Neda Vanovac's Podcast - 2ser FM

Novelist Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most successful, with two Miles Franklin awards under his belt for Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game. His latest book, Autumn Laing, began as a work loosely modelled on the life of artist Sidney Nolan, but quickly morphed into something different.

The heroine, Autumn, is a cranky, fiery woman of 85, flatulent, and impatient, furious at the indignities of old age. She’s looking back on her life with no small measure of guilt. Autumn recognised the talent of artist Pat Donlon as soon as she met him, and they embarked on an affair that would mark the rest of her life.

In the novel, she continually casts back into the past, to Melbourne in 1938 and her circle of artists, poets and writers trying to tackle the establishment of the time.

I met with Alex to talk about biography, guilt, the masks of the confessional, and how Sidney Nolan came to change his life.

The Occupy Wall Street movement this last week in New York reached a turning point when a judge evicted protesters after several weeks of camping.

Occupations across the world have clashed with authorities, and organizers are now faced with the task of reevaluating how the movement will go forward, if at all.

I report the future of the movement in New York and Sydney.

In 2004, Aboriginal man Cameron Doomadgee swore at a police officer in the street. 45 minutes later, he was dead in a police cell, having sustained injuries more typical seen in high-speed car crashes.

The man accused of killing him, Chris Hurley, was a police officer in Cameron’s hometown of Palm Island, a seemingly idyllic island off the coast of Queensland with one of the highest rates of crime and violence in Australia.

The investigation into Cameron’s death was politically charged as two very different elements of Australian society clashed over the tragedy of what had happened.

Journalist Chloe Hooper’s award-winning book on the case, The Tall Man, has been adapted into a documentary.

I spoke with the film’s producer, Darren Dale, about making a film when one of the main characters is dead and the other won’t talk.

A child survivor of the Holocaust, Diane Armstrong migrated to Australia from Poland in 1948 during the postwar boom. With a long career as a journalist and novelist, in her new book she’s returned to that time.

Empire Day follows the lives of the residents of Wattle Street in Sydney, as the locals try to adapt to the unfamiliar ways of the immigrants escaping Europe.

I met with Diane to talk about how she transported herself back to the 40s, the things she remembered and the ways in which her characters took on lives of their own.

Music featured:
Say it with Firecrackers – from Holiday Inn
Buttons and Bows – Dinah Shore
Rambling Rose – Perry Como

American journalist Kim Barker turned up in Kabul not long after 9/11 without much of an idea what she was doing.

She was swiftly swept up in the maelstrom that is the life of a foreign correspondent, doing the Taliban Shuffle between Afghanistan and Pakistan for eight years for the Chicago Tribune.

Her book chronicles the existence of journalists in war zones – always on the edge and about to crack, careening along on an adrenaline high.
Along the way she gives readers background on the region and lets them peer in on a life that saw her close friends kidnapped, her relationships broken down and all the while, relentlessly hit on by senior Pakistani government officials.

She spoke to me from New York about the importance of telling the story you see, being a woman in a war zone, and bluffing her way through some very bizarre situations.

This week an Australian citizen filed charges of war crimes against the Sri Lankan president before a Melbourne magistrate.

The Federal Attorney-General stopped the motion, citing President Rajapaksa’s “diplomatic immunity” as he visits Australia for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting this week.

With the film adaptation of the bestselling trilogy The Hunger Games in production, the boom in teen dystopian fiction is undeniable.

But where does this interest in bleak and brutal futuristic societies come from?

I spoke to two young adult dystopian writers to find out why the genre is so important, the importance of strong heroines, and the pervasiveness of fascist dictatorships.

Maria V. Snyder is author of Outside In, published by Harlequin Teen
Alison Stewart is author of Days Like This, published by Penguin Books Australia

This podcast was first broadcast on 2SER FM, 107.3
On the weekly book show Final Draft (Monday 24 October 2011)

When Joseph Braude became the first-ever journalist to embed with a Moroccan police unit, beatings of suspects, curses on his apartment, and truth-dodging on the part of the authorities were all to be expected. Being involved in a covert investigation of a murder cover-up by the police, on the other hand, wasn’t.

Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi, Braude studied Near Eastern Languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. But when a muder case file fell into his lap and the victim’s family declared their conviction that the police were covering something up, Braude found himself fumbling through the twisting alleyways of Casablanca along with the victim’s best friend as they probed for the truth.

Religion, sexuality and witchcraft all came into play as Braude unspools the story in his book, The Honoured Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World.

I spoke to Joseph about the importance of truth, what you can get away with under an authoritarian government, and being an undercover Jew.

This interview was first broadcast by 2ser FM's book show Final Draft, on Monday 26 September 2011

Beginners is the new film from director Mike Mills. It's the story of graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor) falling in love with Anna (Melanie Laurent).

Oliver's a solitary artist, drawing portraits of old girlfriends and rewinding memories of his past. He's grieving for his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) who has just died of cancer. Hal came out as gay in his mid-seventies shortly after the death of his wife, and spent four happy years as a gay man before getting sick.

Mike mined his personal history to create this love letter to his family. He previously worked as a graphic designer and his illustrations appear in the film as Oliver's work. His father also came out as gay shortly after his mother's death.

I spoke to Mike about grief, loneliness, and fictionalising his own life.

This interview was first broadcast by 2SER's Final Draft on 20 August 2011.

When’s the last time you read an all-Australian comedy crime caper?

Author Derek Hansen thought it had been far too long. He’s cooked up a story about a drought-ravaged country town called Munni-Munni. The residents find $3 million buried by robbers, and their bank manager uses it to re-establish the town on solid economic grounds. But the criminals are out of jail and they want the money, the cops want the money, and two of Australia’s most notorious hitmen are hot on the trail.

I spoke to Derek about the value of violence, the effects of comedy, and basing a character on Neddy Smith.

This interview was first broadcast by 2SER FM's Final Draft on 25 July 2011.