But when she unexpectedly became head of the Labor Party, only weeks away from a federal election, Jacinda discovered she had a tale...

The much-loved actor Sam Neill had an unusual path into acting. Raised in New Zealand as a shy boy with a stutter named Nigel, he was 30 when he got his big break (R) Sam, who has died at the age of 78, was an acclaimed actor, a winemaker, an author, a cancer survivor and a Dad to four children.  In recent years he had cared for cows, pigs, ducks and horses on his farm in New Zealand while making...

Fairytale expert, Kate Forsyth travels back in time to the stories of her youth, to a dark, fantastical and eerie world where cruelty and mischief abound. As a young girl, Kate was sent to stay with her great aunts in Newcastle and there was introduced to the darkness, magic and mystery of Scottish folklore. These stories lit Kate’s imagination on fire, and let to a lifetime of study into these po...

Travel writer Pico Iyer was at the peak of his career when an accidental layover at Narita airport saw him begin to question everything. Pico began flying around the world solo at the age of nine. His parents lived in America and he had become a boarder at the Dragon School in Oxford. To get to school and from school he took several flights each year alone. The formative experience of travel staye...

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large of The Australian, investigates how the country went from the great reform age under Hawke, Keating and Howard, into the tumultuous Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era of prime ministers, and arrived at the current existential crisis facing the Liberal Party. Paul started his career as a political journalist in the 1970s and was at old Parliament House when Gough Whitlam was d...

Wongaibon woman, Gayle Kennedy tells the story of her childhood, punctuated by years of treatment for polio. A bright child, she blitzed school and was drawn to comic book writing, which led to an award-winning career as an author. Gayle was two when she contracted polio. The family was living in a camp outside Condobolin when little Gayle collapsed at her aunt’s house. Gayle’s mother was in hospi...

Troy grew up travelling between two very different worlds with his Indigenous mum and his Maltese Dad. At just 17 he started on his path to becoming one of Australia's biggest country music stars (R) CW: Mentions suicide, please take care when listening Troy Cassar-Daley is a proud Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man, and one of Australia's most beloved country music stars. As a 17-year-old musician j...

Writer Anita Heiss has based her novel  Dirrayawadha on stories from the 1800s during the frontier wars in Bathurst, when martial law was declared.

The filmmaker on her series which documents a period some historians call the most important war Australia has ever fought in. Rachel Perkins is one of this country's great storytellers, translating distinctively Australian stories for the screen, including a television series first released in 2022 called The Australian Wars. It tracks the bloody conflicts that broke out across the continent afte...

Tagalaka man, Victor Steffensen on the ‘walking encyclopedias’ — dear old men he met who entrusted him with their decades of cultural knowledge and taught him to apply the right traditional burn for the right environment, so Country can thrive.  Victor advocates for small, cool fires that emit white smoke. This is something Indigenous people have done for tens of thousands of years to help Country...

For 40 years, crime was the only constant in Lincoln Lynch’s life, until a prison stint forced him to look inward and change the trajectory of his life for good. His young mum went to prison for dealing drugs when Lincoln was little, and eventually he followed in her footsteps. Lincoln endured periods of homelessness and institutionalised abuse as a teenager, and he became a teen father, before wi...

The inaugural winner of Alone Australia on her life as a creative, outrageous, nature-loving misfit who grew up to live through great depths of love and grief. Warning: Discusses the death of a child. In 2023, Gina Chick spent 67 days by herself, in the wilderness of Tasmania’s West Coast, surviving on worms, fish, and one unlucky wallaby. After those 67 days, Gina became the first-ever winner of...

Nuking the moon, putting mirrors in space and blowing up the Polar ice caps are just some of history's hairbrained schemes to control the weather, an obsession man has had since the dawn of time. As a major heatwave tears through Europe, millions of people are frantically trying to stay cool, or praying for some relief. Their desperation is not new. For thousands of years, human civilisations have...

John Hockney's memoir gives a rare insight into the unusual life of one of the world's most famous artists. He grew up in the industrial town of Bradford in Northern England and was one of five children in a creative household, led by his iconoclastic father Kenneth, a conscientious objector who always told his children to 'never worry what the neighbours think'. During the war, there were many sh...

For more than a century, Melbourne's Abbotsford Convent was occupied by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and the "wayward" girls and orphans they took care of. Patricia Sykes was one of those girls. She was dropped off at the orphanage with her three sisters in the early 1950s after their mother died. Their father couldn't afford to take care of four girls at home, but wanted them to stay togethe...

Science writer David Epstein on why freedom can be the enemy of success and how we can all benefit from less choice, not more. We live today with vastly more freedom of choice than our ancestors. But there’s also plenty of research telling us all this choice is making us more anxious, overwhelmed and less creative. In his book, Inside the Box, David makes the case for how constraints can unlock cr...

Veteran performer Paul Capsis on his strict upbringing and the strong female role models who helped him stay in school despite the brutality. A powerful and expressive voice, flamboyant physical presence, and mane of dark hair have become his trademarks as a performer. But when Paul was growing up in inner-city Sydney as the child of Greek and Maltese parents, these same qualities brought him a wo...

Anna Dombkins was 25 years old, when she and her husband happened on a television program about adoption which would completely change their lives. CW: this episode of Conversations discusses adoption. It was a documentary investigating the unimaginable conditions of some orphanages in China. The newly married couple felt compelled to adopt, but because they already had biological children, it was...

Country music artist Kasey Chambers has spent her life making music and connecting with audiences.  It’s what she believes she was put on the earth to do. Growing up Kasey and her family spent much of the year camping and roaming the Nullabor Plain where her dad would hunt for foxes and rabbits. She started singing around the campfire as a little girl and went to sleep to the sound of her father’s...

James O'Loghlin had only just reconnected with one of his best and oldest friends, Jum Wallner, when Jum received some terrible news. What began next was a high stakes race with a fatal deadline. The two men had grown up in Canberra, where thousands of homes had been filled with asbestos, which was often carelessly installed and removed. Jum himself had grown up in one of these so-called "Mr Fluff...

Peter Hoysted, AKA Jack the Insider is back with a look at the humorous and bizarre stories of the newspaper founded in 1979 by a former CIA officer. “174 MPH SNEEZE BLOWS OFF WOMAN’S HAIR”, “BABY BORN WITH TATTOO”, “GARDEN OF EDEN FOUND!” These were some of the fantastical headlines that led the comedic black and white US tabloid, Weekly World News (WWN). Peter Hoysted, AKA Jack the Insider is a...

Darren Hayes rose to fame in the 1990s as part of the musical duo Savage Garden but the scars of his violent childhood nearly ended everything. The band ended up selling 35 million albums and won numerous awards with hits like 'Truly Madly Deeply'. On the surface, Darren had achieved wealth, adoration and stardom —everything he dreamt of as a kid growing up in Logan, on the outskirts of Brisbane....

Ken Gamble is very good at spying on people doing the wrong thing but perhaps the investigations that have had the most impact are the missing person cases he's taken on pro bono. Ken spent part of his childhood living in a remote outback pub and by the age of 12, he was driving drunk jackaroos back to their stations. When his family moved to the Sunshine Coast, Ken took up boxing on the amateur c...

Gonzo journalist and writer John Safran on why he decided to squat in a Hollywood mansion belonging to Kanye West. John Safran has made a career out of getting into places he probably shouldn't be, from breaking into Disney Land, to infiltrating fascist strongholds in Australia. A couple of years ago, one of his journalistic expeditions saw him squatting in an abandoned Hollywood mansion belonging...

Everyone knows the story of the Titanic. But one quintessentially Australian story of survival, love and adventure lay dormant for more than a century before journalist and author Lisa Wilkinson raised it from the depths of the Atlantic. Everyone knows the story of the Titanic - the biggest, most magnificent, most expensive ship ever built. It was meant to be unsinkable. But when it hit an iceberg...