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 one of the many women chosen to become a kind of bride for the leader of an infamous Korean religious group.

It wasn’t until she became critically ill, that her family were able to get the help she needed to escape and to begin the process of being deprogrammed.

Liz Cameron’s memoir is called Cult Bride: How I was brainwashed and how I broke free.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

Conversations' Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Jennifer Leake.

This episode of Conversations touches on cults, brainwashing, religious groups, eating disorders, sexual manipulation, deprogramming, sexual assault, sleep deprivation, family, recovery, healing, trauma, biography, psychology, Providence, JMS, Jesus Morning Star, Pastor Joshua, Jung Myung-seok.

When Kerstin Pilz found out that her charming husband Gianni had been cheating on her while he was dying, 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 discovered her husband was not the man she thought he was.

Further information

Loving my Lying, Dying, Cheating Husband is published by Affirm Press.

Originally broadcast in June 2024.

This episode of Conversations was produced by Nicola Harrison and presented by Sarah Kanowski.

It explores narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, infidelity, terminal cancer, caring for your spouse, marriage breakdown, illness, betrayal, grief, writing, origin stories, love, lust, trust, couples counselling, couples therapy. cheating, dying, grief.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

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 the way mourners uttered his name and felt a sense of calm and ease within their sorrow, because they trusted Ephraim as a master of death who would know how to lead them through the world of mourning.

Ephraim started life as Geoffrey William Finch, the son of a butcher in the working class suburb of Ashfield in Sydney in the 1940s. 

He learned his love of reading from his pop, who would come home from his job at the abattoir and read Oscar Wilde’s work over a cigar on the porch. 

From a young age Ephraim felt an ineffable pull toward monotheism and converted to Judaism, along with his wife, Cas, after the pair met as teenagers at the Wagga Wagga Royal Show.

Eventually he was drawn to his vocation — the sacred and quiet ritual of preparing bodies for burial. 

And he became the go-to man in Melbourne, where over his career he has buried more than 10,000 people.

Further information

Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch is published by Wild Dingo Press.

Katia's first book, a memoir is called The Swift Dark Tide, published by Gazebo Books.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

Conversations' Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Alice Moldovan.

This episode of Conversations touches on death, grief, mourning, burial, Judaism, Jewish, chevra kadisha, Ephraim Finch, Melbourne, Orthodox Judaism, conversion, Jewish conversion, Wagga Wagga, Herman Wouk, deathwork, funerals, epic life stories, origin stories, loss, reflection and biography.

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 burn our tongues. Some of us break bones and suffer from more serious illnesses and conditions.

What you feel when your skin is broken or a ligament is torn is there to tell your brain to be careful, that something is wrong and needs to be protected.

But what happens when doctors can't find any damage? When the tissues in your hips or the pictures of your brain seem perfectly fine, but still, there is agonising pain that refuses to leave you alone?

Lorimer was a physiotherapist who came to this very specific neuroscience after his own experience with chronic pain, following a pretty gruesome sporting injury that by all accounts had been fixed by surgery.

He realised that as he was learning more about how changes in the body are detected (like temperature and pressure), and communicated as pain to the brain through the central nervous system, his own chronic pain started to diminish.

Since then, Lorimer has published hundreds of papers and several books on the topic, in his pursuit to help people also dig themselves out of the hellish cruelty of chronic pain.

Further information

You can find more resources from Professor Moseley about tackling persistent or chronic pain online at TameTheBeast.org

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

The Executive Producer of Conversations in Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Meggie Morris and presented by Richard Fidler. 

It explores persistent pain, migraine, arthritis, neurology, psychology, distrust of the medical system, pain relief, hypersensitivity to pain, doctors who believe you, chronic conditions, endometriosis.

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’s parents Juris and Lois became the face of the campaign to free him and his two brothers were a constant presence in Cairo throughout the ordeal.

But after the initial exhilaration of freedom Peter had to work out how to live a different kind of life.  One far away from the adrenaline of his years reporting from some of the world’s most volatile places.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

This episode of Conversations deals with reporting from war zones, prison, solitary confinement, grief, death, press freedom, family, psychological distress, political unrest, post traumatic stress, prison life, captivity.

What happens when a man can't stop his drive and desire for more? Author Andrew O'Hagan dissects the pitfalls of more money, more success and more applause (R)

Andrew O’Hagan is the author of several highly acclaimed novels.

His most recent book is a sweeping portrait of modern-day London, a city ‘levitating on a sea of dirty Russian money’. 

The main character, Campbell Flynn, is much like Andrew himself: a public intellectual who escaped from the Scottish council estate he grew up in and came to London to enjoy great success.

But success, a big house, a loving family and expensive habits are not enough.

Campbell is a man riding for a fall, and there will be many spectators at the final hurrah, when his life comes tumbling down. 

Further information

First Broadcast May 2024, and recorded at the Melbourne Writers' Festival.

Caledonian Road is published by Allen & Unwin.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

The Gen X actor on making peace with her absent father, the ghosts of her Hollywood past and nursing Anthony Kiedis through his drug addiction while she was still a teenager — a relationship she shudders at today.

The 1990s It girl was named for the Scottish island where she was conceived, before her enigmatic folk singer father, Donovan abandoned the family before she was born.

A string of stepfathers couldn’t remedy Ione's fundamental abandonment and she grew up surrounded by creative types who flowed freely through her mother’s house in Los Angeles.

Following her beloved older brother into the world of acting and modelling, Ione had an early start in Hollywood and it led her to a full, messy life in which she starred alongside the likes of River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves and John Cusack.

When she was only a teenager, she began a relationship with Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was addicted to heroin. 

This dysfunctional relationship led to Ione’s marriage to the first great love of her life, Adam Horovitz of The Beastie Boys, and a period of time she describes as her 90s daydream.

This happy period devolved as Ione joyfully and remorsefully explored her bisexuality and the infidelity eventually ended the marriage.

Today Ione is happily married to Australian musician, Ben Lee and has two daughters.

Further information

Say Everything is published by HarperCollins.

Find out more about Ione Skye and Ben Lee’s creative project, Weirder Together.

Conversations Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

This episode of Conversations deals with absent fathers, epic life stories, personal stories, cheating, divorce, relationship breakdowns, inappropriate relationships, age gap relationships, intimacy, therapy, Hollywood, Ad-Rock, partying, substance abuse, modelling, child actors and acting.

Defence analyst Hugh White says Australian leaders are in denial about how dramatically the world has changed, and need to get a grip on the deep, troubling forces propelling us into a new order of world power.

The balance of global power has changed dramatically over the last 25 years.

Even in the last five years, so much has happened - the pandemic, AUKUS, the war in Ukraine, a change of government here in Australia, Donald Trump's return to the White House, and all the tumult that has followed over the past six months.

According to defence analyst Hugh White, we are quickly heading into a post-American world.

However, Australia's defence assumptions remain based on a world which America built for us, where the United States is still a predominant world power that is heavily invested in Asia, and in us.

Hugh says political leaders in Australia are in denial about all of this, and need to get their heads out of the sand, accept the the world as we knew it is passing away, and redefine our relationships with powerful nations including the United States and China in order to make our way in this new world.

We've done it before, with the United Kingdom in the post-World War II years, and we need to do it again, Hugh says.

Further information

You can read Hugh White's essay, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future, in the June issue of the Quarterly Essay.

If you're interested in more episodes like this one, have a listen to Richard's recent conversation with Marcel Dirsus about tyrants and dictators on the ABC Listen App, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

Conversations' Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Jennifer Leake and presented by Richard Fidler.

This episode of Conversations explores nuclear war, Russian expansionism, Ukraine, Putin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Los Angeles protests, riots, political landscape, Lauren Tomasi, ANZUS, Asia-Pacific, Xi Jinping, Taiwan, invasion, California, the decline of the West, National Guard, law enforcement, ICE.

As a child, chef Graeme Stockdale was embarrassed by the smell of sauerkraut and pickles that would trail him from his Polish and German grandparents' home. A transformative encounter with a barbecued duck in Singapore changed his life, though nothing would prepare him for two monumental floods in his adopted region of Lismore, NSW.

Graeme was only a boy when he was introduced to the power and ferocity of fire. 

As a nine-year-old living in Albany, Western Australia he lit a fire out of curiosity on a neighbour's property. 

It was the look on his mother's face that turned his experience from awesome into terrifying.

Graham grew up with the flavours of his grandparents' German and Polish ancestry, raised by a single mum, and experienced social isolation brought on by the judgement of kids at school.  

After the barbecued duck experience, his whole world became focused on food, and he eventually opened his own restaurant in Lismore, NSW.

Graeme survived two major floods, and in the aftermath, cooked on his barbecue non-stop for weeks, outside his ruined restaurant, feeding his community with help from volunteers.

Further information

Read more about Graeme's restaurant in Lismore, The Stockpot Kitchen.

Graeme's cookbook, Red Hot & Smokin’! was published by New Holland Publishers in 2019.

Conversations' Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Alice Moldovan.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

This episode of Conversations deals with mental health, fire, barbecue, murder, epic life stories, origin stories, sauerkraut, Singapore barbecued duck, the Albany Snake Run, cooking, restaurants, feeding, single mum, aged care, aged care mistreatment, Lismore floods, adventure, vocation.

Dr Jayashri Kulkarni on her Indian-Australian upbringing and her groundbreaking research into women's hormones and mental health (R)

Jayashri Kulkarni’s family moved from India to Australia in 1961.

They found there were no Indian grocery stores, few spices of any kind, and plain yoghurt wasn’t available.

But the Kulkarnis adapted to their new home, teaching their neighbours how to cook Indian food, and encouraging Jayashri's love for studying.

Jayashri became a doctor, and during her training as a psychiatrist she became fascinated by the relationship between women's hormones and mental health.

She’s since been at the frontline of groundbreaking research, which challenged many of her colleagues and ended up helping women all over the world.

Further information

First broadcast in February 2024.

Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.

Conversations' Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison. This episode was produced by Tamar Cranswick and presented by Sarah Kanowski.

It explores female health, medical research, menopause, perimenopause, hormonal health, female medical research, migration, studying medicine, depression, anxiety, gut health, why don't doctors listen to women, gender stereotypes, underrepresentation in medical research, gaslighting in women's health, women's pain, motherhood, stress, psychiatry, reproductive health, hormonal birth control.