Conversations

Physician scientist Professor John Rasko on some of the charlatans and shining lights from the problematic and often tragic field of regenerative medicine. Long regarded as a coming salvation, the full potential of stem cells is yet to be realised. John de-mystifies our understanding of the science and explains why there's reason for hope

Animal behaviourist Gisela Kaplan grew up in devastated post-WWII Berlin, forced to eat soap and wild nettles to survive. A brilliant student who loved music, she trained as an opera singer and an academic. Decades later, after adopting a magpie nestling, she began a new chapter as one of the world's leading authorities on the lives of Australia’s native birds

Betty O'Neill's father disappeared when she was a baby. Decades later, inside a tiny apartment in the Polish city of Lublin she opened a green suitcase to find a huge clue to his secret life Betty O'Neill grew up in country New South Wales with her mum Nora. Nora worked in hotels in Kyogle and Coffs Harbour, and because she wasn't able to live at the hotels with her mum, Betty was often fostered o...

Historian Paul Ham and the story of the terrible 'wearing down war' that took place in Ypres (R)

The story of the 2011 earthquake that triggered multiple disasters in Japan, and took many thousands of lives, as told by Richard Lloyd Parry (CW: descriptions may be distressing) (R)

Ronnie looks back on the ten years she worked as a police officer; the childhood which shaped her, and pays tribute to the guiding strength of her proud Aboriginal father (CW: family violence)

Lacking the patience required to work on a dictionary, Helen turned her abiding interest in language into the subject of a highly successful podcast. Her search for curious and revealing stories about language has taken her around the world (R)

Jared spent his childhood behind the scenes at the Museum of the Northern Territory, up close to prehistoric kangaroo fossils, opulent trading pearls, and sacred crocodiles flown in from Arnhem Land. Then he became the museum's taxidermist (R)

New York-based Australian writer Lily Brett moved her family to Shelter Island during the pandemic. There she's found a different speed of life and been adjusting to the absence of her late father. Now in her 70s, Lily's also been thinking about what it means to be old

Raised in a loving but strict Italian household, Pina Arena became ‘Tina’ to compete on Young Talent Time. Reinventing herself as an adult singer was tough, and it took a disastrous marriage and years living away from Australia to find her self-confidence

Ruth Coker Burks was a young single mum in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when she began helping the dying men everyone else had rejected

Stefan Eberhard on his life as a subterranean ecologist cave diving around the world, including inside the vast glowing chambers found beneath the Nullarbor Plain (R)

Widely known for her performance as Mrs Danvers, in the Hitchcock film, Rebecca, Judith gained a new cult following when she played a Star Trek Vulcan high priestess. Biographer Desley Deacon unearths the life story of an exceptional South-Australian born actor (R)

Sydney GP Dr Brad McKay is often in the media warning against taking health advice from those unqualified to give it, such as Instagram 'wellness influencers'. Then in 2020 Brad learned his name and face were being used to sell Keto diet pills online

Lydia Pearson with the story of the chance meeting which saw her co-found a fashion label which became a global sensation

Judith was nearly 50 and dealing with grief, menopause and a world in climate crisis when the unthinkable happened

Dan Richards follows his curiosity to some of the most remote habitable places in the world including an Icelandic cabin and a monastery high in the mountains of Japan (R)

Lech Blaine was 17 when he walked away unscratched from a fatal head-on collision outside Toowoomba which killed three of his friends and left two of them in comas (CW: contains graphic descriptions of road trauma and accidents. Discretion advised)

Andrew Darby flew around the world on the trail of a small, unassuming migratory shorebird called the Grey Plover. In the middle of his journey, without warning, he began to fear for his own survival (R)

Patrice Newell was a model and a TV host before she began a new life as a biodynamic farmer (R)

Screenwriter Samantha Strauss on her grandmother's vibrant last years in a Gold Coast retirement home where love, sex and startlingly pragmatic conversations about dying were all part of daily life (CW: not suitable for children)

Instead of becoming an Olympic gymnast as she'd dreamed, by nineteen Kirsty Everett had survived leukaemia twice and fought her way to university. A childhood marked by punishing treatment regimes and the deaths of friends fed Kirsty's fierce determination to make the most of life

Writer George Saunders says stories by Russian writers Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy can guide us as to 'how we are supposed to be living down here'

With countries in lockdown, the showdown with China accelerating and the rise of white supremacy, the planet stands on a precipice. Journalist Stan Grant looks at a possible way forward

Midwife Christian Wright with tales of emergency evacuations and surfing with crocodiles while working in remote Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land, helping Yolŋu women birth their babies Christian lives in the tiny town of Nhulunbuy right on the tip of the Northern Territory. His job there is an unusual one. Christian doesn't work in the mines like most of the whitefellas in town. He's a midwi...