Conversations

Julia Stevens was one of Australia's top triathletes when doctors told her they needed to implant a tiny defibrillator inside her chest wall to keep her alive

Matt on his Brisbane childhood, losing his mum at the age of 12, and how a chance conversation with his university drama teacher altered the course of his life

Jackie has lived in the Araluen Valley of NSW for 46 years, where powerful owls boom through the nights and lyrebirds scratch up the garden. In recent months hundreds of native animals have arrived, seeking shelter from Australia's worst-ever fires

For a time, surf-loving athlete Nick Marshall was a professional Ironman. Then he created a new way for kids with special needs to be included at the beach

Ronni Kahn saved 45,000 tonnes of food from landfill and changed how we think about food waste

Eric on life before and after Monty Python's Flying Circus (R)

Mike was 15 when he left school to chip weeds in a Queensland vineyard. Forty years later he found himself in Portugal holding one of the world's oldest grapevines trying to discover if grapes can survive global warming.

When Thea was hired as a nurse on one of the largest cattle runs in the world, the job expanded to include hostessing and saving cows with clover bloat. In 1975 she was at Wave Hill Station when Gough Whitlam handed the Indigenous owners back their land

Margie Bale's car is loaded with ultrasounds, milk crates and angle grinders. All the things needed when you're tending to 7-foot tall camels in the middle of nowhere without a clinic in sight

How WWI helped a homeless vagabond named Adolf Hitler become the dictator of the German Reich (R)

Michelle Garnaut on how she began one of the world's most famous restaurants in communist-era Shanghai (R)

At 100cm tall, Rima is one of the smallest people in the world. But throughout her life, she's demanded to be heard

In 1990 Lorenzo shocked Sydney society by leaving heiress Primrose Dunlop at the altar in Venice to run off with his best man. But behind the headlines was an epic love story which began in the Vietnam War

When doctors told Benny Agius her baby son had Down syndrome, she was full of anxiety about his future. Then Richard grew up to defy everyone's expectations

The opioid crisis is destroying hundreds of thousands of American lives and Beth Macy has been up close to it (R)

Judith was an Australian who found screen stardom in 1940s Hollywood, and has since became a lesbian icon. Biographer Desley Deacon tells her story

Nature photographer Gary Cranitch on his working life floating off the Great Barrier Reef to capture a split-second image of the 'biggest orgy on the planet'

Steve Bevington talks about his years in the thick of an underground movement of London squatters, who would break into abandoned buildings, change the locks and claim them as their own

Former politician Robert Tickner grew up in country NSW, 'showered with love' by his adoptive parents. When he began the search for his biological mum Maida in his 40s, he discovered she'd been much closer than he ever knew

Mathematician Geordie Williamson spent eight years cracking the code to find the weight of atoms in space (R)

Space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman on the unexpected artefacts of the space age (R)

Jamie Simmonds on the successful relocation of Grantham, Queensland after it was destroyed by catastrophic flooding

When an inland tsunami smashed into a rural Queensland town in January 2011, people were killed and the town destroyed. Jamie Simmonds became the right-hand-man of Mayor Steve Jones, and they led an audacious recovery project

Historian Nick Richardson on the year that changed Australia forever

Rick Shine used one toad to defeat another, by a process of evolutionary conditioning, to save the snakes he was studying in Northern Australia (R)