Good Reading Podcast

During the Second Sudanese Civil War, thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks from northern government troops. Many became refugees in Ethiopia. There, in 1989, teacher and community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak assumed care of the Lost Boys in a bid to protect them from becoming child soldiers. So began a four-year journey from Ethiopia to Sudan and on to the safety of a Kenyan refugee camp. Together they endured starvation, animal attacks and the horrors of landmines and aerial bombardment. This eyewitness account by Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot, is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Yuot Alaak about life for the Dinka people of South Sudan before the civil wars, the terrible life for a child soldier, and the wonders of arriving in the city of Adelaide as a Sudanese refugee.

When nineteen-year-old farm girl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper's owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work. What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's like she's poked a bull ant's nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Ronni Salt about her mysterious life on X, the people, the places and exploring beneath the surface of small town life in the Riverina, and why why water and corruption go hand-in-hand.

Acclaimed wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta has been mugged by whales, touched by a baby whale and covered in whale snot. In Humpback Highway, Pirotta dives beneath the surface to reveal the mysterious world of humpback whales — from their life cycle and the challenges humans present, to why whale snot and poo are important for us and the ocean. Plus the cutting-edge new technologies that allow us to see where they swim, listen to them talk and spy on them underwater. Whether you’re a whale lover or you’re simply curious about the underwater world, 'Humpback Highway' will inspire and give you a new respect for these majestic, marine giants. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Vanessa Pirotta about how she became a whale scientist, why Australia's 'humpback highway' is key to understanding whale behaviour, and Vanessa also tells us what kind of parents whales make, and what the future holds for this incredible species.

'36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem', is a book-length poem that is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself. Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like his award-winning book, 'The Boat', '36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem' conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Nam Le about how his first love has always been poetry rather than the prose of his first book, 'The Boat', how the double-bind of the experience of living in Australia as a man with Vietnamese heritage and how it is reflected in his poetry, how language can be imperialist, even destructive yet continues to shape us as a society and as humans.

Named after a famous fictional character, librarian Bridget Jones was raised on a remote cattle station, with only her mother’s romance novels for company. Now living alone in Fremantle, Bridget is a hopeless romantic. She also believes that anyone who doesn’t like reading just hasn’t met the right book yet, and that connecting books to their readers is her superpower. If only her love life was that easy. When handsome Italian barista Fabio progresses from flirting with love hearts on her coffee foam to joining the book club she runs at her library, Bridget prays her romance ‘curse’ won’t ruin things. But it’s the attention of her cranky neighbour Sully that seems to be the major obstacle in her life. Why is he going to so much effort to get under her skin? She soon discovers that not all romances start with a meet-cute, but they might just end in happily ever after... In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Rachael Johns about how our idea of libraries as dull places is now a thing of the past, how exploring relationships and friendships are at the heart of what she writes, and why romance fiction endures by changing with the times.