The Drawing Room

With his husky baritone voice and his stories of Australia—as it was, as it is, and as it could be—William Crighton is staking his claim to be part of the Australian songbook.

In the Drawing Room, William speaks with Andy Park about his new album Water and Dust, his family, his friendship with William Barton, and his love for writing about the human stories.

Influence can be built in many different ways, from the quiet conversations in the corridors of power to the loud attention of celebrity.

Social media has introduced a new playing field and a new title: 'influencer'.

And while the names that dominate online might not have the same household recognition as traditional celebrities, their work generates hundreds of millions of views and billions of dollars every year.

Given their reach, are the people with the biggest voices online in a position to quietly, and not so quietly, change the stories of our society?

Olivia Yallop is the author of Break The Internet: In Search of Influence.

The upcoming Federal election has seen a rise in independent candidates across the country - under the banner of groups like ‘Voices of’ and Climate 200.

But what drives someone to become involved in politics in Australia? And is it possible to truly maintain your independence?

Jo Dyer is the director of Adelaide Writers' Week and the author of Burning Down The House: Reconstructing Modern Politics. She's also one of the candidates running for parliament.

Globalisation was once seen, at least among the Western establishment, as a universal good: the 'rising tide that would lift all boats'.

Lately though, from the rise of Donald Trump to the challenges of Covid, that establishment view has come under increasing challenge from the very political powers that once supported it.

In their recent book, Six Faces of Globalization, Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp have identified six different narratives that have emerged about globalisation—each with its own perspective on the winners, the losers, and the eventual answers.

In a world full of complications and compromises, is it possible to be a truly moral person? To be truly good?

And how do we begin to explain the answer to thorny questions like 'is it ok to punch my friend in the face for no reason?'

Mike Schur is the creator of The Good Place and the author of How To Be Perfect and in the Drawing Room, he takes us from Aristotle to a heart-felt apology.

In an unnamed city, a man goes suddenly blind. Then another. And another, until it's clear that a pandemic is sweeping through the population.

The infected are sent to abandoned hospitals and set under armed guard, while outside the camps the government, and society, slowly fall apart.

Blindness was originally a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, but its most recent adaptation lies somewhere between theatre and sound installation.

In the Drawing Room, playwright Simon Stephens talks about his own path to theatre and how one actor changed everything about the show.

What rights do you have over the things that you own?

It used to be that if you bought something and it broke, you could pull it apart and fix it yourself.

But over the last few decades, companies have used design decisions, intellectual property law and software controls to make that much harder.

It all adds up to a lot more purchases and a lot more waste.

In the Drawing Room, Aaron Perzanowski, the John Homer Kapp Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Right to Repair, explains how we got to this point, and how change could occur.

Written into the bark of the red gums around Lake Boort, north-west of Bendigo in Victoria, is the living history of Dja Dja Wurrung country.

Preserved by the same dam that killed many of the trees, they now form the largest scar tree site in Australia.

It's a remarkable and overlooked record of pre-colonial Australia, and preserving this history has become a mission for a local historian and the Yung Balug clan.

"We need risk in our lives to be healthy humans. And we need it in part because it forces us to be more humble and it forces us to work with others."

Damien Cave has reported from war zones and natural disasters, but when he moved to Sydney to become the Australian bureau chief for The New York Times he had to learn how to confront a surprising new set of challenges.

It's made Damien consider his own openness on risk and in the Drawing Room, he explores how fear and failure has changed his perspective on the world.

The past is a permanent record: a series of events leading inexorably to the present day.

But the way that we understand those events, the telling of history, that can change significantly over the generations.

So what does it mean to 'make history' and shape the events of the past into a story that informs the future?

In the Drawing Room, the historian Anna Clark reflects on the changing philosophy behind Australian history.