Conversations

Magda Szubanski on her loving and complicated relationship with her late mum Margaret, and how a secret that came to light after her death changed everything.

Magda released her first memoir a few years ago, to widespread acclaim.

It was the story of how Magda unearthed the life story of her Polish-born father and his role as an assassin during WWII.

Magda's now written her second memoir which hinges on the life story of her charming and funny Scottish-born mother, Margaret.

Magda had a complicated and deeply loving relationship with her...

Laurie Lawrence's obsession with winning Gold started when he was a small boy growing up above the Tobruk Pool in Townsville. When he became a coach, he had an epiphany about the nature of victory.

When Laurie was a child, he had a chronic lung condition that meant he had to sleep sitting in a chair.

Doctors advised his parents that an operation was necessary, and part of one of his lungs was removed.

After the operation, Laurie's father took over the management of Townsville's Tobruk Pool, and the family lived in an...

Kim Huynh on his family's remarkable journey from Vietnam to Australia. And taking on the role of carer for his fiercely strong-willed father, Thiet.

Kim grew up in Canberra, arriving in Australia with his family as refugees from Vietnam.

Like many migrant children, Kim is a very driven person and has taken on a lot of responsibilities in life.

He is an academic, an ABC broadcaster, an author and a father.

And when his 80-year-old father had a serious stroke, Kim also took on the role of carer.

He...

The legendary actress Jane Fonda on her activism, her hair epiphanies and why older women are often fearless.

Jane has lived her entire life in the public eye, as the daughter of acting aristocracy.

Her father Henry Fonda was a Hollywood legend by the time she was born.

Jane grew up to study acting with Lee Strasberg, and Marilyn Monroe was a classmate.

But behind the public adoration, Jane was battling some big personal demons, including bulimia and the legacy of a shocking family tragedy.

In her 30s she...

Iconic Australian musician, actor, youth advocate and charity ambassador Angry Anderson has died at the age of 79.

Angry spent 50 years in the music industry with his legendary rock band, Rose Tattoo, and the band was due to return to the stage this month for another Australian tour.

But Angry was much more than a raging rock n' roll animal.

He was an incurable romantic, despite his violent childhood in Melbourne. 

He was a loyal, devoted father of four, and Angry was always a friend to the little guy.

You c...

Alison Hoddinot was one of the first Australian women to study at Oxford University, but one of her lecturers, J.R.R Tolkein, refused to take on a woman PhD student. 

Alison was born in Tasmania in 1931.

As a young woman she won a scholarship to study at Oxford University.

But when she arrived, none of the male professors including J.R.R Tolkien, would take on a woman PhD student.

Back in Tasmania Alison became great friends with the poet Gwen Harwood.

The two shared recipes, letters, and t...

Elizabeth Chong didn't cook her first meal until she was a newlywed. Six decades later, the owner of a cooking school specialising in Chinese cuisine, she had taught more than 37,000 people how to cook.

Chef, author and teacher Elizabeth Chong was born in China's Guangdong Province in 1931.

When her heavily pregnant mother was expelled from Victoria under the White Australia Policy in the 1920s, the whole family returned to China.

Years later her family returned and a young Elizabeth was free to roam the closed Queen Victoria Market on Sundays with her siblings.<...

Bryan Brown has played more than 80 roles on stage and screen. Raised in working-class Sydney, his talent, hard work, and unmistakable presence have been his ticket to the world.

In our week of stories from our elders, we begin with the life of Bryan Brown.

Now aged 79, Bryan has had more film and television acting roles than he’s had birthdays, and is an instantly recognisable figure on screens around the world.

From Breaker Morant and Newsfront to Two Hands and Sweet Country, a huge number of classic Australian films feature Bryan, a testament...

Mel Huang Buntine on how computers started entering our homes, and the beige box of a machine that changed her own life.

Personal computers are so ubiquitous now, it's hard to imagine a time when computers were inaccessible to everyday people.

For decades, computers were the size of rooms, and they were used for specialist tasks like processing large data sets for researchers, or sending men to the moon.

But by the 1980s computers had become smaller and more affordable, and people started bringing them into their homes.

From this point...

Prisoner advocate Vickie Roach spent decades in and out of jail but after studying for her masters degree, she helped change the story for thousands of other prisoners.

When Vicki was just two years old, she was given a police record, which enabled authorities to place her into the custody of a family she didn't know.

She grew up under the strict religious rule of her adoptive mother, whom she clashed with frequently.

Vickie left school at thirteen. It was that year she met her birth mother for the first time, and discovered...

Growing up Lisa Henson and her siblings spent a lot of time in their father's workshop and studio, watching puppets get drawn, sculpted and brought to life.

Jim Henson first started messing around with puppets as a teenager, and not long afterwards he began collaborating with his wife Jane. 

Together they founded Muppets Incorporated.

Puppets became a way for Jim to share his extraordinary imagination with the world, and he went on to become one of the most influential creative minds of the 20th century. 

His legacy includes Sesame Street, The Mu...

Author Rebecca Huntley used supervised MDMA therapy to help her with complex PTSD and the legacy of childhood trauma.

Rebecca's public life as a broadcaster, an author and a social researcher made her well-known to many Australians.

But in private, Rebecca spent years grappling with complex PTSD and childhood trauma.

At 50, while walking the Camino, she realised that despite decades of therapy, she was still living with a roiling anger about what had happened to her as a child.

She decided to undergo MDMA therapy delivered by an underground healer. 

Catrine Clay with the story of the children of Nazi perpetrators and Holocaust survivors came together under extraordinary circumstances to come to terms with their dark past.

In the early 1990s, historian and author Catrine Clay was working at the BBC, making a documentary about a woman named Renate.

Renate had been born in Germany in 1941, and grew up in the postwar years as the sole child of a single mother.

When Renate asked her mother about her missing father, she was told he had been an important general in the German forces...

Urzila Carlson grew up in South Africa. Her father threatened the family with a gun when she was 6, and he walked out on the family soon afterwards.

Urzila's mum, who she describes as a 'warrior woman', raised Urzila and her sister.

When she was in primary school, one of Urzila's teachers taught her a big lesson about regret, which has stayed with her for life.

Urzila moved to New Zealand in 2006 to begin working in advertising.

One day a group of her co-workers persuaded her to perform at a local open...

The singer-songwriter on her early introduction to musicals in Port Moresby, how singing became a form of speech therapy for her stutter and also a path into her life’s work.

Meg Washington was born in a musical home in Port Moresby, where her parents had met as Australian expats.

Meg and her sister spent a lot of their time watching classic Hollywood musicals and also down at the local yacht club where their dad DJ'd every Saturday night.

Singing became something Meg was encouraged to do herself after she developed a stutter as...

Louise Adler has been one of the biggest and most controversial names in Australian publishing for decades. This is the story of how she fell in love with the world of books.⁠An asthmatic child, she spent most of Melbourne’s winters in bed with nothing else to do but read novels.

But it wasn't until her parents intervened in Louise's obsession with Enid Blyton’s boarding school series that her deep pleasure in the world of books began in earnest.⁠Shaped by her family's story of surviving World War Two, Louise grew up in questioning everything.

She...

Acclaimed poet and philosopher David Whyte has come to believe a single line of poetry is enough to change your life. 

David grew up amongst the moors and fields of West Yorkshire, with an English father and an Irish mother who had a gift for lyricism and language.

He started writing poems at just seven years old, but it wasn't until he was working as a guide in the Galapagos Islands that David truly understood what poetry was and what it could do for us.

A near-death experience there prepared him for life a...

Why were 400 civilians allowed to fly into a war zone as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? What really happened to them when they were held as hostages? And why has the British government fought for so long to keep it all a secret?

Stephen Davis is an investigative journalist who has been following a story, within a story, within a story for more than 30 years.

It starts on 2 August, 1990 when a British Airways plane landed in Kuwait for a scheduled stopover.

There were nearly 400 passengers and crew on board, mostly British, who had no...

Historian Katja Hoyer was born in 1985, under the old regime of the GDR and grew up in the 1990s, watching many former East Germans struggle in the years after reunification.

Learning about the Nazi era was a big part of her education but Katja left school feeling unsatisfied about what she’d been taught about the period when the Nazis rose to power.

She knew about all the big political moments, but not much about the lives of ordinary Germans and how they responded to the dramatic changes that unfolded around all around them.

...

Journalist Hedley Thomas grew up knowing that his grandmother Gladys had vanished in the sea off Sydney in the 1950s. The mystery of what happened to Gladys helped to inspire his hit podcast 'The Teacher's Pet'.

Hedley has had a storied career in journalism which has seen him win many Walkley Awards and expose a lot of corruption and dodgy dealings.

But it has also placed Hedley and his family in harm's way. 

In 2002 Hedley and his wife Ruth were at their home when bullets were fired into their bedroom. The shooter was n...

Millie Robinson’s family had been through enough as it was before her devoted dad Jim Rogers received his diagnosis in 2021. Today they navigate the unknown together and stay in the moment to enjoy their tight-knit community.

Millie is a celebrant, mum and author living in Brisbane.

She also supports her dad, Jim, who has younger-onset Alzheimer’s. 

Millie started life in the UK, in a very tight-knit network of family and friends who wrapped their arms around Jim, Millie and her siblings when Millie’s mum died of cancer.

Jim became...

British writer Ben Macintyre on the eerie history of Colditz Castle which the Germans used as a prisoner of war camp during World War II.

Since the Middle Ages, Colditz Castle has existed in some form, perched on the edge of a cliff in eastern Germany.

Colditz has served as a royal hunting lodge, a madhouse, and most famously as a prisoner of war camp during World War II.

It was said to be inescapable, but that didn't stop the English officers from trying to escape the nightmare of this gloomy fortress, and th...

Author Tess Woods had always dreamed of her big day, growing up watching her beloved Nana create in-demand bridal gowns. The stories of these dresses became a way for Tess to understand her family’s origins in North Africa, which she left in the late 1970s. (Warning: This episode references the loss of a child.)

Tess moved to Melbourne from Egypt when she was five years old.

At large family gatherings, Tess dreamed of a big, fat, Egyptian wedding with 250 guests, food for days, belly dancing — the works.

But after she became engaged to h...

Who are the Kennedys, really? And what has made the legacy of America's political dynasty so famous, divisive and enduring? 

The Kennedys are often described as the closest thing the United States has to a royal family, with fiercely competitive and divisive figures taking up space in American political and public life for generations.

Even now, the influence of the Kennedy family continues to persist with RFK Junior, who is serving as the U.S. secretary of health and human services.

There have been Kennedys who thrived with fame and power, and those w...

After Pauline McGrath's husband David was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he chose to use Voluntary Assisted Dying. Pauline supported him through the journey as he took the steps to end his life.A few years ago, Pauline came home from work and found the lights on and the dog already fed.

This was something which had never happened in her 30-year marriage to David, a director of paediatric medicine at Queensland Children's Hospital.

Straight away, Pauline asked David, "Who has died?"

Her beloved husband told her he had a brain tumour, and that...

Monday Morning Cooking Club's Merelyn Chalmers her family's story of survival, and piecing together hundreds of treasured family recipes from Jewish communities around the world, including her mother's top-secret yellow cake recipe.

Merelyn grew up tied to the apron strings of her mother, an Hungarian Jew who had survived Auschwitz and eventually ended up in Western Australia.

In Perth, she met a man who had his own remarkable World War Two survival story, after fleeing Poland and being conscripted into the Polish regiment of the Red Army.

For the couple, Perth became their...

Author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching a university class on Homer's The Odyssey, when his elderly father decided to enrol in it.Daniel became fascinated by the stories of the ancient world as a child and grew up to study the classics and then write books and essays to share his knowledge with the wider world.

Eventually he began teaching the Ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, to first year university students at Bard College in New York State.

But when his elderly father Jay asked to sit in on the course, it led to a...

For writer Richard Flanagan, the political belief that white Australians do not belong in this land is wrong and it's damaging any progress we might hope to make as a collective people.

Richard has spent the last 30 years writing award-winning pieces of fiction and non-fiction, tackling the climate crisis, the meaning of art, free speech and the stubborn necessity of hope.

Threaded through all of Richard's writing is a contempt for power and its acolytes, and a great tenderness for human struggle and goodness.

Richard says that while writing novels is an introspective...

Micaela Sahhar grew up hearing stories of her Palestinian family's life in Jerusalem before 1948, and what happened when they had to leave.

There was her grandfather’s tourism business, her grandmother’s wedding necklace, and the dramatic circumstances of her father’s birth.

Most of all there was the house, built by her grandfather for his extended family, at 8 Asa Street Jerusalem.

This was the house her family had fled in 1948.

And one midnight, many decades later, Micaela found herself standing outside its front gate.

Further Information Find Me at the...

Micaela Sahhar grew up hearing stories of her Palestinian family's life in Jerusalem before 1948, and what happened when they had to leave.

There was her grandfather’s tourism business, her grandmother’s wedding necklace, and the dramatic circumstances of her father’s birth.

Most of all there was the house, built by her grandfather for his extended family, at 8 Asa Street Jerusalem.

This was the house her family had fled in 1948.

And one midnight, many decades later, Micaela found herself standing outside its front gate.

Further Information Find Me at the...

Raising girls in an age of smartphones and early sexualisation is tough and in this complex arena, parenting educator Maggie Dent says we can't leave these lessons to chance.Growing up Maggie was a tomboy and noticed when she was treated differently from little boys, who were allowed to be their exuberant selves when she was not.

She can clearly recall her indignation at being made to wear a dress as a little girl.

The process of raising girls has changed since Maggie was a child, but there are new challenges today like smartphone usage...

Political journalist, George Megalogenis has mapped key areas in our population, workforce and geopolitical standing in recent decades, and looks at how these shifts are impacting our collective political future.

For the first time since Federation, Australia’s population is mostly made up of migrants and their children. 

Professional women have now replaced men doing blue collar jobs as the largest segment of the workforce.

And on the world scale, Australia can no longer rely on our traditional allies or trading partners.

These three elements have already changed the political landscape in...

Melissa Redsell was in Year 12 when her doctor told her she was going to have a baby.  After her baby was born, she was told she had 'ruined her life'. Then she set out to prove all her doubters wrong.When Mel broke the news to her parents, they were disappointed and at school, the Principal instructed her to not expect any special treatment.

At 7 months pregnant, Mel graduated, and a little while later, her beautiful baby girl Breanna was born.

Six weeks later, Mel moved out of home into a share house.All her fri...

Paul E Mullen has spent decades interviewing and studying men who have committed unthinkable acts of violence and says these tragic events represent the endpoint of a slow-building private narrative of resentment, isolation and rage. (CW: descriptions of violence)

Now retired, Paul dedicated much of his life's work to the extreme end of the human condition.

First focusing on victims, researching the psychology of stalking and domestic violence.

But after he was caught up in the aftermath of a massacre carried out by a lone gunman, the trajectory of his career changed.

Guitarist and engineer Josie Scott battled crippling gender dysphoria for decades before finally deciding to live openly as a trans woman in her 60s.

In 1984 in Adelaide, two brothers formed a pioneering alternative rock band called The Mark of Cain.

They wanted to make music that was heavy and intense with lyrics about war, and death, and being misunderstood.

Over the years the band gained an international following and plenty of fans at home in Australia.

Earlier this year, one of the band's two founders, Josie Scott, announced on the band's...

Former Detective Sergeant, Deb Wallace on policing the heroin hotspot of Cabramatta in the 1990s and how Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' gave her new ideas for clamping down on illegal gang activity.

When Deb joined the NSW Police Force in 1983, there were very few women on the front line. 

She quickly discovered she had the cool-headed resilience ideal for police work, and she was determined to make a career of it.

In the mid-1990s Deb was a junior Detective when she was given a tough assignment — breaking up the gangs who ruled...

Mark Woodland is an unexpected CEO — he started his career in the Army as a tribute to his late brother, then went on to revolutionise his mum's paper-based childcare company.

As a young man Mark Woodland was at a loss with what to do with his life.

After years of moving around, the family — headed by Mark's single mum — settled in Ipswich, Queensland, where Mark showed himself to be a playful and enthusiastic boy, but school wasn't his first priority. 

When he graduated, Mark was most interested in driving around with his friends, playing...

Mary Li was a star ballerina when she fell in love with her dance partner Li Cunxin.  When their daughter Sophie was born profoundly deaf, Mary walked away from dance for many years.

Mary says she was the least likely girl to grow up to be a ballerina,

She grew up in a family of eight kids in the rough and tumble of the Queensland country town of Rockhampton.

But in a little timber hall, with cattle trains rolling by outside, Mary discovered a talent for dance.

That talent, and a h...

After a catastrophic car crash in the parking lot of her hospital, Dr Olivia Ong became a paraplegic. But her obsession with learning how to walk again was stronger than her incomplete spinal cord injury.

When Olivia Ong was 28 years old, she had the world at her feet.

She had recently qualified as a doctor, something she had dreamed of since she was a child growing up in Malaysia.

She had married a man she loved deeply, and they were busy building their future together.

Then, everything changed after a car...

Lynne Shori grew up with her hero dad, thinking her Papua New Guinean mother was dead. As an adult, she discovered the truth and set about finding her lost family.

When Lynne was growing up, it was just her and her dad.

Lynne's dad was her hero; he was different and adventurous but she always felt safe with him when they went on hair-raising adventures together in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

He had always told Lynne that her mum had died in childbirth.

But when she became an adult...