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In this episode we have a conversation with acclaimed author, Kate Grenville, to discuss her most recent book, Unsettled. Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River. More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”. So she decided to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions. This gripping book is the result of that journey.

In this episode, a conversation recorded at the launch of Shapeshifting, a wide-ranging collection of nonfiction by First Nations writers co-edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven. With Evelyn Araluen and contributors. These lyric essays push the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the biographical or the academic, with pieces that experiment with form and embark on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.

In this episode, a conversation with academic Kate Fitz-Gibbon, and author of Our National Crisis. In this book, Fitz-Gibbon explains why violence against women and children is not a series of isolated incidents but a pervasive, systemic issue. The impacts of this violence on individuals, families and communities are wide-ranging and can be long-term. Addressing domestic, family and sexual violence requires a national effort across the full spectrum of prevention, early intervention, response, and recovery and healing.