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.

Luke Johnson is a physiotherapist and writer from Victoria. 

He’s joining us today with his debut novel King Tide.

When you’re young in a small town it can feel like there’s not much to do. So you make your own fun. Maybe it’s footy, maybe church camp in the summer.

Tate, Luther and Brylie are thick as thieves until the disappearance of Tate’s little brother shatters their world. The boys play footy and Brylie leaves town when her minister father gets a new posting.

Years later and Brylie and her dad are back. Their return coincides with the discovery of a body on the beach. Another disappearance that connects them all.

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

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

Rhett Davis is the author of Hovering. Today we’ve got his new novel Arborescence

Arborescence is the state of having the root and branch like structures of a tree. Importantly it’s a noun, but Rhett Davis asks us to imagine if it were a verb…

Caelyn is at a loss. She’s bouncing between jobs that she quickly loses, like when she gets fired from a nursery for taking home the dying plants (they considered it stealing!). She hates that we’re destroying the world but feels powerless to stop it.

When she hears about a group trying to become trees, she and her partner Bren go to investigate. What she finds are people standing still in a field, with a support network of others caring for them as they attempt to Arboresce. It’s a mad dream, but what if it could be true?

Caelyn throws herself into studying the phenomenon and becomes the worlds foremost expert. Respect does not follow. That is until people start disappearing, while trees appear fully grown in places they shouldn’t be. 

As the disappearances increase in frequency the world’s infrastructure is stretched to breaking. It’s simply not feasible to live with trees blocking streets and without the people required to run a global economy. 

Caelyn insists it’s for the best, but what of those lost?

For those of you who read Rhett’s debut novel Hovering, Arborescence will have you shouting ‘He’s done it again!’ (If you know you know)

The very simple concept of people becoming trees metamorphosises into a narrative both sprawling and deceptively personal. What could be some strange Ent fan fiction is instead a rumination on what it means to be alive.

Central to the narrative is the imperfect love story of Caelyn and Bren. Through them we are shown contrasting views of this world in flux, alongside a kind of model for how to respectfully disagree without being awful

Bren’s own job as a manager to a possibly AI workforce serves as a counterpoint to Caelyn’s increasing fervour about the Arborescent population. It also injects some dark humour into the possibility that we will be ruled one day by our computer overlords.  

It arises through the narrative that becoming a tree is a very human thing to do. Or more appropriately the sense of purpose and the wish to be a force for good is what makes it human. Within this space we must contend with the morality of our responsibilities to each other as social creatures and our responsibilities as the nominal stewards of the world in which we live. It’s a muddy question and this is not your grandparents' apocalypse.

I’m trying to have fun with this review because I had an enormous amount of fun reading Arborescence. And because it’s a book that will take me some time to process and figure out what I truly took from it. That’s not a bad thing but it does present a problem for filing copy.

Suffice to say that Rhett Davis has crafted an intellectually challenging novel with an intriguing concept and a personal, relatable soul. It’s the sort of novel I hope to find and I’m excited to be recommending it to all of you.

Andrew is joined In Conversation by Maeve Marsden.

Maeve is the Artistic Director of Blue Mountains Writers Festival and the two explore programming a festival and exploring ideas that not everyone agrees 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.

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.

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.

January Gilchrist is  Brisbane based author. Her debut novel is The Final Chapter

Writers’ retreats are supposed to be about creativity. In the gardens of Thorne House and the surrounding bush writers, poets and creatives search for their muse.

But on one fateful weekend, as snow descends on the Blue Mountains, four writers arrive at Thorne House with more than literary success on their minds.

Desley has escaped her family and her demanding husband for a last ditch attempt to live her dream as an author.

Colette is seeking escape from the paparazzi who are more than usually ravenous about her public life.

Maia already has the success and the money, but is looking for something more.

Mix in two poets and trapped from the world by the blanketing snow. You have a recipe for murder!

⁠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.

Sally Hepworth is a New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, with her novel The Family Next Door having recently been adapted for television.

Today I’ve got for you her new novel Mad Mabel. 

Elsie just wants a quiet life. She’s been more than thirty years in her quiet little Melbourne lane and she’d happily stay thirty more if she thought she had that much time left.

Unfortunately for Elsie her elderly neighbour Ishaan has to go and die. Nothing suspicious of course and poor Elsie is the one to find the body.

Nothing suspicious, but it only takes one curious person, one probing question and a short search and Elsie’s past is there to discover. And try as she might Elsie can’t seem to escape Mad Mabel.

She’d always just accepted that the other children called her Mad Mabel, never asked why. She’d also accepted that friends were something the other children had, not her.

Mabel had her books. Her mother was distant, her father rich and important, but her aunt doted on her and for a gangly, red-headed girl in 1950’s Melbourne, that would have to be enough.

If only everyone could have left her alone. But when a series of strange and violent incidents occur around Mabel, it’s soon the whole community her Mad. Still Mabel yearns for quiet and privacy. She certainly was trying to become the youngest person ever in Australia to be convicted of murder!

Now, nearly seven decades later Elsie is telling the story of Mad Mabel. She wants to clear the air, but such notoriety doesn’t just disappear quietly.

Sally Hepworth is well loved for her character driven mysteries. In Elsie/Mad Mabel she has crafted a character who defies you to like her and yet despite her curmudgeonly exterior is destined to find a place in the hardest of hearts.

Mabel’s life exposes the impunity with which women and young girls were treated; in the 1950’s as now, and how that treatment, rather than receiving opprobrium often becomes a part of their larger ostracism. As a girl Mabel is sheltered from the truth of her family’s tragic history, but she is not shielded from the notoriety. Bereft of friends she has little resources to call on when her marginalisation leads to unwanted attentions.

As an adult, and believing she’d long since left her past behind, Mabel, now Elsie must figure out if she does have a community to rely on and what her role is within it.

The setup is simple. When a neighbour dies Elsie’s past come rushing in. Despite the clear innocuous nature of the elderly man’s demise people ask; but Mad Mabel was so close by.

We as readers are implicated in this speculation. Aren’t we here for the spectacle?

When a pair of online journalists come knocking on her door, how can we help but imagine Elsie as the latest in a long line of true-crime fodder.

Meanwhile the very human circumstances of Mabel’s life and the choices she made (and those taken from her) unfold in twinned narratives of the 1950’s and present day. The more we learn, the more we are challenged with the question of whether Elsie’s tough exterior is in fact a shield, and whether her proximity is an impending catastrophe or perhaps the best protection we could ask for.

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.

Brandon Jack is the author of the acclaimed memoir 28. Brandon’s debut novel is Pissants. 

Brandon’s also a footballer, who played for the Sydney Swans but on this this show I think we’ll celebrate his writing achievements 

At the [Name Redacted] footy club the Pissants are waiting for the call up to the big leagues. In the meantime they will drink, take drugs, kidnap dogs and every now and then reflect on what they’re doing. Can the Pissants make the big leagues and will they actually discover themselves on the way?

⁠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.

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.

Natalia Figueroa Barroso is a Sydney author of Uruguayan descent

Today we’ll be discussing her debut novel Hailstones Fell Without Rain.

Hailstones Fell Without Rain spans fifty years and three generations of women of the Ferreira family.

Graciela has lived in Western Sydney since she emigrated from Uruguay in her twenties. There she has raised three daughters, although her thoughts are never far from home despite the fact she is avoiding calls from her Aunt Chula.

Chula raised Graciela ever since her mother Tata, a political activist and freedom fighter, was disappeared by the military government in Uruguay. Chula much to tell Graciela, but a conversation would necessitate acknowledging she is estranged from her eldest daughter Rita.

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.

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.

Randa Abdel-Fattah is a researcher whose writing covers Islamophobia, race, Palestine, and social movement activism.

Her books include Coming of Age in the War on Terror, When Michael met Mina, and 11 Words for Love.

Her new novel is Discipline  

A high school student, Nabil is arrested for displaying a Hamas flag at a rally demanding Australia stop supplying weapons to Israel. As the media scramble to cover the story, politicians and the authorities work to present themselves as tough on this sort of thing.

Hannah, a Palestinian/Australian journalist is confronted with how she can represent her community in reporting the news, whilst still being perceived by her white colleagues as an impartial reporter.

Her husband Jamal seeks to use his academic voice to speak up for Palestine but must contend with his more conservative Phd supervisor Ashraf, who is concerned about establishing his own academic credentials free from controversy.

Hannah and Jamal are also monitoring their social media helplessly. There are attacks on Palestinians by Israel and they must wait for news of the escalating violence and pray that their families are safe.

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.