Conversations

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Pauline McGrath's life changed forever when her husband of 30 years, David, was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. Together Pauline and David set out to take advantage of the incoming Voluntary Assisted Dying laws about to come into effect in Queensland. Since David's death, Pauline...

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024.At the make or break moment of his choreography career, the last person Rafael expected to hear from was Australia’s pop princess, Kylie Minogue. Rafael Bonachela was born in the dying years of Franco’s Spain, into a patriarchal culture that didn’t appreciate little boys who wanted to dance...

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Anita Heiss is a Wiradjuri woman and a prolific author. Her latest novel, Dirrayawadha, brings together Indigenous and colonial history, as well as Wiradjuri language, into a 19th century love story between an Irish convict and a brave Wiradjuri woman.  Anita Heiss is a Wiradjuri woman, an...

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Jack Beaumont (not his real name) grew up in a turbulent family in Paris before joining the French Air Force as a young man. After a devastating mid-air accident, he joined the DGSE and became a French secret agent and he now uses his first-hand knowledge to write spy thrillers set in the...

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Rebecca Huntley spent 50 years trying to process PTSD brought on from a traumatic childhood. But it was only when she decided to experiment with MDMA as a treatment that Rebecca's life began to change.  Rebecca Huntley's public life as a broadcaster, an author and a social researcher made...

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Troy Cassar-Daley is one of Australia's most beloved country music stars, with a string of awards and albums to show for it. But his latest album, Between the Fires, is a reflective, deeply personal exploration of grief, love and his childhood, caught between the two worlds of his Indigeno...

When writer Helen Garner began following her grandson’s under-16s football team, she gained a new appreciation for 'the ordinary beauty of human society'.

Finance journalist Alan Kohler and Patricia Collins, who had just joined the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, recall their vivid memories from the night that irrevocably changed Darwin It's been half a century since Darwin was nearly completely razed by Cyclone Tracy. On Christmas Day in 1974, the monster cyclone bore down on the city, killing at least 66 people. Both Alan Kohler and Patric...

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 Blaine 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, sp...

When Richard's team developed pioneering treatment for melanoma, he didn't expect he would become the first person in the world to use this experimental therapy on his own, terminal brain tumour.  Joint Australian of the year Professor Richard Scolyer has spent his medical career saving the lives of people with melanoma. Then suddenly last year, the life he had to save was his own. A tumour was di...

When Dr Gillian Deakin became a GP, she knew she didn’t want to work behind a desk. Instead, she travelled overseas to make a difference. More recently, she has focused on treating patients with functional illnesses — symptoms that come and go despite all tests and scans showing up as normal. Dr Gillian Deakin grew up close enough to hear the lions roaring at night in Sydney's Taronga Zoo. She was...

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says it is time to reinstate the play-based childhood to bring our kids back from life online and into the real world, away from their increasing obsession with devices.  It’s a fact of modern life that children who are given smart phones are able to access pornography, real images of violence and harmful comparisons with their friends and also influencers around...

Dr Laura Driessen takes you 26,000 light-years away, into the centre of our galaxy and beyond in the search for radio stars, supermassive black holes and supernova remnants. Dr Laura Driessen is a radio astronomer who is fascinated with the scale of the universe and the wealth of information it holds, especially in its stars. Her obsession began as a child, looking through her mini telescope on fa...

The Masterchef graduate and cookbook author grew up in Georgia as the Soviet Union was crumbling, gorging on plums in her grandfather's garden. During this time the young, voracious Alice couldn't keep her food down at kindy. And it took years to work out why. Cookbook author and TV presenter, Alice Zaslavsky grew up in Georgia as the Soviet Union was crumbling. She would gorge herself on plums in...

Pip Williams was diagnosed with dyslexia as a teenager. She grew up to write a novel inspired by the history of the Oxford Dictionary, which soon became an international bestseller. (R) Pip Williams was a teenage poetry enthusiast when she had her first poem, called Fifteen, published in Dolly magazine.  Then just a couple of years later, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. But despite her struggles...

The journalist delves into the history of experimental psychopathy treatment in Canada, which included mass, nude LSD trips. Years ago,  journalist Jon Ronson did a course on how to spot a psychopath. People with psychopathic tendencies tend to use certain patterns of behaviour, turns of phrase, and a decoy mask of normality. Then Jon went out and met with men who had committed violent crimes, or...

For years Claude Robinson was doing crime to fund his heroin addiction. He was eventually locked up with murderers in Goulburn Prison, where he shared a dentist with Ivan Milat. But in 2006 he made a big change, to turn his life around. (CW: descriptions of drug use, addiction, and crime) Claude Robinson is the manager of Rainbow Lodge, a home in inner Sydney for men just out of prison. Claude kno...

During the height of his fame as one half of Savage Garden, Darren Hayes struggled to reconcile what he'd lived through as a child growing up in Logan (CW: descriptions of domestic violence). Darren Hayes rose to fame in the 1990s as part of the musical duo Savage Garden. The band ended up selling 35 million albums and won numerous awards with hits like 'Truly Madly Deeply'. On the surface, Darren...

Professor Alice Roberts examines the bones of those who died between five and ten centuries ago, solving the mysteries of how they lived and died. Professor Alice Roberts wants us to listen to skeletons.  She's an anatomist and archaeologist who says that posthumous examination of our bones can reveal so much more than what someone might have looked like. Whether it's about our health, our diet, w...

Paul McVerry is an experienced cattleman and a stud breeder, who had a wild vision to fly a gift of cattle to India with the help of winemaker Dan Murphy. (R) New Zealand-born cattleman Paul McVerry has been surrounded by animals his whole life, and not just in cattle pens or in sheep yards. Paul has accompanied thoroughbred horses on weeks-long ship journeys across the Pacific ocean. He's been st...

Screenwriter, Mithila Gupta thought her life would mimic her beloved Bollywood films — full of swooning and drama. But something was stuck, and she was an adult before she could embrace her vibrant Indian heritage. Screenwriter, Mithila Gupta grew up obsessing over Bollywood heart-throbs, thinking she would meet her own prince in a movie perfect meet-cute, involving serenades and moonlight. Her pa...

Matt Mewburn, one of Australia's last blacksmiths, takes you inside the "iron cathedral", where blacksmithing is still very much alive. Matt didn't grow up dreaming of forging knives and sculptures over heat as hot as volcanic lava. He thought he might take over the family farm or become a scientist. But when Matt was 20 years old, his father unexpectedly died, and Matt went looking for a hobby to...

Louise Philip had just scored her breakout role on Australian television, in Bellbird, when a horrific car crash threatened to derail the life she was forging for herself. Louise Philip was 15 years old when she convinced her parents to let her drop out of high school to become an actress. She had just scored her breakout role on Australian television, but within a few months a terrible car crash...

As a forensic counsellor and then a grief counsellor, Wendy Liu has spent many years right up close to death. Her work with people who are processing all kinds of losses has brought her a much keener appreciation for life. (R) Wendy Liu was a young woman on a social work placement when she realised she had a special affinity for hard conversations about life and death. She put her aptitude to work...

Author Rosalie Ham grew up in a country town three blocks long and three blocks wide. She paid close attention to the characters there, like the woman at the shops whose face was frozen into Munch’s scream. This eye for detail led to her first novel, which became a hit movie starring Kate Winslet. Author, Rosalie Ham grew up in country NSW, in a town three streets wide and three streets long. Duri...