Speaking with...

Freedom of speech is often seen as a cornerstone of democracy, but the unfettered right to express opinions can infringe other fundamental rights. Minority groups are especially at risk of verbal attacks and intimidation, and some countries, including Australia, have legislated protections that limit free speech.

When Attorney-General George Brandis ordered a review of the Racial Discrimination Act and introduced amendments in a failed attempt to remove some of these protections in March this year, he ignited a passionate debate on the importance of free speech and its intersection with other human rights.

In this podcast, Tamson Pietsch speaks with Sarah Sorial about the role of free speech in a democracy and how it can co-exist with other rights.

Sarah Sorial is a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong who is researching the limits of free speech and deliberative democracy.

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Image: flickr/CeBIT Australia

Music: Free Music Archive/Podington Bear

Tamson Pietsch receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Bassist and lead singer of The Church, Steve Kilbey is one of Australia’s most prolific musicians. The band released their 25th album, Further Deeper, in October and will play The Queenscliff Music Festival this Saturday.

Kilbey speaks with Andrea Baker about his recently released memoir, Something Quite Peculiar, which describes his rise to fame, his heroin addiction and The Church’s resurgence.

Please note: This podcast contains mature themes and may not be suitable for younger listeners.

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Image: flickr/debra

Music reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Andrea Jean Baker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Antarctica is the coldest, driest and possibly the most inhospitable place on Earth. It is also the only continent designated entirely as a natural reserve, used purely for peaceful and scientific purposes.

For many decades, Antarctica has been the final frontier for scientific research, governed by a treaty system signed in 1959, that protects the continent from exploitation and military action. But as countries begin to eye off Antarctica’s wealth of natural resources, will this be enough to stop territorial disputes in the region?

Tamson Pietsch speaks with Nick Rowley about democracy on Earth’s coldest continent.

Nick Rowley is an Adjunct Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network at the University of Sydney; he is currently working on a project on Antarctic decision-making.

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Image: flickr/Alan Light

Music: Free Music Archive/Podington Bear, Chris Zabriskie

Tamson Pietsch receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Detroit is in turmoil, officially bankrupt and home to some of America’s poorest citizens. But 50 years ago it was thriving, boasting a booming manufacturing sector and a steadily growing educated middle-class.

What happened? Dallas Rogers speaks with George Galster on the fallout from the decline of the automotive industry, and the glimmer of hope new urban projects offer this troubled city.

George Galster is a professor in the department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University and the author of Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City.

Player Image: Flickr/ifmuth

Music: Free Music Archive/BLEO, Podington Bear, Jahzzar

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Dallas Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When natural disasters strike, the impact varies significantly across different social groups, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) communities are poorly accounted for in disaster management policy and practice.

Dallas Rogers speaks with Scott McKinnon on the different needs of the LGBTI community during a natural disaster event, and how emergency services, policy-makers and aid agencies can better respond to LGBTI populations.

Scott McKinnon is a Research Fellow on an Australian Research Council funded project investigating the experiences of LGBTI people in natural disasters.

Counsellors are available through the following services:

QLife - Ph: 1800 184 527 (free call, including mobiles), 5.30pm-10.30pm, 7 days

If you identify as LGBTI, have been impacted by a disaster and would like to share your experiences with the researchers, please contact Scott McKinnon: [email protected]

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Scott McKinnon receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

Russian-American writer and LGBT activist, Masha Gessen has covered every major development in Russian politics and culture of the past two decades. She is the author of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014), as well as six other books, including the international bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012).

Here, Judith Armstrong talks to Gessen about protest and politics in Putin’s Russia.

See also:

Why we underestimate Putin, according to Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is appearing at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival tonight and tomorrow and is also a guest of the Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas over the weekend.

Read more coverage of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Listen to other podcast episodes here.

Judith Armstrong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Is social media really delivering on its promise of democratising communication? Or have we just replaced one model that privileges those with power for another?

Dr Andrea Carson speaks with Professor Robert Picard, one of the world’s leading academics on government communication policies and media economics.

Listen to other podcast episodes here.

Andrea Carson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

At the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this week, a panel of poets, writers and performers will read and reflect on the poetry of the first world war. Among them is Mark Seymour, the former frontman of Hunters & Collectors and a fixture on the Australian music scene for the past three decades.

Here, Andrea Baker talks to Seymour about his life-long fascination with war, the manipulation of language in songwriting, and saving Nick Cave on stage.

Read more coverage of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Listen to other podcast episodes here.

Andrea Jean Baker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ruth Reichl, the former restaurant critic of The New York Times and author of best-selling gourmet memoirs Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples, is known for describing, in vivid detail, how food can define us.

While in Australia this week, to discuss her first novel Delicious! at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Reichl talks with food researcher Isabelle de Solier about why food really matters, the social contract of inviting people to dinner, “industrial food” and the importance of getting people back into the kitchen.

Ruth Reichl will be appearing at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 August. Details here.

Read more coverage of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Listen to other podcast episodes here.

Isabelle de Solier (IDS): My name is Isabelle de Solier and welcome to The Conversation podcast. I’m speaking with food critic Ruth Reichl, who’s in Australia for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival where she will be discussing her first novel Delicious! and sharing tips on the art of food writing and restaurant criticism.

Ruth, welcome. Let me start by asking you about the significance of food in our lives. What’s your response when people say, “it’s just food”? Why does food matter?

Ruth Reichl (RR): Oh that’s such a big question. The quickest way to answer this is when I went for a tour through San Quentin Prison, they told me that they made sure that, in this high security prison, they had really good food because all riots in prisons started in the cafeteria.

And the truth is that food is the primary concern of people, you need food and water to exist and it drives just about everything else in our lives. It drives our social relations, it drives our politics, it drives the way we connect to each other, it drives the environment. And if you don’t care about food, you ultimately really don’t care about life.

You can not care about flavour, which would be a shame because you would be denying yourself a great pleasure. But to not care about food, to not think about food, to not think about what it means today that half the world has too much to eat and the other half doesn’t have enough to eat is to really not understand the major problems of the world.

And down the road, I mean as we’re speaking, I mean we’re in like, one of the most horrific times that I can think of, certainly in my lifetime, I mean there are horrible things happening all over the world. The Middle East is exploding, America at the moment is having race problems, but that’s nothing compared to the coming issues we are going to be having with water.

You know, if you don’t think about those things, you’re really denying what’s important in life.

IDS: I think part of the critique often directed at food culture today is that it epitomises consumerism, and in the research that I did with amateur foodies for my book, Food and the Self, I found that producing food, in terms of cooking it was more important to them, and held a higher value for them than just consuming it in restaurants.

I’d like to know what your thoughts are on this and if you think there’s been a return to cooking and production in food culture as opposed to more of an obsession with restaurants and consumption in the 80s.

RR: Well, I think you can divide this in two ways. If you think about producing food, is there a return to gardening? Yes. Is there a return to young people being interested in farming, which I mean, we’re losing farmers at an incredible rate, now we have a generation of smart young people who are interested in farming again. That’s all to the good.

Are we losing cooking? Sadly, we are. You know, I’m kind of shocked at how little knowledge young people have about how to produce food and I feel like one of the real things that we need to be doing is getting people back into the kitchen. Getting people comfortable, I mean, cooking is easy! It is my belief that it is man’s natural activity. You know, it’s like what makes us human. We cook, they don’t.

Cooking is also the most generous impulse. I mean people cook as a form of an expression of love, I mean it’s a generosity to want to feed people and I am really hoping for a time when this sort of foodie obsession with running to the newest restaurant will come around to an obsession with feeding people.

One of the reasons I stopped being a restaurant critic was that I was increasingly disturbed by the amount of private time people were spending in public spaces. It’s a very different thing to meet people in a restaurant. To say “meet me at a restaurant for a meal”, than to say “come to my house for dinner.” Because when you say come to my house for dinner you are not just saying come to my house, I’m going to cook for you, you are sharing your life, you are opening yourself up, you are becoming vulnerable. I mean, people come to your house and they see if you are messy, if you have good taste, if your children have manners, if your animals are disciplined, it’s a kind of vulnerability that we are no longer ready to risk.

So, I’m hoping for people to start cooking again for so many reasons. More than just it’s a wonderful thing to know how to cook, it’s a very pleasurable thing, there’s nothing nicer than having people around your table, there’s nothing more comforting than knowing that you know how to feed your family on very little money, which you need to know how to cook to do.

But it’s bigger than that. The whole social contract that happens around a table, it’s very different in a restaurant than it is in a home.

IDS: One of the main changes in the sphere of restaurant reviewing in recent times has been the emergence of online amateur food criticism, and in particular, food bloggers. How do you view amateur restaurant bloggers?

RR: You know there are many ways of doing a restaurant review. Restaurant criticism is no different to any other kind of criticism. The primary purpose of a good critic is to enhance the experience for the reader. So if you read a really good critique and you go to a museum, you see that art in a different way.

And with restaurant criticism, with a really good critique, you go to that restaurant prepared to experience that food in a richer way. You’ve learned something about, you know, where this food comes from, where the chef comes from, where it fits into the history of restaurants.

The kind of blogging reviews that happen are essentially consumer reports. They’re … go spend your money here or don’t spend your money there. And what I like about them is that as a consumer of those kind of critiques, you need to use your own judgement. You need to be able to triangulate between: this is probably a friend of the chef, it’s his mother, this is a disgruntled person who is probably a jerk. You need to like read them and bring your own intelligence to it.

And the other side of it is that it has made the professional critics better. I mean I think, certainly in the United States right now, we have the best restaurant critics we have ever had. I mean they are the most knowledgeable, the best writers, the most interesting group of restaurant critics we have ever had. Because restaurant critics used to able to just be consumer reporters.

I mean if you look at Craig Claiborne, who essentially invented restaurant criticism in the United States, all he was really doing was saying was “spend your money here, don’t spend your money there”, and if you look at the evolution of it and you look at say, Jonathan Gold who was the only American ever to win a Pulitzer for restaurant criticism. I mean what he brings to it is so incredible. He’s comparing food to music, he’s putting in context, if he’s eaten, you know if he’s writes about a taco he’s comparing it to every other taco in LA.

IDS: When you were working as a restaurant critic, especially the New York Times, you were often described, in terms of the cliche, as having the power to make or break a restaurant. How did you handle this kind of power and responsibility as a critic? What kind of ethics do you think structured your reviewing?

RR: If you believe that criticism is important, and that’s a big “if”, but if you believe it’s important, it’s important to be fair. And being fair means saying something is bad when it’s bad. Although always acknowledging that what you are talking about is basically something that’s going on in your mouth, I mean it’s like, it’s your idea of bad.

But what I kept, a photograph of a young couple who only got to go out once a year. And they saved their money all year and they went out for a really great meal and they went out on their anniversary. And I imagined that I had written a very nice review of a place that wasn’t very good, and that they went and spent their money at this restaurant and were very disappointed and they were my reader. And my responsibility was to them, not to the restaurant. They were the people who were paying my salary. And every time I was tempted to pull my punches, I’d look at that photograph and think: they’re going to be disappointed.

And, it’s hard to do. I mean you don’t want to, if you are a normal human being, your inclination is not to be be mean and to close restaurants and to put people out of work. On the other hand, that couple, it’s not fair to them if you’re saying this restaurant is good when it just isn’t.

IDS: Another thing when you worked as a restaurant critic for The New York Times, you decided to wear disguises when visiting restaurants so you wouldn’t be recognised and given preferential treatment. Some of your identities included Molly, a frumpy blonde and Brenda, a bohemian redhead. How were your various characters treated differently, and what do you think it revealed about prejudice towards different kinds of people in society?

RR: Well, certainly Betty, my frumpy little old lady, was treated like dirt in every restaurant she went to. But the other thing that it taught me was that we’re basically in control of how the world perceives us. Betty was a little old lady, but so was my mother - who I also turned myself into - and she knew, that if you are going to go to an expensive restaurant, you dress up. You demand respect.

And part of, for me, I mean it was fascinating, because I had never really cared about clothing or what I looked like and I didn’t really feel like I was in control of it. But doing all of these disguises was so odd because I would put on all of these disguises but inside I was still me. But what happens is that people respond to what they’re seeing. And suddenly, I would respond to their response.

And so suddenly I would be wild Brenda, who was lovely. I mean she was just the loveliest person, I mean my family liked Brenda better than they liked me! She was so nice, I mean nothing ever bothered her. She was the ultimate “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”, and I realised that we are in control of how we get treated.

And you know, if you go to a fancy restaurant in shabby clothes, they don’t want to see you in that front seat. I mean restaurants are kind of theatre, and to me, you know it’s a contract with the restaurant. If you’re going out to spend a lot of money in a restaurant, their deal with you is that they take your major money and in return they will give you the illusion, if only for a few hours, that you are a privileged person.

But if you want that experience, you have to dress the part. And so you know the contract goes a little bit both ways.

IDS: And did your experience of playing those different characters influence you when you were writing you new novel Delicious!?

RR: Absolutely. I mean when I decided I wanted to write fiction, well actually an editor came to me and said, “You should write fiction” and I said, “well, you know, I’m a memoirist”, I’m not sure I can write fiction. And she said, “oh come on Ruth! What do you think you were doing when you wore all those disguises?” She said, “you weren’t writing fiction but you were living fiction. All you have to do is figure out what character you want to be and instead of being her, put her on the page”.

And she said, “who do you want to be?” And I said, “I want to be 21!” [laughs], and so Billy is 21.

IDS: You said that your Jewish identity is very important to you. How has that shaped your relationship with food?

RR: My mother was the antithesis of a Jewish cook, the sort of stereotype of a Jewish cook is someone who cooks things to death. My mother barely cooked things. I mean, she’s put a turkey in the oven and pull it out ten minutes later and in tell you it was cooked! And I did not grow up with classic Jewish food, and in fact, don’t have much taste for it.

I grew up in a very sort of Jewish intellectual household, that maybe because my parents were Jews, they almost deliberately disdained food. They were, like “food isn’t important to us at all. We don’t care”. And so in response to their not caring, I care enormously.

I certainly don’t come from any religious background, but my parents were very strongly cultural New York Jews. I realise now because so many of my friends are not Jewish, what a small world, I mean, I grew up in publishing, and my parents’ friends were, pretty much, all Jews. It’s odd to think about because none of them were religious. You know, I went to a public school in Greenwich village, the schools were empty on the Jewish holidays.

IDS: The contemporary obsession with food and popular culture in everyday life comes at a time when rates of obesity in the US and Australia are extremely high with 25% of adults in Australia and 35% of adults in the US are obese, and projected to rise further. What role, if any, do you think the food media has to play in educating people, not only about the pleasures of food, but also about health and nutrition?

RR: My own bias on this is less with the notion of health and nutrition and more with the notion of get rid of industrial foods. I don’t think that people need to think of food as medicine to be healthy. But I do think that clearly, we have run an experiment on two generations now, where we have allowed our food to be industrialised and constantly refined, become worse and worse and worse.

And it’s very clear that, I don’t know if it’s the antibiotics, but you have to think about the antibiotics that are used in the meats in the United States. You know 80% of the antibiotics in the United States are used on perfectly healthy animals, and it’s basically to fatten them up. Well is that fattening us up? The jury is out on that.

Is the fact that people think it’s perfectly normal to drink 64 ounces of soft drinks? You know, is the fact that kids get these huge empty calories in soft drinks, that they’re eating cereal that is filled with chemicals, that we allow children to be advertised to, who are sitting ducks. Kids are plonked in front of the television and there are these ads about terrible foods and these ads are being streamed at them constantly. They have no way of filtering them at all.

Eating we know is learned behaviour. Japanese children do not grow up liking rice and fish because they have a natural inclination, that’s what they’re fed.

Children learn to like what they’re fed and so my real bias on this is that I wish we had less sort of “touchy-feely” media about food and more a hard hitting: this is a political issue, we need the government to step in on this. The food lobby is enormous in the United States and we need to activate people because these things are only going to change when people get up on their two feet and start demanding that the government institute laws about what we are allowed to be fed. What children are allowed to be fed, what children are permitted to watch. I mean we really need to take control of this.

IDS: So the industrialised food system is sort of the key?

RR: I think so. I don’t think it matters how much fat and eggs and butter you eat if you are eating real food. But I think we, and we in the media, really need to, it is really important for us, to just keep going over this again and again and again and again, and making things transparent.

You know we’ve done a very good job in the United States of making “cafos”, confined animal facilities, 10 years ago, nobody knew that animals were being tortured in animal factories, people know that now. If you choose to eat industrialised pigs and that those animals have miserable lives. We really need to keep pushing for transparency in everything.

IDS: Do you think the shift towards local food is important as part of that?

RR: I think it’s very important. I think that you know for one thing keeping money inside the community is very important. The more we globalise food and, you know, make it cheaper for people to buy food from China than food from the farmer next door, the more we are making our own environments worse places.

We need farmers. We need food to be local. The safest way to eat is to know the people who raised your food. You know, one of the big problems we are finding with these huge food epidemics of food-born illnesses is that it’s very hard to trace. You know, what sickened these people? Where do these animals come from? Where did that cantaloupe come from that made people sick?

If you are buying, you know, if someone in you family gets sick and you bought food from the farmer next door, it’s very easy to trace.

IDS: As you spoke about earlier, there’s 800 million people in the world who don’t have enough food to eat, and it’s not just a problem confined to the developing world, but also one on our doorstep with 5% of households in Australia and 15% in the United States of people experiencing food insecurity.

RR: I think it’s more than that. I think it’s one in five children in the United States goes to bed hungry. One in five.

IDS: What do you see as ways of addressing this?

RR: It’s such a big problem and we all know that it’s largely a problem in the third world. It’s largely a problem of distribution, it’s not that there’s not enough food. In western culture, one of the ways you address it is that people need to learn to cook again. You know, if you know how to cook, it’s easy to live on things like rice and beans, which are very cheap. And if you know how to balance protein. If you think that you need meat at every meal, you create a system of scarcity.

So, part of it is teaching people to eat, part of it is, waste is an enormous issue and not just on the macro level but, within households. I mean the amount of food, there are estimates that, you know 50% of food in the states gets essentially wasted. And part of it is, we need to teach people to cook on a household level. People are just throwing things out.

One of the things that is really encouraging is that chefs all over the world are starting to address these issues. When I first started reviewing restaurants there were no second harvests, no food pantry people. Now there are people who go and collect food from restaurants for redistribution.

But again, I can’t speak to Australia, but the biggest issue in the United States is taxation policy. It’s like we tax the wrong things. So meat is subsidised, sugar is subsidised. If you changed that and you started subsidising healthy food. I mean there’s a reason why when you go to McDonald’s – it is cheap to buy a hamburger and more expensive to buy a salad. And that’s because of our tax policy.

So, so much of this needs to be changed at a government level. It’s very hard for individual people to do anything other than lobby the government.

Isabelle de Solier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Andrew Lock is the most accomplished high-altitude mountaineer in Australian history. He is the only Australian, the first person in the Commonwealth, and just the 18th man in the world to climb all 14 of the world’s 8000-metre mountains, including Everest – twice.

Here, sports scientist David Bishop talks with Lock about “grit”, the psychological and physical stamina required for 24-hour days of climbing, and how he digs deep enough to achieve such incredible goals.

Andrew Lock appeared at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for Great Journeys: Mountains on Sunday August 24 at 1pm.

Read more coverage of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Listen to other podcast episodes here.

David Bishop (DB): My name is David Bishop from ISEAL at Victoria University and welcome to this The Conversation podcast. I am speaking with Andrew Lock, the most accomplished high altitude mountaineer in Australian history, who has recently written a memoir about his experience, Summit 8000, and will be appearing at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival later this month.

Andrew, welcome. Let me start by asking, which was the greatest challenge, climbing all of the world’s 8000-metre mountains or writing Summit 8000?

Andrew Lock (AL): [Laughs] It’s a fair question. I think at the time they both seemed the harder of the two. This is my first book and it took a couple of years and a few false starts. It was certainly a challenge, although a very enjoyable challenge and just as enjoyable as climbing the mountains themselves.

DB: Great, because everyone I speak to says it’s one of the most difficult things that they’ve ever done in writing a book.

AL: Yeah, I’m not a particularly introspective person, and what I found is that the book forced me to be that. I had kept very comprehensive diaries through all my expeditions. I had really detailed notes to refresh my memory but the perennial question of course is: “Why do you do it?” and “What did you feel?” and I needed to answer that question as best I could in a book. For that I had to dig quite deep and also, I’m actually a very private person so revealing a lot about myself was quite an emotional challenge. But my publisher and my agent kept cracking the whip and I think I managed to do that for them.

DB: I’ve just finished reading another book, its called The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler and it talks about how extreme athletes have redefined the limits of the possible. It seems to me that you are superman and your achievements must have seemed impossible not that long ago. How do you think you’ve been able to redefine the limits of possible?

AL: Look, I definitely would not consider myself to be a superman, I am very much an average person from an average background. But I do think that it’s the very lucky people in life who discover their innate ability and love doing that. For me that was mountaineering and because I already had an affinity for the outdoors, when I discovered mountaineering, I took to it like a duck to water and absolutely loved it. For me the adventures in the outdoors have always been about taking on challenges where the outcome is uncertain. Because if it’s guaranteed then for me there’s no point in doing it.

In order to then achieve those challenges and overcome the obstacles both internal and physical, that forced me every time to draw deeply upon my own motivation and physical stamina. The 8000 metre mountains – every single one of them is an enormous challenge every time.

I went on one of these expeditions and I had to dig deeper and deeper each time and when I finished I achieved one particular objective, then I set my sights on a more difficult one so I had to dig deeper each time and I think all of us have that capability it’s just a matter of identifying the process of what’s forcing us to draw upon it.

DB: This author, Steven Kotler, discusses how athletes have been able to achieve the impossible by tapping into “flow”. Which is an optimal, almost effortless, psychological state that allows us to be our best. Is this something that you get often when you are climbing or when you are falling?

AL: Well actually, that’s very interesting that he said that because I would agree wholeheartedly. I probably don’t feel like I’m flying when I’m falling but the state that I’m trying to achieve when I’m climbing is a physical and mental state where I am pushing really hard, but not to the extent that I’m going to burn out in a short amount of time. Because climbing on these mountains can be 10 hours a day for weeks and weeks and weeks, and a summit a day is invariably at least an 18-hour or 24-hour day of climbing. You’ve got to get into that zone where you keep going despite the pain and the misery and waning motivation. Just find that zone where you just keep on going, and of course as you see the mountains dropping away below you and the distance of the entire planet opens up before you, that’s a great motivator to keep on going.

And when I achieve that zone, and it isn’t on every mountain because weather conditions and difficulties can stop it. But when I do achieve that zone I find that I can just go and go and go and I think it’s a bit like long distance running – you just click into that zone.

DB: I guess why I mentioned falling is because he describes it as when everything is happening very quickly around you but there’s also this – it’s kind of like the world slows down and you can see all of the options – yeah I need to grab here and I need to grab here, I need to open my legs I need to do this and that and I was just wondering whether you also get to that physiological state when there is maybe a more dangerous instance during your climbing?

AL: Well, I am very focused, I certainly find I am extremely focused when I climb and in fact I liken it to almost being meditative because you are so focused and it’s a prolonged state of meditation because you are focused for weeks and weeks.

And yes, one becomes hyper-vigilant for all the dangers and the threats that are around you. But you are also very focused on the immediacy of what you are doing so as you say, looking for the right hand hold or the right placement of your ice tool? Or crampon points or whatever and that is a very tunnel-visioned focus, which does last for days and days and weeks throughout the expedition.

DB: It’s obvious that it takes great mental strength to do what you’re doing. Is there any specific training that you do in this regard or is just something that you think you have naturally?

AL: I do have a natural physiology that allows me to cope with high altitude but of course I have to train. I don’t train psychologically other than the fact that I love having epics so whenever I go for an outdoor adventure it’s always one that tests me as much as I can.

But in terms of physical training for the mountains, high altitude, particularly legs and lungs – it’s all about stamina and as I get older I have to train more and more, running and mountain biking and building that stamina. Because that explosive power that we have when we are young isn’t what you need at high altitude it’s just long days for ten or so weeks.

DB: And with that training, is that self-directed at the moment or do you consult with a sports scientist for example?

AL: No, I’ve never gone down the sports science track, I’m completely self-directed. I’ve joined gyms in the past and not enjoyed them so I do it under my own guidance. But I’m quite a, perhaps not an introvert, but I’m very comfortable with my own space, so I’m happy to train hard by myself and in fact I think I enjoy it more when I’m training by myself. But I like to have adventures with climbing partners. I don’t climb solo all the time but I don’t struggle for motivation to get out into it on my own.

DB: And what about, I guess in the climbing world, you know right at the beginning, we were talking about the limits of possible and I guess as we get closer and closer to those limits, is climbing becoming more professional, with other climbers using sports psychologists or nutritionists or sports scientists etc.?

AL: It may well be, I haven’t come across that, but it’s certainly becoming more commercialised and more available to less-experienced people through the use of guides and supported Sherpas. It may well be extreme athlete climbers who do seek that sort of professional scientific support, but I’m not actually aware of it.

DB: I was surprised that in your book you described yourself as not a supreme athlete, but even though you might not see it, I see a lot of parallels between you and other great athletes. For instance, there’s a controversial theory that you need 10,000 hours or about ten years to become an elite athlete and this seems to match pretty well with your training for your first 8,000 metre ascent and I was wondering if you could maybe just explain just a little bit of your nine years of preparation to climb K2.

AL: Yeah, that’s a very good point. When my dream to start mountaineering was born, I had seen a slide show about climbing Mount Everest and I was so inspired by that vision that I decided I’d climb with myself. But you couldn’t be guided in those days, and I’m not the sort of person who would want to be so it really became a matter of project management. So whilst the end goal for me was climbing Mount Everest, I had to break that down into achievable chunks, the first of which was to learn how to rock climb, which I did in Australia and I climbed fanatically in Australia for a year before travelling to New Zealand and transferring those rock skills and rope skills to the alpine environment and I climbed for successive years in New Zealand building my alpine skills then climbing around the world building my altitude skills. And then, finally, taking on 8,000 metres.

But in fact my first two 8,000 expeditions, which were to Mount Everest, were unsuccessful and partly because I was drawn into the rescues and assisting other people on the summit pushes but also I think there was probably some poor decisions made which I needed to learn from. So I decided to step back from Everest and then to go and climb a few other 8,000 metre mountains and build some more experience before I came back to Everest, and as you say, the first successful summit was actually K2 about nine years after I first started climbing. And ironically, that is generally considered to be the hardest mountain in the world but I guess I developed sufficient skills to get me up there although it was a desperate, very difficult ascent and a desperate descent.

DB: It’s interesting, and I guess this ability to take small persistent steps towards a long-term goal has been described as “grit” and there’s a researcher in America, Angela Lee Duckworth, who thinks it’s one of the most important determinants of elite performance. How important do you think this grit has been in enabling you to achieve your incredible feats to date?

AL: It’s been absolutely vital. As I mentioned, the descent from K2 was desperate and in fact two of my climbing partners were killed in that fall. Another climber from another team also died. And whilst I didn’t actually identify it at the time, I think I was affected by those deaths and my motivation waned a little bit for just for a couple of years, and I still kept climbing but I then didn’t succeed on the mountains I went to.

And I made a conscious decision that I would either start succeeding or take up a different activity and with that conscious decision that I would simply not give up when I was tired, sick, exhausted, scared, or whatever, I would force myself through those stages and only allow myself to turn around when it was, you know, simply too difficult for me or the risk was no longer acceptable. That developed in me a new psychological approach of simply – grit is a great word for it – that I would keep going no matter what until either of those two things stopped me, the risk was too great or it was beyond my ability.

And, with that newfound psychology, if you like, I started to succeed very regularly in the mountains. That didn’t make the mountain climbing any easier, I still had plenty of epics and a few close survival experiences, but I found myself time and again in situations where I was really very, very tired and just wanted to get down, and get back to warmth after being on the mountain for weeks or in blizzards or trapped to very difficult climbing conditions. But I just would not let myself give up and I think grit is probably the right word.

DB: How do you think you have been able to push yourself to the very limit, but also quite accurately assess the risks, so how do you think you’ve been able to do that maybe a little bit better than some of the other climbers?

AL: To be honest I was lucky in the first instance to be able to survive the accidents, of course of deaths of those three climbers, but I learnt from it and I very quickly became a good risk manager. Now, I continued to be lucky, there were incidents that occurred where others were killed and I could have been and I was just purely lucky, but I certainly chose to take a very risk-management focus to all of my climbs so it’s always about calculated risk.

And there were plenty of times when I deemed it too dangerous to go on and that I needed to turn around or just on a particular day the conditions were too cold and I needed to turn around, but just come back the following day just to fight off frost bite on that particular day, and so that drew the process of climbing those mountains out for a number of years.

One particular mountain took me five attempts because on several of those attempts the conditions were too dangerous and it was my own risk assessment that caused me to turn around and go back down and come back another year.

It was always a great disappointment because it delayed my objectives and cost a lot of money and affected all of the other aspects of my life, but that was very, very important to me because at the end of the day they are just lumps of rock and ice.

DB: So that comes back to the “grit” I guess and the key to keep pushing on with that long-term goal in mind.

AL: Yes that’s right. The long-term goal of climbing all the peaks evolved from when I eventually summited Mount Everest in 2000, that was my seventh successful 8,000 metre summit and as I mentioned before, I like challenges where the outcome is uncertain, and the end of one challenge is always the starting point for the next.

So having climbed Mount Everest, I licked four of the next big challenges and at the time only half a dozen of the world’s elite climbers had climbed all 14 of the 8,000 metre peaks so that seemed an appropriate challenge. I didn’t really think that I would be able to achieve it because all of those other climbers were in a completely different dimension as far as mountaineering elitism goes. But therefore it made it a worthwhile challenge and a project to focus on and to push towards no matter how many years it took.

DB: And the way you described it, I guess climbing often seems like a solitary pursuit, but I was interested to read that you like climbing in teams so I’m just wondering if you can tell me a little bit about the team sport aspect of climbing a mountain?

AL: Oh look I think adversity shared is – makes the achievement – far more enjoyable. I don’t like climbing in big teams, I don’t tend to enjoy the dynamics of big teams, but small teams of like-minded individuals – two or three – to me that’s an ideal size where you can work together. The leadership in those sort of circumstances is generally shared and if you’re climbing with people of similar experience and philosophy as to the approach to the climb then it can be a very enjoyable experience and I found that relationship with two or three other climbers over the years, where we almost didn’t need to speak when it came to a particular challenge, a cliff that we had to climb or a crevasse we had to cross or whatever, we just knew what we had to do and we did it to the satisfaction of the other members of the group.

But you know, it is psychologically very supportive to have team members to share the fears and the adversity with when times are really tough. And so of course we share the elation of success at the end of those expeditions.

I have climbed solo on some of them and that’s a completely different challenge. That’s more of a psychological challenge and whilst there’s a great sense of satisfaction, at the end of it you don’t have anyone to share it with, it is not as much fun.

DB: One of the hot topics of sport is talent identification. If we were to try and find the next great Australian climber, what sort of characteristics do you think we should look for?

AL: Hm, gosh that’s a good question. I’d be looking for people who are under the radar, are out climbing interesting, technically challenging peaks in ranges of little expeditions and exploration and who are doing it off their own bat without sponsorship because they tend to be the ones who have that grit to take on the really big challenges without the need for kudos or a camera in their face.

There are Australian climbers out there doing great things in remote and barely-known mountain ranges so Australia already has great climbers out there doing things. I just happened to get a bit of publicity because of the particular peaks I was climbing, but those high-achieving Australian climbers are already in action.

DB: Well thanks for your time today Andrew, good luck with the book and also your appearance at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival later in the month.

AL: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for that.

David Bishop does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.