Conversations

As a boy, Dr Rangan Chatterjee saw his dad work day and night as a doctor before succumbing to an auto-immune disease. After his father's death in 2013, Rangan had an epiphany about his own future. 

Rangan rew up watching his workaholic father come home from his first job in a hospital, have dinner, shave and leave for his night shift as a home-visiting GP.

It was normal for his dad to only sleep three nights a week...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 Ja...

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 ...

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. B...

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 da...

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 lonel...

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, ...

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 ...

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 a...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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’...