Dame Nellie Melba was Australia's first international superstar, taking Europe and America by storm with a voice that thrilled the world. Most Australians imagine an imperious Dame dressed in furs and large hats, but behind the public facade lies a story of a young woman struggling to overcome social expectations in pursuit of a dream. After surviving an abusive marriage she found true love with a would-be King of France, an affair that brought both scandal and personal fulfilment into a life th...
Sep 24, 2021•19 min
Pip doesn't like going home anymore. Her Mum isn't the same since her new boyfriend moved in and to cap it off her best friend Mika has moved away. When she finds an injured baby dragon that needs her care she starts to believe anything is possible. In this charming story of love, loss and survival, Karen Foxlee weaves a magical tale exploring what it really means to love and nurture while finding the courage to embrace change. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Karen Foxlee about becoming e...
Sep 22, 2021•15 min
Born evil or simply mad? Frederick Bailey Deeming was known and reviled across three continents. He spent years travelling under various aliases, preying on the innocent, the gullible and the desperate. The Devil's Work raises fresh questions about Deeming's role in the Whitechapel murders and the identity of Jack the Ripper. In an era when spiritualism and a fascination with the afterlife was rife, Deeming's story attracted some of the world's most powerful and influential people, including Aus...
Sep 11, 2021•21 min
In this series of interconnected essays Delia Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer and a lover of nature in a era of unprecedented change. From an 'unnatural' history of coal to the effect of a seal turning up in a park just below her apartment Delia embarks on a searching and poetic examination about the meaning we can find in the change that is all around us. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Delia Falconer about why we are already using the term Anthropocene, obse...
Sep 11, 2021•17 min
As a child growing up in country Queensland Lisa Millar dreamed of having a big life. Now with years on the road as an ABC Foreign Correspondent behind her, she shares her moments of joy among the reporting on grief and tragedy. Lisa battled a debilitating fear of flying that threatened her life and career but only now has she been able to reflect on a joyful childhood, the journey that brought her here, and the change she has witnessed along the way. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Lisa ...
Aug 31, 2021•22 min
Back after suspension, Detective Sergeant Robert Cardilini is immediately tasked with solving domestic violence cases. To complicate matters, his new partner is the eager and idealistic young Detective Lorraine Spencer. When a young woman is found bleeding and tied to a chair it leads to a sinister game of exploitation reaching the highest echelons of society. When Spencer goes out on a limb to unravel the mystery, the question is: will Cardilini be there to catch her? In this episode Gregory Do...
Aug 31, 2021•17 min
Josie de Bray was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. This immensely readable social history uses the life of Josie de Bray as conduit into the lives of her friends and competitors – the many women who paraded in their petticoats on the verandas of Roe Street, and who were kept from the public view and were secret keepers themselves in the seamier side of town. In this episode, author and researcher Leigh Straw chats to Heather Lewis about the stigma of ...
Aug 29, 2021•14 min
Australia has been directly involved in the nuclear industry for decades: from the establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to the secret tests at Maralinga and the decision to export uranium in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether we like it or not we are part of the global nuclear industry and bear a moral obligation as guardian of around 30% of the world's uranium deposits. In Long Half-life, Professor Lowe exposes the fundamental challenges politicians and decision-makers fac...
Aug 27, 2021•27 min
Three housemates. One dead, one missing and one accused of murder. Melbourne journalist Olive 'Oli' Groves is obsessed with the 'Housemate Homicides' a story that set career in motion nine years earlier. When the one missing housemate suddenly turns up dead the whole story comes flooding back for Oli. Paired with enthusiastic and tech-savvy millennial Cooper Ng to reinvestigate the case, Oli is forced to confront both her past and the present in a new media landscape that's turned digital. Oli s...
Aug 26, 2021•18 min
Tori Swyft wakes up in a Barcelona hotel room to a gruesome murder scene. With a splitting headache and no memory of the night before, her world is in turmoil. Could she really have done such a thing? If she didn't then who did? A man known only as The Voice phones her with revelations of a shocking video proving Tori is the murderer. Set within the seedy world of global politics and counter-espionage, Tori soon finds herself in a race against time to prove her innocence. In this episode, Gregor...
Aug 03, 2021•20 min
Battle scarred investigative journalist and former war correspondent John Bailey is picking up the pieces of his life after the death of the one woman who helped him hold it all together. He's got a new job, he's given up the drink and he's somehow even acquired a four-legged companion. When Federal Police raid his home armed with a warrant granting unprecedented powers, Bailey is determined to get to the truth. While investigating the rise of a global white supremacist group, it becomes clear t...
Jul 31, 2021•15 min
In this deeply personal reflection on women's lives and creative desires Nikki Gemmell explores the struggle she experienced in finding her own creative space. Dissolve is a meditation on those difficult times in establishing herself as a writer, but also a conversation with all young women who are seeking to fulfil their own creative desires. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Nikki Gemmell about emerging from the humiliation of heartbreak in her early twenties, building confidence as a wri...
Jul 31, 2021•19 min
It's 1967 in Lithgow (the 'arsehole of the universe') and a young Roy Slaven is a promising student at the De La Salle Academy. He is already demonstrating early evidence as a sporting savant. Blessed with uncanny abilities with the ball, Roy experiences a moment of religious enlightenment when Uncle Baz presents him with an Australian Rugby League team jersey. John Doyle was right there beside Slaven during this formative year and when Slaven approached him to record those momentous times in bo...
Jul 31, 2021•28 min
Tim Richards is a freelance travel writer and Lonely Planet guidebook contributor who loves chasing down a story with an historical angle. He decided to shake up his life by embarking on an epic train journey across Australia. Covering some 7,000 kilometres, his train journey began in far north Queensland and boarding iconic trains like the Indian Pacific, Overland and Spirit of Queensland. Along the way Tim encounters giant crocs, archetypal Australian publicans and the ghosts of Australia's pi...
Jul 25, 2021•19 min
Scarlett Jacques is the girl everyone wants to be – charismatic, wealthy and desirable but also dangerous and manipulative. She's the coolest kid at Maypole House, a secondary college for the offspring of the wealthy. When she befriends teenage mother Talullah Murray, things get weird. When Talullah suddenly goes missing, her mother Kim is thrown into a panic. Meanwhile Sophie Beck, an author of thrillers and recent arrival at Maypole House, stumbles on clues that lead to very dark places. In th...
Jul 22, 2021•18 min
Dianne O'Brien (Auntie Di) grew up believing her Irish adoptive mother Val was her birth mother. When Val died while Dianne was still a teenager her whole life changed. Raped at the age of 15 and sentenced to time at the notorious Parramatta Girls Home, Auntie Di suffered years of horrific domestic abuse and a cruel betrayal. At the age of 36 Auntie Di discovered she was a victim of the 'stolen generation' and is actually a Yorta Yorta woman. This revelation reawakens her fighting spirit and hel...
Jun 30, 2021•20 min
When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine takes her mother Della on an historical tour of the UK's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will heal old wounds and help them reconcile their past. While Jasmine immerses herself in her literary idols, Della rediscovers the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. As both women grapple with their place in others' lives, a powerful reminder of a mysterious family tragedy, buried in their past, propels old secrets to the surface. In this episode Gregor...
Jun 30, 2021•21 min
For over three decades Dr Norman Swan has been answering the questions Australians have been asking about the medical and lifestyle issues that concern all of us. With his trademark honest, straightforward approach Dr Norman Swan brings it all together in this one-stop handbook that helps us get to the truth. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Dr Norman Swan about the real Mediterranean diet, living younger longer and the importance of a wholistic approach to health and wellbeing.
Jun 29, 2021•24 min
It's not easy to maintain grace and good humour through the peaks and troughs of modern living. Throw in a pandemic, political upheaval and environmental disaster and you've got a recipe for a life of endless worry. In a time when mental health is more important than ever, Brigid Lowry offers thoughts on living simply and learning how to nourish yourself and those around you. Informed by contemporary psychology and Zen Buddhism, Brigid provides insights into everything from grief and loss to lov...
Jun 06, 2021•18 min
In 1942 Eve Langley published her first novel The Pea Pickers to critical acclaim. Hailed as a tour de force, it tells the story of two feisty sisters who wander the Australian countryside dressed as men. In Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers, Helen Vines deftly unravels the threads of a life story that became curiously entangled with the author's works of fiction. This compelling new biography paints a portrait of a complex family constellation plagued by mental illness and obscured by a veil of s...
Jun 02, 2021•20 min
Most of us fail to confront the reality facing our ageing parents. Our inclination is to wait and see what happens but when a simple thing like a fall occurs, it can precipitate a crisis which can be devastating both for parents and the whole family. Avoiding the Ageing Parent Trap is an essential guide for all families as their elders approach the years of inevitable physical and mental decline. Packed full of information, cautionary tales and practical strategies and solutions, this book is de...
Jun 01, 2021•24 min
From searches for serial killers and missing persons to the persecution of migrants and Aboriginal people, David Price takes us back to a time when the line between lawmakers and criminals was lightly drawn. Based on a wide array of contemporaneous accounts of life in the Gascoyne, these sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing true crime stories depict an era when Australia’s laws served to maintain order rather than to secure justice. Dark Tales from the Long River offers a window into an evol...
May 31, 2021•17 min
Sinéad Stubbins has always known that there was a better version of herself lying just outside of her grasp. That if she listened to the right song or won the right (any) award or knew about whisky or followed the right Instagram psychologist or drank kombucha, ever, or enacted the correct 70-step Korean skincare regime, she would become her ‘best self’. In My Defence, I Have No Defence raises the white flag on trying to live up to impossible standards. Wild and funny and wickedly relatable, it ...
May 31, 2021•16 min
In an atmosphere of chaos where social structures and the environment have been shattered by the effects of climate change, Li is tracking her lost daughter Matti across a disintegrating country. Resourceful and determined but alone and on foot, Li will need to draw on every instinct just to survive. In this relentless and utterly terrifying psychological thriller, Unsheltered poses questions we all dread and asks if our humanity is enough protection in a dystopian world where nothing and nobody...
May 23, 2021•19 min
July 2014, a lonely road at twilight outside Croppa Creek, New South Wales: 80-year-old farmer Ian Turnbull takes out a .22 and shoots environmental officer Glen Turner in the back. On one side, a farmer hoping to secure his family’s wealth on the richest agricultural soil in the country. On the other, his obsession: the government man trying to apply environmental laws. The brutal killing of Glen Turner splits open the story of our place on this land. Is our time on this soil a tale of tragedy ...
May 04, 2021•21 min
Kyle Mewburn grew up in the sunburnt, unsophisticated Brisbane suburbs of the 1960s and '70s in a household with little love and no books, with a lifelong feeling of being somehow wrong – like ‘strawberry jam in a spinach can'. In this book, Kyle describes this early life and her journey to becoming her own person – a celebrated children’s book author, a husband and, finally, a woman. She shares the dreams, the prejudice and the agony of growing up trans and coming out, the lengthy physical orde...
May 03, 2021•18 min
When Rod Barton applied for a job at the Australian Department of Defence he had no idea where it would lead. For the next few decades he found himself disarming militia in Mogadishu, flying to Baghdad as a UN weapons inspector and hunting for Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction. In this extraordinary behind-the-scenes account of a life straight out of an adventure novel Rod Barton unmasks a world of lies, secrecy and deception ruled by politics rather than truth. In this episode Gregor...
May 02, 2021•23 min
As he reluctantly celebrates his 100th birthday, Jack Furey casts his mind back to his experience during World War II as a police sergeant in Far North Queensland. Here, the arrival of the Americans to set up a new airforce base has brought with it a swag of trouble. The small town of Wangamba is plagued by rumours of prostitution and backyard abortions and violence soon erupts. In an atmosphere of racism and resentment Sergeant Jack Furey is determined to uncover the truth behind a string of mu...
May 02, 2021•17 min
*Content warning: This podcast contains discussions of sexual assault and violence against women. Listener discretion is advised.' Kathryn Heyman's childhood was marked by violence, poverty and chaos. She was left with no real example of how to create a decent life but she had one thing in her favour – she was a reader. The power of stories provided a means of escape and a pathway to a reimagined life. After experiencing the trauma of sexual assault as a young woman, Kathryn made the decision to...
May 02, 2021•26 min
Homecoming is a work of extraordinary beauty that awakens the voices of four generations of Elfie Shiosaki's family. Written using archival records, family letters and oral history, it is the culmination of five years of research that shares stories of indigenous resistance and renewal. Homecoming weaves a vivid tapestry of history, language, memory, landscape and spirit that asks something special of the reader. It is a book to be treasured, a reminder of a brutal past and a remarkable story of...
Apr 15, 2021•15 min
