Novelist Emma Pei Yin ran away from Hong Kong as a teenager to start fresh in Australia. But she found herself repeatedly drawn back home whenever she put pen to paper. Emma grew up in England and Hong Kong. But her life in Hong Kong wasn’t so much about the neon skyscrapers as it was about her family’s ancestral village, tucked away in the New Territories. Emma spent her school holidays there with her grandparents, learning how to take care of the family cemetery and joining in Chinese Festival...
Jul 16, 2025•49 min
Zach was still a teen when he was scouted by the AFL in Ireland, beginning a great adventure in Australia, where he fell in love and unexpectedly became a dad. On his way home from training, a 24-year-old Zach would have to pull over on the side of the road to cry before he got home to his young family. Zach Tuohy was just 17 years old when he was scouted by the Carlton Football Club at a Gaelic football tournament in his home country of Ireland. He did two trials for the club before taking the ...
Jul 15, 2025•52 min
After a lifetime of nursing and midwifery, Janty Blair discovered her funny bone in her late 50s, following a serendipitous Bumble date (R). Janty's father, Bob, was a staff sergeant in the Australian Army, and so she grew up moving around the country. Home for Janty, a Butchulla, Mununjhali and Woppaburra woman, was really Hervey Bay in Queensland, where she would go on trips every year to visit her aunties, uncles, cousins and grandparents, all of whom were stomach-achingly funny. While Janty ...
Jul 11, 2025•47 min
Leah Purcell grew up in a small town caring for her mum Florence. Her options after graduation were nursing or working at the meatworks. But after a push from her meatworks boss, Leah defied her own expectations for herself (R). Leah is now an acclaimed actor, playwright, and stage and film director. She grew up in the Queensland country town of Murgon. Although she came from a big family, it was just her and her mum for most of her childhood. Her dad lived in town, but didn’t acknowledge her as...
Jul 10, 2025•53 min
Bundjalung man, Jack Manning Bancroft's scholarship to a prestigious Sydney University college showed him a rarefied world that shocked him, and he used his childhood grit to channel his energy into a world-changing project. Jack's mother is Bundjalung artist, Bronwyn Bancroft. Growing up in inner-Sydney, he was intimidated by her artistic drive and threw himself into sport, because that was the only way a young Jack thought a man could have influence in the world. When he was ten the family mov...
Jul 09, 2025•51 min
Yvonne Orley grew up on Aboriginal missions in NSW as the child of the matron and manager. But it turned out that Yvonne had much deeper connections to the country, and the people, that she knew at the time. Although her mother had tried to hide this part of the family story, it turned out that Yvonne herself was a Kamilaroi woman and this was her mother’s traditional country. Yvonne’s life took another unexpected turn 25 years ago when her sister asked if she would allow a group of high needs m...
Jul 08, 2025•46 min
Lech Blaine with the strange true story of his childhood, shaped by love, religious zealotry, and four wildly different parents. CW: descriptions of foster care and child removal. Lech grew up in a big family in country Queensland, where his dad Tom ran pubs for a living. He had six older siblings, who had come to the family as foster kids before he was born. It was a happy, knockabout, sports-obsessed childhood. But in the midst of all the love and warmth, Lech's mum Lenore lived with a creepin...
Jul 04, 2025•52 min
Lech Blaine with the strange true story of his childhood, shaped by love, religious zealotry, and four wildly different parents. CW: descriptions of foster care and child removal. Lech grew up in a big family in country Queensland, where his dad Tom ran pubs for a living. He had six older siblings, who had come to the family as foster kids before he was born. It was a happy, knockabout, sports-obsessed childhood. But in the midst of all the love and warmth, Lech's mum Lenore lived with a creepin...
Jul 04, 2025•52 min
For journalist Kate Halfpenny, moving to a beachside town during Melbourne's lockdowns seemed like the perfect way to unwind and escape her huge mortgage. Then she had to contend with the triple whammy of perimenopause, her husband's alcoholism and distance from family and friends. For the first time in her life, Kate had an empty house, no job commitments and no city life to distract her. She was able to indulge daily in her love of boogie boarding and surf-side walks with her dog, Maggie. One ...
Jul 03, 2025•53 min
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 an ableist 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. S...
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
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
