With special guest:

Hugh Mackay AO
… in conversation with Bill Kable

When we looked forward to 2021 we also looked back on the disaster of the national bushfires season of 2019/20. That changed us but we did not expect the floods and then the ongoing impact of Covid 19.

Our guest today is Hugh Mackay who has been listening to what the community thinks and says for over 60 years as the country’s pre-eminent social researcher. Hugh draws on this immense experience to see where the community is now and what comes next.

It may turn out that The Kindness Revolution is Hugh’s last non-fiction book to grace our book shelves so we should all listen up. In his usual articulate way Hugh sees that the horrors of 2020 and 2021 have in fact set the scene for a kindness revolution.

Podcast (mp3)

With special guest:

Jeff Apter
in conversation with Bill Kable

Bon Scott as his name might suggest was born in Scotland but after his parents signed up to be £10 Poms he arrived in Australia at the age of 6 to a new life. That short life was filled to the brim and Bon provided plenty of his own commentary on his wild adventures before and during his time with the world beating rock band AC/DC.

Our guest today is writer Jeff Apter the author of Bad Boy Boogie, a new book published by Allen & Unwin. Jeff is very familiar with the AC/DC story having previously written about other members of the band the Young brothers and original bass player Mark Evans. When we speak with Jeff again today we are able to go behind the scenes to find out how Bon fitted in so quickly and easily with the Young brothers in their closely guarded troupe. We find out more about the real Bon Scott, his wild side where a party could go on for days but also how many women who came into his orbit described his as a real gentleman.

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With special guest:

David W Cameron
… in conversation with Bill Kable

Port Arthur is a beautiful setting for what our guest today describes as “misery of the deepest dye”.

In his book Convict-Era Port Arthur David Cameron takes us back to the days before it became a convict settlement, before its charms were viewed in a completely different light by the British newcomers.

Its advantages as a proposed convict settlement included that it was surrounded by wild impenetrable bush except for one narrow access route that was easily secured. The security at what became known as The Dog Line involved half-starved dogs that were waiting for any convicts trying to escape. You could not swim away from confinement but just in case food scraps were often scattered to keep the sharks interested.

However as we hear today there was one bold escape when convicts stole the Commandant’s boat and got as far as New South Wales before their recapture and return. David tells us what the conditions were really like and why Port Arthur had such a feared reputation as the last stop for the worst of the worst. Most of the inmates had committed a second offence on top of the original crime that had them sent to New South Wales or Tasmania.

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With special guest:

Rosie Ayliffe
… in conversation with Bill Kable

All Hell broke loose on that night in 2016.

When we speak with Rosie Ayliffe about her book Far from Home we hear firsthand how her loving 20 year old daughter Mia was put in harm’s way in a backpacker hostel. We hear how Mia and another backpacker who tried to protect her were both killed by another resident in the middle of a psychotic episode. What made it even worse is that Rosie was far away on the other side of the world in England when this nightmare unfolded. Rosie’s dreams of a future life involving her daughter Mia were gone.

Rosie thought that her daughter was working in a healthy environment on a farm in outback Queensland in order to comply with the Australian government’s visa requirements for an extended stay in Australia. After being told by the local Police in England about her daughter’s tragic death Rosie decided immediately to come to Australia and get to the bottom of what had happened.

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With special guest:

John Broadbent
… in conversation with Bill Kable

Our guest today lets us know about secret men’s business. John Broadbent takes us on a journey to discover what we do not know about ourselves.

John has written a new book Man Unplugged where he sets out some questions we should be asking ourselves. Surprisingly even elders, that is men who have been on this earth for fifty years or more, may be surprised to find out what is really driving them.

Since the first edition of this book came out ten years ago there have been significant changes in John’s life and it became necessary to do an update with many many insights for all of us. One of these insights that could have a major impact on all of us is how relationships can more easily form and be improved. This is by men acknowledging that they have a feminine “aspect” as distinct from the somewhat critical reference to a feminine “side”. Once acknowledged men can take advantage of this in activities such as art and music. A man can learn to live between his masculine and feminine aspects. Wisdom emerges when a man can call on both or either of these principles.

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With special guests:

Brendan Morris & Stephan Wellink
… in conversation with Bill Kable

The Thornetts, a band of brothers as Shakespeare might have called them.

Today we explore what makes a champion when we hear about a sporting giant from 1960’s Australia, namely Richard, or as he was more commonly known, Dick Thornett.

Dick was the youngest in a family of champions. Dick’s oldest brother was John who became the Captain of the Australian Rugby team, the Wallabies. Under John, the Wallabies had a legendary tour of South Africa. The next brother Ken also played Rugby at a representative level but is best known for his Rugby League abilities. Starting his Rugby League career in England he became known as the Mayor of Leeds before he came back to Australia representing Parramatta and Australia in the Kangaroos.

Dick is called “the Natural” because he was so good at any sport he turned his hand to. After representing Australia in water polo at the 1960 Olympics in Rome he went on to represent Australia in two very different sports namely Rugby and Rugby League.

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With special guest:

Dr Will Davies
… in conversation with Bill Kable

Will Davies has been on the program before, bringing us inside stories from The Great War.

Today we get to discuss Will’s new book Secret and Special. We hear about a boys’ own adventure story that started at a beautiful part of Sydney and which took our adventurers on a dangerous trip to Singapore harbour. They were on a night mission to put limpet mines on some ships in port. The unsuspecting Japanese occupiers of Singapore never knew what hit them.

The difference from most adventure stories is that this is all true and draws on the meticulous research of Dr Davies that we have come to expect.

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With special guest:

Jeff Apter
… in conversation with Bill Kable

Everyone remembers Jon English with those raccoon eyes and tall thin frame contributing to a very distinctive appearance.

Jon English had regular appearances in so many different forms of entertainment. He was a rock singer, a star of live musicals, a romantic star of acclaimed television series, and at all times a rascal. In between those activities he wrote sensitive music and became an entrepreneur.

But there was a lot more to his fascinating story as revealed by our guest today. Jeff Apter wrote Behind Dark Eyes: The True Story of Jon English. It is the subtitle of the book which gives a clue that all was not sunshine and roses for Jon English.

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With special guest:

Dr Sara Webb
… in conversation with Bill Kable

The title of this program may look as though it will make us doom struck or at least a little gloomy but strangely it does not. This might have something to do with our guest who is so bright and cheery talking about these biggest of the biggest of issues.

Dr Sara Webb has written The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (That Could End the World) for a general audience who will be able to get a better understanding of where we have come from and where our Earth and humanity itself will go.

Today we talk about what has happened in the distant past, in fact when time began. An amazing number of things had to go just right for the universe as we know it to exist. This goes back to the laws of physics as explored in the recent past by Albert Einstein. Who knew that if the forces between the atomic particles were different, the matter of which we are made simply would not have formed?

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With special guest:

Paul Ham
… in conversation with Bill Kable

Our topics do not come much bigger or more interesting than The Soul: A History of the Human Mind written by our guest today Paul Ham. Certain ideas come to mind when we mention the word “Soul”. Are we talking about soul music or the definition in the catechism or maybe the soul of America which was said to be lost during the Vietnam war?

Paul tells us that the soul can mean all of these things and more. Paul has tackled a topic which is huge in breadth and also extended over the millennia to the beginnings of civilisation. His discovery is that what humans first called the soul was originally thought to be a part of all of us. The soul survived the death of the body and then ventured to an underworld which might be Heaven or Hell. Some Christians believed at one stage that there was also a halfway house called Purgatory but that has disappeared in more recent beliefs. In fact the soul itself disappeared mysteriously during the period called the enlightenment until we arrive where we are today and scientists tell us that the mind is a creation of the brain.

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