The Drawing Room

Late 1800s naturalist John Muir once said "rivers flow not past, but through us."

They blend land and water, carrying and supporting life; creating valleys in which humans grew the first food and set up the first cities. And yet we have not been kind in return.

In the Drawing Room, Jennifer Peedom discusses her latest documentary, River.

When Anna Qu was fifteen, she was put to work in her family's sweatshop in New York, working long hours after school cutting the threads off clothes and taking the train home alone late at night.

Meanwhile her half-siblings had lives of relative comfort and support.

Eventually Anna allowed her guidance councillor to call child services on her parents, and their relationship changed forever.

Anna has written about her life in a new memoir, Made in China.

Bob Dylan's songs sit at the heart of modern America's music and storytelling traditions.

Those songs also form the heart of the recent musical, Girl From the North Country, which takes audiences to Dylan's hometown of Duluth, Minnesota in the midst of the Depression into which Dylan was born.

Terence Crawford and Elizabeth Hay, two of the stars of the Australian production, talk about their own relationship with the music.

It's become one of the most powerful companies in the world, valued at more than one trillion dollars, with warehouses and high tech fulfilment centres across the globe and a huge media empire as a side-hustle.

But what are the impacts of Amazon's remarkable success: on businesses, on workers, and on governments?

Alec MacGillis is a reporter with ProPublica and the author of Fulfilment: Winning and Losing in One Click America.

Bernie Krause has been listening to the world for decades, travelling from one end of the Earth to the other to capture the sounds that make each habitat unique: their biophony.

His installation piece, The Great Animal Orchestra—created in association with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and presented as part of the Biennale of Sydney—gives listeners a chance to travel with him.

In the Drawing Room, Krause explains why listening helps his ADHD and how sound can reveal the environmental impact of development.

"Sometimes you just can't stop yourself from writing about the things that need to be written."

When Courtney Marie Andrews started writing her latest album, Old Flowers, she had just come to the end of a nine-year relationship.

At first, she tried to write songs about other things, to take her mind off the situation. But eventually she gave in, let herself heal, and created a beautiful breakup album along the way.

In The Drawing Room, Courtney talks about the wrong paths she's avoided, writing from the heart, and the importance of aimless walks.

Slab waves are some of the most impressive and terrifying things you're likely to see in nature: waves the size of a forty foot apartment building crumbling onto a few centimetres of water and, below that, a hard ground of rock and reef.

Only a few daring souls would even consider taking a surfboard out onto one.

In the Drawing Room, Bentley Dean talks about his new documentary, Facing Monsters, which follows Kerby Brown as he tests himself against those wild conditions and turns surfing into an artform.

Cedric Burnside is a third-generation blues musician.

Growing up listening to his family play at house parties and juke joints, he realised that music would always be a part of his life. And by the age of thirteen, he was touring internationally with his grandfather, R. L. Burnside.

In the Drawing Room he talks about those early tours, his recent success, picking up falconry and DIY disasters during lockdown.

What do you see when you look into the night sky?

Do you know the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross?

What about the Celestial Emu and the Seven Sisters?

The skies of Australia were the focus of stories and study long before Europeans set foot on this land. And that knowledge from First Nations Peoples is beginning to be more widely acknowledged and celebrated.

Associate Professor Alice Gorman is a Space Archaeologist and the guest editor of Astronomy: Sky Country, a new book in the First Knowledges series, written by Gomeroi astrophysicists Krystal De Napoli and Karlie Noon.

"Don't say anything that isn't true."

Colm Tóibín's work spans eras, genres and takes on everything from the domestic to divinity, and he has been rewarded with a collection of the major prizes from around the world.

But this year, he celebrates a new debut—his first collection of poetry.

In the Drawing Room, Tóibín discusses the rules of poetry; the surprising observations he made while recovering from cancer; and his recent novel The Magician.