The Drawing Room

When the young daughter of a merchant sets sail on the Batavia to join her father, she's excited by everything around her: the nimble sailors, the giant soldier, the colours and sounds of the ship.

But anyone with a knowledge of the history will know that this story isn't going to end well. The story of The Batavia is one of horror: shipwreck, treacher,y murder and enslavement.

The Night Ship, the new novel by Jess Kidd, takes that history and crafts something new, moving between the distant and recent past, as the stories of two lonely children connect across the centuries.

What does it mean to be without a past? To have your connection to history taken away?

During the 20th Century, hundreds of thousands of children—some Australian born, some migrants—were placed in institutions or out-of-home care in Australia.

In 2009, then Prime Minister Keven Rudd made a formal apology to these Forgotten Australians, and pledged to stop it from happening again.

In their new show Sleeplessness, Kaz Therese explores what it means to be one of those familes and tells the story of their past through the fragments of history that remain.

Nature, we are often taught, is one giant competition: kill or be killed; survival of the fittest. But have we missed the forest for the trees?

As we learn more about the environment around us, we are finding complex layers of cooperation that allow the world to survive and to thrive.

Kristin Ohlson is an award winning writer, and in her latest book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Kristin looks at this changing understanding of nature and our own place within it.

Seen from the outside, the archipelago of Palawan is a place of amazing natural beauty, with remarkable forests and pristine beaches.

But Delikado, the new documentary by Karl Malakunas, exposes a darker truth: a province that is described as ‘eating itself up from the inside’.

The movie follows a small band of land defenders, who risk their lives to confront and arrest the illegal loggers who are clearing those forests.

For decades, Anthony Ham has travelled to the world’s wildest places and shared their stories, for the likes of Lonely Planet, National Geographic, and the New York Times.

His latest book, The Man Who Loved Pink Dolphins, takes readers deep into the Amazon rainforest, where a Scottish man, Christopher Clark, made his home with the people of Xixuaú and helped to to protect their land.

Tom Boyd is a champion of his game: the number one AFL draft-pick, he signed a massive contract with the Western Bulldogs and became a key part of their premiership-winning team.

But in the aftermath of his greatest victory, Tom faced perhaps his biggest challenge, and had to sit out part of the following season as he dealt with panic attacks and depression.

In 2019, he quit the game he had once loved, to find a new path.

Now, Tom’s written about that time, his struggles and his success, in a new memoir called Nowhere to Hide.

Tim Baker was living the dream as an award-winning surf writer, but one day everything was turned upside down when he learned that he had metastatic prostate cancer.

Doctors talked about survival rates and treatment plans, but Tim didn’t just want to survive, he wanted to heal and to keep a life worth living.

In the Drawing Room, Tim shares the ups and downs of his experience and talks about his new memoir, Patting the Shark.

With a collaboration that began before they ever met in person, Mindy Meng Wang and Tim Shiel have combined the tradition and history of the guzheng with the current trends of electronic music.

The end result is some beautiful cascading lo-fi vibes and their debut EP, Nervous Energy.

The global pandemic put the brakes on our ability to move around the globe for a time, but we’re once again on the move, and in droves, so what does this mean for our fragile planet?

That’s one of the questions at the heart of the latest project by the Australian Chamber Orchestra - The Crowd & I.

In the Drawing Room, the ACO's artistic director Richard Tognetti shares his thoughts on crowds, concert halls, and the challenge to concentrate.

What happens when you create your own take on a beloved character and it doesn’t go well?

Doctor Who is a central figure in pop culture in Australia and the 2005 relaunch of the show has been hugely successful.

But in 1996, an attempt to reboot Dr Who for an American audience received a very different response. The 8th doctor appeared in a single television movie, sparked outrage amongst fans, and then vanished from screens.

Matthew Jacobs was the writer on that project, and he’s the director, alongside Vanessa Yuille, of a new film, Doctor Who Am I, which explores his attempt to reconnect with the fandom that rejected him.