It's a Long Story

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an independent advocate on Inuit human rights. When she was growing up, she wanted to be a nurse and then a doctor, but that didn't pan out very well because she wasn't very good at chemistry, physics, or mathematics.

Watt-Cloutier lives in Iqaluit on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. If the Arctic is the world's barometer, says Sheila, then the Inuit are the mercury, and she has campaigned tirelessly to get this message out, to explain to the world that climate change is not just an environmental concern, but very much a human one too. It is work that has made a mark globally and saw her nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

From a very early age, Jesse Bering has been asking questions of himself. Growing up amid AIDS hysteria in Reagan's America, Bering knew that he was attracted to other boys but was terrified into a guilty silence. In high school he took up wrestling in a bid to fight back sexual desire but found only deeper consciousness of his homosexuality. As an adult he has continued asking questions with frankness and with humour, handling sensitive topics like sex, evolution, religion, and morality. His books Perv and Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? Have elevated him to cult hero status. "If I had to put a label on myself," hey says, "it would be a sexual libertarian."

There are people with interesting life stories, and then there are people whose lives read like a screenplay. From being conscripted as a child solider in Sudan to finding a new home in suburban Australia as a refugee where he taught himself to read and to write. Deng Thiak Adut is today a lawyer representing those who, just like him, struggle to find a voice. He's even been at the centre of one of those most modern phenomena, a viral video sensation. Like millions of children who grow up within the geography of conflict his childhood was taken away. "I didn't understand what freedoms I had lost", he says. "I didn't understand how fearful I should have been."

Shaken by a court's decision to acquit George Zimmerman over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza wrote, "Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter." From there, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born and then a social movement. It is a world away from the life she had growing up with her mother, stepfather, and brother, where they ran an antique shop in Marin County in San Francisco. Standing firmly in the national spotlight today in a divided America, she is a leading voice in what's widely viewed as America's new civil rights movement.

Henry Rollins discusses his tumultuous childhood growing up in Washington DC, and how he transitioned from scooping ice cream at Haagen Dazs to fronting punk rock band Black Flag. A turning point came for Henry Rollins about a decade ago, marked by a departure from music into activism and spoken word performance,  "For me, music was a time and a place. I never really enjoyed being in a band", says Henry Rollins. "It was in me, and it needed to come out. Like a 25-year exorcism. One day I woke up and I didn't have any more lyrics."

What galvanised African American activist Alicia Garza to co-found #BlackLivesMatter? How did Henry Rollins make the jump from shift manager at Häagen-Dazs to lead singer of US punk rock band Black Flag? How does NSW Australian of the Year Deng Thiak Adut’s former life as a Sudanese refugee and child soldier inform his practice of the law?  

Find the answer to these questions and more in a new Sydney Opera House podcast It's A Long Story. A podcast that explores the the stories behind the big ideas of some of our most influential and acclaimed guests.