Life Sentences Podcast

Race Matthews had a distinguished career as a federal politician and Victorian state Minister, but the highlight of his career was his time as Gough Whitlam’s Principle Private Secretary. A joiner from a very early age, he understood the power of working within an organisation to bring about change but his ambitions for reform and social justice were often thwarted years ago factional in-fighting. He remained a passionate advocate for Fabian values and collectivism. His second wife, Iola, a journalist with several books to her name, decided to complete her husband’s memoir as a biography when ill health made the task impossible for him. The result is a loving, considered account of Race’s career and her experience of being a political wife.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson. Together, the couple became part of a bohemian crowd of artists who moved between Sydney and Melbourne, and helped shape Australian art for decades. Now their daughter Christabel has documented a significant, passionate and fruitful decade of their early years and marriage, thanks to her parents love letters and her mother’s diaries. The result is a uniquely personal and intimate perspective on a creative partnership. To see images from Charles and Barbara Blackman a decade of love and art, go to: @carobaumlifesentences on InstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham - about three literary legends: Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard, Elizabeth Harrower - three writers who experienced the twentieth century very differently but who overlapped in shared perspectives on their home country, Australia, and its ability to fulfil its potential. While both Hazzard and Clift spent large parts of their lives overseas, Harrower mostly stayed home, sharing an extensive correspondence with Hazzard. Clift, meanwhile, shared her thoughts on issues both frivolous and serious with her devoted readers in a regular weekly newspaper column, as well as in her books. While Hazzard achieved literary glory internationally, Clift and Harrower found success, to varying degrees, at home. All three are in print today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko. The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a remarkable figure of enlightenment and progressive ideals, whose influence was felt from his native Poland to America, where his will was a vexed issue for his friend Thomas Jefferson.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biographical suite of scenes that tell his life story in almost cartoonish images. He talks to Caroline Baum about how Tom Ley became known as Lemonade Ley and how he rose from abject poverty to become a Minister in the NSW government, before travelling to London and being accused of murder. It sounds like fiction, but it’s all true.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the ‘flash madam’ of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for buying real estate and flair for style and comfort attracted the big end of town, as well as the attention of the press. As well as running a brothel, she was a wife and a mother, a fascinating character who showed care and consideration for her employees. Her biographer Barbara Minchinton uncovers her story through a mix of archaeology, a photo album and the sleuthing skills of a feminist historian.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Caroline Baum interviewed Fleet Street veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson about his new, very favourable biography of Katherine, Princess of Wales, the conversation did not go as planned.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For decades, Kitty Kelley has held the reputation as the queen of celebrity biography in the US, writing juicy and revealing accounts of the lives of Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, The Bush family, Nancy Reagan etc. Now in her eighties, she reflects on how she got started as a journalist in Washington DC, and reveals some of the tricks and techniques that she used to get reliable sources to talk to her while avoiding prosecution from her powerful subjects. In this candid and revealing conversation she talks about the rewards and downsides of a unique career as the world’s bestselling biographer.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 conservative right to the progressive left, thanks to his enthusiasm for Gough Whitlam's vision of Australia's potential.   Famous for his love of a long lunch (especially when he was the editor of the Bulletin), he was indeed lucky to find in his second wife Myfanwy a partner who was a true collaborator in all his ideas.   Ryan Cropp's energetic debut biography captures the paradoxes and many-faceted ambitions of the man and his times.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 that his talents were more curatorial and, after bringing Russian art to Paris, he returned with The Ballets Russes, a troupe of brilliant dancers, including Nijinski, and gorgeous sets and costumes, taking the city by storm.   Collaborating with artists like Picasso and Stravinsky, Diaghilev changed the face of dance forever. He defined the word impresario in a unique way, discovering talent, finding the money to stage lavish productions and generating huge audience excitement, in a dizzying feat of risk-taking and flair.   In this episode, British cultural critic Rupert Christensen discusses his book Diaghilev's Empire, about the impact, influence and legacy of a larger than life individual who loved Russia but was condemned by history to a life in exile.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 details man, who consults, listens and is outcome focussed. A man who is not political in the traditional sense, but who has leadership skills and who values of integrity and decency but is not always good at playing the media game. He'd much rather play football with his old mates.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 that is now being addressed.   The Director of the National Dictionary of Biography is historian Dr Melanie Nolan. She tells Life Sentences how the Dictionary differs from its British counterpart, how entries are selected and how the Dictionary is trying to move with the times.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 88, he is currently at work on the eagerly awaited fifth volume of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson.   Robert Gottlieb is a former editor of the New Yorker and has edited many of the greats of twentieth century American literature from Joseph Heller to Toni Morrison. His partnership with Robert Caro was a unique relationship between author and editor that never translated into a personal friendship outside of work.   Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb's daughter, was given unprecedented access to the very shy, modest and private Robert Caro. Her observational documentary tells the story of his research methods, of how he uncovered the racism inherent in Robert Moses' approach to urban development and of the secrets and lies buried within the Johnson family that Caro's unflagging patience and active listening uncovered in Texas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 documents from the White House and the FBI, this is a biography of King written for the generation that came of age with Black Lives Matter, that may know little of King and his dream.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.   Understanding, misunderstanding, conflict and a remarkable journey together to Britain give this double-headed biography a compelling and sometimes poignant narrative.   Life Sentences is produced by David Roach for Two Heads Media and edited by Kirra Jordan for PipeWolf Media. We live and work on Dharawal country and pay our respects to elders past and present. Music is composed and performed by Amanda Brown.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 intellectual sleeves and got his hands dirty, helping the Algerians to arm themselves by setting up a gun factory. The story of this venture is worth a movie in its own right.   Clashing with Castro, supporting Solidarity in Poland, Pablo was an influential force without ever becoming a leader. He was ahead of his time in his support for fully-fledged feminism and maintained a strong circle of friends throughout his life.   Hall Greenland's biography, The Well-Dressed Revolutionary, is an admiring portrait of a man and a time when socially progressive ideas had real momentum and it felt as if the world were tilting towards a raised consciousness on equality and human rights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Rothenberg's sympathetic biography takes the reader off the court into the inner circle of coaches, managers, family and fans to paint a portrait of a complex, elusive young woman who is one of the most intriguing champions on the circuit today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Harrison presents as a series of contradictions, but there is no doubt that he was eclipsed and under-estimated by Lennon and McCartney in the Beatles. He is, however, credited with writing one of its greatest hits and introducing the band to Eastern music, through his interest in learning to play the sitar, thanks to his deep friendship with Ravi Shankar.   Later he enjoyed global success in his own right, as well as becoming a pioneer of pop philanthropy, producing the landmark concert for Bangladesh and had a second career as a successful independent film producer, financing his friends The Pythons Life of Brian.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 combines exceptional surgical skills with an excellent bedside manner and a holistic vision of how the body heals.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 her powerful father, and paints the scene when Sydney was bubbling with new ideas from a heady collision of the rationalist society, rising nationalism and a flourishing underground bohemian scene. Bee was at the centre of everything, but also had nowhere to live.  Just how did this intelligent, infuriating, unpredictable, outspoken woman become famous for being homeless?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 selectively. In doing so she reflects on the moral dilemmas that face a biographer who is close not only to their subject but respectful of the people in his orbit who may wish to remain anonymous.   The result is an intimate introduction to an intriguing figure in Australian culture, who knew how to make a mean martini.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 woman never marry?   This is the remarkable and until now untold story of an independent free-spirited woman who lived on her own terms, with her closest companion and creative soul mate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 activism against the fascists in Spain as well as in his writing, few traces of Eileen are to be found.   Funder, an avowed Orwell admirer, brings O'Shaughnessy out from the shadows and portrays her as a sharp, resourceful and calm partner under pressure, who is also an intellectual match for her husband. Funder questions the silence that has enveloped O'Shaughnessy for too long: is it deliberate, or simply the symptom of general oversight explained by the sexism of the times?   At times furious and at times funny, this is biography at its most creative and thought-provoking, forcing the reader to re-assess the reputation of one of the most admired writers of his time. Wifedom is a game changer.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 biography by historian Bain Atwood, who examines Cooper's life and influence in the context of colonialism and the Aboriginal experience of dispossession and the impact of a Christian mission education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 journalist Jeff Apter has written biographies of Keith Urban, Gwen Stefani, The Bee Gees and Jeff Buckley. He talks about the genre of rock/pop biography, and explains how lyrics can reveal more than any interview.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 recognition.   After two previous attempts by other writers fail, Ann-Marie Priest rises to the challenge of the first biography of a major literary figure who lived off the radar. Ann-Marie Priest navigates all the twists and turns of Harwood's life of ducking and weaving and hiding behind false identities to unmask a true original and reveal an unknown love story.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 spoken to many of Nora's friends, colleagues, and contemporaries to get beneath the groomed surface of her subject.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 of her ambition, her victories and setbacks, and the one interview she failed to secure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 personal tensions and themes of betrayal feed into plays like Death of Salesman and All My Sons.   He also talks about Miller's collaboration and friendship with Elia Kazan and the rift between them following their testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the era of McCarthyism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 origins and her difficult mother, had a lacklustre career at the United Nations but  was reborn when she reached Italy.   After several unhappy love affairs she found true harmony with the distinguished biographer Francis Steegmuller; Together they moved in intellectual circles and lived a privileged, cultured life  in New York, Naples and on Capri.   Olubas has spent forty years studying Hazzard; the result is arguably the finest Australian biography of the year.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Virginia, and why the project took fifteen years to complete.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bryce Courtenay remains one of the highest selling Australians writers of all times, with sales of more than 20 million of his blockbuster stories of life in Africa and in Australia. Beginning with the Power of One, which became a classic, he took off as a novelist in his fifties after a successful career in advertising. But his beginnings were far from promising and it took all his willpower and drive to overcome poverty, illegitimacy and hard physical labour to achieve his childhood ambition. His second wife Christine Gee has written a loving, very subjective memoir-biography of the man whom she first came to know professionally as his publicist and researcher. When Bryce started to make romantic overtures to her, she was less than sure about changing the nature of their relationship. But Bryce was not a man who gave up easily. This is an intimate portrait of a man whose past provided him with tremendous material and a capacity for empathy for anyone who struggled. Thanks to discovering a cache of letters to his mother, Christine Gee has been able to tell the full story of larger-than-life Bryce as never before.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The family biography is a popular  pastime, but few family biographies get published or are as colourful and bohemian as Sharon Connolly's account of her vaudevillian relatives, including her great Aunt Gladys who was best known for her prowess as a whistler.  Featuring a roll-call of rogues and eccentrics, My Giddy Aunt goes beyond  biography to become a culture history of the disappearing age of  traveling troupes of entertainers in the era before cinema.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How has Lachlan Murdoch managed to live comparatively below the radar given his immense power and influence as a  media player? And why  is it so important to him that he identifies strongly as an Australian ? Journalist biographer  Paddy Manning answers these and many other questions  about the heir to Rupert Murdoch's dynasty and the threat posed by his siblings in The Successor, a biography whose title winks knowingly at the TV drama Succession. Providing a balanced portrait based on interviews with more than sixty people close to Lachlan, this is more than a business biography.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a society figure in Georgian England, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was more than a hostess, gossip and subject of scandal. A sharp wit, she wrote essays that were radical in their ideas, and way ahead of their time. She was also an early pioneer of inoculation, a technique she observed and experimented with on her own children  as a diplomat's wife in Turkey. Friend to the good and the great, including Alexander Pope and Voltaire, she was also susceptible to financial scam artists, much like many older women today.   In this episode  TV  drama producer turned biographer Jo Willett, author of The Pioneering Life of   Mary Wortley Montagu brings Lady Mary to life and explains why she deserves to be as well known as other leading figures of  scientific and feminist history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In their heyday, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were the most glamorous and famous couple of stage and screen in Britain, he for his patriotic and patrician roles  as Lord Nelson and Shakespeare's heroes and villains, she  as the  beautiful actress who won Hollywood's most coveted role in Gone with the Wind as Scarlett O'Hara. But the chemistry  between them had a dangerous side, overshadowed by her mental health problems and his ambition.  When they fought, it was bruising for both of them and shocking for their friends and colleagues. Hollywood writer Stephen Galloway examines this combustible marriage with forensic care, having trawled through letters and  diaries and  quoting many of the couple's closest friends and associates about the dynamics that made them so charismatic and yet so unhappy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In between the two world wars, a group of lesbian expatriate women from the US and UK found freedom in Paris to explore and foster creativity. They dressed differently and lived and loved with abandon. Some are well known to us today, like Gertrude Stein, some have been forgotten, among them Sylvia Beach, who took a risk and published James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would touch it. In this conversation biographer Diana Souhami revisits these free spirits who sought creative fulfillment and sexual liberation through a bold new movement of artistic experimentation that would come to be known as Modernism and would include giants of the twentieth century.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Award winning author Kate Grenville has an ambivalent attitude to biography.  She leverages  this by using its materials, particularly letters, to create an alternative version of events in her novel A Room Made of Leaves, about the colonial figure of Elizabeth Macarthur. But when she came to editing the original letters for a recently published collection, what else did she discover about Elizabeth and the  ambiguities of correspondence in the eighteenth century, when news took so long to reach the other side of the world?  And when what was left unsaid was sometimes as eloquent as the writing on the page? Kate's  thought-provoking conversation  with Caroline Baum sheds light on one of the most fruitful but challenging aspects of biographical research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O'Halloran  about  The Master from Marnpi, his biography First Nations artist Mick  Namarari Tjapaltjarri.O'Halloran had never written a biography  before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by  his way of expressing his place and his culture. Over several years and many visits to  the Western Desert, Alice Springs and Kintore,  he earned the trust of his subject's widow and community enough to capture a sense of Tjapaltjarri's life as a hunter, a stockman , artists and family man. His lavishly illustrated, self-published biography tells the story of how Tjapaltjarri became a leading figure in the  Papunya Tula art movement, one of the most significant in Indigenous art.  In seeing the project through, O'Halloran kept  an important promise.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Few biographers can equal Claire Tomalin's reputation as the queen of British biography. After her beginnings in journalism, she's had a long and glittering  career writing about the illustrious lives of Dickens and Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Katherine Mansfield - an amazing roll call. Modest and self-effacing herself,  Tomalin  has also shed life on women who have been forgotten  by history or overshadowed - like the actress Nelly Tiernan, who was Dickens' lover, and another actress,Mrs Jordan, a royal mistress of William the Fourth who bore him ten illegitimate children. As well as being dauntingly prolific, she manages to be both scholarly and popular. Since this interview, Tomalin has published her tenth  biography,  of the young HG Wells, announcing that it would be her last book, which is fair enough when you are 88.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Katharine Susannah Pritchard (1883 -1969) enjoyed early success as a writer, travelled internationally and married a war hero. Despite seeming privilege, her life was anything but smooth. In this episode, Caroline Baum talks to her biographer Nathan Hobby about uncovering the identity of her married lover, and how she became a passionate and uncritical follower of Soviet Communist ideology while writing novels that were well ahead of their time. What emerges is the portrait of an unconventional woman who  spoke and wrote her mind, often at great personal cost.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Charmian Clift returned to Australia with her husband George Johnston and their children, they left behind a creative Greek idyll and returned to suburban Sydney at a time of social upheaval. Charmian threw herself into her weekly column on the women's pages of a major newspaper and used it to question whether the country had changed as much as people claimed it had during their absence.  Seeing herself as both a migrant and returning expat gave her a unique outsider perspective. She soon developed a huge following for her opinions on everything from the war in Vietnam to the wearing of hats. Her biographer Nadia Wheatley talks to Caroline Baum about how Charmian adjusted to suburbia and how she used her own lived experience and distinctive personal voice to connect with her readers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Caroline Baum talks to the doyenne of Australian biography Brenda Niall on the publication of her memoir, An Accidental Career, about her evolution as a biographer, which coincided with fresh interest in figures in Australian cultural history. Niall reflects on how the status of biography has changed, how she came to write about figures like the Boyd dynasty and the recurring themes of home and displacement as central to her understanding of her subjects, whether writing about painter Judy Cassab or the daunting figure of Archibishop Mannix.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the most perplexing figures in modern Australian literary biography, Eve Langley used her experiences as a teenager with her sister in rural Victoria as the basis for her bestselling novel The Pea Pickers. But many other aspects of her life remain a mystery to this day. Why did she spend seven years in a mental institution? Why did she change her name to Oscar Wilde? Why did she lose contact with her husband and three children? Why were she and her sister, to whom she was once so close, estranged at the end of her life? In her biography Helen Vines attempts to find answers to these and other mysteries that surround Langley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In one of the most remarkable seafaring stories of stowaway adventure, Suzanne Falkiner tells the story of Rose de Freycinet, who could not bear to be parted from her husband and so, wearing men’s clothes, snuck on to his ship in 1817 to join his scientific expedition to the South Seas. In doing so, not only was Rose doing something highly illegal, but she also became the first woman to circumnavigate the world and leave a record of that perilous journey. In letters and her journal , she recorded remarkable scenes and encounters in places including Mauritius, Brazil and the early Sydney settlement before being shipwrecked on the Falkland Islands. Rose has long deserved a biography that acknowledges her courage and capacity for resilience, curiosity and French savoir-faire.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Multi-award winning novelist Colm Toibin tackles his second biographical novel in The Magician, about the German novelist Thomas Mann and his eccentric family. After writing The Master, his first biographical novel about Henry James, Toibin turns to another writer with a secret inner life as a homosexual who, like James, also lived in exile from his homeland. The Magician takes us from the strict and formal high bourgeois home of young Thomas Mann in Lubeck to France, Switzerland and America, where Mann observes the Nazi regime from a safe distance. Meanwhile his flamboyant children pursue their own adventures in a series of much more open and casual sexual encounters - while his all-seeing wife Katia keeps the family together.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Mary Beauchamp, a musical young woman from a middle class family in Sydney married a German count, she became Elizabeth von Arnim. Soon disenchanted with marriage and motherhood, she shut herself away at her country estate and began writing bestselling books about her garden and the society around her. She continued to write while married to her wayward second husband, Lord Russell, and had an affair with HG Wells and a young man half her age, while entertaining lavishly at her Swiss chalet. Elizabeth also had an often spiky relationship with her cousin Katherine Mansfield. Although she is known as a light romantic satirist, she touches on darker themes of domestic violence and the desires of older women. Joyce Morgan’s biography brings von Arnim to life through extensive research into her diaries and letters. The Countess from Kirribilli reads like fairy tale, farce and psychological drama in a narrative that never loses momentum. Life Sentences is a Two Heads Media production Producers: David Roach and Jennifer Macey Audio Editing: Louise Osbourne Music: Amanda Brown www.carolinebaum.com.au All the books in this series are available from good bookshops and online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s thirty years since David Marr wrote his landmark biography of Australian Nobel laureate, novelist Patrick White. In this provocative and revealing conversation, Marr reflects on his relationship with his subject and its enduring impact on him, admitting that although White could be a curmudgeon, Marr came to adore him. He talks about the significance of White’s snobbish Anglophile mother, the discovery of a substantial cache of letters after his death, the break up of his relationship with Sidney Nolan and the crucial role of White’s life partner, Manoly Lascaris while voicing strong opinions about the kinds of biographies that annoy him. Life Sentences is a Two Heads Media production Producers: David Roach and Jennifer Macey Audio Editing: Louise Osbourne Music: Amanda Brown www.carolinebaum.com.au All the books in this series are available from good bookshops and online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For the first time, in Miss Dior, British biographer Justine Picardie tells the unknown story of couturier Christian Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, and her courage as a member of the French resistance during the Occupation. With unparalleled access to the Dior archives and homes, Picardie builds a portrait of the close relationship between brother and sister during the war and the terrible price Catherine paid when she was captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. On a happier note, her return to Paris prompted her brother to create a fragrance in her honour, inspired by the flowers that she grew in Provence. The result became a classic whose origins can now be fully appreciated. Life Sentences is a Two Heads Media production Producers: David Roach and Jennifer Macey Audio Editing: Louise Osbourne Music: Amanda Brown www.carolinebaum.com.au All the books in this series are available from good bookshops and online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kathleen Kennedy was JFK’s beloved sister. They shared a unique combination of physical charisma and personal charm, and a passion for politics and people. And they both had tragic, untimely deaths. In 'KICK', Paula Byrne’s affectionate biography, Kick comes to life as a woman of irreverent wit, who defied her formidable mother to marry out of her religion and into the British aristocracy. Privilege, glamour, family, high society and war all collide in this fascinating story. Life Sentences is a Two Heads Media production Producers: David Roach and Jennifer Macey Audio Editing: Louise Osbourne Music: Amanda Brown www.carolinebaum.com.au All the books in this series are available from good bookshops and online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.