Conversations

Filmmaker Kasimir Burgess travelled to Mongolia to follow two young men on their gruelling journey to bring 2000 horses to safer pastures during an exceptionally brutal winter. For centuries, the herders of Tsakhir Valley in Mongolia have protected their horses from the harsh winters by nominating their bravest young men to move them. But the ancient practice has been forced to stop in recent year...

Award-winning Australian author, poet and essayist David Malouf died last week at the age of 92, he  spoke with Richard in 2014. The first son of a Lebanese family, David spent his early years in South Brisbane, his vivid memories of life as it was then are captured in his classics, Johnno and 12 Edmondstone Street. Although his father played representative rugby league and was a champion boxer, D...

The ABC journalist explains how competing, overlapping narratives and outright myths form our understanding of events of the past, featuring an impersonation of Winston Churchill talking about a lemon tree. Matt presents and writes the ABC TV show and podcast “If You’re listening”, where he says he explains the world’s most important stories while hiding in his basement from assassins and authorit...

Bonnie Hancock got the idea to paddle around Australia after she stumbled on a book in her local library, the wild adventure ended being a gruelling 12,700 kilometre journey took almost a year to complete. Along the way, Bonnie met sharks, crocodiles, and sea snakes, she battled unrelenting seasickness and some serious storms. She also met some fascinating characters and saw the whole of Australia...

Professor Daniel Reynaud on the incredible true story of an assuming vicar who turned out to be the most decorated military chaplain in Australian history, who had at one point lived his life on the edge. During World War Two, a self-effacing man named Walter Dexter served as the vicar of a church in West Footscray. Walter was in his 60s and his attempts to take up a career as a farmer and a teach...

At 23 years old, Stephanie Browitt willed herself to stay awake long enough to survive a volcano eruption on New Zealand's Whakaari / White Island. More than six years later, her resilience and sanity remains as strong as ever. The rescue mission to White Island in November 2019 was led by three civilians, who immediately flew from the mainland, as the emergency services deemed the island too dang...

The Danish-British author, broadcaster and comedian recalls her unusual early life with glee, including how she came to be holding the hand of Neil Armstrong’s assistant at NASA’s headquarters on July 20, 1969. (R) Sandi’s interest in the world was stoked from a young age by her father, Claus, who was Denmark’s first Foreign Correspondent, and who was incredibly famous in his homeland. It was her...

When the world's most famous dancer offered a young sailor a job as his assistant, Blue Robinson thought it was a joke at first. But what followed was the most fascinating and formative year of Blue's life. Simon 'Blue' Robinson grew up sailing and playing rugby on the idyllic island of Jersey, between England and France. In his 20s, he went further a field, first to London and then Blue started w...

Alex Braczkowski is a big cat expert and for years he's been following a rare group of tree-climbing lions, including the charismatic, enigmatic, three-legged Jacob. Alex fell in love with animals by accident, he'd just been expelled and while his parents were trying to find him a new school, they made him use his time wisely by volunteering at the Johannesburg Zoo. From there he went to game rang...

Hannah Clarke and her three children were killed in an horrific attack that shocked Australia but for Dave Kramer their deaths were personal, he was friends with Hannah and had witnessed her relationship up close. Dave's own childhood exposure to domestic violence had blinded him to some of the signs that Hannah and her kids were in danger. After Hannah's death, Dave began the difficult work of co...

Author Helen Pitt has written a history of the iconic fun park and it's a tale bound up with con men, crooked cops, and developers who have long wanted to snatch up the prime piece of waterfront real estate. Millions of people have happy memories of walking through the teeth of the gigantic face on the edge of Sydney Harbour but it wasn't the first Luna Park in Australia, that honour goes to the M...

When Sonia Henry signed up to work as a GP in a remote mining town in the Pilbara, the experience changed almost everything she believed about Australia. An unfortunate romantic entanglement just before her final exams left her questioning everything, just as she was about to qualify as a doctor. To escape her life in Sydney, she signed up to work in some of Australia's most far-flung medical clin...

Jane Messer grew up with a loving father who never really understood why as a child his mother left him and his older sister at a boarding school, so she decided to find out the full story and prove that he was in fact, loved. Her father Michael was born in Berlin in the years between the two world and to escape Nazi Germany he was sent to live in England as a child. There were a few fleeting visi...

Novelist Emma Pei Yin ran away from Hong Kong as a teenager to start fresh in Australia. But she found herself repeatedly drawn back home whenever she put pen to paper. Emma grew up in England and Hong Kong. But her life in Hong Kong wasn’t so much about the neon skyscrapers as it was about her family’s ancestral village, tucked away in the New Territories. Emma spent her school holidays there wit...

Writer Cynthia Banham on discovering the shocking truth about her great-grandmother, reckoning with buried family secrets, and the criticisms mothers face from others and sometimes most harshly, from themselves. Cynthia Banham grew up hearing the story of her great-grandmother, Natalina, who had supposedly been orphaned in Italy in the 19th century. But when Cynthia became a mother herself she fel...

Toxic people are around us in our workplaces, our families and our dating lives. Research psychologist Leanne ten Brinke is here to tell you how to spot them, and get rid of them from your orbit. Leanne ten Brinke is a research psychologist whose special area of expertise is what she calls 'dark personality types'. These are particularly cruel, malicious, manipulative people who lack empathy, peop...

Born with a magnificent voice, Opera star Teddy Tahu Rhodes fought against his destiny for years until a letter he'd been avoiding reading changed everything (R) 

Dr Nada Andric wants to improve the health of people who are marginalised in the community and their access to healthcare. She works at the Reverend Bill Crews GP clinic, a place where people who might be completely off the database of society can get help. Whether they're facing homelessness, dealing with mental health issues, addiction, or simply don't have a Medicare card or passport to their n...

Two-time World Debating champion Bo Seo on how love and listening can improve how we disagree, so we're not at each other's throats online and offline (R). When Bo was 8 years old, he and his parents migrated from Korea to Australia.  Bo was a quiet boy and sometimes felt overwhelmed at school.  But in Year Five, something happened which changed his life: one of his teachers introduced Bo to debat...

Stephen Grosz has welcomed people into his office for more than 40 years, and believes our greatest task in life is to see ourselves and others with more clarity, in order to live more easily and with more please. Stephen has sat with people as they have shared their darkest fears, strangest dreams and their most explosive love affairs. Through thousands of hours of these conversations, he has tri...

Writer Tanya Heaslip on swapping life on an Alice Springs station for the fairytale streets of Prague, and the remarkable parallels she found between these two magical worlds. Tanya was in a pub in London in 1989 when she watched on the television as the Berlin Wall came down. She was the tail end of a solo backpacking trip, which didn’t quite live up to what she’d imagined it might be as a little...

The late Widjabul Wieybal woman of the Bundjalung Nation Rhoda Roberts lived through great loss and grief, in the midst of becoming one of Australia's most influential cultural leaders in the arts (R). Content Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this episode of Conversations includes the names and voice of someone who has died, used in accordance with the wishes o...

Nick Orchard on how a tough childhood, mental health issues, couch surfing and hip hop have helped him learn how to help others recover from burnout and impostor syndrome. When Nick was growing up, his mum struggled with her mental health and when he was on a date as a teenager he got the worst call of his life, and went to be with his mum when she needed him most. Nick turned to the Melbourne hip...

Melina Marchetta grew up in Sydney in a close-knit Sicilian family, but she never wanted to be seen as 'that Italian girl'. Years later, she drew on her story to write an Australian classic (R). Growing up, Melina lied about the fact she was forbidden to go out on the weekends, and instead told her friends she had to attend lots of weddings. At 19 years old, she visited Italy for the first time an...

Tracy Drain is Chief Engineer of the Europa Clipper, a NASA spacecraft currently travelling to Jupiter on a journey that will take six years. Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, and scientists believe there could be an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. Having water would make Europa one of the best places to look for signs of life in the solar system. Tracy Drain has worked a...