Life Sentences Podcast

Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films like Robin Hood, he had lived the life of an entitled boss on plantations in New Guinea as a fortune hunter before being discovered on the beach at Bondi.

His rapid rise to stardom in Hollywood was enabled by the powerful studio system operating at full tilt and by media complicity that burnished his image and relished the scandals of his many marriages. When he was put on trial for statutory rape in 1942, it only served to increase his popularity and fan base.

A new biography by colonial historian Patricia O’Brien provides a fascinating and often shocking insight into Flynn’s behaviour and his values, as well as shedding light on his family’s shady background, his many under-age lovers, and his tendency to exaggerate wildly about his exploits.

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Peter Matthiessen was a giant of American twentieth century letters, and the only writer ever to win the National Book Award in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. He was a complicated man who went to great lengths to escape the privilege he was born into.

A comprehensive new biography The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Australian biographer Lance Richardson sheds fresh light on the many aspects of his complex personality as an eloquent advocate for the environment, through his enduring classic The Snow Leopard and other books about journeys to remote and fragile eco systems; and as social justice crusader and advocacy journalist for native American Indians.

Using previously unpublished letters from his widow Maria, together with other personal sources from previous wives and lovers, Richardson is also able to write about Matthiessen’s three marriages and often messy family life, his powerful ego and his lifelong sense of longing and quest for transcendence.

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Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt.

Now a TV adaptation, directed by acclaimed First Nations director Wayne Blair, and written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, tells the Goolagong story on screen in a dramatization based on her memoir. But a biopic is constrained by budget and other issues such as casting that mean the story has to be told differently. So what gets left out?

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After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next book and what should it be about? Her UK publisher was not keen on her ideas and so she turned to journalism and went undercover to write an exposé of the life of a domestic servant.

It was a revelation to her and to her readers: the behaviour of her employers, the exhaustion, the injuries in the course of a working day, the lack of time off, all of this written about by a spy in various well-heeled homes.

Then Miles‘ radical spirit went further and she took off for America, where she joined a network of feminist reformers.

In Miles Franklin Undercover, scholar and journalist Kerrie Davies draws on a wealth of primary sources to get inside the mind of one of the most significant and unconventional writers in Australian literary history.

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Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accused of being part of a paedophile ring. In a sensational twist, he was murdered in his home.

As the mayor of a major industrial hub, Arkell had ambitious visions of how the city could transform itself into a tourism destination with a more refined profile, and applied himself to promoting his plans with relentless conviction. But his darker side became increasingly public knowledge.

Historian Erik Eklund, who grew up in Wollongong, has written a biography of Arkell that explains his background, his impact and his legacy.

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Authorised biographies, especially of those in high office, tend to suffer from being overly respectful if not downright deferential. But in the case of Juliet Rieden’s authorised biography of Quentin Bryce, the first female Governor General of Australia, authorisation means co-operation without editorial control.

In this episode, Rieden explains her close relationship with her subject and how she used the trust she had developed with Bryce to get beyond the immaculate façade she presented in public life. The result is a portrait that is revealing of a woman of grit and determination whose country roots  gave her the ability to connect with everyone she met.

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In this very revealing memoir/biography hybrid, bestselling author Bryce Courtenay’s son Adam explores the motives and personality traits that shaped his father as a public figure and parent.

As a pathological fantasist, Bryce could not resist making up stories about his ancestry and life experience growing up in South Africa. Later, he was able to harness his success in advertising to making the leap into writing fiction. But he seemed unable to distinguish between the stories he invented on the page and the stories he told about himself, causing hurt and confusion at home.

Based on his own memories and conversations with many of Bryce’s friends and associates, Adam paints a complex portrait of a generous man who did everything - from running to drinking to writing at full tilt. His books The Power of One and April Fool’s Day earned him the adoration of millions, but he could never earn the respect of the literati. In Adam Courtenay’s account, his father was better at life in public than in private, finding fame easier than family.

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Elizabeth Harrower is not a household name in Australian writing, so how has she ended up with not one but two biographies, both published within a month of each other?

By sheer coincidence, journalist Helen Trinca and literary editor Susan Wyndham both found themselves on the Harrower trail, working through the same archives, talking to the same sources, each well aware of the other. This double shot of attention is ironic, given that Harrower was best known in the fifties for her novels The Long Prospect and The Watchtower, but withdrew a subsequent novel from publication and vanished from the literary landscape until she was rediscovered in 2012 by a publisher keen to revive her work for a new audience.

Both Trinca and Wyndham met Harrower on several occasions. What conclusions did they come to and where do they differ in how they see Harrower’s life and work? How do they interpret her decision to sabotage her career? In their first joint conversation, Trinca and Wyndham compare notes.

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Australian poet Dorothy Porter blazed across the literary scene like a meteor. She was even more seductive in real life than on the page and broke many women’s hearts in her short but busy amorous life. Now her adoring younger sister, Josie McSkimming has written Gutsy Girls, a revealing memoir biography of her sister and their family, exposing some of the darker aspects of life with their QC father Chester Porter.

A restless traveler, a passionate lesbian who fell in love as easily as breathing, Dorothy Porter consumed life at a heightened intensity and velocity. Her best known works made poetry part of the mainstream, including the crime verse novel The Monkey’s Mask. She beat cancer, but died in 2008 at the age of just 54, of pneumonia.

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Although there are several biographies of big game fishing bestselling American author Zane Grey, none of them focus on his two visits to Australia.

Author Vicki Hastrich is also a fishing enthusiast, so when she came across Zane Grey by accident, her interest was piqued. How had this handsome athletic man become the world’s first millionaire author? And why did he leave the US to set up camp on the south coast of NSW with a large entourage, generating massive public and media interest?

The Last Days of Zane Grey documents a man with a complex temperament driven by a larger than life appetite for the chase - of big game fish at sea, and of women on land. With a flair for hyperbole and self-promotion that was ahead of his time, Grey is part Hollywood, part Hemingway.

Hastrich’s lively and entertaining biography sparkles with prose that brings the ocean to shimmering life on the page while also capturing almost farcical moments of mishap involving a fake shark.

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