Conversations

Lech Blaine with the strange true story of his childhood, shaped by love, religious zealotry, and four wildly different parents. CW: descriptions of foster care and child removal.  Lech grew up in a big family in country Queensland, where his dad Tom ran pubs for a living.  He had six older siblings, who had come to the family as foster kids before he was born. It was a happy, knockabout, sports-o...

For journalist Kate Halfpenny, moving to a beachside town during Melbourne's lockdowns seemed like the perfect way to unwind and escape her huge mortgage. Then she had to contend with the triple whammy of perimenopause, her husband's alcoholism and distance from family and friends. For the first time in her life, Kate had an empty house, no job commitments and no city life to distract her. She was...

Hannah Diviney made history in 2022 when she became the first person with a disability to film a sex scene for Australian television. Then she went viral when she confronted both Lizzo and Beyonce over an ableist slur in their song lyrics. When Hannah was growing up, the only people she saw on TV who used a wheelchair like her were Paralympians or in Road Safety ads. Hannah spent a lot of her chil...

Hollywood actor Tim Pocock was tricked by his dying, devout mother into undergoing gay conversion therapy. After she died, Tim finally learned how to be himself, without fear and self-loathing. Tim grew up under the thumb of his charismatic, pious mother. He went to a school with links to the controversial, secretive and conservative Catholic organisation, Opus Dei. There, he desperately tried to...

American novelist Ann Patchett reflects on Frank, Mike and Darrell, the men who made her, going a year without shopping and her power to make herself invisible (R) Ann Patchett is an acclaimed American novelist and the owner of an independent bookstore in Nashville. Ann has had three fathers — Frank, Mike and Darrell, who have each provided her with material or motivation for her writing. In 1974...

In April 1980, a group of armed men invaded the Iranian Embassy in London, taking hostages, and issuing demands in the name of a cause almost no one had ever heard of. The 'Group of the Martyr', a collection of Iranian Arabs, wanted independence for their province of Iran, but their demands were impossible for the British Government to meet, and so the then-little known Special Air Service (SAS) w...

China's cultural revolution was murderously violent and culturally devastating; millions of people, artefacts and ideas went up in smoke. So what's fuelling today's Neo-Maoist movement and nostalgia for that period? In 1966, the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong went to war against his own government. What followed was ten years of murderous violence and utter insanity, until Mao's death in...

Liz Cameron was 18 years old when a stranger approached her in a book shop. It was the beginning of her induction into a cult, and it was an experience Liz barely survived. The process of brainwashing happened gradually, first came the love-bombing and the allure of finding a new purpose in life. Then came the isolation from friends and family, along with sleep deprivation, overwork and sexual man...

When Kerstin Pilz found out that her charming husband Gianni had been cheating on her while he was dying and she was taking care of him, she had to decide what to do next (R) She had fallen madly in love with this Italian man when she was in her 40s. The two married and began travelling the world together. Then Gianni suddenly fell ill. As he was in the hospital undergoing surgery for life-threate...

Author Katia Ariel tells the story of Ephraim Finch, a man synonymous with death in the Melbourne Jewish community. He started life as Geoffrey William, the son of a butcher, who would go on to become a master builder before his life became unrecognisable to him. Several years ago, Melbourne author and book editor, Katia was invited to write Ephraim's biography. Katia was already familiar with his...

Professor Lorimer Moseley is neuroscientist, who specialises in the complexities and mind-boggling nature of pain - what it is, why it exists, how it works and when it can go wrong. For most of us, pain is a fundamental part of being alive, and staying alive and yet none of us will ever experience the exact same pain as someone else, which makes it incredibly difficult to understand. Every day, we...

It’s been a decade since Australian journalist Peter Greste became a global news story, spending 400 days imprisoned in Egypt. But he still misses the life he had as a foreign correspondent. Peter and two colleagues were arrested while working for Al Jazeera in Cairo, they were charged with spreading false news and aiding terrorism.  Peter then was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in jail...

What happens when a man can't stop his drive and desire for more? Author Andrew O'Hagan dissects the pitfalls of more money, more success and more applause (R) Andrew O’Hagan is the author of several highly acclaimed novels. His most recent book is a sweeping portrait of modern-day London, a city ‘levitating on a sea of dirty Russian money’.  The main character, Campbell Flynn, is much like Andrew...

The Gen X actor on making peace with her absent father, the ghosts of her Hollywood past and nursing Anthony Kiedis through his drug addiction while she was still a teenager — a relationship she shudders at today. The 1990s It girl was named for the Scottish island where she was conceived, before her enigmatic folk singer father, Donovan abandoned the family before she was born. A string of stepfa...

Defence analyst Hugh White says Australian leaders are in denial about how dramatically the world has changed, and need to get a grip on the deep, troubling forces propelling us into a new order of world power. The balance of global power has changed dramatically over the last 25 years. Even in the last five years, so much has happened - the pandemic, AUKUS, the war in Ukraine, a change of governm...

As a child, chef Graeme Stockdale was embarrassed by the smell of sauerkraut and pickles that would trail him from his Polish and German grandparents' home. A transformative encounter with a barbecued duck in Singapore changed his life, though nothing would prepare him for two monumental floods in his adopted region of Lismore, NSW. Graeme was only a boy when he was introduced to the power and fer...

Dr Jayashri Kulkarni on her Indian-Australian upbringing and her groundbreaking research into women's hormones and mental health (R) Jayashri Kulkarni’s family moved from India to Australia in 1961. They found there were no Indian grocery stores, few spices of any kind, and plain yoghurt wasn’t available. But the Kulkarnis adapted to their new home, teaching their neighbours how to cook Indian foo...

Cheng Lei's years in detention in China, on trumped-up espionage charges, go from cruel and isolating, to absurd and romantic when she gets moved into a cell with three other women. The Chinese-Australian journalist was held in detention in China for more than three years, accused of selling state secrets to foreign people and powers. In episode one of this two-part series, Lei explained how the c...

When journalist Cheng Lei was detained by Chinese state security agents, she thought would be freed within the week. Instead, she was held on absurd espionage charges for more than three years, much of that time spent in isolation. When Cheng Lei moved back to the country of her birth after the dramatic opening up of China to the world, she was a part of something exciting and historic. That all c...

In 2008 Nathan Dunne was night swimming in Hampstead Heath in the middle of winter when a psychological catastrophe struck him. He felt his sense of self split in two, and an unbearable pain overtook him. He couldn’t work out what had happened to him, and neither could the doctors. CW: This discussion contains sensitive mental health details and mentions suicide. Nathan was driven to attempt suici...

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason on what it takes to keep up with her seven children — all of them gifted classical musicians (R). Kadiatu is a former English academic and the mother of seven extraordinary children. All of them are gifted classical musicians. Her eldest daughter, Isata wrote and performed her first piano concerto at the age of eleven. Her son Sheku mastered the cello and performed at the roya...

The Irish novelist has always been open to where life can unexpectedly take him, and the excitement that comes with that kind of freedom. Colm Toibin's first big move was from rural Ireland to Dublin after his father died when he was young.  Then, it was off to experience the wild hedonism and sexual liberation of post-Franco Spain, a pleasant shock after needing a prescription to buy condoms in I...

When Hilde Hinton was on the cusp of adolescence, her mother died. For years she protected her younger siblings from the truth about their mum. Despite the great grief of her mother's shocking death when Hilde was just 12 years old, there was also a sense of relief for Hilde.  She shielded her younger siblings, Samuel and Connie Johnson, from the truth of how and why their mother died. But when Co...

When Alex Schnell was around 5 years old, playing in rock pools around Clovelly beach in Sydney, she had an alien encounter.  The creature in the shallow water in front of her was a little octopus and unlike anything Alex had seen before, and instead of darting off in fear like a fish might, to Alex it felt like the octopus was genuinely curious in her. Alex has now spent many hours observing them...

Sean Sweeney on the complications and joys of growing up as a a hearing child in a deaf family, using Auslan, a distinctively Australian sign language. In his twenties, Sean rebelled against the deaf world, and began to look for a new life in the hearing one. But after eighteen years, he returned. He found work as an interpreter at TAFE, and he met his future wife. In 2019, Sean became well known...