Radical Australia

This week's guest, Gatwech Wal, is a war survivor from South Sudan. When Gatwech was 11 years old, he had to flee his village with his older brother and he spent 11 years in a refugee camp on the border of Ethiopia. We hear this story and what it was like. Since coming to Australia, Gatwech has worked incredibly hard to have a successful life and is now a Family Law - Family Violence lawyer. This...

On our last live show for the year, we welcome the return of popular guest, Robert 'Smokey' Wolfgramm. We find Robert in conversation with Joe about his PhD on the ethnic identity. Robert set out on his research to answer the questions 'What does it mean to be Fijian? What does it mean to be ethnic? How do we know who we are?'. Find out what answers Robert came to in this engaging conversation. We...

Jill Lockwood is a community-minded gardener from the Dandenong Hills, currently volunteering her time at the Knox Environment Society in Ferntree Gully with all the other 'seedy ladies' and 'HAGS' cleaning seeds and preserving the indigenous flora of the area. Jill was born in 1944 at Epworth Hospital, worked in insurance and also as a medical receptionist for 26 years. The greatest love of her l...

Baba Desi. The Wizard. The Doctor. Desmond Bergen. He is known as many things and has been many things in his long life: jazzer, hippie, bodgie, pirate. In fact, he's 'been them all', he says. We are delighted to welcome Baba Desi to Radical Australia this week to share with us some tales from his long life of 94 years. Baba Desi was born in Wangaratta and also lived in Warrnambool when he was you...

We are delighted to bring you a very special episode of Radical Australia this week, sharing it with you today on International Day of People with a Disability #IDOPWD, Sunday December 3. This week's guest is intellectual disability self-advocate, Colin Hiscoe. Colin has been an active member of self-advocacy group Reinforce for decades and his story is sure to both move and inspire you. Colin spe...

"Encouragement is a great thing in practise". We welcome back Percy Rogers to Radical Australia this week for the third and final instalment of our conversation with this amazing medical doctor who has done so much for so many across his years of medical practise in Australia. Percy worked until he was 86 years old. We take up this conversation at a time in his life when Percy was a single father....

Imagine being able to boast that one of your claims to fame was getting yellow-carded in a soccer match against a young Maradona. Such has been the life of our lovely guest this week, Tommy Latupeirissa. Tommy's family comes from Maluku (Spice Islands) in Indonesia and they were a military family. Tommy was a young gun soccer player and represented Indonesia in the Junior World Cup in Japan. For t...

"Advocacy never stops. It keeps going". We were treated to conversing with the lovely Ricki Spencer this week. Ricki is a trans woman, mental health and disability advocate from Footscray who has endured some really rough treatment in her life and she continues to hold her head up high. Ricki tells us that she was stigmatised and bullied throughout primary and high school for being different and s...

"Things are not going to change unless we do something about it. Don't sit on the sidelines. Become involved". Bevan did get involved in activism and quit his job to work on the Vietnam moratorium movement in the 1970s. It was when Bevan first went to Africa as an Australian Volunteer Abroad in 1965 that his eyes were opened to African independence movements and other political struggles going on...

This week's guest, Sue Smith, has been a trailblazer and a great friend to many in the disability self-advocacy space in Victoria and beyond for many years and has just recently retired. Sue leaves a great legacy. In 2008, Sue and friend began the Self Advocacy Resource Unit (SARU) at Ross House in the Melbourne CBD, an amazing resource supporting countless disability self-advocacy groups with gui...

This week's guest, David Ayliffe, has had a busy life with lots of different projects and this made for a bit of a rowdy show! David was born in Sydney and spent many years in Queensland, at one stage working for Murdoch newspapers before joining a cult for 21 years after a born-again experience. He met his wife there and raised four children. David is no longer in the cult. Since then, he has wor...

The lovely, bubbly, Kayla Cartledge joined us on the show this week to rally support for the YES vote and to tell us all the amazing community organising she has been up to on the Mornington Peninsula. Kayla is a Gurindji woman who grew up on Larrakia (Darwin) country, people known for their land rights activism. Kayla carries her mother's strong spirit on the Mornington Peninsula where she has li...

This week's guest, Deborah Gough, started out life on a good footing, leading a school strike in Year 7 when the bubble taps didn't work on a really hot day. So they all went home. Fast forward to when she was 12 and it was then that Deborah first thought about the life of a journalist and what that could mean for her. Deborah was a clerk at The Age and worked on Western suburbs newspapers for 10...

Percy Rogers joins us again this week for Part Two of our special as we learn about his professional life as a doctor in Melbourne. Percy has done a lot to change the birthing experience for women in Australia. He was appalled at the treatment of pregnant women in hospitals many decades ago and ushered in breathing techniques that were non-existent and which now are commonplace. Percy has always s...

This week's show is Part One in our interview series with Melbourne GP, health innovator and activist, Percy Rogers. Percy was a kindly GP to many people over many decades in Coburg and beyond, specialising in maternity health, but he started life in Western Australia in 1927. Percy grew up in Australia's experience of the Depression and the Second World War. He remembers how much it cost to pay l...

Sash Gillies-Lekakis is a bright young PhD candidate and 3CR broadcaster who loves everything Latin America. He's been to Cuba a few times already in his young life and decided to learn Spanish at university, even though he comes from a family of Crimean Russians and Greeks. It's a family joke. Sasha has always loved modern history and produces Latin American Update, a long-running Sunday morning...

We are all phantoms. So introduces us to this week's very interesting guest, Robert Wolfgramm. Robert has done nearly everything you can pack into doing with a life: from lecturing in philosophical anthropology and sociology, to running a newspaper in Fiji during the military coup in the 00's. Robert has an interesting family background and was born in the 'village in the clouds' in Fiji before co...

Marisol Salinas from 3CR's Mujeres Latinoamericanas joins us on the show this week for our second special commemorating the 1973 coup in her homeland of Chile. Marisol hails from the far south of Chile on an island called Chiloe. Her people are the Mapuche and Marisol shares with us the trauma of her mother's life being a first nations woman and living in fear. Marisol is good at maths and physics...

3CR Chairperson, Pilar Aguilera, joins us this week to talk about the day that changed Chile forever and her personal family story that was swept up in it: September 11, 1973. The day of a militiary coup when Chile's democratically-elected, progressive government was taken over, a day that began the routine of storming houses and instilling fear among the populace. Pilar was just two years old. In...

Use the time. Don't let the time use you. Arthur says this was the best piece of advice he received during his 8 year stint in the netherworld of Pentridge Prison and other gaols for armed robbery when he was a young, confused man. He received another piece of wisdom during his time that he says encapsulated all the study he did in his Masters of Criminology. Arthur has dedicated a lot of his life...

We were delighted to welcome Indonesian anti-corruption activist and teacher, Todung Mulya Lubis, online from Indonesia, onto the show this week. For many decades, Todung has committed his life to talking about the truth, in his idealistic and fearless way, about corruption in his homeland of Indonesia. Todung studied law and human rights at university and worked for Indonesian Legal Aid. In this...

We've been waiting to welcome Lana Woolf onto Radical Australia for some time. We first became aware of Lana's work with storytelling at a homelessness forum organised by then named Moreland Council a number of years ago. Lana is now part of the 3CR family, joining the team on PX Whanau Radio, Australia's first and only queer pacifica program, broadcasting every Saturday afternoon at 1:30pm. Lana...

We've got another guest on the blower from Queensland this week: Ian Curr. Ian was born in a private hospital and nearly died! Lucky for his Italian doctor, the only one in the state. Ian has got up to all sorts of activist mischief in his life, including preventing freeways. Check out 'The Battle for Bowen Hills' on Vimeo. Ian was a lifelong unionist during his working life, including at the Aust...

We had so much fun listening to this week's guest, Arthur Bolkas, who kept us on the edge of our seats with his tale of his armed robbing stint back in the day. Arthur was born in Carlton to parents from Lemnos, Greece, and was a top athlete in school, throwing javelin, and becoming both dux and school captain. He enrolled in Arts and Law at Melbourne University and the pressure started to mount....

"What is the best use of me for the world?" So asks Jiselle Hanna from 3CR's Asia Pacific Currents, broadcasting every Saturday morning, who joins us this week and shares some of her life journey so far, from a childhood growing up in Coburg, where she and her sisters ruled the local pool, to a high school on the other side of town that changed her life. Jiselle has been on a healing journey for a...