works

The Last Whale

This is the story of the end of whaling in Australia. It’s also the beginning of Greenpeace International and Australia’s first big direct action environmental campaign. And it’s a story of a group of whalers who went from being whale killers to whale lovers.

Faust’s Ghost

In 1888, Federici, the singer in Gounod’s Faust playing the part of Mephistopheles died on stage while descending into hell. And his ghost has haunted Melbourne’s Princess Theatre ever since. So, is it foolhardy to make a bargain with the devil, or should Faust go to heaven in the end? Would that relieve the ghost of its anxious haunting?

CJ Dennis, through the eyes of his wife

This week’s Hindsight approaches C.J Dennis, that most larrikin of Australian poets, through the eyes of his wife, a tough minded woman whose name was Olive Herron, although Dennis called her Biddy and she wrote under the pen name Margaret.

Happy New Ears

This week on Into The Music, in honour of the centenary of John Cage’s birth, Lyn Gallacher pays personal tribute to the composer who blew the future of music wide open by changing the way we listen.

Learning to be dead

On The Night Aiir, it’s all about beginnings and endings and the idea that in the beginning nothing and nobody has experienced the end. Creation is only possible because of destruction — and death is a natural part of that eternal cycle. But we can never actually know death … we can only imagine.

The trials of Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood, that much loved classic by Dylan Thomas, came very close to never being written. This program is the tale of a masterpiece that almost wasn’t.

Poetry Militant: Walt Whitman and Bernard O’Dowd

One of the most treasured objects in the State Library of Victoria is the Whitman Cabinet, a special box, purpose built by the Australian man of letters Bernard O’Dowd to house his personal correspondence with Walt Whitman. Today we take a peek inside that cabinet.

Nancy Keesing: Riding the Elephant

Meet Nancy Keesing: poet, prose writer, anthologist, reviewer and, among other things, chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council during a revolutionary period of Australian writing.

The Art of Being Europe
—a 6 part radio series

How robust is European culture? After the economic impact of the GFC, how have the region’s creative industries fared? This series checks the health of the cultural canary in the European coal mine.