Hannah Diviney made history in 2022 when she became the first person with a disability to film a sex scene for Australian television. Then she went viral when she confronted both Lizzo and Beyonce over a slur in their song lyrics. When Hannah was growing up, the only people she saw on TV who used a wheelchair like her were Paralympians or in Road Safety ads. Hannah spent a lot of her childhood feeling lonely and left out, though she was sure she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. She was st...
Jul 02, 2025•51 min
Hollywood actor Tim Pocock was tricked by his dying, devout mother into undergoing gay conversion therapy. After she died, Tim finally learned how to be himself, without fear and self-loathing. Tim grew up under the thumb of his charismatic, pious mother. He went to a school with links to the controversial, secretive and conservative Catholic organisation, Opus Dei. There, he desperately tried to hide his sexuality, and was ruthlessly bullied for his musical and stage talents. Despite Tim's succ...
Jul 01, 2025•53 min
American novelist Ann Patchett reflects on Frank, Mike and Darrell, the men who made her, going a year without shopping and her power to make herself invisible (R) Ann Patchett is an acclaimed American novelist and the owner of an independent bookstore in Nashville. Ann has had three fathers — Frank, Mike and Darrell, who have each provided her with material or motivation for her writing. In 1974 Frank signed up for a subscription to the “100 Greatest Books of All Time” from the Franklin Library...
Jun 27, 2025•50 min
In April 1980, a group of armed men invaded the Iranian Embassy in London, taking hostages, and issuing demands in the name of a cause almost no one had ever heard of. The 'Group of the Martyr', a collection of Iranian Arabs, wanted independence for their province of Iran, but their demands were impossible for the British Government to meet, and so the then-little known Special Air Service (SAS) were told to plan an invasion of the building to rescue the hostages. They had taken 26 people hostag...
Jun 26, 2025•54 min
China's cultural revolution was murderously violent and culturally devastating; millions of people, artefacts and ideas went up in smoke. So what's fuelling today's Neo-Maoist movement and nostalgia for that period? In 1966, the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong went to war against his own government. What followed was ten years of murderous violence and utter insanity, until Mao's death in 1976. Children were urged to denounce their parents, teachers were beaten to death in front of howli...
Jun 25, 2025•48 min
Liz Cameron was 18 years old when a stranger approached her in a book shop. It was the beginning of her induction into a cult, and it was an experience Liz barely survived. The process of brainwashing happened gradually, first came the love-bombing and the allure of finding a new purpose in life. Then came the isolation from friends and family, along with sleep deprivation, overwork and sexual manipulation. Liz was one of the many women chosen to become a kind of bride for the leader of an infam...
Jun 24, 2025•54 min
When Kerstin Pilz found out that her charming husband Gianni had been cheating on her while he was dying and she was taking care of him, she had to decide what to do next (R) She had fallen madly in love with this Italian man when she was in her 40s. The two married and began travelling the world together. Then Gianni suddenly fell ill. As he was in the hospital undergoing surgery for life-threatening cancer, Kerstin discovered her husband was not the man she thought he was. Further information ...
Jun 20, 2025•54 min
Author Katia Ariel tells the story of Ephraim Finch, a man synonymous with death in the Melbourne Jewish community. He started life as Geoffrey William, the son of a butcher, who would go on to become a master builder before his life became unrecognisable to him. Several years ago, Melbourne author and book editor, Katia was invited to write Ephraim's biography. Katia was already familiar with his name. She had seen the way mourners uttered his name and felt a sense of calm and ease within their...
Jun 19, 2025•52 min
Professor Lorimer Moseley is neuroscientist, who specialises in the complexities and mind-boggling nature of pain - what it is, why it exists, how it works and when it can go wrong. For most of us, pain is a fundamental part of being alive, and staying alive and yet none of us will ever experience the exact same pain as someone else, which makes it incredibly difficult to understand. Every day, we stub our toes and burn our tongues. Some of us break bones and suffer from more serious illnesses a...
Jun 18, 2025•53 min
It’s been a decade since Australian journalist Peter Greste became a global news story, spending 400 days imprisoned in Egypt. But he still misses the life he had as a foreign correspondent. Peter and two colleagues were arrested while working for Al Jazeera in Cairo, they were charged with spreading false news and aiding terrorism. Peter then was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in jail. Back home, Peter’s parents Juris and Lois became the face of the campaign to free him and his two b...
Jun 17, 2025•53 min
What happens when a man can't stop his drive and desire for more? Author Andrew O'Hagan dissects the pitfalls of more money, more success and more applause (R) Andrew O’Hagan is the author of several highly acclaimed novels. His most recent book is a sweeping portrait of modern-day London, a city ‘levitating on a sea of dirty Russian money’. The main character, Campbell Flynn, is much like Andrew himself: a public intellectual who escaped from the Scottish council estate he grew up in and came t...
Jun 13, 2025•51 min
The Gen X actor on making peace with her absent father, the ghosts of her Hollywood past and nursing Anthony Kiedis through his drug addiction while she was still a teenager — a relationship she shudders at today. The 1990s It girl was named for the Scottish island where she was conceived, before her enigmatic folk singer father, Donovan abandoned the family before she was born. A string of stepfathers couldn’t remedy Ione's fundamental abandonment and she grew up surrounded by creative types wh...
Jun 12, 2025•47 min
Defence analyst Hugh White says Australian leaders are in denial about how dramatically the world has changed, and need to get a grip on the deep, troubling forces propelling us into a new order of world power. The balance of global power has changed dramatically over the last 25 years. Even in the last five years, so much has happened - the pandemic, AUKUS, the war in Ukraine, a change of government here in Australia, Donald Trump's return to the White House, and all the tumult that has followe...
Jun 11, 2025•52 min
As a child, chef Graeme Stockdale was embarrassed by the smell of sauerkraut and pickles that would trail him from his Polish and German grandparents' home. A transformative encounter with a barbecued duck in Singapore changed his life, though nothing would prepare him for two monumental floods in his adopted region of Lismore, NSW. Graeme was only a boy when he was introduced to the power and ferocity of fire. As a nine-year-old living in Albany, Western Australia he lit a fire out of curiosity...
Jun 10, 2025•48 min
Dr Jayashri Kulkarni on her Indian-Australian upbringing and her groundbreaking research into women's hormones and mental health (R) Jayashri Kulkarni’s family moved from India to Australia in 1961. They found there were no Indian grocery stores, few spices of any kind, and plain yoghurt wasn’t available. But the Kulkarnis adapted to their new home, teaching their neighbours how to cook Indian food, and encouraging Jayashri's love for studying. Jayashri became a doctor, and during her training a...
Jun 06, 2025•52 min
Cheng Lei's years in detention in China, on trumped-up espionage charges, go from cruel and isolating, to absurd and romantic when she gets moved into a cell with three other women. The Chinese-Australian journalist was held in detention in China for more than three years, accused of selling state secrets to foreign people and powers. In episode one of this two-part series, Lei explained how the charges hinged on a document that was read out publicly on television, and how she survived the cruel...
Jun 05, 2025•48 min
When journalist Cheng Lei was detained by Chinese state security agents, she thought would be freed within the week. Instead, she was held on absurd espionage charges for more than three years, much of that time spent in isolation. When Cheng Lei moved back to the country of her birth after the dramatic opening up of China to the world, she was a part of something exciting and historic. That all changed after Xi Jinping came to power, and Australia's relations with China deteriorated. In this fi...
Jun 04, 2025•49 min
In 2008 Nathan Dunne was night swimming in Hampstead Heath in the middle of winter when a psychological catastrophe struck him. He felt his sense of self split in two, and an unbearable pain overtook him. He couldn’t work out what had happened to him, and neither could the doctors. CW: This discussion contains sensitive mental health details and mentions suicide. Nathan was driven to attempt suicide, and endured years of misdiagnoses from doctors and medications that didn't work. Nathan didn't h...
Jun 03, 2025•52 min
Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason on what it takes to keep up with her seven children — all of them gifted classical musicians (R). Kadiatu is a former English academic and the mother of seven extraordinary children. All of them are gifted classical musicians. Her eldest daughter, Isata wrote and performed her first piano concerto at the age of eleven. Her son Sheku mastered the cello and performed at the royal wedding of Harry and Megan Markle. Every day the seven Kanneh-Masons, who range from early teens t...
May 30, 2025•49 min
The Irish novelist has always been open to where life can unexpectedly take him, and the excitement that comes with that kind of freedom. Colm Toibin's first big move was from rural Ireland to Dublin after his father died when he was young. Then, it was off to experience the wild hedonism and sexual liberation of post-Franco Spain, a pleasant shock after needing a prescription to buy condoms in Ireland. Since then, he's journeyed to Sudan, Los Angeles, New York and beyond. Wherever Colm goes, he...
May 29, 2025•53 min
When Hilde Hinton was on the cusp of adolescence, her mother died. For years she protected her younger siblings from the truth about their mum. Despite the great grief of her mother's shocking death when Hilde was just 12 years old, there was also a sense of relief for Hilde. She shielded her younger siblings, Samuel and Connie Johnson, from the truth of how and why their mother died. But when Connie also died, decades later of cancer, Hilde was propelled into writing her first novel, in between...
May 28, 2025•51 min
When Alex Schnell was around 5 years old, playing in rock pools around Clovelly beach in Sydney, she had an alien encounter. The creature in the shallow water in front of her was a little octopus and unlike anything Alex had seen before, and instead of darting off in fear like a fish might, to Alex it felt like the octopus was genuinely curious in her. Alex has now spent many hours observing them in the ocean, and has discovered extraordinary things about octopus intelligence, personalities, fea...
May 27, 2025•52 min
When Alex Schnell was around 5 years old, playing in rock pools around Clovelly beach in Sydney, she had an alien encounter. The creature in the shallow water in front of her was a little octopus and unlike anything Alex had seen before, and instead of darting off in fear like a fish might, to Alex it felt like the octopus was genuinely curious in her. Alex has now spent many hours observing them in the ocean, and has discovered extraordinary things about octopus intelligence, personalities, fea...
May 27, 2025•52 min
Sean Sweeney on the complications and joys of growing up as a a hearing child in a deaf family, using Auslan, a distinctively Australian sign language. In his twenties, Sean rebelled against the deaf world, and began to look for a new life in the hearing one. But after eighteen years, he returned. He found work as an interpreter at TAFE, and he met his future wife. In 2019, Sean became well known for interpreting from English to Auslan for Australia's Rural Fire Service during Australia's Bushfi...
May 23, 2025•51 min
Marcel Dirsus is fascinated by the treadmill of tyranny: how dictators gain power, how they stay there and how they fall. This is his blueprint for bringing an end to authoritarianism. With democracies seemingly faltering worldwide, political scientist and writer Marcel Dirsus is putting tyrants under the microscope to better understand how they rise and how they fall. Years ago, Marcel took a break from his university studies and travelled to central Africa, where he took a job in a brewery. On...
May 22, 2025•52 min
The bestselling Irish author grew up on a farm set on “50 acres on the side of a hill”. Growing up, she witnessed a harsh, misogynistic country that convinced her she would never marry. Claire shares what she has learned about writing from a litter of newborn piglets. Her works Small Things Like These and Foster have both been made into movies. Claire's stories often take place in the landscape where she grew up — the farms and small towns of Wexford in Southeast Ireland. Claire was the youngest...
May 21, 2025•53 min
The writer had a complex relationship with his mother, whose professional reputation built a wall between them, but also saved his life more than once while working as a war correspondent. Peter Godwin was born in Zimbabwe when the country was still under colonial rule. His English mother was the only doctor for thousands of kilometres and early on, Peter realised that he came second to her patients. When Peter was little, civil war broke out at home and so he was sent away to boarding school, a...
May 20, 2025•54 min
Psychiatrist Warren Ward treats patients who are severely ill with eating disorders. Understanding the mystery of human nature has driven him since he was a young doctor. Warren Ward's patients are often critically ill with diseases like anorexia. Warren says asking someone with anorexia to eat is like asking an arachnophobe to put their hand in a jar full of spiders. As a psychiatrist, Warren uses psychotherapy to help his patients. He encourages those with an eating disorder to approach their ...
May 16, 2025•52 min
When writer Hannah Kent first visited Iceland in 2003, she came across a gothic true story about Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman hanged in Iceland. That story would change her life. Hannah's arrival to the Nordic island as an exchange student in 2003 was a difficult one. On her first night in the country, she found herself stranded late at night at Keflavik Airport and desperately homesick. But within weeks, Iceland had begun to change young Hannah — its dramatic landscapes, extraordinary lig...
May 15, 2025•51 min
Claude Robinson developed a heroin habit as a young man, and spent years in jail. In 2006 he began to turn his life around for good. (CW: descriptions of drug use, addiction, and crime) (R) Claude Robinson is the manager of Rainbow Lodge, a home in inner Sydney for men just out of prison. Claude knows the place well because nearly 20 years ago he was sent there himself. Claude was a heroin addict who had taken to crime to pay for his habit and wound up in a minimum security jail. But after he as...
May 14, 2025•52 min
