Conversations

A chance encounter led Lovemore Ndou into his local boxing gym, and a lucky left hook became his ticket out of apartheid South Africa

Ben Gillies was a 15 year old drummer when Silverchair became a global sensation. After almost two decades of being a rock star, the band broke up, and Ben began to face his own demons

Lawyer and author David Gillespie has been on a mission to understanding psychopaths after realising he might have worked with one

Josh Niland on his mission to cook fish eyes, fish liver, and fish sperm to help revolutionise how we cook and eat fish Chef Josh Niland is devoted to changing ideas about how we cook and eat fish in the western world. He believes that rather than eating just the fillet, we should aim to eat the whole fish, as we do nose-to-tail with animals. At his restaurants he cooks with fish eyeballs, fish li...

David Marr with the story of his great-great-grandfather Reg Uhr, who led murderous expeditions with the Native Police during Queensland’s frontier wars CW: mentions the names of Aboriginal people who have died

Diego Garcia-Bellido is a palaeontologist who specialises in soft-bodied fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago. These perfectly preserved eyes, guts and nervous systems provide a window into the beginning of our own family tree, and into life on Mars.

Robyn Davidson on her adventures high in the Himalayas, her love affair with an Indian prince, and her late in life reckoning with her own story (CW: mentions suicide)

Jessica is an orchestral conductor, organ virtuoso and also a synesthete who 'sees' colour in her mind's eye (R)

James O'Hanlon digs deep into the secret world of spiders; complex and tiny lives most of us are either unaware or afraid of

Historian Katherine Pangonis with stories from five cities of the ancient world, from their splendour in antiquity to their comparatively modest twilight

Actor and writer Brendan Cowell with tender and funny tales from his boyhood as a child actor and a budding playwright (R)

Suzie Miller with stories from her free range St Kilda childhood, her drama-filled life as a lawyer, and the inspiration behind her play Prima Facie

Meaghan Katrak Harris with stories from her life as a teenage mother and raising a multicultural family, and her working life as a social worker and an academic

Forensic scientist Dr Xanthe Mallett on her work analysing skeletal remains, investigating cases of wrongful conviction and studying the decomposition of the human body (CW: contains references to death and crime)  Xanthe is a forensic anthropologist, criminologist and author who works with police to analyse skeletal remains. Xanthe worked for years at Scotland's Centre for Anatomy and Human Ident...

Dog behaviourist Laura Vissaritis uses science and psychology to better understand what our dogs really are telling us

Nicholas Jose was living in China in 1989, when the military was sent in to violently quell pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square. He left Beijing the next day and returned to a changed city

Sam Neill is a winemaker, a cancer survivor and a father. He's also an actor, who's made more than 100 films

Rachael Mead with the true story of Nel Law, who stowed away on a Danish ship in 1961 to become the first Australian woman to set foot on Antarctica 

Strategic analyst Sam Roggeveen says Australia needs to think more like an echidna when it comes to defence 

Dr David Sinclair is a longevity expert who believes ageing is a treatable disease (R) 

Kate Cole-Adams has discovered what happens to us while we dwell in the chemical oblivion of general anaesthetic (R)

Chadden Hunter was in his twenties when he found himself sitting around a campfire in the Ethiopian highlands, talking about his PhD thesis with Sir David Attenborough. The meeting changed his life 

When Bronwyn Sheehan's daughter befriended a little girl in year four, her eyes were opened up to the realities of life for children in care, and their carers

From the 1944 wartime referendum, to the 1999 vote on whether to become a republic, referenda always tell us things about Australia that aren't revealed in a normal federal election

Broadcaster Peter Goers was in his twenties when his parents died suddenly, in a plane crash outside New Orleans. Decades later, he's beginning to make sense of the loss