Donald Horne was Australia’s leading public intellectual in the sixties and seventies and coined the phrase The Lucky Country in his bestselling book of the same title. The phrase has entered the Australian vernacular, and is often misused and interpreted as a sign of national complacency.   Before he became an author, Horne had tried on many hats: as a journalist, ad man, and editor; later he became an academic and a bureaucrat. The big story in his life was his political shift from the...

There has never been anyone like Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev.   The Russian impresario shook up the dusty world of ballet, making it the centre of the avant garde in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in Paris where the premieres of L’Apres Midi ‘D’un Faune and the Rite of Spring caused shock and scandal.   Born in a provincial backwater, Diaghilev made his way to St Petersburg with ambitions as a painter and composer, but failed at both. Eventually he discovered...

Recorded in the lead up the UK election of 2024, this is a conversation with Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s biographer, journalist and former Labour insider Tom Baldwin. He explains how the biography was written with Starmer’s co-operation but was not authorised by him and how Starmer learns things from the book that he did not expect, but feels uncomfortable with some of the details about his complex family relationships.   What emerges is a portrait of a relentless, hardworking...

Most people are unaware of the existence of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, a remarkable effort of scholarship by an army of volunteer historians and specialist contributors committed to documenting significant and representative Australians. It’s a challenging task in terms not only of scale but because previous entries need to be revised in the light of fresh historical evidence and interpretation. Women and First Nations figures were overlooked when the project began, but...

To fully enjoy this episode, it is recommended that you watch the documentary Turn Every Page about the unique working relationship between biography giant Robert Caro and his editor of fifty years, Robert Gottlieb.   Robert Caro is regarded by many as the greatest biographer of his generation, thanks to the ambition, scope and meticulous detail of his 1974 best selling biography The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, the unscrupulous developer who built the New York we know today.   Now...

This content is from BIO, The US based Biographers International Organisation, which promotes and champions the practice of biography to writers and readers.   You can read more about BIO here: https://biographersinternational.org/   In this episode award-winning biographer Jonathan Eig talks about why it was time, after more than three decades, for a new biography of Martin Luther King that explored his flawed humanity.    Benefitting from the release of previously unavailable...

Historian Kate Fullagar tells the story of the intertwined destinies of Governor Phillip and First Nations leader Bennelong, beginning with their deaths and spooling gradually back to their first encounter.   This bold, unconventional approach allows for a wider lens and different perspective on their respective personalities and achievements, and on the events which brought them together at a time when Britain’s colonial ambitions were to shape Australia for the next century.   ...

An elegant Trotskyist, Michael Pablo grew up in Greece to become an urbane revolutionary, who made his presence felt at many of the most significant uprisings of the 20th century in an attempt to build what he called self-managed socialism.   Partnered by his dynamic and fearless wife Elli Dyovoumoti, Pablo was often in great danger, spent time in prison, and made enemies among fellow socialists. But when it came to the Algerian uprising of 1962 against the French, he rolled up his...

She is part Japanese, part Haitian but trained and lives in the US. Nothing about  Naomi Osaka is conventional, but she forged her career in the mold of her idol Serena Williams- and then beat her. Along the way, she struggled with mental health and admitted that in public, carried the Japanese flag into an empty stadium at the Tokyo Olympics during Covid, and attracted Asian sponsors desperate for a role model their customers could relate to. Oh and she also became a mother.   Ben...

Perth based skin and burns surgeon Professor Fiona Wood is one of the most trusted and admired figures in Australian life and yet it took her years to agree to biographer Sue Williams request to let her tell her life story.   Time poor and a workaholic, she eventually relented. Williams also talks to her colleagues and patients and recreates the scenes on the ground following the Bali bombing to paint a rounded but nonetheless admiring picture of a very determined medical pioneer who...

In George Harrison, The Reluctant Beatle, veteran rock journalist and biographer Philip Norman (author of the definitive Beatles book, Shout!) gives us an access all areas portrait of a paradoxical figure who found fame a burden but emerged from the band, to grow into a new creative phase of life that was rewarding and productive in unexpected ways.   Based on extensive interviews with those who knew Harrison intimately,  this is a biography that is not always flattering to its subject....

One of the most puzzling and flamboyant women on the streets of Sydney in the twentieth century, Bee Miles became the stuff of legend, a celebrity in her own lifetime, but also a troubled soul who spent time in asylums and in and out of jail. In  Bee Miles, Australia’s famous bohemian rebel, Rose Ellis uncovers a medical diagnosis that sheds new light on what caused Bee’s notorious episodes of misbehaviour in public places.   She also examines the intense and fraught dynamic between Bee and...

Catharine Lumby is the first out of the gate of two biographers to tackle the many-faceted life of author Frank Moorhouse, who was a well known bon vivant, bushwalker and prolific author of fiction and non fiction. He was also an active campaigner on issues including censorship and copyright law.   Lumby’s biography, Frank Moorhouse: A Life, is organised thematically and relies on her longstanding friendship with Moorhouse for its very personal approach as she navigates his archive...

Every Australian knows My Country, the poem that made Dorothea Mackellar famous at a young age. But very few people know much about her life.   In Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar, biographer Deborah Fitzgerald was approached by her descendants and given unprecedented access to her papers, including a diary she wrote in code. What secret loves was she hiding and protecting? And why did this privileged, beautiful, intelligent and eligible young...

Anna Funder has already garnered international praise for her non fiction (Stasiland) and fiction (All That I Am)   In Wifedom, she does something new and bold, creating a hybrid of genres that brings together biography, memoir, fiction and feminist critique in what she calls ‘an intervention’ that examines how George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy came to be erased from the many biographies of her husband.   Though very much a crucial partner and collaborator in his political...

William Cooper was a remarkable Yorta Yorta man from Victoria, born in the 1860s who sought justice for his people by petitioning the British King for black representation in parliament. He believed that it was necessary to ‘think black’ to understand and implement justice for Aboriginal people. When he heard about the persecution of the Jews following Kristallnacht, he took a petition to the German consulate in protest. An eloquent and distinguished activist, he is the subject of a scholarly...

Often acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest singer songwriters,  and compared to Paul McCartney, who is a fan, Neil Finn has had a pretty regular life. He comes from a happy and musical home, which he shared with his older brother Tim.  First in Split Enz and then in his own band, Crowded House, the brothers demonstrated a capacity to make joyful hooky music that became worldwide hits. But there were tensions with Tim and the death of band member Paul Hester’s cast a long shadow.   Rock...

She was one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced but Gwen Harwood was also a very mischievous woman, who played literary pranks on editors who failed to publish her work. When marriage takes her to Tasmania, she hates the place. Her husband is an intensely jealous man who is totally uninterested in her work. She embarks on intense friendships with both men and women and passionate love affairs, writes hundreds of letters and poems and eventually finds acclaim and...

Nora Ephron had it all: success, love, friendship, a brilliantly original voice, personal style.   As the writer of Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, she demonstrated an acute ability to write about relationships between men and women that was bestselling and box office gold. Her essay collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck, showcased her talent for being simultaneously frivolous and profound.   First time biographer Kirstin Marguerite Doidge is an Ephron fan who has...

Award-winning investigative journalist and political biographer Margaret Simons was hesitant about undertaking a biography of Tanya Plibersek until she made a surprising discovery of their shared enthusiasm for Jane Austen.   Here, Simons discusses the differences between authorised and unauthorised biography and which Austen character Plibersek most resembles. She also talks about the impact of Plibersek’s background as the daughter of migrants, her strengths and weaknesses, the character...

In the second part of this conversation John Lahr talks about Arthur Miller’s disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe how it came about and discusses the impact of success and celebrity on Miller,  as well as one of his greatest and most relevant plays,  The Crucible and The Misfits, the film script he wrote for Monroe, as well as his play about her, After the Fall. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Theatre’s most respected critic, New Yorker critic and biographer John Lahr has compressed his deep understanding of Arthur Miller’s life and creative process into a fascinating biography Arthur Miller: American Witness.   In this revealing portrait, full of personal anecdotes from family and friends, and drawing on an unpublished memoir by a nephew, Lahr explores the connections between Miller’s complex family dynamics, particularly with his father and his brother, to illustrate how...

While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unaware of her life story. She was a private woman, and because she lived in Europe and America,  Australia had mixed feelings about her - and those mixed feelings were reciprocated.   Now, in a superb new biography, literary scholar Brigitta Olubas provides a comprehensive, insightful portrait of a complex woman who was ashamed of her  genteel Sydney...

In this episode, Sophie Cunningham talks about using biography as the thematic spine of her novel This Devastating Fever. The bold, playful narrative interweaves two strands: a modern day one in which Melbourne based biographer Alice is struggling to write a biography of Leonard Woolf, and a historical one, in which we meet Leonard in his life as a civil servant in Ceylon and in his marriage to Virginia Woolf. Sophie talks about the research process, how she became haunted by Leonard and...