Conversations

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 o...

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 cla...

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 ...

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 wor...

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...

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...

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...