For all who know Brisbane, McWhirters, a once celebrated department store in Fortitude Valley, is an icon. For Melissa Fagan it is also the starting point for a remarkable exploration of her mother and grandmother’s lives, a poignant reminder of the ways in which retail stores and fashion have connected women’s lives across the decades.

Behind the dusty shop counters of an Art Deco treasure, Melissa discovered both what had been lost and what continued to shine. Her book is, ultimately, a tender exploration of self and family, speaking of the ways in which life surprises us and of how the legacies of others can truly enrich our own relationships and lives.

In his intimate ground-breaking memoir, told with wit and insight, Kerry O’Brien reflects on the big events he has observed, on lessons learned and ignored, on the foibles and strengths of the public figures who construct our world. The end result is an engrossing study of a life lived in the public eye, a life intrinsically bound up in nearly three-quarters of a century of social and political history.

Kerry is one of Australia’s most respected journalists. He has won six Walkley awards including the Gold Walkley and the Walkley for outstanding leadership in journalism. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he has worked for a wire service, newspapers, television and as a foreign correspondent. Thirty-three of those years were at the ABC where he worked on current affairs programs such asThis Day TonightandFour Corners. He was the inaugural presenter of Lateline and the editor and presenter of 7.30 for fifteen years.

Shelley discusses her recently published memoir Shadow Sisters.

During the terrifying years of Apartheid in South Africa, Shelley Davidow’s family was a crime. At a time when it was illegal for black and white people to live together, Shelley’s social activist parents took in Rosie, an abandoned black three-year-old. Rosie grew up as a beloved daughter and sister in a white household. Against the backdrop of racist laws and ever-present threats of violence, Shelley’s parents did all they could to provide a safe, happy home for their five children. But when Rosie was sixteen, devastating truths came to light, shattering the family’s understanding of the past.

'Davidow's memoir is not only a vivid, stark and resonant reminder of those days, but a rites-of-passage tale about growing up in the midst of violence and killing – as well as experiencing the pangs of first love.' Sydney Morning Herald

Gillian Triggs has had a long and diverse career in International Law. Born in London she migrated along with her parents to Australia in 1958, when she was thirteen. She attended school in Melbourne and studied law at Melbourne University, then went to Texas to do a Masters in Law, working with the Dallas Police Force on the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. She completed a doctorate a decade or so later. In 1982 she was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria as a barrister and solicitor. Soon after that she joined Mallesons Stephen Jaques as a consultant on International law practicing with them for ten years before joining the Melbourne Law School as a professor of International Law. While there she produced papers on a range of subjects, including the WTO, energy and resources law, the law of the sea, international criminal law, international environmental law and human rights.

In 2007 she took on the role of Dean of the University of Sydney’s Law School. In 2012, as we all know, she was appointed the President of Australia’s Human Rights Commission, a position she held for five years. She is now the Acting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and is here with us today to talk about her recently published memoir Speaking Up.

Patrick Nunn is here to talk about his recently published book The Edge of Memory, Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World.

Patrick is the author of several other books, including the popular Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific. He is, at present, Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast but is well known for the work he undertook in the Pacific Islands where he was, for 25 years, part of the faculty of the University of the South Pacific, holding the positions of Professor of Oceanic Geoscience and pro-Vice Chancellor. His early work on the Quaternary geology and tectonics of many islands and island groups in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu still represents the latest word on many of these issues today.

Patrick has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on several occasions, and, in that role, he was a co-recipient of its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has also been awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, and his world-class research in climate change has been extended with the announcement that he will be Lead Author on the ‘Small Islands’ chapter of the next Assessment Report of the IPCC, scheduled for completion in 2022.

Kristina Olsson is a Brisbane-based writer. She worked as a journalist for many years, writing for The Australian, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written both novels and memoirs, including The China Garden and Boy, Lost, the memoir about her mother and about Kristina’s missing brother, which won the 2014 NSW Premier's Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Just this month Simon & Schuster have chosen Kristina’s new novel, Shell, to launch the literary imprint of Scribner in Australia.

Kristina has been to Maleny several times, some of you may remember her visiting Rosetta Books in the 2000s to talk about her novel In One Skin and the book she co-wrote with Debbie Kilroy, Kilroy was here.

We begin with Josepha Dietrich whose memoir In Danger was published by UQP earlier this year. By way of introduction I’m going to take the unusual step of reading the author note from the front of her book as a way of describing her because, honestly, I can’t think of a better description:

Josie Dietrich is an English immigrant to Australia. She lives in Brisbane in the home she and her partner built on passive house principles. After coming out of a long reign as a carer, she’s worked as a research assisant for universities on projects to improve psychiatric discharge planning and women’s wellness after cancer. Her prior long-term work was in the After Hours Child Protection Unit, assessing children’s risk of harm alongside the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit of Victoria Police. To remain sane during this period, she flitted off overseas for months at a time to climb cliff faces while sleeping on beaches or in abandoned shepherd’s huts. After her cancer treatments finished and in light of her experience caring for her dying mother, Josie joined the advisory committee of CanSpeak Queensland as a cancer and consumer advocate.

This memoir, In Danger, is about her own journey through a diagnosis of breast cancer, following on from the death of her mother from the same disease fourteen years previously. It is not by any means a grim book, in fact it’s quite the opposite, probably, or possibly because of Josie’s familiarity with the illness and her lack of sentimentality towards it.

Gareth Evans was a representative for the Australian Labor Party in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for twenty-one years, from 1978 to 1999. During that time he served as a member of Cabinet for fourteen years in the Hawke and Keating governments, including seven and a half as Foreign Minister, a role in which, it is univerally acknowledged, he excelled.

After leaving politics he became President and CEO of the International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009, during which period the organisation grew to become the pre-eminent international non-government organisation (NGO) working on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.

He is presently the Co-Chair of the international advisory organisation The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), from 2010 to 2015 he was Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Canberra-based Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, and remains the Patron and Emeritus Convenor of the Asia Pacific Leadership Network on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He is also the Chancellor of the Australian National University.

He has written or edited eleven books including A Cabinet Diary, Inside the Hawke-Keating Government, and the new book he discusses in this podcast Incorrigible Optimist.

In this podcast Outspoken organiser and interviewer swaps chairs and is interviewed by Kate Evans from Radio National about his new novel, Hinterland, which is set in the fictional town of Winderran.

Shelley Davidow is the author of Whisperings in the Blood, a memoir in which immigrant voyages, repeated from one generation to the next, form the basis of an extraordinary story that explores the heartache and emotional legacies created by those who leave their homelands forever. It tells the story of her grandfather, Jacob Frank, who leaves his village in Lithuania to sail to America, of her mother, leaving America to go to South Africa, and her own voyage repeating these and other journeys before settling in Australia. Shelley now lives on the Sunshine Coast.

A C Grayling is a genuine example of that much bandied about thing, a most remarkable man. Born in Rhodesia, raised in Nyasaland, he discovered a love for philosophy at the age of twelve, going on to study at ever more prestigious institutions, culminating in Magdelene College, Oxford.

Apart from being the author of thirty books he writes widely on contemporary issues, including war crimes, euthenasia, secularism, the legalisation of drugs and human rights. He founded the New College of The Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London, where he is presently the Master, and was, just this year, awarded the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to philosophy.

His most recent book, The Age of Genius, the Seventeenth Century and the Invention of the Modern Mind, argues that the mind-set of modern times was established in the 1600s, amid terrible war and great injustice. His contention is that, despite such turmoil, this was the period in which ideas of magic and revelation, and the dead hand of religious law, first gave way to science and the rational, leading the way to the Enlightenment and the modern world as we know it. It is a work of philosophy but also of history, following the lives of some of the most significant figures from the period.

Malachy Tallack is from the Shetland Isles, as far north in Scotland as you can go. He attracted a lot of attention with his first book, 60 Degrees North, an account of his journey around the world along the line of the 60th latitude. It was a book that Robert MacFarlane described as brave and beautiful, chosen by BBC Radio 4 as Book of the Week. He was in Australia to promote his new work, The Un-Discovered Islands, a study on islands of imagination, deception and human error. Also well-known as a singer songwriter with four albums to his name, in the final ten minutes of this podcast Malachy plays a couple of his songs.

Kári Gíslason was born in Iceland. He’s the author of four books, two non-fiction and two novels. The Promise of Iceland tells the story of return journeys he’s made to his birthplace, while Saga Land: The island of stories at the edge of the world, co-written with Richard Fidler, is an account of visits they made together to the places where the Icelandic sagas actually took place. It won the Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2018.

Here he discusses his new novel, The Ashburner. Kári comes back onto the stage to answer questions at the end of Richard Fidler's podcast.

Richard Fidler is best known these days for his Conversations with Richard Fidler on ABC radio. Conversations is the most podcast program on the ABC, with 1.8m podcasts downloaded a month, which, by any standards, is a lot of podcasts.

But Richard had an earlier career, before he morphed into Australia’s best interviewer. He started out in the trio the Doug Anthony All Stars in the 80s, playing guitar in the ensemble with Paul McDermott and Tim Ferguson. All three of them have gone on to be significant figures in Australian cultural life, but at the time DAAS was an iconoclastic group who tore into, and apart, every taboo they stumbled across during the eighties and early nineties, and, I think it is fair to say, they bumped into a fair few. DAAS was, at the start, better known overseas than it was in Australia, at least until they joined up with the comedy show The Big Gig. The British comedian Al Murray said of seeing the group at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988, "they came onstage with the attitude of feral invaders … they were an insanely hot act who sang, cursed, sweated and insulted each other and their audiences with a level of commitment and polish that seemed exotically charged and almost transgressive…” Hard to imagine when you see the demure Mr Fidler sitting next to me on the stage here.

But he has morphed once again, now, into a historian. In 2014 he went to Istanbul with his son Joe and, on his return sat down to write an account of their travels while seeking out the location of many of the crucial moments in Byzantine history. Richard says of himself that the label is not appropriate, he is more of a history enthusiast than a historian, but you’d be hard pressed I think, once you’ve read Ghost Empire, to argue the point, for this is a history begging to be told, a history that picks you up and engages you on so many levels, demanding a rethink of how we view our past, and, really, there’s little else you can ask from a history book.

Tallking about her book Wasted, Text 2016

In 2009 Elspeth Muir’s youngest brother, Alexander, finished his last university exam and went out with some mates on the town. Later that night he wandered to the Story Bridge. He put his phone, wallet, T-shirt and thongs on the walkway, climbed over the railing, and jumped thirty metres into the Brisbane River below.

Three days passed before police divers pulled his body out of the water. When Alexander had drowned, his blood-alcohol reading was almost five times the legal limit for driving.

Why do some of us drink so much, and what happens when we do? Fewer young Australians are drinking heavily, but the rates of alcohol abuse and associated problems—from blackouts to sexual assaults and one-punch killings—are undiminished.

The World Without Us, Mireille's third novel, is set somewhere in the Hinterland of NSW's north coast, and concerns the Muller family, Stefan, Evangeline and their two daughters. Stefan, a beekeeper, is originally from Germany, while Evangeline grew up on a commune in the hills behind where they live. The story is woven around the absence of a third daughter, Pip, and the way they each deal with the grief her loss has provoked. At the same time it also braids within its cloth the radically changing landscape wrought by the work miners and loggers, as well as the mysterious failing of Stefan’s hives.

The novel has attracted remarkable reviews:

Alberto Manguel, writing in the Guardian says, Juchau’s style is perfectly poised, elegant and restrained. Almost any page of this astonishing novel offers proof of a writer of great poetic power… [it is] a revelation, a masterly story involving the refuge of silence, the fate of bees, and the shadows of old sins.

Magda Szubanski is one of Australia’s most beloved performers, most famous for her role in Kath and Kim as Sharon Strzelecki, but also for her work in the comedy sketch programs Fast Forward, the D-Generation, and, of course, as Esme Hoggett in the film Babe.

In this new and extraordinary memoir, Reckoning, Magda describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood haunted by the demons of her father’s espionage activities and the secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family. With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on. Heartbreaking, joyous, intimate and utterly captivating, Reckoning, announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers.

Paul Williams is Program Coordinator in Creative Writing at Sunshine Coast University and the author of several short stories and novels. His most recent book is Cokcraco, an exhilarating, playful and witty novel about writing, identity and literary KritiKs.

Some comments from reviews:

'Ever since Don Quixote, novelists have been taking the piss. In Cokcraco Paul Williams does exactly that, turning the full beam of his satirical spotlight on the civil wars in university departments, the cultish bunkum of literary theory, the self-obsession of creative writing courses and the self-flagellation of white liberal guilt… a strange, funny, intelligent and quite unforgettable novel. What Flaubert did for parrots, Mr Williams has done for the humble roach.' Jeffrey Poacher

Professor Tim Flannery is one of Australia’s leading writers on climate change. An internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007.

He has held various academic positions including Professor at the University of Adelaide, director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum and Visiting Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

His books include Throwim Way Leg, Here on Earth, The Future Eaters and The Weather Makers. Under the Gillard government he was appointed Climate Change Commissioner, with the specific task of communicating the science of climate change to the public, explaining the reasons why it is necessary to price carbon. In this podcast Professor Flannery talks about his new book The Atmosphere of Hope, which, in the lead up to the December talks in Paris, gives an overview of where climate science is now and what can be done.

Kate Holden is the author of the memoirs In My Skin and The Romantic, Italian Nights and Days. In My Skin was nominated for many awards and was published in twelve countries. Her stories and columns have appeared regularly in The Age as well as The Monthly, Cleo, New Woman and the Weekend Australian.

The biography on her website begins with the tantalising entry:

I was born in Melbourne in 1972 and, apart from some time in Rome, Shanghai and London, I have always lived here. I went to progressive community schools and the University of Melbourne, where I got an Honours degree in literature and classics. I had jobs as a dish-pig in a café in a patisserie, as a hair model and in a bookshop before turning to an unexpected career in heroin addiction and, a little later, as a professional sex worker.