Ideas at the House

The term “heterofatalism” has gone mainstream, capturing a growing pessimism around straight romance, and it’s influencing everything from dating app use to the quiet rise of celibacy.

Straight women are exhausted by underwhelming dates, constant safety calculations and endless emotional labour. As disappointing swipes, draining dates and “embarrassing” boyfriends multiply, a new mood is taking hold — a rising belief that heterosexual relationships are inherently flawed.

Chanté Joseph, Dr Lisa Portolan and moderator, Lucy Smith unpack this cultural moment with humour, sharp analysis and hard truths. Chanté, who blew the lid off the embarrassment of boyfriends in British Vogue, brings her insider lens on contemporary dating culture, while Lisa, an academic, researcher and author shine a light on how gender, power and emotional labour shape modern digital romance. Together, they explore how women and gender diverse people are reshaping their romantic lives.
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Deborah Cheetham Fraillon is an Australian arts trailblazer, but a career in music was not something her family had imagined for her. Growing up in Sydney, Deborah always loved music, but when she experienced Opera for the first time — everything changed.

Deborah went on to have an expansive global career as a soprano across the globe, and as a writer and composer of countless new works premiered all around Australia. She is the founder of Short Black Opera Company, with a mission to develop First Nations opera singers and uses her artforms as vehicles for radical truth-telling about untold Indigenous stories.

This intimate chat, moderated by Santilla Chingaipe, looks at the formidable career that took Debroah from Stolen Generation to opera star, to writer and composer of the first Australian Indigenous opera, Pecan Summer.

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New Motherhood is a time of overwhelming joy and love — but alongside those experiences, many new mothers also face exhaustion, emotional extremes, anxiety and profound changes in their mental health.

The much rarer cousin of postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis affects one to two in every 1,000 mothers. The early signs can look deceptively ordinary and be difficult to identify, but delayed diagnosis can lead to devastating consequences.

Moderator Lauren Novak (Meltdown) joins Ariane Beeston, Anne Buist and Rachel Skillington to break down the stigma surrounding motherhood’s misunderstood crises, unpack the warning signs with compassion, and look to solutions.
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Don’t Ask the Trees for Their Names, a recently published collection of stories, brings together nine Arab-Australian women who have had to start over in a new country, carrying the weight of home and the promise of possibility.

In this talk Contributors Loubna Haikal, Oula Ghannoum, Mariam Maatooq and Sivine Tabbouch join moderator Antoinette Lattouf to share their intimate, sometimes raw, often joyful stories of migration, identity and belonging.

From the legacies of homelands to the surprises of new communities, these voices reveal the courage, creativity and resilience it takes to forge a life from scratch. Their stories confront political injustices, celebrate cultural heritage and illuminate what it means to build family, community and selfhood in a new land.

Warm, urgent and unapologetically human, this conversation is a powerful celebration of women, storytelling and the transformative power of shared experience.
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Jane Birkin was synonymous with chic. An unlikely icon of French cinema, her effortless style and artistic legacy have been immortalised through her music and film career. And, of course, this British babe was the inspiration behind one of the world’s most coveted handbags — the Hermès Birkin. But who was the real woman behind the muse?

Join writer, critic and film curator, Kate Jinx and New York Times bestselling author Marisa Meltzer for an in-depth discussion about Birkin’s extraordinary life, times and legacy, inspired by Meltzer’s newly published biography, It Girl.
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