We’re failing this continent. We have been for some time. The latest State of the Environment Report only confirms what we’ve all known for years. In Northern NSW, west of the Divide, it used to be brigalow scrub, growing on what turned out to be the richest soil in the country - not a coincidence as it happens - but it’s almost all gone, and the job of protecting what’s left falls to environmental officers. Late one afternoon in 2014, out near Croppa Creek, things come to a head. An 80 year old...
Oct 05, 2022•1 sec•Season 2022Ep. 10
Katie’s first novel, The Mistake, was exceedingly well-received, with cover notes by such luminaries as Liane Moriarty - I absolutely loved this novel… fresh, funny and heartfelt… I didn’t want it to end. Now she returns with The Accident, revealing the inner lives of Grace, Zoe and Imogen, whose worlds are linked through shared but not always obvious connections. The Accident explores the ways in which our formative years shape our future, examining the influence of unrequited love and the heal...
Oct 05, 20220•Season 2022Ep. 9
Outspoken is delighted to bring Dr Norman Swan to Maleny for a conversation about his new book, So You Want to Live Younger Longer? Trained in paediatrics, Dr Swan was one of the first medically qualified journalists in Australia, and has had a broadcast career spanning more than 30 years. He currently hosts Radio National's The Health Report while also reporting on 7.30 and several other ABC programs. In addition to being an active journalist and health broadcaster, Dr Swan has a deep strategic...
Aug 12, 2022•1 sec•Season 2022Ep. 8
Fiona Robertson is a writer and doctor (yes, two doctors for the price of one!). Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia and the UK, and has been shortlisted for international competitions. Her collection of stories, If You’re Happy, won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the 2020 Queensland Literary Awards. Fiona lives in Brisbane with her husband and children. ‘Mapping a terrain of loneliness, compromise, ageing and tension,...
Aug 12, 20220•Season 2022Ep. 7
Kári Gíslason was born in Iceland. He’s the author of four books, two non-fiction and two novels. The Promise of Iceland tells the story of return journeys he’s made to his birthplace, while Saga Land: The island of stories at the edge of the world, co-written with Richard Fidler, is an account of visits they made together to the places where the Icelandic sagas actually took place. It won the Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2018. His novels include The Ash Burner and the book he will be dis...
May 04, 20220•Season 2022Ep. 5
The Honourable Kevin Rudd AC. Mr Rudd was first elected as Prime Minister in 2007. Early initiatives of his government were the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, A Parliamentary Apology to the Stolen Generations, and the 2020 Summit. During the term of his government Labor also managed to keep Australia out of recession, despite the Global Financial Crisis, as well as commencing the roll-out of the National Broadband Network and the introduction of nationwide early childhood education, amongst many...
May 04, 2022•1 sec•Season 2022Ep. 6
Chinese history is long, sprawling and gloriously messy. It is full of heroes who are also villains, prosperous ages and violent rebellions, extraordinary cultural and scientific leaps and deep dark times. Linda Jaivin distils this vast history into a concise narrative that allows us a glimpse of its importance to the formation of China as we see it today. Right now in Australia, we desperately need this sort of understanding. Linda is the author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction. He...
Apr 21, 2022•1 sec•Season 2022Ep. 4
Warren is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Queensland. His writing has appeared in many publications and he is a winner of the New Philosopher’s Award. His book, Lovers of Philosophy explores the intimate lives of seven philosphers, investigating the way their most personal experiences came to shape their ideas. Warren has a wonderful way of weaving the personal with the public, so that, while he tells the grim story of, for example, Nietzsche's emotional trials and Sartre ...
Apr 20, 20220•Season 2021Ep. 3
Kevin grew up on the western edge of the Snowy Mountains, in a small sawmill village. He has worked primarily in drama and theatre, as actor, writer and teacher. His poetry has been published in Australia and overseas but Awake to the Rest of My Days is his first anthology. His poems have been runners-up, finalists, short-listed, gained special mentions, commendations and honourable mentions in major competitions around the world. Mark Tredennick says that Kevin is ‘a rare voice in Australian po...
Mar 23, 20220•Season 2022Ep. 1
The tag line on the cover of Scott’s remarkable new book, Full Circle, says simply: ‘Australia lost a Senator, the world gained a luminous writer’ and that just about sums it up. Ludlam proves to be more than just erudite, he’s prepared to enlist descriptions of the very foundations of life into his argument for a better understanding of our place in the world, and the responsibilities that come with it. In Full Circle Ludlam seeks old and new ways to make our systems humane, regenerative and mo...
Mar 23, 2022•1 sec•Season 2022Ep. 2
David Williamson is the most produced playwright in the history of Australian theatre. Now, after 50 years of mainstage productions and numerous film scripts – a remarkable body of work – David has written his long-awaited memoir, Home Truths. In the book he reveals how a childhood defined by marital discord sparked a lifelong fascination with the capacity for drama to explore emotional conflict; but also about the anxiety that plagued him as he crafted his plays, notwithstanding the joy of conn...
Oct 21, 2021•1 sec•Season 2021Ep. 8
Anthony is a BAFTA and AWGIE award-winning screen-writer. His first short film STOP! was selected for Official Competition at Cannes, and one of his first television gigs was writing webisodes for the ground-breaking US television series LOST. Anthony has been a script producer and script editor on numerous award-winning shows, including Safe Harbour – which won the 2019 International Emmy for best Mini-Series. He has a doctorate in visual arts from the Queensland College of the Arts, where he t...
Oct 21, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 9
Luke Stegemann is an award-winning Australian Hispanist, author of The Beautiful Obscure, recipient of the Malaspina Award for his outstanding contribution to the development of cultural relations between Australia and Spain. His new book, Amnesia Road - winner of the Queensland Literary award for non-fiction this year - is a compelling literary examination of historic violence in rural areas of Australia and Spain. It is also an unashamed celebration of the beautiful landscapes where this viole...
Jun 06, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 8
Ian Lowe AO is a bona fide Australian treasure. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society (and former Head of Science) at Griffith University; the author of ten books and uncounted articles; a former President of the Aust Conservation Society and the recipient of the Konrad Lorenz Gold Medal, awarded by the International Academy of Sciences. Just to begin with. His new book, Long Half-life is a timely and riveting account of the political, social and scientific comple...
Jun 06, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 7
Hugh Mackay is probably Australia’s best-known ‘social psychologist’. He’s written twenty-two books, including Advance Australia… where?, The Art of Belonging, and Beyond Belief. He appears regularly on television, radio and newspapers as a commentator. Being multi-talented he doesn’t stop there, he’s also published seven novels. His new book, however, is The Kindness Revolution, in which he examines the way our society is developing, asking if it might be possible that Australia be not simply t...
Jun 06, 2021•1 sec•Season 2021Ep. 6
Melanie is a Brisbane-based writer, editor, academic and occasional actor. She is a graduate of QUT’s nationally acclaimed acting program and has a Doctorate in Creative Writing. In 2018, she won the Qld Literary Awards Glendower for an Emerging Writer for her manuscript 'Garrison Town', which was published as Meet Me at Lennon’s by UQP in 2019. Meet Me at Lennon's was shortlisted for the 2020 Qld Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance and the 2020 Courier-Mail’s People Choice Award. H...
Jun 06, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 5
Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of history at James Cook University in Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal people. His other research interests are in Australian nationalism and environmental history. Here he speaks about his biography of Alec Chisholm, Idling In Green Places. Alec Chisholm was a naturalist, journalist, newspaper editor and author, but, above all an ornithologist with a passion for Australian birds and...
May 05, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 3
While he’s best known for his radio and television work Karl also has degrees in Physics and Maths, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery. He has worked as a physicist, tutor, film-maker, car mechanic, labourer, and as a medical doctor at the Kids’ Hospital in Sydney. He is the present Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at Sydney University, where his ‘mission’ is to spread the good word about science and its benefits. He is one of only 100 ‘Apple Masters’ an award which celebrates the achieveme...
May 03, 2021•1 sec•Season 2021Ep. 4
Marian Wilkinson is regarded as one of the most distinguished journalists in Australia. She has won two Walkley Awards and was the first executive producer of Four Corners. She was a senior journalist for many years with The Sydney Morning Herald, was the Washington correspondent for The National Times and The Age and a senior reporter for The Australian. She is the author of three books of investigative journalism, including Dark Victory, co-authored with David Marr. In the summer of 2019/20, a...
Apr 08, 2021•1 sec•Season 2021Ep. 2
We're delighted to introduce debut novelist Katie McMahon, talking about her novel, out in March, The Mistake. While Bec and Kate are sisters, they couldn’t be less alike. Bec is living the domestic dream with her surgeon husband Stuart and three perfect children. So why does she find herself so attracted to free-spirited Ryan? Kate’s life is hardly a dream. But when she meets Adam – tall, kind, funny – things start looking up. Until she finds out he’s been keeping secrets from her. ‘I absolutel...
Apr 08, 20210•Season 2021Ep. 1
Leigh Robshaw is a journalist, free-lance writer, copywriter, business blogger and sub-editor. She writes for a remarkable range of magazines and publications. Now she has written a fast-paced, colourful and sometimes shocking memoir, You Had Me at Hola, set in South America and Mexico. A young Australian woman meets a beautiful Peruvian artisan in a market in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. Sensing a deep connection, they fall in love and begin a new life together. Over a period of three years, they t...
Nov 06, 20190•Season 2019Ep. 5
Clare Bowditch is a musician, an actor, radio presenter, educator and now author (on her website she calls herself music maker/story baker/educator). She visited Maleny to talk about her memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl, a revealing story of a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, a story that tells how these forces shaped her life for better and for worse. It is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful. In this podcast she also sings a couple of her songs. Clare won an Aria Awar...
Nov 06, 20190•Season 2019Ep. 6
Mary Garden was born and raised in New Zealand, but has lived in Australia for much of her adult life. She also spent several years in India, on a spiritual quest. Her experiences in that country were the subject of her first memoir The Serpent Rising: a journey of spiritual seduction. She moved to Maleny in 1989 and has had strong connections to the town ever since. Her new book, Sundowner of the Skies, is a memoir/biography of her father, a famous aviator who achieved notoriety when he became ...
Jun 25, 20190•Season 2019Ep. 3
Before turning to writing full-time in the late 1990’s, Anna Funder worked as an international lawyer for the Australian Government, focusing on human rights, constitutional law, and treaty negotiation. After jettisoning her legal career to write Stasiland, she jobbed for a time as a radio and television documentary producer at the ABC. Stasiland describes the period Anna spent in the former East Germany, after the wall came down. It tells the stories of people who heroically resisted the commun...
Jun 25, 2019•1 sec•Season 2019Ep. 4
I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged. I defied all of those expectations and so have millions of women like me.’ Anne Summers has been prominent in Australian media, politics and feminist activism for more than four decades. She is the author of eight books, including the remarkable Damn Whores and God’s Po...
Mar 03, 2019•1 sec•Season 2019Ep. 2
For all who know Brisbane, McWhirters, a once celebrated department store in Fortitude Valley, is an icon. For Melissa Fagan it is also the starting point for a remarkable exploration of her mother and grandmother’s lives, a poignant reminder of the ways in which retail stores and fashion have connected women’s lives across the decades. Behind the dusty shop counters of an Art Deco treasure, Melissa discovered both what had been lost and what continued to shine. Her book is, ultimately, a tender...
Mar 03, 20190•Season 2019Ep. 1
In his intimate ground-breaking memoir, told with wit and insight, Kerry O’Brien reflects on the big events he has observed, on lessons learned and ignored, on the foibles and strengths of the public figures who construct our world. The end result is an engrossing study of a life lived in the public eye, a life intrinsically bound up in nearly three-quarters of a century of social and political history. Kerry is one of Australia’s most respected journalists. He has won six Walkley awards includi...
Dec 28, 20180•Season 2014Ep. 1
Shelley discusses her recently published memoir Shadow Sisters. During the terrifying years of Apartheid in South Africa, Shelley Davidow’s family was a crime. At a time when it was illegal for black and white people to live together, Shelley’s social activist parents took in Rosie, an abandoned black three-year-old. Rosie grew up as a beloved daughter and sister in a white household. Against the backdrop of racist laws and ever-present threats of violence, Shelley’s parents did all they could t...
Dec 28, 20180•Season 2018Ep. 5
Gillian Triggs has had a long and diverse career in International Law. Born in London she migrated along with her parents to Australia in 1958, when she was thirteen. She attended school in Melbourne and studied law at Melbourne University, then went to Texas to do a Masters in Law, working with the Dallas Police Force on the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. She completed a doctorate a decade or so later. In 1982 she was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria as a barrister and solicit...
Oct 18, 2018•1 sec•Season 2014Ep. 4
Patrick Nunn is here to talk about his recently published book The Edge of Memory, Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. Patrick is the author of several other books, including the popular Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific. He is, at present, Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast but is well known for the work he undertook in the Pacific Islands where he was, for 25 years, part of the faculty of the University of the South Pacifi...
Oct 18, 20180•Season 2018Ep. 3
