Good Weekend Talks

Arj Barker has been a fixture on the local comedy scene for decades, headlining our comedy festivals and turning up on shows including Thank God You’re Here and Spicks and Specks. But the San Francisco-born stand-up began telling jokes at open mic nights in 1989, before appearances on American late night TV for Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, and David Letterman - not to mention a memorable turn on the hit sitcom Flight of the...

Starting a business is one thing, running it successfully is another – but doing it with your spouse and four kids is a different kettle of fish. Janine Allis has done all of the above, after founding Boost Juice as a single store in the 2000s and growing it into a global empire. She’s since become one of the most sought-after entrepreneurs in the country and a regular on small screens, both as a judge on Shark Tank and...

Peter Singer, often called the world's most influential philosopher, is turning 80, and he's returned home to Melbourne too, after almost 25 years as a professor of bioethics at Princeton University.
Singer's practical ethics has had a huge impact and caused controversy across issues as diverse as the rights of animals, voluntary euthanasia and abortion, freedom of speech, and our moral obligation to help thos...

Rob de Castella, otherwise known as “Deeks” - or, to his opponents, “Tree”, due to his sturdy limbs and unshiftable calm - is a two-time Commonwealth Games gold medal winner and Australian running royalty. He joins Good Weekend Talks to chat about his Indigenous Marathon Project, in which he takes a group of Indigenous people from around the country every year and signs them up for a rigorous training a...

Australian author and intellectual Anna Funder specialises in telling the stories of people forgotten or ignored by official histories. She began her writing career with Stasiland, detailing the state surveillance of the people of the former East Germany, which was followed by her prize-winning novel, All That I Am, telling the previously untold story of early resisters to the Nazis. In her most recent work, Wifedom, Funder shifted...

Picture this: a crumbling Italian mansion in the Tuscan hills, an eccentric aristocrat, sun-soaked lunches, too much wine and a house humming with secrets. That’s the delightful world into which we’re heading today as we talk to writer Andrew Sean Greer, whose new novel, Villa Coco, is loosely inspired by his own time at an Italian estate around a famous Baroness. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less also joins us ...

John Safran burst into the public consciousness in 1997 as a contestant in the ABC TV show Race Around the World, where young filmmakers travelled the world making four-minute films in just 10 days. Safran won the popular vote on the reality show after running through Jerusalem naked, and asking a voodoo priest to put a curse on an ex-girlfriend. Almost 30 years on, the show is back, with Safran as a judge. Today’s conversati...

There's a profound grief associated with not having kids if you really wanted them, one that's rarely acknowledged, even less understood. But there's also an unexpected joy when you come out the other side. In today's conversation, Good Weekend senior writer Katrina Strickland discusses the ups and downs of her own path into childlessness with Good Weekend editor Melissa Stevens. They traverse what medical developments have given y...

Shaun Micallef has graced our TV screens since 1989 – from crime caper Mr and Mrs Murder to long-running game show Talkin' About Your Generation and weekly satirical news comedy Mad as Hell.
But he's not averse to tackling the big issues, either: his latest series, Going for Broke, examines our national gambling habit.
In today's conversation, with senior culture writer Kerrie ...

Social media was once harnessed by Barack Obama to spread hope. Now “angertainers” are exploiting our human instinct to seek threat to divide society and to build their own cultural, political and social capital, often based on misinformation and lies.
They create content for platforms that reward stunts, insults and anger – in the process, distorting reality and hijacking any possibility of ...

Bob Brown has spent the past 50 years trying to make people put the planet before profit. The environmental crusader, former senator and medical doctor, and founding member of the Wilderness Society has fought pivotal battles, including campaigns to save the Franklin River and the Swift parrot. He also practises what he preaches: he has lived sustainably for decades in a one-bedroom home.
Today, to celebrate t...

You might know her best from Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell, but over the past 20 years, Christie Whelan Browne has become one of the most in-demand stars of the Australian stage, appearing in Britney Spears: The Cabaret, The Producers, Shane Warne: The Musical and Muriel's Wedding.

But the thing that has kept her in the headlines is no laughing matter – the allegations of sexual harassment she made against her Rocky Horror Sho...

When Fran Lebowitz was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, she won a school award for being “the Class Wit” – and in her 50-year career as a writer and speaker, she’s repeatedly earned that label. Among her countless famous aphorisms, this zinger: "The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

As a writ...

Luke Bateman is perhaps Australia’s most unlikely book critic – a former rugby league star and recovered gambling addict who works as a logger on a remote Queensland property. While hardly your average inner-city literary type, Bateman had always loved reading – especially fantasy books – but living in the bush with only black snakes for company, had no one to talk to about it. So one day in April last year,...

Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has made a career out of chasing the kinds of stories that most people would be wise to leave alone. The New Yorker writer is drawn to powerful institutions and the people at their heart – from the Sackler dynasty, whose pharmaceutical company created the opioid painkiller OxyContin, in Empire of Pain, to the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in Say Nothing. His late...

New York food writer, editor and podcaster Laurie Woolever spent the early years of her career assisting two very famous chefs: first Mario Batali, then Anthony Bourdain, for whom she worked for nine years. Woolever was also, for much of this time, an addict – using alcohol, marijuana and sex to get through the ups and downs of work, marriage and motherhood. She writes about all of this in her candid 2025 memoir, Care & F...

Marianne Perkovic spent decades working in the finance sector. In 2006, she was the youngest chief executive of an ASX-listed company and in 2018, as a banking executive, she faced a grilling at a royal commission. This is not the standard path for nailing the best seat at Australian Fashion Week. In fact, becoming executive chair of the Australian Fashion Council in 2023 was meant to be her “fun board” (while giving he...

Stephanie Alexander is a national icon: an internationally renowned cooking guru, best-selling writer and inspirational founder of a nationwide kitchen-garden scheme for schoolkids. She's also the final arbiter of kitchen disputes in homes all over Australia – resolving disagreements about how to store tomatoes and when to take the sponge out of the oven – as the author of Australia's most famous cookbook, The Cook...

Bob Carr has done hard jobs before. He was premier of NSW for 10 years, and later served as foreign minister under Julia Gillard’s government. But when his beloved wife, Helena, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2023, he faced the hardest job of his life – learning how to live without her. Carr worked through his deep shock and sadness by obsessively walking the Sydney streets he once presided over as premier, often ...