Conversations draws you deeper into the life story of someone you may have heard about, but never met. Journey into their world, joining them on epic adventures to unfamiliar places, back in time to wild moments of history, and into their deepest memories, to be moved by personal stories of resilience and redemption.
Hosted by Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski, Conversations is the ABC's most popular long-form interview program. Every day we explore the vast tapestry of human experience, weaving together narratives from history, science, art, and personal storytelling.
Conversations Live is coming to the stage! Join Sarah Kanowski and Richard Fidler for an unmissable night of unforgettable stories, behind-the-scenes secrets, and surprise guests. Australia’s most-loved podcast — live, up close, and in the moment. Find out more at the Conversations website.
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Writer Cynthia Banham on discovering the shocking truth about her great-grandmother, reckoning with buried family secrets, and the criticisms mothers face from others and sometimes most harshly, from themselves. Cynthia Banham grew up hearing the story of her great-grandmother, Natalina, who had supposedly been orphaned in Italy in the 19th century. But when Cynthia became a mother herself she felt compelled to look for the real story of her maternal line, which suddenly stopped three generation...
Toxic people are around us in our workplaces, our families and our dating lives. Research psychologist Leanne ten Brinke is here to tell you how to spot them, and get rid of them from your orbit. Leanne ten Brinke is a research psychologist whose special area of expertise is what she calls 'dark personality types'. These are particularly cruel, malicious, manipulative people who lack empathy, people who are psychopaths, narcissists or sadists. Psychologists estimate than one per cent of any popu...
Born with a magnificent voice, Opera star Teddy Tahu Rhodes fought against his destiny for years until a letter he'd been avoiding reading changed everything (R)
Dr Nada Andric wants to improve the health of people who are marginalised in the community and their access to healthcare. She works at the Reverend Bill Crews GP clinic, a place where people who might be completely off the database of society can get help. Whether they're facing homelessness, dealing with mental health issues, addiction, or simply don't have a Medicare card or passport to their name. This year, the clinic in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield turns 40. This episode of Conversations ...
Two-time World Debating champion Bo Seo on how love and listening can improve how we disagree, so we're not at each other's throats online and offline (R). When Bo was 8 years old, he and his parents migrated from Korea to Australia. Bo was a quiet boy and sometimes felt overwhelmed at school. But in Year Five, something happened which changed his life: one of his teachers introduced Bo to debating.Debating became a way for Bo to excel socially and academically. He went on to win world titles fo...
Stephen Grosz has welcomed people into his office for more than 40 years, and believes our greatest task in life is to see ourselves and others with more clarity, in order to live more easily and with more please. Stephen has sat with people as they have shared their darkest fears, strangest dreams and their most explosive love affairs. Through thousands of hours of these conversations, he has tried to help patients understand themselves so they can live with more ease and with greater satisfact...
Writer Tanya Heaslip on swapping life on an Alice Springs station for the fairytale streets of Prague, and the remarkable parallels she found between these two magical worlds. Tanya was in a pub in London in 1989 when she watched on the television as the Berlin Wall came down. She was the tail end of a solo backpacking trip, which didn’t quite live up to what she’d imagined it might be as a little girl growing up on a remote cattle station near Alice Springs. But Tanya booked to go to Berlin the...
The late Widjabul Wieybal woman of the Bundjalung Nation Rhoda Roberts lived through great loss and grief, in the midst of becoming one of Australia's most influential cultural leaders in the arts (R). Content Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this episode of Conversations includes the names and voice of someone who has died, used in accordance with the wishes of their family. Aunty Rhoda Roberts AO, a guiding force in Australia's arts scene and the woman who ...
Nick Orchard on how a tough childhood, mental health issues, couch surfing and hip hop have helped him learn how to help others recover from burnout and impostor syndrome. When Nick was growing up, his mum struggled with her mental health and when he was on a date as a teenager he got the worst call of his life, and went to be with his mum when she needed him most. Nick turned to the Melbourne hip hop scene for a sense of community and purpose. It’s also where Nick would go looking for a couch t...
Melina Marchetta grew up in Sydney in a close-knit Sicilian family, but she never wanted to be seen as 'that Italian girl'. Years later, she drew on her story to write an Australian classic (R). Growing up, Melina lied about the fact she was forbidden to go out on the weekends, and instead told her friends she had to attend lots of weddings. At 19 years old, she visited Italy for the first time and met her great aunts, still grieving the siblings who had left for Australia decades earlier. Melin...
Tracy Drain is Chief Engineer of the Europa Clipper, a NASA spacecraft currently travelling to Jupiter on a journey that will take six years. Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, and scientists believe there could be an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust.Having water would make Europa one of the best places to look for signs of life in the solar system. Tracy Drain has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for more than two decades. She is also a National Geographic Explorer and...
Together with his husband, Vinko Anthony runs a matchmaking agency for gay men looking for the type of enduring commitment and love that they found. As part of his role as matchmaker, Vinko shares what he's learnt about love and listening through the ups and downs of his own relationships. Vinko grew up on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, where he spent a lot of his childhood with his Nonna. The two of them would walk together for hours in silence, listening deeply to the birds, the waves and the...
Stephanie Wood was new to online dating when she met a sweet man named Joe. But within weeks, she realised 'farmer' Joe was not who he claimed to be (R). Stephanie was a successful and well-travelled journalist when she met a sweet man named Joe online. They spent many romantic weekends away and discussed a future where they would live together in the country. But after months of his last minute cancellations and no shows, Stephanie finally ended the relationship. What she discovered next was a ...
Charles Lomu on being privileged to see love in action in his grandparents, how a spiral into grief and anger led him to periodic detention, and how cutting hair today helps him steer young men away from a dark path (R). When Charles was born, he was lovingly given to his grandparents, in the Tongan adoption custom of pusiaki. He lived a gentle, religious life in Tonga, and saw love in action through his grandparents' care. The family moved to Australia, where Charles grew to be an up-and-coming...
Benjamin Gilmour describes the hectic work of saving lives, and what it's like to bring people back from the brink of suicide. (R) Ben was been a paramedic for twenty six years and was based in inner Sydney for more than a decade. A regular working week for Bondi's ambulance crews would see them called out to cardiac arrests, drug overdoses, domestic disputes, and to suicides. Their patch included a notorious cliff known as 'The Gap', where it would often be Ben’s job to convince people to come ...
When Anna Ferguson was a little girl she was badly hurt in a roller coaster accident. Although she made a full physical recovery, emotionally everything was different, and for many years she couldn't understand why she remained either angry or numb. Anna was 10 years old when she went with her family to the Melbourne Royal Show. Anna was excited to ride a roller coaster for the first time, but something went wrong on the ride, and Anna and her sister were trapped for hours. Both of them needed m...
Military strategist Jennifer Parker on the story behind the biggest disruption to oil supplies in world history, happening now in the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf has a particular geographical importance to the world, as the land on one side belongs to Iran, and the country has a history of using it to pressure its enemies in times of conflict.A quarter of all oil production passes through it so disrupting that flow can have an enormous impact on the global economy. ...
Jenny Briscoe-Hough on the uncomfortable truths which saw her set up Australia's first ever not-for-profit funeral home (R). After her mother died, Jenny Briscoe-Hough had an epiphany about the business of funerals. Although her family brought in their own flowers and had a simple service, the bill came to $11,000. A short time later, Jenny began thinking about setting up a not-for-profit funeral service in her local area. With the help of a documentary and a crowdfunding campaign, she and the c...
From wearing red stilettos on her first day of university and travelling solo into rural Egypt, to relocating to the United States with four kids in tow, Margie Warrell created her own life for herself off the dairy farm. Margie grew up on a dairy farm in Victoria, the eldest daughter in a big Catholic family. It was assumed she would either enter the convent or marry a farmer. But Margie knew she wanted a very different life. First, she branched off into the big smoke to go to university; then ...
Writer Tony Birch with tales of his Fitzroy childhood including his grandmother Alma's 'op shop fever', his love for pine cones and blankets, and the macabre holiday he lived through when he was 5 years old (R). Tony grew up in inner city Melbourne in the 1950s and '60s. His grandmother taught him to waste nothing. So Tony and his siblings would scour the streets for bottles, lead and copper to sell, and for wood from demolished houses to use for firewood. His grandmother even ran a sly grog sho...
Writer Drusilla Modjeska has built a career exploring the extraordinary lives of pioneering women writers and artists, who have never stopped asking important questions about gender, freedom and expression. Drusilla was born in England right at the end of the Second World War. She was raised to be a well-behaved and self-effacing young woman, in a very conservative time in history. But Drusilla escaped this version of herself by marrying very young and moving to Papua New Guinea, and then to Aus...
New York Times columnist and author M.Gessen on the slow strangulation of democracy, happening right now in Trump's America. M Gessen grew up in the Soviet Union and migrated to the US as a teenager before returning to Russia in the 90s to cover the country's brief attempt at democracy and then the slow slide back into autocratic rule under Vladimir Putin. M's insight into the mindset of the autocrat offers some clarity on why such leaders do the things they do and how they see the world. This C...
Colin's band, Men At Work, was one of the biggest acts of the 1980s. Their first album shot the band to international fame. Then quite quickly, everything unravelled, and Colin had to begin again (R). Colin's band, Men At Work, was one of the biggest acts of the 1980s. Their first album shot the band to massive international fame, giving them two simultaneous number ones on the US charts, for album and single. Along with Who Can It Be Now? and Overkill, another enduring hit for the band is the s...
When Megan Gilmour's son was 10 years old, he spent nearly two years in isolation at the Sydney Children’s Hospital. The months he missed at school didn't just affect him academically. Megan, her daughter and her husband all relocated from Canberra to be with Darcy in Sydney as he underwent life-saving medical treatment, and lived at hospital. Over his many months in hospital, Darcy missed a lot of school. What worried Megan wasn’t just that he was falling behind academically, it was his lonelin...
It was a Sunday night in the garage of their family home when journalist and author Kate Legge found out her husband of 30 years had been cheating on her for decades. After a downward spiral as she came to terms with the news, the two of them took a road trip to Broken Hill to investigate the four generations of cheaters in his family line. The process led Kate to look into the murky waters of how love was expressed in her own family, with an intellectually frustrated mother who could be surpris...
Lisa Petty began her dance career in 1980s New York, intoxicated by the grime and flamboyant life of the city. She witnessed countless friends lose their lives to AIDS, and the lessons she learned in closeness have stayed with her. As a young woman, Lisa Petty was visiting her aunt in a retirement home when she started to speak to the older people there about the role of wartime dance halls in their lives. These were stories of luminous intimacy. The old men and women’s faces would light up as t...
Political journalist Ian Dunt dissects Britain's recent struggles, tracing the roots of its "malaise" to post-2008 austerity, systemic flaws in the Westminster model, and the distorting impact of its electoral system. He critiques the transformative "burn it down" ideology of the modern Conservative Party and the divisiveness fueled by Brexit. Dunt also shares his personal journey out of dogmatism, advocating for intellectual humility and the embrace of doubt in an increasingly polarized political landscape.
In the 1990s, Glenn Jarvis was living in London working for a very powerful American corporation called Enron. He was under a huge amount of stress at work, when his mental health began to spiral downwards. In the late 1990s Australian Glenn Jarvis won a job in London with Enron, a giant American energy and investment corporation. Life was exhilarating and he made lots of friends. But after a time Glenn began to notice some very odd transactions at Enron. Giant amounts of money were flooding in ...
The former Kings Cross street kid on his time in prison, recovering from an alcohol-induced brain injury, the puppy called Sunny who showed him what love is and how buying car parking spaces set him up for the rest of his life. Warning: This episode contains sensitive topics and reference to physical violence against women. John Howard came from a dysfunctional and often violent home in the outer suburbs of Sydney, and when he was able to, he ran away to the dank but promising Kings Cross of the...
Kate McClymont is chief investigative reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, she has won 10 Walkley Awards for her work on some of the biggest crime and corruption cases in NSW. She grew up on a farm in NSW, and during university, funded her start in Sydney by setting up a busking booth in Kings Cross. Passers-by would pay her to answer a question, have an argument, or verbally abuse them. Kate's start in crime reporting came from an early job writing for a gossip column. She was instructed to ...
