Good Reading Podcast

Battle scarred investigative journalist and former war correspondent John Bailey is picking up the pieces of his life after the death of the one woman who helped him hold it all together. He's got a new job, he's given up the drink and he's somehow even acquired a four-legged companion. When Federal Police raid his home armed with a warrant granting unprecedented powers, Bailey is d...

In this deeply personal reflection on women's lives and creative desires Nikki Gemmell explores the struggle she experienced in finding her own creative space. Dissolve is a meditation on those difficult times in establishing herself as a writer, but also a conversation with all young women who are seeking to fulfil their own creative desires. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Nikki Gemm...

It's 1967 in Lithgow (the 'arsehole of the universe') and a young Roy Slaven is a promising student at the De La Salle Academy. He is already demonstrating early evidence as a sporting savant. Blessed with uncanny abilities with the ball, Roy experiences a moment of religious enlightenment when Uncle Baz presents him with an Australian Rugby League team jersey. John Doyle was right...

Tim Richards is a freelance travel writer and Lonely Planet guidebook contributor who loves chasing down a story with an historical angle. He decided to shake up his life by embarking on an epic train journey across Australia. Covering some 7,000 kilometres, his train journey began in far north Queensland and boarding iconic trains like the Indian Pacific, Overland and Spirit of Queensland. Along...

Scarlett Jacques is the girl everyone wants to be – charismatic, wealthy and desirable but also dangerous and manipulative. She's the coolest kid at Maypole House, a secondary college for the offspring of the wealthy. When she befriends teenage mother Talullah Murray, things get weird. When Talullah suddenly goes missing, her mother Kim is thrown into a panic. Meanwhile Sophie Beck, an author...

Dianne O'Brien (Auntie Di) grew up believing her Irish adoptive mother Val was her birth mother. When Val died while Dianne was still a teenager her whole life changed. Raped at the age of 15 and sentenced to time at the notorious Parramatta Girls Home, Auntie Di suffered years of horrific domestic abuse and a cruel betrayal. At the age of 36 Auntie Di discovered she was a victim of the &apos...

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine takes her mother Della on an historical tour of the UK's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will heal old wounds and help them reconcile their past. While Jasmine immerses herself in her literary idols, Della rediscovers the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. As both women grapple with their place in others' lives, a powerful reminder of...

For over three decades Dr Norman Swan has been answering the questions Australians have been asking about the medical and lifestyles issues that concern all of us. With his trademark honest, straightforward approach Dr Norman Swan brings it all together in this one-stop handbook that helps us get to the truth. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Dr Norman Swan about the real Mediterranean diet,...

It's not easy to maintain grace and good humour through the peaks and troughs of modern living. Throw in a pandemic, political upheaval and environmental disaster and you've got a recipe for a life of endless worry. In a time when mental health is more important than ever, Brigid Lowry offers thoughts on living simply and learning how to nourish yourself and those around you. Informed by...

In 1942 Eve Langley published her first novel The Pea Pickers to critical acclaim. Hailed as a tour de force, it tells the story of two feisty sisters who wander the Australian countryside dressed as men. In Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers, Helen Vines deftly unravels the threads of a life story that became curiously entangled with the author's works of fiction. This compelling new biography...

Most of us fail to confront the reality facing our ageing parents. Our inclination is to wait and see what happens but when a simple thing like a fall occurs, it can precipitate a crisis which can be devastating both for parents and the whole family. Avoiding the Ageing Parent Trap is an essential guide for all families as their elders approach the years of inevitable physical and mental decline....

From searches for serial killers and missing persons to the persecution of migrants and Aboriginal people, David Price takes us back to a time when the line between lawmakers and criminals was lightly drawn. Based on a wide array of contemporaneous accounts of life in the Gascoyne, these sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing true crime stories depict an era when Australia’s laws served to maint...

Sinéad Stubbins has always known that there was a better version of herself lying just outside of her grasp. That if she listened to the right song or won the right (any) award or knew about whisky or followed the right Instagram psychologist or drank kombucha, ever, or enacted the correct 70-step Korean skincare regime, she would become her ‘best self’.In My Defence, I Have No Defence raises the...

In an atmosphere of chaos where social structures and the environment have been shattered by the effects of climate change, Li is tracking her lost daughter Matti across a disintegrating country. Resourceful and determined but alone and on foot, Li will need to draw on every instinct just to survive. In this relentless and utterly terrifying psychological thriller, Unsheltered poses questions we a...

July 2014, a lonely road at twilight outside Croppa Creek, New South Wales: 80-year-old farmer Ian Turnbull takes out a .22 and shoots environmental officer Glen Turner in the back. On one side, a farmer hoping to secure his family’s wealth on the richest agricultural soil in the country. On the other, his obsession: the government man trying to apply environmental laws. The brutal killing of Glen...

Kyle Mewburn grew up in the sunburnt, unsophisticated Brisbane suburbs of the 1960s and '70s in a household with little love and no books, with a lifelong feeling of being somehow wrong – like ‘strawberry jam in a spinach can'.In this book, Kyle describes this early life and her journey to becoming her own person – a celebrated children’s book author, a husband and, finally, a woman. She...

When Rod Barton applied for a job at the Australian Department of Defence he had no idea where it would lead. For the next few decades he found himself disarming militia in Mogadishu, flying to Baghdad as a UN weapons inspector and hunting for Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction. In this extraordinary behind-the-scenes account of a life straight out of an adventure novel Rod Barton u...

As he reluctantly celebrates his 100th birthday, Jack Furey casts his mind back to his experience during World War II as a police sergeant in Far North Queensland. Here, the arrival of the Americans to set up a new airforce base has brought with it a swag of trouble. The small town of Wangamba is plagued by rumours of prostitution and backyard abortions and violence soon erupts. In an atmosphere o...

*Content warning: This podcast contains discussions of sexual assault and violence against women. Listener discretion is advised.' Kathryn Heyman's childhood was marked by violence, poverty and chaos. She was left with no real example of how to create a decent life but she had one thing in her favour – she was a reader. The power of stories provided a means of escape and a pathway to a r...

Homecoming is a work of extraordinary beauty that awakens the voices of four generations of Elfie Shiosaki's family. Written using archival records, family letters and oral history, it is the culmination of five years of research that shares stories of indigenous resistance and renewal. Homecoming weaves a vivid tapestry of history, language, memory, landscape and spirit that asks something s...

A huge celebrity in her day, Kate Kelly was eventually forgotten while the reputation of the Kelly Gang graduated from folklore to cultural icon. Kate was a talented horsewoman and often ran decoy for the Gang and was present at the infamous gun battle at Glenrowan. In later life she changed her name in an attempt to escape the notoriety but her life ended in tragedy. Kate was found drowned in a l...

'Remember' is the first non-fiction novel from neuroscientist and 'Still Alice' author Lisa Genova, which delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. In this episode, Heather Lewis chats to Lisa about the process of writing her first non-fiction novel, how she got started in neuroscience, and some mind-blowing facts about the brain.

This anthology of Australian surf writing celebrates the diversity of surf culture from epic surf adventures in Mexico to the relationship of humans with the sea and to Taj Burrows final campaign in Fiji. Featuring the writing of Sally Breen, Emily Brugman, Sam Carmody Madelaine Dickie, Jake Sandtner and Mark Smith, these non-fiction stories explore the passion, the fear, the joy and the pain of A...

Catherine Leroy, Frances Fitzgerald and Kate Webb arrived in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 at the height of the war. Leroy was a French daredevil photographer; Frances Fitzgerald a blue-blood American intellectual; and Kate Webb was the first Australian woman to report on the war in Vietnam. Together these three women permanently shattered the barriers to women reporting on war in a field of journalism...

Paula is a dedicated GP who witnesses the brutal murder of her friend and her children at the hands of their estranged husband and father. Paula is haunted by the thought that she couldn’t protect them when they most needed it. Soon after a patient with suspicious injuries attends her surgery and Paula is faced with a decision that could make this woman safe but also compromise everything her trai...