Conversations

Dr Raymond Shuey saved countless lives during his career with Victoria Police, driving significant change to road rules, as well as how police respond to incidents involving the mentally ill. Ray is Victoria's Senior Australian of the Year 2020

Isaiah lived in 17 places in his first 18 years, none of them with his parents. Now he's established an organisation to give Indigenous young people in the out-of-home- care system everything he wanted back then: love, cultural and family connections, and a sense of pride

Sarah Holland-Batt's dad Tony was a loving father, her intellectual mentor and her friend. At 18, she became one of his carers. Later she battled an aged care system which let him down in the worst way possible

After decades walking in the South East Forests of NSW, John Blay thought he knew them well. Then Indigenous friends showed him the Bundian Way, a trail from the mountains to the coast predating both the Silk Road and the Roman Empire

Dylan Moran on his County Meath childhood, making Black Books, and why he gave up drinking for good (R)

Rozanna Lilley was raised in a bohemian household by her parents, writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley. In her early teens, her childhood was carelessly broken. Later she made a good life for herself as a writer and an autism academic ***CW: This episode discusses sexual assault

Owen Davies on his 98-day trek with goats and dogs, walking more than 990 kilometres down the Georgina River in outback Queensland (R)

Sugarbag bees who headbutt their queen to death are among the many Australian bee species which fascinate ecologist Toby Smith (R)

Claire Nelson was in the Joshua Tree National Park hiking alone when she strayed from the trail and slipped, shattering her pelvis. Her phone was out of range, and she knew she had to stay alive long enough for someone to realise she was missing

Stephanie Wood was a successful, confident journalist when she fell for a romantic fraudster (R)

Natasha Trethewey was 19 when her mother Gwendolyn was brutally murdered. During this great rupture in her life Natasha began to garner acclaim for her poetry. In 2012 she was named America's Poet Laureate

Peter O'Brien was a new minted teacher in 1960 when he took a job at a one-room bush school in Weabonga, NSW. The living was hard, but the job was incredibly sweet

The stories which preceded modern iterations of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood were often much more disturbing (R)

Irish novelist Paedar O'Guilin weaves old myths into startling new stories (R)

Historian Jill Lepore untangles the secret history of one of the 20th Century's most striking superheroes. She explains the myths, politics and eccentric genius behind behind the Wonder Woman story

Neil explores some of the stories from Nordic mythology which have captivated him since childhood (R)

Sarah's life took a gothic turn as she crafted her version of Melmoth (R)

Author Bart van Es with the story of the young Jewish girl Lien de Jong, hidden by Bart's Dutch grandparents during WWII when they joined the resistance

How zooarchaeologist Melanie Fillios uses the remains and fossils of animals, including dingoes, to understand more about ancient humans

Writer Favel Parrett’s grandmother fled Prague as a teenager, but her sister stayed on, and then lived through both Nazism and Stalinism (R)

Stan Grant on his life as a journalist, author and filmmaker from the Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi and Dharawal First Nations of Australia

At 15, Rebecca McCabe was on track to compete in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics for swimming. As swam, she would often ask herself big questions about the meaning of life. When her life in the pool ended abruptly, she decided to take a huge leap of faith

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake's extreme experiments, many of which involve his physical body and varying forms of fungi, have led to equally remarkable discoveries English biologist Merlin Sheldrake, son of Rupert Sheldrake, became fascinated by fungi when he was a boy. He grew mushrooms in his cupboard and brewed bog myrtle beer under his bed. He went on to study fungi at Cambridge University, and h...

David Hepworth charts our fascination with that most earth-bound of gods, the rock star; and discusses some of music history's striking examples

Despite never really liking maths at school, Eddie made up his mind in the teaching sign-on queue, to become a maths teacher. This split-second decision changed his life, and the lives of many of his future students (R)