Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Rebecca Huntley spent 50 years trying to process PTSD brought on from a traumatic childhood. But it was only when she decided to experiment with MDMA as a treatment that Rebecca's life began to change.  Rebecca Huntley's public life as a broadcaster, an author and a social researcher made her well-known to many Australians. But in private, Rebecca spent years grappling with complex PTSD and childhood trauma. At 50, while walking the Camino, she realised that despite decades of the ..read more

Reflecting on a year of phenomenal guests, we are bringing you a selection of the Best Conversations of 2024. Troy Cassar-Daley is one of Australia's most beloved country music stars, with a string of awards and albums to show for it. But his latest album, Between the Fires, is a reflective, deeply personal exploration of grief, love and his childhood, caught between the two worlds of his Indigenous mother and his Maltese-Australian father.  Help and support is always available You can call Lifeline 24 hours a day on 13 11 14. Troy Cassar-Daley is a proud Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man ..read more

When writer Helen Garner began following her grandson’s under-16s football team, she gained a new appreciation for 'the ordinary beauty of human society ..read more

Finance journalist Alan Kohler and Patricia Collins, who had just joined the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, recall their vivid memories from the night that irrevocably changed Darwin It's been half a century since Darwin was nearly completely razed by Cyclone Tracy. On Christmas Day in 1974, the monster cyclone bore down on the city, killing at least 66 people. Both Alan Kohler and Patricia Collins survived that night in very different circumstances. Alan was living in a share house on stilts with other young journalists at the time, and they were all huddled in the bathroom when the ..read more

Lech Blaine with the strange true story of his childhood, shaped by love, religious zealotry, and four wildly different parents. CW: descriptions of foster care and child removal ..read more

When Richard's team developed pioneering treatment for melanoma, he didn't expect he would become the first person in the world to use this experimental therapy on his own, terminal brain tumour.  Joint Australian of the year Professor Richard Scolyer has spent his medical career saving the lives of people with melanoma. Then suddenly last year, the life he had to save was his own. A tumour was discovered in Richard’s brain and the diagnosis was terminal. So Richard and his colleagues decided to try something completely radical and experimental. This episode of Conversations touches on pe ..read more

When Dr Gillian Deakin became a GP, she knew she didn’t want to work behind a desk. Instead, she travelled overseas to make a difference. More recently, she has focused on treating patients with functional illnesses — symptoms that come and go despite all tests and scans showing up as normal. Dr Gillian Deakin grew up close enough to hear the lions roaring at night in Sydney's Taronga Zoo. She was part of a large, Catholic family and learned social justice and critical thinking from a young age. When Gillian became a doctor, she promised herself her career wouldn’t involve sitting behind a des ..read more

Is Australia's social media ban the right way to go? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says it is time to reinstate the play-based childhood to bring our kids back from life online and into the real world, away from their increasing obsession with devices.  It’s a fact of modern life that children who are given smart phones are able to access pornography, real images of violence and harmful comparisons with their friends and also influencers around the world. Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt argues that as the social norms have changed, and younger and younger children have been allow ..read more

Author Rosalie Ham grew up in a country town three blocks long and three blocks wide. She paid close attention to the characters there, like the woman at the shops whose face was frozen into Munch’s scream. This eye for detail led to her first novel, which became a hit movie starring Kate Winslet. Author, Rosalie Ham grew up in country NSW, in a town three streets wide and three streets long. During a mouse plague, the rodents were so prolific that their droppings would appear at the bottom of the cereal packet, and the town's children — unsupervised — would chop the mice up with a downpipe in ..read more

From Wollongong to London, via Alice Springs, this is writer Nikki Gemmell on her deeply romantic life, and how she defied expectations to become a famous author. Writer Nikki Gemmell grew up the daughter of a coal miner who thought writers were a burden on society, while her mum taught Nikki that only success was worthy of love. So Nikki went above and beyond to prove her beloved father wrong, and to get the attention of her mother through her achievements, publishing 20 books in the process, including the wildly successful The Bride Stripped Bare. The mother of four children, Nikki has also ..read more