Good Reading Podcast

An Australian journalist attends a party in Rome, the Eternal City. The result is at once a celebration and a distillation of what travel can be and still is: an intelligent, hilarious, and sometimes prickly conversation between cultures. With finesse, Antoni Jach affectionately lampoons everything from the publishing world and the writing life to relationships, his beloved hometown Melbourne, and the often-pompous nature of national pride.

Erudite and amusing, A Midsummer Party is both a revelation, a romp and a penetrating reflection on the intersection of art and our own human foibles.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Antoni Jack about how 'A Midsummer Party' may or may not be a book about travel, why dialogue is his preferred route for character development, and the source for his distinctive brand of humour.

Snow gums are the most beautiful trees on Earth. But they're vanishing quickly. In this stunning new book, bestselling author Anthony Sharwood and climate activist Anna Langford help us view Australia's unique high country with fresh eyes, show us what's being lost, what can be saved - and how we might just save ourselves in the process.

From Anthony Sharwood, the bestselling author of From Snow to Ash and Kosciuszko, and Anna Langford, an exciting new voice in nature writing, comes the detailed and fascinating story of snow gums and the people trying to save them. This is an Australian story - and it's also a global story. Because snow gums are the canary in the global climate coalmine.

Through the fate of this one exquisite mountain tree species which exists in a small corner of the flattest, driest inhabited continent on Earth, we gain a terrifying snapshot of the future of biodiversity across the world.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Anthony Sharwood and Anna Langford about why the snow gum is a misunderstood species surviving in a misunderstood landscape, how climate change is the number one reason for its potential demise, and why we should be looking at Australia's high country with fresh eyes.

In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.

History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.

Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River. It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Wayne Marshall about the enduring interest in Henry Lawson's life and work, the rather unattractive proposition presented to Henry by The Bulletin's JF Archibald and what he thought about it, and how the blurred line between history, fiction and myth became the foundation of 'Henry Goes Bush'.

1899, Fremantle Asylum, Western Australia. For three years now, Gilberta Brady has kept quiet and stayed out of trouble, hoping to soon be released. But when Norah Devaney screams into the ward with revenge in her heart and a story no-one believes, Brady’s carefully guarded peace is shattered.

On the run and out of options, they collide with Malkar and Kedalak, Nyungar brothers on their own journey home. They form an unlikely gang of bushrangers and embark on a dangerous mission: track down the man who killed Norah’s mum.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Meg Caddy about how historical fiction can help fill in the gaps in our documented history, how her research exposed the horrors of the Fremantle Asylum at the turn of the 19th century, and how writing in the first person allows the individual perspective of each character to reveal their inner selves.

Cornwall, 1628. Steeped in herbal lore, a woman with no name guards a dangerous secret, while across the land whispers of witchcraft turn deadly. When a witch hunter sets out to track down the woman, their meeting will change the course of history. Can she survive in a world that burns what it does not understand?

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Bernice Barry about exploring her own historical connection to the Cornwall landscape of times past, the dangers of being an intelligent, educated woman in 17th century Britain, and how RD Blackmore's classic romance, Lorna Doona became a reference point for her own work of historical fiction.

An elderly couple are driving to the pound. At last, the old lady is getting a dog. The dog is driven through a gate in the fence to its new home. It goes to sleep in front of the black stove, but when it wakes, the old lady is confused. Doesn’t she already have a dog? The old lady slips a pair of pantyhose through the dog’s collar and walks it along the fence. For some reason the gate has disappeared. In the dog’s new home objects are uncoupling from their meaning. Is the dog still a dog? When the gate opens for the very last time will the dog go through?

With whimsical drawings from artist Noel McKenna, The Lady with the Dog is a homage to the exquisite sadness of Chekhov’s famous short story. A masterful novella about the importance of animals in language and life.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Carrie Tiffany about the relationship between her story and Anton Chekhov's short story of the same name, how Carrie managed to get inside the head of an Alzheimer's sufferer, and how those muddled conversations with her mother became the foundation of her prose in The Lady with the Dog

They say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. For Dan Milligan it isn't his life ... it's memories of his dad. Dan has spent his whole life chasing something. Fast cars, leggy blondes, the rush of making a lot of money and the cocaine high to celebrate. But as the stock market plummets in 1987, his world comes crashing down.

A new life on the South Coast isn't too bad. Mowing lawns is good, honest work. Most days. But other days, he tells himself he'll get back in the game. He'll get his head together, get his mojo back and master the market again. He just needs some luck. Then one day ... his luck changes. And suddenly he has a choice. Dan has no idea what he could unleash on his life, himself and his family. Or how far he will go to find a way back.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Matt Nable about  storytelling from the gritty end of town, how his characters are shaped by research into real world crime , and the distinct and separate creative worlds of screen and page.

What many of us fear, especially as we hit our forties and fifties, is not being as quick of mind. Not remembering as well as we used to. By our 60s and 70s we worry there's nothing we can do and that we are falling helplessly into an abyss which leads to dementia.

Dr Norman Swan, one of Australia's most trusted doctors, shows us that we've been thinking about brain ageing the wrong way. It doesn't need to be about decline and deficit. It's about how to help our brains adapt, become resilient and maintain cognitive function - and it's much more than what we eat, how we exercise or our genes.

Dr Swan has interviewed people from around the world in their 90s and 100s who still have remarkable cognitive function. These cognitive super-agers have very different life stories, but it turns out that underneath they're pretty much the same, with lessons that will help us all in our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Dr Norman Swan about why the changes in the brain as we age are more about adaptation than decline, why our genetic make-up isn't as influential on our brain health as we might think, and how the lifestyle choices we make contribute to our brain health.

When the Wet comes to Wyndham, bones wash down with the loose shale of the surrounding Bastion ranges. Year round, lost spirits wander this tiny port town on the northern tip of Western Australia. Some say they belong to the forgotten inmates of an apartheid hospital, built here in 1936 on the foundations of Social Darwinism and eugenics, theories that would reach their horrifying climax in the Holocaust. 

The Wanted and the Unwanted is the story of the Wyndham Native Hospital, born from a maelstrom of personal animosities, ambitions and beliefs and from the warring spirits of the early twentieth century. It is the tale of a hospital built three miles from a town that banned Aboriginal people, a place where men, women and children were imprisoned, left untreated and subjected to experimental treatments without their knowledge and against their will. And it is the story of those who resisted and survived to transform Three Mile into a place of hope and a site from which a new Wyndham would emerge.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Annabel Stafford about the 'great Australian silence' that obscures our sense of history, the vision and the reality for the Wyndham Native Hospital, and about the cast of white bureaucrats, doctors and politicians who shaped our dark past.

When A.J. 'Sandy' Mackinnon sailed a tiny dinghy through twelve countries from North Wales to the Black Sea, he survived pirates, the English Channel, international incidents and all the disasters, big and small, that can befall a little boat on a long voyage. Those adventures became his beloved bestseller The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow.

Decades later, that trip is a happy memory and Sandy is firmly back on land – until a message from a stranger presents an opportunity too good to refuse. Sandy picks up where his first voyage left off, sailing and rowing single-handedly around the coast from Romania to Venice. From Istanbul to Ithaca, Mount Olympus to the ruins of Troy, he finds himself immersed in the legends of antiquity, plays chicken with mercurial border police, and is saved more than once by the kindness of strangers. He recounts it all with his unbreakable enthusiasm and self-deprecating humour, taking the reader on a hilarious and unforgettable adventure.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to A. J. 'Sandy' Mackinnon about the reincarnation of that little mirror dinghy the 'Jack De Crow', the remarkable people he encountered on his journey from the Danube Delta to Venice, and why it's not curiosity alone that drives Sandy in his travels and his storytelling.