Final Draft - Great Conversations

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture.

For nearly thirty years Final Draft has found its home at 2ser 107.3. 2ser is a Community Radio Station broadcasting from Sydney, Australia. 2ser was born in October 1979 as a community voice and disruptor of the dominate voices in the Sydney media scene. For more than forty years 2ser has been a voice for Sydney, representing the many communities who don't always get to hear themselves in the mainstream.

Every October 2ser celebrates its birthday with Radiothon, an opportunity to thank our listeners and invite them to become a part of our family.

Today's special bonus episode is a little look at the history of 2ser and a big Happy Birthday for Radiothon.

Research and references from today's episode come from 2ser's 46 Boxes of Stuff - An Incomplete History of Community Radio from Liz Giuffre and Demetrius Romeo.

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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This week on book club we're helping you with your school holiday fun with some reading recommendations and a fantastic exhibition to share the love of reading with young and old.

Titles Mention in this Episode

What to Say When You Don't Know What to Say by Davina Bell and Hilary Jean Tapper

The Imagineer by Christopher Cheng, Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo

Baby Business by Jasmine Seymour

When We Say Black Lives Matter llustrated and written by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Macca the Alpaca illustrated and written by Matt Cosgrove

...and many more

Imagine... the Wonder of Picture Books

This celebration of children’s literature brings to life stories and characters from much-loved Australian picture books. 

Where: Exhibition Galleries, State Library of New South Wales

When: Daily 9am till 8pm

Admission: FREE

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 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.

Jack Gow is a writer and comedian based in Sydney, who has sold out, critically acclaimed shows across the country. You might have caught Jack’s stories on Radio National, the Story Club podcast, and FBi Radio’s All the Best.

Jack is also co-director of NYWF and is joining us with the inside scoop on the festival.

The National Young Writers’ Festival is an annual gathering of young writers. A place for them to showcase their work, share ideas, and learn. 2022 sees NYWF as a hybrid festival, with both in person and online events. Festival programs are free, and made by and for young writers who create across stage, page, web and beyond.

Check out the National Young Writers Festival online and plan your festival.

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/ 

Children’s books are a portal into ideas and imagination and when you read them with the little ones in your life you are supporting their developing language and cognitive skills, their sense of wonder and their critical thinking.

Today I’ve got the latest from Jasmine Seymour, Open Your Heart to Country.

Jasmine Seymour is a Dharug woman. She is a language teacher and language activist, whose work is reawakening the Dharug language and this is so prominent in her writing. She is the author of children’s books Baby Business and Cooee Mittigar. Open Your Heart to Country is her latest and it is a visual and linguistic feast for the senses.

All of Jasmine Seymour’s books for children feature both Dharug and English language. There are more than 250 Indigenous languages on this continent. The area across which 2ser broadcasts includes the traditional lands of the Dharug people and we actively try to acknowledge and pay respect to the custodians of that land. But I often find myself wondering what it means to acknowledge and pay respect. It’s a great set of words to utter but how can we pay that respect everyday? 

Open Your Heart to Country (and all of Jasmine’s books) offer young readers the chance to discover ideas and language of the Dharug people. Many children of preschool age learn aspects of local culture and language in their schools. Warami is a Dharug greeting that children learn as part of their everyday. In Open Your Heart to Country Jasmine Seymour invites readers that “by reading the Dharug words told with their own English translations you will hear this story with Dharug Ears”.

The book is also an explosion of colour and light that is guaranteed to excite young minds to discover things in their local area.Each page brims with a kaleidoscope of animals and landscapes depicting Dharug land.

This is a book to be shared and through sharing, enriching the minds of readers young and old alike. Learning a second language has so many proven benefits, from supporting listening skills, memory and concentration. Second language skills also support problem solving skills and critical thinking. Our brains just kinda grow when we engage with other languages!

But it isn’t just about what it does for us. Sharing Open Your Heart to Country with young readers in your life introduces them to the land they live on. It tells them that it is someone’s land and begins the stories that have been denied in this country. Most importantly though, it is an opportunity to share in these stories and understand Dharug culture. An invitation to practice the acknowledgement and respect and make it a part of their developing lives.

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.

Shirley Marr is a first-generation Chinese Australian author of young adult and children's fiction, including YA novels Fury and Preloved, and children’s novels Little Jiang, A Glasshouse of Stars.  

In Singapore Peijing understood how everything worked; her Ba-Ba worked hard seven days a week, her Ma-MA worked to raise the family and her Ah-Ma worked at making delicious mooncakes. Peijing and her little sister Biju worked at creating their little world and populating it with animals both real and mythological, and telling fantastic stories about the animals' lives.

In Australia things seem upside down to say the least. Ba-Ba now goes to work for only five days and is wearing a polo shirt. Ma-Ma needs Peijing to translate and is not happy that she is not allowed to bring her daughters lunch at school. And Ah-Ma seems confused and is always asking Peijing her name. Peijing must be strong and honorable for her family but that is not always easy when everything is so new.

Join me as we discover Shirley Marr’s All Four Quarters of the Moon...

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 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.

CBCA Winner Andrea Rowe joins us to discuss her book Jetty Jumping, winner of the Early Childhood Prize at the Children's Book Council Awards.

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/ 

Today I have got something truly unique; thought provoking, puzzling, laugh out loud funny.

Siang Lu’s The Whitewash might just be the whole package

Brood Empire was meant to be a landmark for Asian representation in Hollywood. With a $350 million budget and a lead who looked like he'd been carved from stone this would be THE film that broke through and put all the subtle and overt racist stereotypes to bed.

Instead production was dogged from the start, the lead got pulped in an ill advised cage fight and the whole set leaked worse than Tom Holland on a bender. 

The Whitewash is the unofficial history of the rise and fall of Brood Empire detailing not only the film’s unseemly demise but its origins in the anals of racist representation of Asia and Asians throughout 20th century filmmaking.

    -------

The Whitewash is told in a documentary style lead by the team at Click Bae - and online gossip rag that specializes in entertainment news and celebrity gossip of the most salacious kind. 

Click Bae have secured exclusive access to JK Jr, the superhero physiqued Hong Kong actor who has been cast in the leading role in Brood Empire.

The film itself is an adaptation of the cult novels of Yu Guan featuring his secret agent Brando X - a Chinese James Bond who inverts all the tropes fighting a white supervillain seekins to subjugate the eastern world.

About now I feel the need to acknowledge that I am not much of a cinephile and there were definitely moments in The Whitewash were fiction and reality blurred in a way that I couldn’t separate. Because this is film history with an incredible alternative narrative inserted in ways that blur reality.

As the title suggests, The Whitewash explores the ways that White Culture (in this case cinema) has a tendency to pick, choose and bleach aspects of other cultures for its own entertainment and edification.

Alongside the fly on the wall access to the development of Brood Empire we are treated to a whistle stop history of Asian representation in Hollywood; from its inception in villainous caricatures through to the edification of martial arts as the savior of the blockbuster.

The Whitewash is very aware of its source material and does not miss a trick in satirizing the film industry, the media-industrial complex, cults of celebrity and even all of us if we are foolish enough to uncritically consume what is dished up to us across multi-media platforms.

The broad thrust of the plot is the rise and fall of the film Brood Empire, as it seeks to break free of the Hollywood stereotypes only to fall victim to the machine. This is a gross oversimplification though, as the reader is treated to a deviously woven narrative consisting of an ensemble cast you’ll play book to keep track of.

I truly loved The Whitewash for its irreverent take on the entertainment industry that was knowing but also incisive in its critique. The book shows us an industry known for its exploitation and opens up our eyes to just how much goes on behind the scenes. 

And if a terrific story wasn’t enough, The Whitewash is accompanied by a companion website The Beige Index

 https://thebeigeindex.com/film/tt1745960 

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.

Vikki Petraitis is a writer, presenter, teacher and podcaster. She is well known for her true crime writing and today she is joining me with a new book, The Unbelieved.The Unbelieved is fiction but it is so uncomfortably close to real life, it could be ripped from the headlines.

A woman stumbles out of a bar, unsteady on her feet. A man has followed her out but as he grabs at her it’s clear he’s not there help…

A string of drink spiking incidents in bars around Deception Bay points to a serial rapist. So why isn’t anyone joining the dots? Detective sergeant Antigone Pollard has seen this before. It’s the case that drove her out of Melbourne. 

Can she take on the system that says it’s all a bit of fun and boys will be boys? Can she help the women of Deception Bay protect themselves?

Join me as we discover Vikki Petraitis’s The Unbelieved...

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/ 

Paul Daley is a Walkley Award winning journalist, author and essayist. He writes the feature Postcolonial for the Guardian, which explores Australia’s national identity.

Jesustown is clearly an extension of this conversation. The novel offers up a compelling narrative that forces a lens up to colonial and contemporary attitudes towards First Nations Peoples.

Spanning generation, the novel hones in on Patrick Renmark. Patrick has landed in the remote former mission of Jesustown, a broken man. Now pushing fifty, Patrick has not returned to Jesustown since his humiliating withdrawal as a teenager. Then he was fleeing the aggressive whip of his grandfather Nathaniel “Rennie” Renmark.

Renny is famous, or notorious for saving The People. In the novel The People are the custodians of the land around Jesustown, and stand in for Indigenous peoples across the land. Renny’s shadow is everywhere in Jesustown and hovers most distinctly wherever Patrick stands. As he seeks to discovering who Rennie truly was underneath all the myths, Patrick finds that Rennie’s hubris is perhaps his most enduring legacy.

Jesustown began for Paul Daley in a museum storage room in Adelaide. On viewing a cache of human remains belonging to First Nations Peoples he was moved to pen a narrative that centered the struggle to have remains and relics returned to their rightful owners.

The novel displays no great love for the so called explorers and pioneers that moved into what we now call Australia and plundered everything that could be carried away. Nor does it look favorably on those who came after to chronicle what they believed to be the dying days of people who had been systematically targeted for extinction by the invading colony.

In this light we can view Renny’s tale as a sort of pleading with history. Fiercely protective of his legacy Renny denied anyone the opportunity to tell his story. Now as his archive stands empty his successor Patrick arrives in Jesustown the victim of his own hubris.

Patrick has allowed his own mythologising tendencies to blind him and in doing so he has destroyed his own life. Jesustown is both the last place he wants to be and the only place that will have him.

Jesustown is a striking novel for its singularly ugly figures of Renny and Patrick. Traveling alongside them we are left to assume that if the telling of Australia's national myth is left to them, then we are not much chop.

Patrick is a so-called story-ist, a philosophy or style peculiar to the book but which might best be summed up as ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. Patrick has storified everything he touches but finds he cannot do the same to Renny’s legacy because it seems it has always had a touch of the fantastical.

Traveling with these professionally unreliable narrators invites the reader to think about their own attitudes and approach to history. Here we see the subjective nature of records and the flagrant self-interest of the parties who want to come out on top.

We are asked to consider this story of discovery and adventure that leaves out the murder and subjagation of those inconveniently in the way.

Jesustown is a fascinating examination of colonial legacy and contemporary responsibility. It holds a light up to the crimes of the past and leaves the reader in no doubt that there is much to recompense.

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 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.

Yasmin Abdel Magied is an engineer who has run oil and gas rigs, a formula one mechanic, a social advocate and a writer, novelist and public intellectual. Her new book Talking About a Revolution collects essays, writings and speeches from the past ten years.

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/