Conversations

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 we...

For the last decade or so we’ve looked on as the United States has radically changed itself, but the UK has been changing too as it continues to struggle with economic stagnation and the fallout from Brexit.

The British people, famous for their aversion to radical and emotional politics, have embarked on a course which was supposed to take them back to the comforting certainties of the past, but has instead, brough...

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 not...

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, ...

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 rep...

For years, Brendan Cullen was known around Broken Hill as the happy man who ran thousands of ewes across tens of thousands of hectares with a smile. What they didn't see was  the guy crying in a room by himself, drinking himself stupid, thinking he wasn’t providing enough for his family.

Brendan calls himself a ‘glorified shepherd’.

He manages a sheep station outside Broken Hill, a part of the country he loves and k...

Filmmaker Lynette Wallworth on how nearly dying as a little girl set her on a lifelong path to interrogate out-of-body experiences, spirituality and what really happens to us when we die.

When Lynette was a little girl, she had a near death experience on her grandparents' property.

Her father brought her back from the brink and what she saw and experienced there, on the edge of death, came back with her.

For years, L...

The chief conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra on the chair of spikes which accompanied his early musical career, and why he doesn't tone down his Italian self for work (R)

During his Suzuki lessons in Turin, Italy, a young Umberto Clerici was sitting up straight on a chair full of spikes, lest his posture slip.

Umberto chose the cello as his instrument, mainly because it wasn’t the violin, which sounded l...

The act of care and service through food has been incredibly important to Besha Rodell throughout her life, from her first, euphoric experience of a fancy restaurant at age eight, to the aftermath of September 11.

Today Besha is the chief restaurant critic at The Age.

The thrill of a fancy restaurant first imprinted itself on her psyche when she was a girl, treated to dinner at Stephanie's iconic spot in Melbourne.

A...

Naomi Mourra grew up as a door-knocking Jehovah's Witness but at 21, she realised Doomsday was not upon her, and left the religion for good.

As a child, Naomi  thought she was going to live forever.

She was told the end of the world was coming, but she would survive the apocalypse and live in paradise for eternity, because she was special.

She spent her youth in Western Sydney, preaching these same beliefs to neighbo...

Tony Tan’s parents pinned their hopes on him when they sent him from home in Malaysia to Melbourne to become a white collar professional in the 1970s. There he found “funny smelling cigarettes”, a lovely man called Terry and a destiny he couldn’t escape.

Tony was exposed to deep, rich flavour and the precision of cooking from a young age.

His mother was a chef in Malaysian colonial kitchens and Tony would often acco...

We rarely stop to wonder who invented the wheel, the alphabet or the printing press but so much of what feels fundamental to daily life was once a bold, untested idea, and someone had to think it up first.

In The Shortest History of Innovation, Andrew Leigh traces that long thread of human ingenuity from ancient breakthroughs through to the inventions reshaping our world today like the car, social media and artific...

Psychologist Dr Tracey Westerman on her groundbreaking work transforming mental health outcomes for Aboriginal communities (R)

Dr Tracy Westerman grew up in the Pilbara, where suicide and mental health issues have deeply scarred Indigenous communities. So this Nyamal woman decided to do something about it.

Nyamal woman Tracy Westerman grew up in some of the most remote parts of Western Australia, moving from a stati...

The iconic folk duo met at an audition for the only country music band at a prestigious jazz school in Boston. They immediately clicked, and joined the rich lineage of Americana artists that stretches back centuries.

In their 20s, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings discovered they had something special when they sang together, a sort of eerie emotional resonance that is usually confined to the blood harmonies produce...

Growing up, John Marsden found school incredibly difficult and, as a teenager, spent time in hospital after a breakdown. This difficult early life profoundly shaped his work as a writer and educator of young people.

With the help of a therapist, he began to recover, but it took him many years to find his place in the world.

Eventually he studied teaching, then in his mid-thirties John began to write.

John wrote over ...

Dan Richards investigates the multifaceted realm of night-time. Hear about when he survived a brush with death, a treacherous journey on a Scottish ferry, shadowing a search and rescue team, and the comfort and exquisite agony of new parenthood.

The writer and broadcaster argues that night-time is universal in that everyone goes through it, but there are so many different experiences of the dark.

He has met the many...

The legendary surfer has grieved the deaths of her adoptive mother, stepmother and birth mother. Only later in life did she realise her drive to win came from a place of loss, and Layne needed to look inward to find her place off the podium.

Layne is a legendary surfer who is the first person ever to win six consecutive world titles.

Since her childhood spent on Sydney's Northern Beaches, Layne has loved being in th...

After a painful divorce, Charlotte Ree began to piece her broken heart back together by cooking for her neighbours (R)

Charlotte Ree grew up in a family full of love, but with its own particular challenges. 

Her mum struggled with mental illness, which meant Charlotte grew up very quickly.

Charlotte met the man who would become her husband when she was 19. Within a few years, they married, but money became a major so...

Philosopher and writer Eamon Evans on humanity's relentless and impossible pursuit of happiness through materialism, social media and self help, and why the kindest and best people have been 'crushed by life' a couple of times.

Eamon started to think more deeply about happiness and contentment in his 20s, after a bout of serious depression.

He realised that trying to be happy all the time was paradoxically making hi...