I have been enjoying a couple of new podcasts recently. The first is called Read This, with interviews of writers, many of them Australian. The second is Wiser than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus interviewing older women about their lives.
There are beautiful insights in every episode, for example in Read This, the writer Dylin Hardcastle talking about their 97-year old great uncle, when they told him they were gay. He broke into song and sang them ‘you’re so beautiful’ and then said ‘and anyway, I’ve always known.’
Julia Louis Dreyfus interviewed Jane Goodall in the most recent episode I’ve listened to. Jane’s favourite animal is. . . a dog. She can’t have one as she’s travelling around the world talking about animals and the importance of looking after our planet 300 days in every year, at the age of 90. For her 90th birthday, her friends and family arranged for 90 dogs to be on a beach with her.
Then this weekend I went to the Writer’s Festival. I heard Suzie Miller and Shankari Chandran talking about their lives as lawyers and whether stories and writing can make a difference. Intriguingly, they both spoke persuasively about how they think it can. Suzie wrote a play that includes themes of the huge imbalance in the legal system against victims of sexual assault; and through influential people seeing her play, she has influenced judges and the legal system in the UK so that now they are required to point this out as part of the process in such cases, helping to rebalance perceptions of jury members. Shankari’s books have been read by educated Sri Lankans who said they hadn’t been aware of the atrocities and civil war stories she describes in her books until they read about them. She is funny too: her latest book is a love story set in a remote offshore Australian detention centre, and when summarizing it, she said ‘and if that doesn’t sell books I don’t know what will.’
Before that session, I signed up to a session about something I didn’t know anything about: journalist Michael Visontay’s family history wrapped up in the story of one of the original Gutenberg bibles printed in 1455, and the story of how one copy had made his relative’s fortune, enabling his grandfather to buy a delicatessen when he migrated to Sydney in the 1950s. Michael had unearthed and distilled secrets during the COVID lockdown, interviewed people from all over the world, and trawled through his father’s many papers, including receipts from his honeymoon and for his car in the 1970s, among many scraps that some people might not have kept, to find some of the threads.
One of the panel members in a third panel I attended, Rebecca Harkins-Cross, has written a book about the precarious employment situation of academics in Australian universities and the exploitation entrenched in the system, sharing what it’s like to live in that world. Qin Qin wrote about being a model Asian child and the impact that can have on the trajectory of a life. And Rick Morton spoke about Robodebt and how that blight on our public service came about.
Today I saw just one session, about three authors who have written about things that are confronting: the experience of Veronica Gorrie working in the police force for ten years and seeing police who are violent and sexually abusive to their partners and colleagues; a sex worker, Hilary Caldwell, writing about parts of society that are not so much spoken about; and a lawyer and researcher, Katrina Marson, who has written about the importance of education to teach kids about consent. Her message was to ‘talk early and often’ to your children.
I don’t find there’s a large amount of scope for talking with our teenagers, but we try to keep the lines of communication open.
My next read is a book that Lara has been wanting me to read for a long time, one of her favourites: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. In reading that, I will learn what she loves in a book. And it will keep me going while I await some of those books I’ve just been hearing about, that I’ll request from the library.
