Saturday Extra - Separate Stories Podcast

As a young diplomat Sue Boyd was summoned to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam where he asked about her posting in Portugal “what's going on, what does it mean for Australia and what do we do about it." This is the mantra Sue says that a good diplomat has to be able to answer. And so began her long career as a successful diplomat. Sue talks about the struggles for equal opportunity for females in DFAT, that Canberra was often the hardest place to be a female in this field compared to the rest of her overseas postings, and how you do your job when you disagree with the directive given by the government. The example Sue discusses is that of the Pacific Solution under John Howard, where she had to find Pacific countries willing to set up refugee processing centres.

Bricks and mortar surely can't lie. How can a historical site like Angkor Wat or the site of Abu Simbel not reveal the accurate story about their creation? How do you restore, re-build or re-locate and keep the authenticity of the site and the history? Does it matter? And importantly, who decides? John Darlington is an archaeologist, the Executive Director of the British affiliate of the World Monuments Fund and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His book Fake Heritage: Why we rebuild monuments is published by Yale University Press.

The Sackler’s are one of the richest families in the world and for years they were lauded for their philanthropy, while the source of their fortune remained a mystery. Then it was revealed that they were the developers of OxyContin, the drug at the heart of the opioid crisis that crippled America, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Spanning three generations, the story of the Sackler family is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second gilded age, and a parable of twenty-first century business.

Why did humans start to live together in cities as opposed to villages and why did they fail? Professor of Ancient History and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London Greg Woolf explores these questions in his book that has the subtitle a natural history as Greg believes that this is the key to answering these questions.

Twenty years after its humble beginnings, Wikipedia has become an indispensable tool. In a world of misinformation, it has been described as the ‘last bastion of idealism’ on the Internet. How did Wikipedia come to realise such unlikely success, and what are the challenges it faces as it enters the next phase of its life?

America's youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman recently reminded us of the intersection between the political and the personal, and the power of poetry to express this. This was something that resonated with Australia's wartime prime minister John Curtin, who read poetry every Sunday evening and declared it 'good for the soul'. Not only was poetry a great love for Curtin, it informed his politics, prose and even his relationships.

What needs to be done to ensure the future of liberal democracies.