Final Draft - Great Conversations

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

David Brooks is an award winning essayist, short-fiction writer, novelist and poet.

His new collection, The other side of daylight explores our connection to the world, the environment and the non-human animals we share it with.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

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Sharlene Allsop is the debut author of The Great Undoing.

The Great Undoing offers up a speculative future where our endless drive for connectivity and security threatens to turn society on its head.

Scarlet Friday is a truth teller in a hyper connected world. Her job is to explore archives and provide context for the official narrative of history. Knowing is something of a state of being in Scarlett’s world. With everyone connected by BloodTalk it can seem like the world is unifying. Yet even as everyone seems to be hurtling towards the future Scarlet delves into the past to understand our place, her place.

Scarlet work becomes something of an obsession when she discovers her Great-Grandfather’s military service and the hostile reception he received as an Aboriginal man returning to a country that wouldn’t recognise his humanity. Scarlett feels driven to unlock his past to make sense of her own present. 

But the past is never truly buried and outside Scarlett’s archives the rest of the world is teetering on the brink. As systems shut down around the world, Scarlet finds herself on the run. Unwelcome in England, she is now a refugee seeking safe passage back to Australia.

The Great Undoing is a strange and compelling novel about what it means to live in a world that runs on information. As protagonist, Scarlett Friday is both victim and foil to this ever present need to know.

Sharlene Allsop’s speculative future sees us all connected through the (hopefully) fictional technology of BloodTalk. Conceived as kind of biohack that links us all into a hyper online world wide web, BloodTalk both facilitates and hinders life depending on who you are.

Allsop is playing with ideas of an ever evolving world order that demands accountability. BloodTalk connects but it also compels, meaning people can fall out of its good graces and then they are adrift. In this world the right people are always at home but also seemingly never connected to land or place so much as their digital existence.

Connection is also inextricably linked to the past and Scarlett's role as a truth teller shows the reader something of this future’s need to reconcile itself to its past. The conceit of truth telling is creatively imagined through the literal writing of Scarlett’s story; the book is written over the pages of a faded tome, Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia. Scott’s work is a triumph of colonial, ‘victor’ history and the very thing a truth teller would seek to contextualize not overwrite. Through this device we see the interplay of present and past and must work to read these coherently, even as they intrude on each other.

The real battle for connection builds in pace as Scarlett is forced on the run. When she was safe in her world Scarlett seemed to project the luxury of time, that sense that we will always have tomorrow to figure things out. Thrown out of her old life she must try to find the things that connect her, even as she makes a desperate bid to get back to the land that has raised her up.

The Great Undoing is a fascinating and insightful novel about identity and where we draw our sense of self. The narrative works hard to hold together its threads as we shift back and forth through Scarlett’s story. Like most speculative fiction it is most satisfying, and most terrifying when it skirts closer to our contemporary world than we might otherwise feel comfortable with.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Today SWF Artistic Director Ann Mossop joins Andrew to discuss the Sydney Writers Festival 2024 Program Launch. Discover the festival theme, Ann's picks of the festival and a hot take on when AI authors will be gracing our festival stages!

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

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One of the pure pleasures that I have in sharing great Australian literature is bringing in a new poetry collection and the poet gives us an opportunity to hear them read some of their work in their own words.

Today I have for you David Brooks new collection. David is an award winning essayist. He's a short fiction writer. He's a novelist. He is a poet and an academic.

I wanted to share his poem. It is called An Invasion of Clouds from David’s collection The other side of daylight.

The collection has a real preoccupation and consideration of animals, our relationship to our non human friends and an invasion of clouds is just a such a great exemplification of that.

So for today on the on the book club, can I please share David Brooks reading and invasion of clouds…

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher. She is the editor of the Aurealis Award–winning This All Come Back Now, and the winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award for Always Will Be.

Always Will Be carries the subtitle; Stories of Goori Sovereignty from the Futures of the Tweed. The collection explores possible futures where First Nations sovereignty is both reclaimed, respected and offers a future for a fragile planet.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Great conversations looks back at some of the fantastic authors and writers we feature every week on Final Draft. It’s not always possible to use the full conversation live to air and this is your chance to discover more secrets and hidden gems about the books you love…

We love to hear about what you’re reading, what you love about books and what you've discovered from the show!

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Today I’m bringing you a debut novel. It’s called Tidelines and it’s by Sarah Sasson.

Sarah Sasson is an Australian physician and writer. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction have been published in Australia, the United Kingdom and USA. 

On a suburban street in the south of Sydney Grub waits in her car. In the house opposite lives the man who was her brother’s best friend. Grub is there to confront him. To finally wring from him the confession that her family’s life would have been better if he’d never entered it.

Grub is still mourning for all her family has lost. Each of their lives seemed untouchable and now she struggles to recognise the happy family of her teenage years.

Unfolding across the years of their adolescence, Tidelines is the story of Grub and her family. Of her bond with her brother, and the different directions their lives took.

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I read Tidelines over the summer and there is a lot about this book that screams ‘beach read’. From the atmospheric cover featuring a figure suspended, afloat in water, to the opening chapters; alive with the saltwater promise of Grub and her brother enjoying the dwindling days of a teenage summer in the early 2000’s.

Tidelines is that glorious afternoon at the beach, but it is also the early evening when you realize you didn’t wear enough sunscreen. 

I don’t love that analogy but I’m hoping it conveys the sense that this book wants to complicate simple enjoyment and show us a world full of complicated motivations and far reaching consequences.

The book begins in a Sydney summer ringed by heat and fire. The ever present danger is backdrop to the siblings exploring their world and pushing into that space between adolescence and adulthood.

Grub is in awe of her brother Elijah and this sheen of talent and cool carries them both into new experiences. Compared to Elijah’s seeming effortless ability to turn his hand to anything, Grub feels adrift.

As they grow Grub will harness her talents and turn to medicine and Elijah to art but always they will have each others back.

It’s here that the story turns and Grub must reconcile her youth and her ideal vision of her family as their world threatens to crash down around them.

The power in this novel lies in the struggle between the ideal that we all want to occupy and the reality that too often overcomes us. Grub is confronted with a world that perhaps was hidden, perhaps she had chosen to ignore. In discovering her brother’s struggles with his mental health, she must reevaluate the life she had thought they had enjoyed.

Tidelines is a nuanced exploration of grief and loss shown over a young life. It’s never enough to look for simple answers when things fall apart and Grub must come to terms with her whole life if she is going to make peace with how her present seems so chaotic.

I appreciated that this book looked unflinchingly into the dark corners of Grubs world and showed us how this could be so many of our lives. It’s a book to read critically and one to allow to sink in, even as you appreciate the storytelling of this tremendous new author.

Sarah Sasson joined me on Final Draft and you can look out for that interview on the podcast.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Jane Harrison is a playwright & author descended from the Muruwari people. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed play Stolen and we most recently spoke last year about her acclaimed novel The Visitors.

Jane is also the festival director for the Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival

Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival started in 2016. This year the event is happening over four days in Naarm (and digitally countrywide) Blak & Bright celebrates the diverse expressions of First Nations writers and covers all genres from oral stories to epic novels and plays to poetry.

Check out the full Blak & Bright lineup

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

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Grace Chan is a speculative fiction writer and psychiatrist. Her short fiction has appeared in Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, amongst many others, and she has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards, the Norma K Hemming Award, and Viva la Novella. 

Today I’ve brought in Grace Chan’s techno-futurist novel Every Version of You.

In the not too distant future Australia, like much of the world around it, is a harsh and hostile place to live. Those with the means can protect themselves in hermetically sealed apartments and even afford the occasional luxury of fresh food that grew in the earth rather than a lab.

Tao-Yi and Navin have grown up in a world in decline and have watched as their existence moved into increasingly digital spaces. The world of Gaia began as a digital frontier but now it is the place where Tao-Yi works and socialises.

Gaia’s immersive nature parallels the declines in Navin’s health until it seems there is little choice but for Navin to upload himself permanently into the system.

What harm could it do?

Navin is convinced there are only benefits as he stares down his own mortality. So much of their lives already pass in Gaia, this would just be making it official. Tao-Yi is less sure. Her mother stubbornly refuses to log in and Tao-Yi doesn’t know what it will mean for all of their humanity if she lets go of this terrestrial life.

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I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy from way back, and while I rarely worry about the emergence of dragons into my workaday life, there is always something of a concern about bracket creep when it comes to near future speculative fiction.

Where twenty years ago Every Version of You might have sat alongside The Matrix as firmly in the realm of science fiction. Now we can read updates on our own digital proxies about Neuralink implant chips into people’s brains. I’m confident that I’ll get this to you before the tech outpaces the story but not so much about the longevity of this review as anything other than an artifact.

And so it becomes essential to engage with stories like Every Version of You, and so much the better that Grace Chan’s novel is such a compelling read!

The story is refreshingly ordinary even as it stretches us into the digital fantastic. The world of Tao-Yi and Navin is circumscribed much in the ways all our lives were during the pandemic and hence their escape into Gaia all the more relatable.

The world of Gaia is both incredible and prosaic. Never fear that tachyon processing will free us of our most banal predispositions. Every Version of You assures us that we will still have insecurity and jealousy, but so also will we have ambition and love.

Traveling alongside Tao-Yi we must face the possibility that the digital world is our world but that it cannot perfectly coexist with our flesh and blood selves.

This entanglement is not clear cut and I cannot assure the book offers answers. It is the journey that is the adventure as we struggle alongside Tao-Yi and Navin to understand how they might continue to exist and to be themselves when so much of what that means is disappearing.

This is also a love story and that was what completely suckered me into the futurism. I’m not so sure what it might mean to live forever, digitally or otherwise, but it has long been a concern of fiction to wonder how that long life and all its changes might impact our hearts.

Could you love someone digitally and how do we let go of the humanness that comes with life as we know it. These are the real questions of speculative and science fiction; not how do we transcend our mortality, but how do we hold on when it seems to be escaping us?

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Povo is the latest anthology from Sweatshop.

Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney which is devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing and critical thinking. Today's panel features:

Adam Novaldy Anderson

Adam is a mixed-race Australian-Indonesian writer and activist. Adam’s short stories and essays have appeared in various anthologies and publications. He is the editor of Povo (Sweatshop, 2024).

Natalia Figueroa Barroso

Natalia is a Uruguayan-Australian writer from Penrith. Natalia’s poem, “Anew”, was shortlisted for the 2015 Lane Cove Literary Award and her screenplay, “Roots”, was selected for a 2018 Breakthrough Emerging Screenwriter Development. Natalia was also longlisted for the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers Competition, which resulted in the collection Between Two Worlds (Hardie Grant Books, 2022). Natalia is currently working on her debut novel.

Katie Shammas

Katie is a Palestinian Australian writer. She has been published in Red Room Poetry and kindling & sage magazine.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Robert Skinner is the author of I’d Rather Not. To delve much further into his biography would be risk spoilers for I’d Rather Not which reads something like the autobiography of someone you’d love to meet at a party, but definitely before the beer runs out.

Robert is also the founding editor of The Canary Press, Australia’s greatest and possibly only short story magazine. This accolade should serve as a recommendation for his prose and again also as something of a spoiler for the events of I’d Rather Not.

Now about here I’m forced to acknowledge that the lion's share of the enjoyment in I’d Rather Not come less from the series of mishaps and adventures in Skinner’s life and more from the deft and entertaining way he describes them.

Arriving in the city, running a literary magazine from a corridor, sleeping in a swag in a ditch; these are not inherently entertaining things (actually they do sound rather entertaining as long as they’re not happening to me) but flowing from the pen of Robert Skinner they are transformed into astute and often inscrutable insights into the human condition.

Beginning in the unemployment line and ending in the back of a police car, I’d Rather Not embodies the truism about the inherent value of the journey. Whether failing up or falling down we as readers are buckled in for the ride and I’d Rather Not seems determined to give us value for our ticket.

It’s about here in this bookclub/review that I’m beginning to realize the impossibility of the task before me. By trying to convince you in my own words of the value and enjoyment in reading Robert Skinner’s words I might as well be trying to describe the invisible man. Sure I can’t give you the general outline and realistically you need to just run headlong into it to get any sort of impression.

What I can describe is the pure pleasure I got from immersing myself in fun and thought provoking prose. Riding along as Robert discovers himself in the Melbourne literary scene or walking through the outback beside a camel it’s impossible not to think on life and how we live it.

I’m still trying to paint you that impossible picture, when in fact I should just be exposing you to a little piece of I’d Rather Not. So to finish of this book club I decided to open the text to a random page, confident that I’d find a delightful and bizarre observation that would set you on the path to reading I’d Rather Not.

Here’s Robert on his time editing the Canary Press:     

“Somehow, without meaning to, and without really knowing that such a thing existed, we became part of the Melbourne Literary Scene. It was like running joyously along a beach and accidentally joining up with a triathlon. Suddenly you find yourself jostling for space, measuring your progress not against the beach but against the people around you.”

Go check out I’d Rather Not and discover the pleasure of reading for the sake of wonderful words!

Discover Robert at - https://www.mrrobertskinner.com/home