The Drawing Room

Kim Salmon has played a defining role in grunge music and Australian rock, as a member of bands like The Scientists, Beasts of Bourbon, and Kim Salmon and The Surrealists.

It's been a decade since that last group released a new recording, but they're back with an improvised album called Rantings From the Book of Swamp.

In his new book, The Genes That Make Us, Professor Edwin Kirk looks at the people, the science, and the ethics of the genome.

It's been less than two decades since the human genome was mapped, and every year since then our knowledge has grown in leaps and bounds.

But how complete is that map and how much is still the modern equivalent of 'here be dragons'?

How did the spread of suburban banks lead to an age of armed robbery? And why did some criminals adopt the tactics of the anti-conscription movement?

In Mark Dapin's new book, Public Enemies, he traces the rise of armed robbery in Australia in the 1970s, and shows how some of the most infamous criminals were shaped by the society around them, and how they fought against it.

Apps have changed the dating landscape a lot over the last decade, but some women are still paying a penalty for being too forward or too successful.

In her new book, Emily J Brooks argues that women need to push back and embrace making the first move in a relationship, and that everyone needs to look for a teammate, instead of a soulmate.

Helen Reddy is famous for the feminist anthem I Am Woman. But her rise to fame wasn't easy.

When Reddy travelled to New York in the 1960s, she thought she had a recording contract locked up. But when she arrived, it turned out that the record company wasn't interested after all.

And so Reddy, a single mother from Australia without a work permit, had to find a way to stay in America and to conquer the music industry.

The new film, I Am Woman, tells her story.

Can children's music be entertaining for adults as well?

That's one of the challenges that sisters Byll and Beth Stephen set themselves when they started Teeny Tiny Stevies as a side-project.

It's been a very successful experiment and the band is three albums in, with songs about everything from emotional intelligence to anaphylaxis.

Can inspiration come from an algorithm?

For Sam Leach's new exhibition, Fully Automatic, he introduced an AI into his creative process.

Artificial intelligences have created stories, music and art, but none if it ever really passes close examination. What becomes possible when it's part of a collaboration?

Parties and crushes, study and hormones: early adulthood is an exciting and often confusing time.

Every moment and every decision can seem momentous.

In Georgina Young's debut novel, Loner, she captures the intensity of those days, and explores the need for human connection and for independence.

What if the ghosts of your past were literal, and the traumas you had endured came back to haunt you?

Jillian Nguyen and Shawn Seet discuss Hungry Ghosts, a new Australian TV show, in which four Australian families come face-to-face with their ghosts after a tomb is opened in Vietnam.

In the 1950s, Esther Amini was growing up in New York: a Jewish girl with an American childhood of ice skating, school lessons, and concerts at Radio City Music Hall.

But her parents had come from Mashhad in Iran. And in that city, their religion was banned and women were not expected to read, let alone become educated.

In her memoir, Concealed, Esther explores the split between the wider world and the world of her home, and the ways in which her parents' scars became part of her own story.