Good Reading Podcast

This fascinating book sets aside the clichés of Australian history and asks us to look again. What really happened when exiled criminals made a home in an occupied and defended country? How were they changed by this new world? What can the first years of settlement tell us about Australia today?

The First Fleet left Britain at the height of the enclosure movement, when traditional rights to communal land were being rapidly extinguished. Many convicts brought those older ideas about land with them, and the first years of the colony saw a distinctive new society develop. Later, it was supplanted by a system favouring free settlers, large land grants and a creed of unstoppable progress. But the first thirty-five years of the colony tell a different story.
In Origins, James Boyce brings this formative period to life. The protagonists include convicts, Aboriginal people, soldiers, governors, and the country itself. The picture that emerges will change how you think about Australia's origins.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to James Boyce about why the early colonists were unable to understand the land management practices of the indigenous people, why the British Enclosure movement had such an impact on the way Australia was colonised, and why convicts, not soldiers or the free settlers, were the first to develop a deep connection to the Australian landscape.

An Australian journalist attends a party in Rome, the Eternal City. The result is at once a celebration and a distillation of what travel can be and still is: an intelligent, hilarious, and sometimes prickly conversation between cultures. With finesse, Antoni Jach affectionately lampoons everything from the publishing world and the writing life to relationships, his beloved hometown Melbourne, and the often-pompous nature of national pride.
Erudite and amusing, A Midsummer Party is both a revelation, a romp and a penetrating reflection on the intersection of art and our own human foibles.
In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Antoni Jack about how 'A Midsummer Party' may or may not be a book about travel, why dialogue is his preferred route for character development, and the source for his distinctive brand of humour.

Snow gums are the most beautiful trees on Earth. But they're vanishing quickly. In this stunning new book, bestselling author Anthony Sharwood and climate activist Anna Langford help us view Australia's unique high country with fresh eyes, show us what's being lost, what can be saved - and how we might just save ourselves in the process.

From Anthony Sharwood, the bestselling author of From Snow to Ash and Kosciuszko, and Anna Langford, an exciting new voice in nature writing, comes the detailed and fascinating story of snow gums and the people trying to save them. This is an Australian story - and it's also a global story. Because snow gums are the canary in the global climate coalmine.

Through the fate of this one exquisite mountain tree species which exists in a small corner of the flattest, driest inhabited continent on Earth, we gain a terrifying snapshot of the future of biodiversity across the world.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Anthony Sharwood and Anna Langford about why the snow gum is a misunderstood species surviving in a misunderstood landscape, how climate change is the number one reason for its potential demise, and why we should be looking at Australia's high country with fresh eyes.

In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.

History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.

Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River. It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Wayne Marshall about the enduring interest in Henry Lawson's life and work, the rather unattractive proposition presented to Henry by The Bulletin's JF Archibald and what he thought about it, and how the blurred line between history, fiction and myth became the foundation of 'Henry Goes Bush'.

Cornwall, 1628. Steeped in herbal lore, a woman with no name guards a dangerous secret, while across the land whispers of witchcraft turn deadly. When a witch hunter sets out to track down the woman, their meeting will change the course of history. Can she survive in a world that burns what it does not understand?
In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Bernice Barry about exploring her own historical connection to the Cornwall landscape of times past, the dangers of being an intelligent, educated woman in 17th century Britain, and how RD Blackmore's classic romance, Lorna Doona became a reference point for her own work of historical fiction.