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.

Graham Akhurst is a Kokomini writer who grew up in Meanjin. He is a Lecturer of Australian Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing at UTS. Borderland is his first novel.

Jono is finishing high school and trying to figure out his place in the world.

At school he always felt like he stuck out. As one of only two Indigenous students, along with his best friend Jenny, Jono was targeted by students and always felt like he had to work twice as hard to get half as far. 

Now Jono and Jenny are starting at the Aboriginal Performing Arts Centre, and Jono’s still not sure. He doesn’t know who his mob are, he feels adrift and the other students still single him out.

When an opportunity comes along for Jono and Jenny to work with a documentary crew filming in the Queensland desert they both jump at the chance. The gig is in support of a fracking project though and Jono’s instincts are telling him there’s a lot more to this trip than he initially suspects.

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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Tony Birch is the author of novels, poetry and short fiction. You’ve met him on the show before with his collection Dark as Last Night which won the Steele Rudd award at the Queensland Literary Awards. Today Tony is joining us with his new novel Women & Children.

Joe Cluny lives with his Mum and his sister Ruby. He attends the local Catholic school where he generally wishes he got in less trouble and could avoid the hell the nuns keep threatening him with.

Joe’s no stranger to violence, getting the strap more often than accolades at school. In Joe’s world there’s plenty of violence to go around and his sister Ruby has warned him that you don’t ask questions about other people’s bruises.

But then when one day Joe’s aunt Oona arrives at the house bruised and shaken, Joe’s mother must act to keep her from further harm. Joe doesn’t understand what is happening but he will come to learn how much violence lurks in all their lives and what it takes to stand up to it.

Tony Birch’s Women & Children takes us back in time but not so far that we won’t recognise the behaviors and attitudes that fuel domestic violence and fear. Through Joe Cluny’s eyes we see a world where beatings and even the threat of violence are used to control people, beginning in the institutions where children should feel safest.

The novel is about the reality of this violence but it is not the perpetrators that are central to the books. As the title suggests, Birch zooms in on the lives of the Women & Children who must face up to the daily grind of fear and how they are able to carve out space for themselves.

Joe is a powerful character, whose perspective allows the reader to indulge their incredulity at the prevalence and frequency of beatings across all levels of life. Through Joe we are able to witness the horrible injuries which his aunt arrives with and understand that these are shocking but also understood. Joe reminds us that even at an age when this should all be foreign he knows that this can happen.

Against this we see Joe’s mother Marion, his aunt Oona and even his teenage sister work themselves up to the point that they can resist, whatever that may look like.

Through Joe we see the horrible paradox as a vicious cycle, where only more violence might see an end. The constant remonstrations that Joe shouldn’t be witness to this only serve to reinforce that violence perpetuates itself.

Birch counters this narrative through the friendship between Joe’s Grandfather Charlie and Ranji Khan. The two men meet and discuss their lives in the manner of showmen regaling an audience and through their comradery give Joe a glimpse of life well lived through bonds built on love.   

As Joe explores Charlie’s collections and Ranji Khan’s bric-a-brac it may well be that he finds the solution to all their problems but, the narrative asks us; will it be right to use it?

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You can get more books, writing and literary culture every week on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast. Hear interviews with authors and discover your next favourite read!

Book Club 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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*Today's is a special Bonus episode rebroadcasting Chris Womersley's The Diplomat which was no longer available in our archive

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.

Chris Womersley is the award winning author of  four novels including Cairo and City of Crows. He’s joining us today with his new novel The Diplomat.

Stepping off a plane in Melbourne, Edward Degraves seems resigned to his fate. Edward and his wife Gertude committed the largest art heist Australia has ever seen, but after years in London Gertrude is dead and Edward is lost. After listing this litany of struggles Edward informs the reader “All I had to do now was survive the rest of my life. Which was no small order, of course.” 

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/ 

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.

Chris Womersley is the award winning author of  four novels including Cairo, The Diplomat and City of Crows. He’s joining us today with his new novel Ordinary Gods and Monsters.

Summer, the end of high school, family dysfunction. Nick’s life has shifted into some sort of liminal zone.

When his best friend Marion’s father is killed in a hit and run, Nick wants to be there for her. But a series of spooky actions seem to indicate that the best way to support Marion is to track down her father’s killer!

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/ 

This week's episode is an encore performance of the book club originally from June 2022

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar writer, from Western Australia, now based in Naarm. Claire’s debut novel is the award winning Terra Nullius as well as the author of The Old Lie and the acclaimed non-fiction book, Lies Damned Lies. Calire’s third novel, the one I want to talk about today is Enclave.

In the community of Safetown residents live a comfortable life, secure in the knowledge they are protected by the wall. Within that concrete edifice security patrol their streets and drones surveil the airway to ensure even the smallest transgression is met with swift consequences.

Christine has spent her entire life basking in the comfort her fathers wealth and Safetown’s security provide the daughter of an influential family. Sure her father is a distant figure, her mother a high functioning alcoholic, but they’ve just bought her an apartment and extended her a line of seeming unlimited credit.

Safetown was built to protect families like Christine and she should be happy with this safety. Except her best friend Jack is missing and Christine has begun to notice her servants, people who don’t look quite like her…

I think the potency of Enclave will hit readers in different ways. 

On a first pass, Enclave seems to have taken the worst of the days headlines: Trump’s wall, fake islands in the South China Sea, almost sentient algorithms watching our online behaviors. Enclave has taken these ideas and extended them to their horrific conclusion. This can seem like a grossly distended version  of reality and may strike some as Escher-like, while to others it’s a kind of dystopian porn. 

Coleman sets us up in Safetown, allowing us to walk alongside Christine, but it is not with the sort of familiarity or sympathy we might expect from an anointed heroine/protagonist.

At this point it would be easy to see Enclave as commentary on the wrong turn society took too-long ago and Christine as an exemplar of our own generation coming to the realisation we are on the wrong side of history.

But this is Claire G Coleman and just as the reader starts to feel safe that they know where Christine’s story is heading she pulls back the proverbial curtain.

Fans of Claire’s first novel Terra Nullius will know her ability to stage an about face that changes everything you thought you know about the story.

Enclave is a dark tale of excess and the absolutely destructive path of privilege. It exposes racism by showing the absolute mundanity of the everyday actions that reinforce power. There were times as I read that I thought the book was moving too slow, not showing me anything I needed to see. But that was Claire lulling a reader like me, someone who’s lived close enough to privilege to not see it, into believing that this world could exist.

The horror she paints of a segregated society and rampant excess doesn’t look terribly different to a real housewives episode and therein lies the power.

Enclave is an absolute recommendation from me but beware. It’s a story that has your expectations in its sights and knows that we don’t change anything by maintaining the status quo… 

Loved this review?

You can get more books, writing and literary culture every week on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast. Hear interviews with authors and discover your next favourite read!

Book Club 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/ 

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.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of Foreign Soil, The Hate Race, and poetry collections Carrying the World and How Decent Folk Behave. She is also the author of children's picture books including The Patchwork Bike and When We Say Black Lives Matter. Today she’s joining us to discuss the absolutely joyful We Know a Place.

We Know a Place is about the joys of wandering bookshop shelves in search of adventure. Following a family as they make their weekly pilgrimage to their local bookstore after completing weekend chores and coming home with a world of wonder.

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/ 

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Davina Bell is a children's book editor and an author of books for all ages. Her picture books include All the Ways To Be Smart and All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors. Her debut young adult novel, The End of the World is Bigger than Love, won the 2021 CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers. 

Davina is also the author of two incredible books for young readers that I like to turn to for a little inspiration. They are What to Say When You’re Not Sure What to Say, and the recently released What to Do When You’re Not Sure What to Do.

Both What to Say and What to Do introduce children (and adults) to simple things they can share that promote kindness and inclusivity. Each page is its own little world; containing a simple aphorism and picture that gently unfolds a story about how to approach, deal with or overcome some of the difficult moments in our lives.

The book is designed to show children that while the world often looks scary, and is full of new and unfamiliar things, that we can take it one step at a time and best of all we can approach it with a helping hand from a friend.

These books are gorgeously illustrated by Hillary Jean Tapper. Hillary’s illustrations craft whole narratives in a single image. The pictures feature a revolving cast of children moving in and out of each other's lives; offering support and a smile at all the right moments.

What to Do and What to Say are the sort of books that invite sharing. They read best when sat alongside someone else to explore the story and discover things in the pictures. 

Each moment is both general and specific and invites memory and empathy as we come together over moments in our near or distant past.

I haven’t got much more to say about these books. They are such that they need to be discovered but I can assure you that they almost certainly contain something you’re looking for right now and some words that will help you along, even if they can’t make everything right.

Loved this review?

You can get more books, writing and literary culture every week on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast. Hear interviews with authors and discover your next favourite read!

Book Club 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/ 

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's show features Felix Shannon in conversation with Sara M Saleh.

Sara M Saleh is a writer, human rights lawyer, organiser, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely in English and Arabic.

Songs for the Dead and the Living is described as a coming-of-age tale played out across generations and continents, from Palestine to Australia. 

Discover more from Sarah M Saleh

Hear more from Felix on Death of the Reader

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/ 

Graham Akhurst is a Kokomini writer who grew up in Meanjin. He is a Lecturer of Australian Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing at UTS. Borderland is his first novel.

Jono is finishing high school and trying to figure out his place in the world.

At school he always felt like he stuck out. As one of only two Indigenous students, along with his best friend Jenny, Jono was targeted by students and always felt like he had to work twice as hard to get half as far. 

Now Jono and Jenny are starting at the Aboriginal Performing Arts Centre, and Jono’s still not sure. He doesn’t know who his mob are, he feels adrift and the other students still single him out.

When an opportunity comes along for Jono and Jenny to work with a documentary crew filming in the Queensland desert they both jump at the chance. The gig is in support of a fracking project though and Jono’s instincts are telling him there’s a lot more to this trip than he initially suspects.

Jono’s story centers around the question of identity and explodes that notion to explore how identity, country and culture are entwined for Indigenous people.

Jono feels like many of us will at some point in our lives. He’s clearly talented; he achieved a scholarship at an exclusive private school and won his audition for the documentary, but Jono never feels like enough. Throughout Borderland, Graham Akhurst shows us that Jono’s achievements are only part of the journey he is on.

In a key early scene Jono must perform for his dance class. He is unprepared but takes to the floor and expresses something within himself. It’s an opening up that takes Jono on a step towards becoming his true self.

As we move from school, the performing arts center and out to the desert, where the documentary will be shot, we meet an ensemble cast each of whom is on their own journey into identity. From those strong in their ties to the land, to those just learning about this connection, Borderland is at pains to ensure all readers can see the process and the individuality of learning.

Borderland is a pacy novel that hurtles the reader along Jono’s path into manhood. The pace of this journey is reflected in Jono’s own unpreparedness. As he learns more about himself he is shocked by the ruptures and is even beset by what he thinks are panic attacks. We are given the sense that Jono must overcome if he is going to survive.

At the heart of the novel is the transformation that Jono will make as he learns about his true self. There’s an incredible twist here that I only want to allude to, but I feel safe in reflecting on my conversation with Graham Akhurst where he reflected that he wanted the kind of inspiring story about a young Indigenous man that he didn’t have when he was growing up.

Jono’s journey of discovery takes him into the Queensland desert and onto traditional lands being denuded by fracking. Jono and the documentary crew must reconcile their work communicating about the mining and the communities it potentially threatens. Jono in his turn must also reconcile the deeper threats to country and the deep bond he is only just discovering within him.

As a white reader I can reflect that I have only a shallow understanding of country in Indigenous cultures and cosmologies. It’s a concept that I feel we must approach with open minds and respect if we’re going to learn about this land we live on. Graham Akhurst’s Borderland is a terrific read that opens the door to learning more about how culture and country exist for First Nations and their importance in both the past, but also the present and our future together.

Loved this review?

You can get more books, writing and literary culture every week on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast. Hear interviews with authors and discover your next favourite read!

Book Club 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.

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.

Love Your Bookshop Day celebrates the unique role our local bookshops play in helping to expand our worlds. Join Andrew as he celebrates the role bookshops play in fostering our imaginations and find out whether anyone picks up when he calls his favourite, local bookshop!

Find your local bookshop at loveyourbookshop.com.au

Shop Megalong Books gorgeous collection or visit the store...

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/