The Readings Podcast

Please note, this episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse.

In this episode, hear David Meagher, author of Secrets and Lies, in conversation.

Secrets and Lies is a story about child sexual abuse; the culture that enabled it; how the perpetrator groomed his victims; how the abuse came to an end; and how, four decades after the crimes were committed, his victims embarked on a successful two-year journey to bring the offender to justice.

To interview David about this book, and this story, we’re joined by Stephen Brook, deputy editor of The Sunday Age.

In this episode, a conversation with poet and author Siân Hughes, whose book Pearl is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

Pearl is a stunning novel, originally published in the United Kingdom by The Indigo Press, and has just been republished in Australia by University of Queensland Press.

Pearl is a ghost story, a folk story, a story of loss and familial haunting. Hughes’ narrator, Marianne, is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love, and the songs and stories of her childhood. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.

In this episode, a conversation with journalists, Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, editors of the essay collection, Pandemedia: How Covid Changed Journalism.

The Covid-19 pandemic ripped through the world with no regard for borders, age, status or wealth. It was brutal in its impact and created a raft of new social norms. And without warning, the pandemic changed journalism, in some ways irrevocably. With contributors including Stan Grant, Michelle Grattan, David Speers, Alan Kohler, Lisa Millar and Dr Norman Swan, Pandemedia takes readers behind the scenes of Australia's media organisations to give a firsthand perspective on the new reign of the fourth estate.

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch for Eugen Bacon’s most recent novel, Serengotti.

This is a novel bathed in sensuous, original language, a love letter to the strong women who bind families together despite everything. It’s also a tender remembrance of the many who haven’t or couldn’t survive the dislocations and tragedies of their turbulent pasts.

For the launch, Bacon was in conversation with award-winning author and translator Dominique Hecq.

In this episode, author Kate Grenville talks about her latest book, Restless Dolly Maunder. This novel brings Kate’s grandmother to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.

This compelling new novel is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able — if at a cost —to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.

Grenville was interviewed by Yves Rees, writer, historian and podcaster who co-hosts Archive Fever.

In this episode, The Victorian Pride Centre on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, in Melbourne’s south, was opened on 11 July 2021. Its location, its design and its well-thought out objectives combine to make it one of the most imaginative and sympathetic public places in Australia.

Dr Judith Buckrich’s book, The Making Of The Victorian Pride Centre, details not only the building of this now-iconic centre and its gorgeous architecture, but also provides an overview of the history of LGBTIQ+ people in Australia, particularly in Melbourne, in a beautifully photographed and edited volume.

To go into the history of the Pride Centre, we were joined by Jude Munro, inaugural chair of the Victorian Pride Centre, and, Nicholas Henderson, sound curator at the National Film and Sound Archive and curator at the Australian Queer Archive. To interview our guests, we enlisted the help of James McKenzie, longtime broadcaster on 3CR Community Radio with the show In Ya Face.

In this episode, an interview with Polly Barton, writer and translator.

Barton is the author of two books of nonfiction, Fifty Sounds from 2021, and Porn: An Oral History, published this year. Barton has also translated numerous works of fiction from Japanese into English, including Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job – with more to come.

This episode is the fourth instalment of The Comics Question series. In these podcasts, Bernard Caleo and Nico Callaghan discuss comics, graphic novels, and the place they inhabit within the broader books and publishing world.

For this episode, Bernard and Nico sat down with Michael Fikaris, a central figure in both the comic book and street art movements of the early 2000s in his hometown of Melbourne. Fikaris has exhibited in professional and guerrilla contexts locally and abroad. His artwork is held in numerous private collections along with the National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of Victoria, and National Gallery of Australia.

In today’s episode, from one of Australia’s most wryly funny writers comes an original and utterly hilarious memoir of reaching for the stars while lying in a ditch.

Robert Skinner arrives in Melbourne, searching for a richer life. Things begin badly and then, surprisingly, get slightly worse. Pretty soon he’s sleeping rough and trying to run a literary magazine out of a dog park. His quest for meaning keeps being thwarted, by endless jobs, beagles, house parties, ill-advised love affairs, camel trips and bureaucratic entanglements.

Sometimes a book catches the spirit of the times, and Skinner’s book I’d Rather Not is about work, escape and that something more we all need.

In this episode, a discussion with author Angela O’Keeffe about her new novel, The Sitter.

Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.