Mel Bampton Presents...How Human

This is a story about that inner turmoil that plagues so many of us. It’s the sinister chisel of self-doubt that both breaks us down but also propels us, it’s the quest of answers in a life that comes with no guidebook, the hurts that can swallow us whole or see us striving to do our best. 
 
This is the story of Johnny Abegg, a once-aspiring pro-surfer, turned independent filmmaker, metamorphosised into the Founder of Surfers For Climate. He is a quiet and powerful changemaker, who recently released his most personal and introspective film - Fragments of a Half Life.

This is the tale of a beautiful legend, who’s turned his internal musings into visuals that help us all find our way. A beacon of manhood at a time when manhood is plagued with uncertainty and false prophets.

Come on a journey through the waves of Tasmania, into the surfing World Qualifying Series and an unexpected pivot, that's become a mechanism for understanding life.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

Live music, liberation, and the meaning of success - this conversation with Ben Ely is a deep dive into what truly matters. From the raw energy of Livid Festival and Brisbane’s underground music scene to Regurgitator’s intergenerational impact, we explore how creativity, relationships, and personal growth shape a musician’s journey.

In this episode, I sit down with Ben for the first time since 2008’s The Great Australian Album Series, reflecting on the changes, challenges, and revelations of the years in between. We talk about gentle sobriety, co-parenting, and the human drive to create music—why it’s more than just sound, but a tool for survival.

If you’ve followed my work over the past 30 years, you know I like to go deep, fast—so let’s get straight to it.

Themes you'll hear:

 🎵 The cultural rebellion of Brisbane’s live music scene
 🎵 Sobriety's impact on all aspects of life
 🎵 The key to Regurgitator’s long-lasting impact
🎵 Redefining success beyond fame and industry hype
🎵 The intersection of creativity, co-parenting, friendship and sobriety
🎵 Why music is essential to human survival

Follow & Connect:
📍 Follow Ben Ely 

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

This is a conversation for men about men, but it is also very much a conversation for all people, no matter how you identify, because we're all in this gigantic exquisite shitshow together. It is about the gap many of us are feeling and starting to acknowledge in this juncture of our attempts at equality and in it, Ryk Goddard offers a fascinating approach to reducing the world's suffering, through, wait for it, sex for men. And don't aim to make any preconceived notions about this conversation, because they will be incorrect. 

Ryk Goddard has an extraordinary mind. I met him for 6 minutes in Hobart and I was immediately fascinated by the sophisticated nuances in the way his brain ticked.
 
 Ryk Goddard is a comedian, an MC, a presentation skills coach, he’s from a theatre background and he is the mind the world needs right now.

You can find Ryk here 

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

Is there any more difficult terrain to navigate as a human being, than heartbreak? That wretched feeling when you know something has to end, it’s crushing, you feel your whole world tilting sideways and you know that things will never be the same – whether that’s because of an event, someone has crossed a line that there’s no going back from or because of the slow corrosion of a relationship dying over time.

How good would you say you are at breaking up?  What feelings does the very thought of a breakup initiate in your body? Are you in the pain of separation right now – at the start, the thick heavy going middle or the time of grief that comes with the spaciousness of the definitive end? How are you holding up? Are you separating as well as you'd like? 
 
In this episode of How Human, we’re looking at How To Break Up Well.

 Nikki Parkinson is a Divorce and Separation Doula, Coach, Strategist, Parenting Coordinator, with 30 years of experience in Family Law, she’s spoken at TEDx on these topics but her biggest learning curve was her own divorce. Nikki. During one of the hardest times of our lives, can we go into it - despite all of the hurt - with the goal of doing it well and achieve a wonderful outcome?

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

How does a small child recover from losing their Mum? Not just survive, full of self-destruction and fear, but learn great joy, even gratitude for the darkness that once was your universe?

How do you come back from the shame of things you once did as a result of that sense of abandonment, to truly love yourself as an equally precious part of the same 'one big organism'?

 I first met Clay Macdonald 22 years ago when The Beautiful Girls released their debut album Learn Yourself. Clay was one half of the band’s rhythm section, along with drummer Mitch Connoly and I was presenter of Triple J Drive at the time with Charlie Pickering. There was definitely a certain, let’s say, free spiritedness, that struck a chord with my punk anarchy. 

Over the years we’ve popped up in each other’s lives at the most seemingly random but of course, serendipitous times – charity surf comps, in the forest in the Northern Rivers and more recently on a relatively remote beach, several weeks in a row. I became fascinated by the man that Clay had become, living very simply was one part of it, the other was this effervescent, contagious joy that glimmers out of his entire being . 

How do you find that in a world that’s geared toward fear, toward self-doubt? How do you take that corrosive poison out of your heart and turn it into self-love? Meditating for two hours every morning, and stopping for 3 consious breaths every 3 hours is part of Clay’s secret, but there was so much more to Clay’s inspiring metamorphosis than I saw coming. 

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

Hannah Darling is abundant in life's extremes. She is poetry in motion and an alchemist turning despair, hardships and challenges into things of great beauty.

From shining on the stage in the Australian series The Voice, to loving someone in the chaos of heroin addiction. She has seen the pointy fringes of life's edges first-hand.

Hold onto your hearts friends, there’s a bumpy, beautiful ride ahead. Hannah Darling writes incredible songs, full of delicate stories that manage to pound at the door of your heart – and - she has a beautiful voice. Her gift comes to life in sound. A strange irony for her Mum, who was born a CODA – child of deaf adults – who became Mum to a singer. Hannah Darling, along with her Mum, navigates two worlds – a world heaving with soundscapes and a world where sound is absent. But that’s just a portion of Hannah’s tale - she grew up in a house of brothers - of drug addiction – it’s very worst consequence and it’s most unforeseen outcome. Hannah’s   fragility alchemises into strength through a trait that perhaps is the most absolute definition of human – the capacity to turn suffering into art.
 
 in the deaf community, Hannah and her Mum run festivals, events and immersive, nurturing, uplifting retreat experiences. Their aim – to fill the void between the most basic supports and the things that make a human life really worth living.

Follow Hannah's self=proclaimed 'ordinary life' here.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

What is the superpower of grace and how can it help us as humans to overcome enormous tragedy?

Madeleine West has seen the best and the worst of the human experience. She is an actor, becoming a household face in the iconic Australian shows Neighbours and Underbelly, a mother of 6, author of the book Six Under Eight and a staunch environmentalist. 

In 2002 Madeleine suffered terrible injuries when she was hit by a bus and whilst unconscious she was robbed. In 2022, Madeleine revealed that she was a child sexual abuse survivor and she sought justice against Peter White, her childhood neighbour who had abused her for 5 years. In making public her experience, 6 other victims came forward and Peter White was imprisoned for his crimes. 

How does someone learn how to keep getting up after being knocked down? What is in the human mind that enables one person to dust themselves off and rise with grace, and someone else to fall into a pit of darkness?
 
In this episode Maddy and I talk about serious injuries, child sexual abuse, being in command of your own mind, the discipline of grace and what part of the brain determines us as being  human.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

As a mother, a foster carer, a therapist and a fairly compassionate human being, I often watch the world in horror, as judgements are made about others disregarding the path they walked in their childhood. Often we express outrage at child abuse but when the effects of that abuse play out in that child during adolescents and into adulthood, suddenly all compassion dries up – we get convenient amnesia to make way for righteous outrcries – forgetting the horrors that person may have been raised in. 

For my guest today, the conditioning that was set in motion during their horrifically violent childhood wasn’t to be an abuser but a criminal. Every cell in his being was conditioned for crime, patterns violently forced upon him by his career criminal father. Along the way there were other harmful habits but the one that wove most deeply into Ron Isherwood was crime. His last stint in prison began in 2002 when he was sentenced to 18 years for conspiracy to import cocaine. 

Through it all, there was a strange and powerful thread in Ron, one in vast contrast to his upbringing – the desire to help others. And now, with his patterns of crime dissolved, helping others is his fulltime gig. Ron is the creator and founder of The Truth About Addiction and the author of Born Into A Lie Of Crime. This tale is of movie-esque proportions, full of grit and wisdom. So sit back and take it all in. This is not your everyday conversation.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

Over the past 15 years, since changing my career, my geography, my habits and my name, I've been on a great quest to learn about what makes us humans tick.  On this episode, I go solo to share some of the significant things I've learned about change along the way. 

What it means to make big life changes - do they really matter?
Why change is both so hard, as well as unavoidable.
What is the cage that keeps us all trapped in these loops of suffering?
And how do we fly free?

Join me for this juicy little snapshot into the human mind to understand yourself, and the people around you, a little better.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety

This episode takes yet another plot twist, with an indepth and intimate chat between two yoga teachers, together for 13 years, having raised 6 children between them and at times, holding on for dear life.

In this episode I invited in my own wingman, Shane Turner, and we put ourselves - and our relationship - under the microscope to reveal our own patterns, the conditioning that we developed through our own parent's relationships and the ones we've developed during our time together. We talk about the good, the icky and the problematic (or should I say pivotal?).

Relationship challenges, parenting patterns, the impact of the grim reaper, tools to withstand the tough times, the thrill of sharing someone else's clothes and so much more.

Support the show

Follow Mel Bampton for upcoming opportunities to support you to become a Master of Change:

• Instagram: @melbampton_
• Leave a review on Apple Podcast: 'Mel Bampton Presents...How Human'
• Subscribe to the website & get Mel's free 'Slaying Bad Habits Ebook'

Catch some of Mel's presentations:

The Uncensored Truth About Ovaries
Message From The Bottle: Stories Of Sobriety