Conversations

Jon Owen on how he chose a life of 'intentional downward mobility' to help addicts, sex workers, and the homeless, from Calcutta to Mount Druitt to the Wayside Chapel

How a fashion-loving misfit from Sydney took over Hollywood with husband Baz Luhrmann, winning more Oscars than any other Australian (R)

Professor Ian Hickie has spent decades trying to understand clinical depression. Where does it come from? What role do genes play? And most importantly – what works to release its chokehold? Ian Hickie has spent his career trying to help people at their darkest times. He's a psychiatrist who is particularly passionate about taming the black dog of depression. Depression is not a simple puzzle to s...

Brendan Watson took his Scouts promise very seriously as a young boy. He's leaned in to his pledge in some very unexpected ways, from Moscow to Mongolia and through temporary blindness back home again

Ecologist Katherine Moseby is helping Australia's bilbies, quolls, and stick-nest rats evolve to become tougher, faster and stronger, so they can survive the looming threat of more than 2 million feral cats (R)

Mick O'Regan met his feisty and brilliant wife Jo for the first time on a work brigade in Nicaragua. They fell in love and had a beautiful baby boy. Then quite unexpectedly, when Jo was in her 50s, Mick became her carer

Darryl Jones on the dramatic lives of Australia's city-dwelling native birds 

When David Hannan was a young man, he fled university and took a detour to the wild coral coast of WA where he became a lobster fisherman, before earning an Emmy for his underwater cinematography

Kylie Moore-Gilbert spent two years inside the Iranian prison system, secretly communicating with fellow women prisoners while she waited for news from Australia

Richard Flanagan was forever changed as a young man, when he was trapped for hours and almost drowned in an isolated stretch of river on Tasmania's wild west coast

Writer Kate Forsyth on how revisiting the story of a mythic Minotaur lurking in a labyrinth in Crete helped her realise that we all need monsters (R)

Zayd Dohrn’s parents were militant left-wing revolutionaries, and he was born while they were living underground, fugitives from the FBI (R)

Dr Merrick Ekins is Australia's leading expert in carnivorous sea sponges. Some sponges are secret killers, others are made up of glass and imprison tiny shrimp-like lovers for eternity, and others make love to themselves to reproduce

On a whim, Bruce Englefield bought a wildlife park in Tasmania and moved from across the other side of the world to make life better for Tasmanian Devils

The Danish-British author and comedian on her father's laissez faire attitude to school, and how this opened her mind and brought her to NASA's mission control room for the moon landing of 1969

From homeless teen to operatic stardom: how a job at the David Jones food hall changed the trajectory of Stephen Smith's life

In 2018, Shanelle Dawson's family were the subject of a hit true crime podcast which helped convict her father Chris Dawson of her mother's murder. Now she's reclaiming her own story and the story of her mother Lynette 

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

Penny grew up consumed by catastrophic thoughts and developed habits to try to ward off impending doom. It turned out she had been living with obsessive compulsive disorder for 30 years Penny Moodie grew up consumed by catastrophic thoughts and ideas - that her parents would die in a car crash, that her mother was not really her mother, or that she had somehow contracted HIV aids. It's not unusual...

Marine biologist Dr Edith Widder was inside a submersible searching for bioluminescence in the ocean depths when she saw a giant squid as big as a two story house (R)

Tony Wilson was always drawn to the world's great speeches. Then, without warning, he was called on to make the most difficult speech of his life (R)

How Jodie went from skateboarding in her home town of Albany to become a world surfing champion, frothing all the way. When Jodie Cooper was growing up the kids in her hometown of Albany in Western Australia raised money to build one of the world's first-ever skate parks. They named it the Snake Run, and a talented young Jodie shone on the track. Once she discovered surfing at the age of 16, she w...

An unexpected DNA test result sent Penny Mackieson on a mission across the other side of the world, to find her real natural mother, and discover her identity

Dr Kira Westaway is a geochronologist who places modern and ancient humans in context by dating things found in caves. For Kira, how we understand ourselves now is tied up in the past (R)

Helen Pitt on how the luminous shells of the Sydney Opera House nearly didn't get off the drawing board