Ideas at the House

Esther Freud’s own childhood was an unusual one - as the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, this may not be surprising. Her first novel, Hideous Kinky, draws on her childhood memories of living in Morocco with her sister and their bohemian mother; her newest book, Mr Mac and Me, is the story of a young boy finding an unlikely friend in Scottish architect...

Scrutiny of Australia's Muslim community has only increased in recent years. Australian women who wear Islamic head coverings have been subject toharassment, but we’ve seen the spontaneous solidarity of #illridewithyou in the wake of the Lindt Café siege. For Muslim women, episodes of community concern about their rights sit alongside racist stereotyping. Listen to Muslim women discuss their own p...

The arrival of women in the workplace has changed the way society functions – whether we’re talking about jobs and career, bringing up kids, or relationships. Research tells us that while women’s responsibilities have shifted to include paid work, their male partners still don’t share equally in the work at home. In fact, men are often stuck at the office, expected to be the ‘ideal worker’ and to...

Beyoncé is one. So is Daniel Radcliffe. The only woman in federal cabinet says she isn’t. At some point in the last few years, we began talking about public figures “coming out” as feminists. Others affirm their belief in “gender equality”, but don’t find value in the F-word itself. With so many conflicting ideas about what a feminist looks like – or, more crucially, what a feminist does – anyone...

The global conversation about women’s lives has opened up, women’s voices are heard more than ever before, and social media has brought a huge range of public conversations to life. But when you can reach more people, there are more people to offend, and discussions are often curtailed by capital-O Outrage; a Twitter mob can descend on an unwitting provocateur in minutes. There are still some thin...

A father drives his car across a highway and into a dam, his children in the back seat. They drown, he walks away. A writer sits through the trial of this ordinary man for the murder of his three young sons, and from this tragedy, Helen Garner creates a compelling story of Australian life and death: her new book, This House of Grief. What happened behind that wheel? Can it be explained or understo...

Fighting forces have been some of the last all-male workplaces. The Australian Defence Force will remove all gender restrictions on combat roles from 2016 onwards, but there are no women in the senior leadership group, and of all personnel serving now, women are only about 14%. Women have gradually infiltrated the ranks, but the hurdles have been high: from scandals about the treatment of women, t...

Everyone knows something needs to be done – but when facts are twisted to fit agendas, complex processes dumbed down for pop-science clickbait and research funding decimated, how on earth do we talk about how to save the earth? Legendary American marine biologist, Sylvia Earle speaks with environmental journalist and educator Simran Sethi about the environmental crises looming ahead - from the bot...

Born in Syria, moving to Detroit as a child, and running away to New York in her twenties to become a rock star: Rayya Elias built up a lifetime of stories by the time she was 25, and a few more in the decades after. Her brash, brutal memoir Harley Loco – probably the only book you’ll read this year titled after the author’s prison nickname – doesn’t stop there. Elias’s book stomps through a lifet...

Shakespeare wrote challenging, glorious roles for female characters well before women were allowed on stage. With often fewer lines than the men, Shakespeare’s women pack a dramatic punch, from cross dressing girls to bloodthirsty villains, and everything in between. Two Australian icons take the stage to discuss what 21st-century audiences want from 16th-century heroines. John Bell’s passion for...

When two young men lose their lives in drunken assaults in the space of a few weeks, governments declare ‘Enough is enough’, and enact strict regulation to prevent another incident. But despite one Australian woman being killed by a current or former partner every week, family violence doesn’t attract anywhere near an equivalent amount of airtime, or popular outrage. Rosie Batty awed Australians w...

With a background in journalism and philosophy, Yotam Ottolenghi was never going to be your average chef.  Starting out as a pastry chef, Ottolenghi delicatessens and restaurants followed, as did cook books includingOttolenghi and Jerusalem, both with Sami Tamimi, Plenty, and his latest book Plenty More (Random House/Ebury Press).  With his close-knit team of collaborators, he has created a style...

Sydney Writers’ Festival and Ideas at the House presents one of Australia’s finest writers Peter Carey. The only Australian to have twice won the Booker Prize, Peter speaks with Jennifer Byrne about his extraordinary career and new novel Amnesia. With uncanny timeliness, Amnesia explores the relationship between Australia and America, from the Battle of Brisbane to computer hackers, via the Dismis...

The case of David Hicks, incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay and described as one of the ‘worst of the worst’, brought up many issues that we are still dealing with today. As the ‘War on Terror’ gradually became a range of other conflicts, questions about what happens to citizens who fight in other countries and the role of the Australian Government in protecting their rights remain contentious. When t...

The Art of Belonging advances the argument put forward in Mackay's bestselling The Good Life: a 'good life' is not lived in isolation or in the pursuit of independent goals; a good life is lived at the heart of a thriving community, among people we trust, and within an environment of mutual respect. Most of us struggle to reconcile our need to belong with our desire to live life on our own terms....

Big stories and dangerous ideas sometimes can come our way because someone had an idea, and sat down and thought about it. But some important stories, can only be found in forbidding environments and with dangerous consequences. For Lydia Cacho, death threats have been the result of her reporting on violence against women in Mexico. Outspoken journalist Masha Gessen left Russia when changes to Rus...

Noel Pearson is a lawyer and activist. Pearson shows how the idea of "race" was embedded in the constitution, and the distorting effect this has had. Now there is a chance to change it - if we can agree on a way forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeanette Winterson OBE is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Across novels, screenplays, essays and journalism, Winterson has taken risks and challenged us to think differently about identity and relationships. At fifteen, Winterson's love affair with another woman was discovered. She was condemned by her church, leading to her expulsion from the community and her decision to leave hom...

Author. Entrepreneur. Visionary. Arianna Huffington is one of the world’s leading businesswomen and most influential women in media. Born in Greece, Huffington moved to the US by way of Cambridge University in England, becoming a renowned broadcaster and nationally-syndicated columnist. In May of 2005, she launched the Huffington Post, which quickly became one of the most widely-read and -cited on...

Throughout history, the cultural forces that have repressed female sexuality have also created a picture of women as sexually passive and requiring protection from the rapacious desires they inspire in men. Women's sexuality has been denied in its totality, let alone their capacity to become paedophiles or predators. And where stories of women as sexual predators do emerge, attractive women are ex...

Women, and their bodies, are for sale. You don’t have to go to Nigeria, where Boko Haram wants to sell kidnapped schoolgirls, to find women on the market. Throughout the world, women and children are trafficked and traded as workers in the multi-billion-dollar sex industry, and their bodies are bought by ‘consumers’ everywhere. In the West, ads for everything from clothing to cars feature scantily...

For the past forty years there’s been a concerted effort to deny the growing evidence that marriage matters. Families with married parents are more likely to provide stable homes for children. Children in single parent families are less likely to thrive than those with two parents, particularly married parents. Family structure is one of the key factors in predicting the future lives of our childr...

There’s been great unease about the future of 'serious' investigative journalism since the eruption of the internet shook up the traditional newspaper model. What if it’s not just the money to support this journalism that’s gone? What if it’s the readers as well, too busy sharing cat videos and shark memes to think about real news? While new philanthropic models for journalism are emerging, and tr...

In the West, slavery is often seen as a dark part of the colonial past. Although it’s illegal in all countries, it remains alive and well—and is growing dramatically. Impervious to recession, it forms a thriving part of the globalised sex industry run by organised crime. International trafficking of women and children for sex is a multi-billion dollar business that won’t be anywhere near ‘abolitio...

John Pilger addresses the 'great Australian silence', applying it not only to the treatment of Indigenous people but to class, great power and the limits of public debate. What are the 'unofficial truths' that are often unmentionable in Australian 'mainstream' debate? The treatment of First Nations people is often presented in stereotypes while the majority deny the rapacious past, and present. In...