Life Sentences Podcast
by Caroline Baum
What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person’s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised orunauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.
Episodes
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The Swashbuckler
Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films like Robin Hood, he had lived the life of an entitled boss on plantations in New Guinea as a fortune hunter before being discovered on the beach at Bondi.…
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Walks on the Wild Side
Peter Matthiessen was a giant of American twentieth century letters, and the only writer ever to win the National Book Award in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. He was a complicated man who went to great lengths to escape the privilege he was born into. A comprehensive new biography…
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Shooting the Shots
Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his...
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In Disguise
After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next book and what should it be about? Her UK publisher was not keen on her ideas and so she turned to journalism and went undercover to write an exposé of the…
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Mr Wollongong
Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accused of being part of a paedophile ring. In a sensational twist, he was murdered in his home. As the mayor of a major industrial hub, Arkell had ambitious...
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The Very Model of a Modern Governor General
Authorised biographies, especially of those in high office, tend to suffer from being overly respectful if not downright deferential. But in the case of Juliet Rieden’s authorised biography of Quentin Bryce, the first female Governor General of Australia, authorisation means co-operation without...
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The Power of Two
In this very revealing memoir/biography hybrid, bestselling author Bryce Courtenay’s son Adam explores the motives and personality traits that shaped his father as a public figure and parent. As a pathological fantasist, Bryce could not resist making up stories about his ancestry and life...
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A Second Chance
Elizabeth Harrower is not a household name in Australian writing, so how has she ended up with not one but two biographies, both published within a month of each other? By sheer coincidence, journalist Helen Trinca and literary editor Susan Wyndham both found themselves on the Harrower trail,...
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My Sexy Sister
Australian poet Dorothy Porter blazed across the literary scene like a meteor. She was even more seductive in real life than on the page and broke many women’s hearts in her short but busy amorous life. Now her adoring younger sister, Josie McSkimming has written Gutsy Girls, a revealing memoir...
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Big Fish
Although there are several biographies of big game fishing bestselling American author Zane Grey, none of them focus on his two visits to Australia. Author Vicki Hastrich is also a fishing enthusiast, so when she came across Zane Grey by accident, her interest was piqued. How had this handsome...
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Fearless
Fearless Beatrice Faust is an overdue biography of a significant reformist force in the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s in Australia. Written by political scholar Dr Judith Brett, this lively biography returns Bea to the prominence she once enjoyed as a controversial media figure…
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French Wave
American film critic Carrie Rickey has written the first biography of celebrated French cinema pioneer, Agnes Varda. Varda was born in Belgium but found her creative community in the southern French port town of Sete, which cemented her love for the beach and for many other things that would...
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Samurai Soldier Spy
The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli is a fascinating biographical investigation into the life of Harry Freame - a half Australian, half Japanese military Scout who defied the odds at the front in some of the most vicious fighting of World War One. Some believe he deserved the VC for his bravery but…
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Austen-tation
To mark the sesquicentenary of Jane Austen’s birth, this episode is an edited version of an event for Sydney Writers Festival. Speakers are scholar of English literature Professor William Christie, bestselling author Jane Caro and First Nations author Larissa Behrendt. Each of them celebrates...
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker, who has devoted thirty years of his life as an academic to a close archival study of Alice Munro’s work. It was revealed that...
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The Fictional Biographer
Dominic Amerena is a rising young Australian writer who has chosen a biographer as the central figure in his novel I Want Everything. His ambitious, unnamed narrator recognises an older woman at the city baths one day as Brenda Shales, a writer who was famous for two incendiary novels before...
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Best Biographies
In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read and enjoyed recently. -Ryan Butta chooses Anthony Sharwood’s hybrid travelogue biography of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kosciusko and also mentions Didion...
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Pillow Talk Part 2
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century and...
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Pillow Talk Part 1
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century and...
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The Good Wife
Race Matthews had a distinguished career as a federal politician and Victorian state Minister, but the highlight of his career was his time as Gough Whitlam’s Principal Private Secretary. A joiner from a very early age, he understood the power of working within an organisation to bring about…
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Love Is Blind
Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson. Together, the couple became part of a bohemian crowd of artists who moved between Sydney and Melbourne, and helped shape Australian art for decades. Now their...
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Literary Legends
Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham - about three literary legends: Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard, Elizabeth Harrower - three writers who experienced the twentieth...
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Pole Position
Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko. The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a…
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Bitter Lemons
The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biographical suite of scenes that tell his life story in almost cartoonish images. He talks to Caroline Baum about how Tom Ley became known as Lemonade Ley and how…
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Flash Madam
Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the ‘flash madam’ of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for buying real estate and flair for style and comfort attracted the big end of town, as well as the attention of the press. As well as running a brothel, she was…
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The Huffy Hagiographer
When Caroline Baum interviewed Fleet Street veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson about his new, very favourable biography of Katherine, Princess of Wales, the conversation did not go as planned.
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The Queen of Celebrity
For decades, Kitty Kelley has held the reputation as the queen of celebrity biography in the US, writing juicy and revealing accounts of the lives of Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, The Bush family, Nancy Reagan etc. Now in her eighties, she reflects on how she got started as a...
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Lucky
Donald Horne was Australia’s leading public intellectual in the sixties and seventies and coined the phrase The Lucky Country in his bestselling book of the same title. The phrase has entered the Australian vernacular, and is often misused and interpreted as a sign of national complacency. Before...
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The Impresario
There has never been anyone like Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. The Russian impresario shook up the dusty world of ballet, making it the centre of the avant garde in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in Paris where the premieres of L’Apres Midi ‘D’un Faune and the Rite of...
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Superboy
Recorded in the lead up the UK election of 2024, this is a conversation with Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s biographer, journalist and former Labour insider Tom Baldwin. He explains how the biography was written with Starmer’s co-operation but was not authorised by him and how Starmer learns...
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Brief Lives
Most people are unaware of the existence of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, a remarkable effort of scholarship by an army of volunteer historians and specialist contributors committed to documenting significant and representative Australians. It’s a challenging task in terms not...
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Two Bob's Worth
To fully enjoy this episode, it is recommended that you watch the documentary Turn Every Page about the unique working relationship between biography giant Robert Caro and his editor of fifty years, Robert Gottlieb. Robert Caro is regarded by many as the greatest biographer of his generation,...
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After The Dream
This content is from BIO, The US based Biographers International Organisation, which promotes and champions the practice of biography to writers and readers. You can read more about BIO here: https://biographersinternational.org/ In this episode award-winning biographer Jonathan Eig talks about…
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Biography Backwards
Historian Kate Fullagar tells the story of the intertwined destinies of Governor Phillip and First Nations leader Bennelong, beginning with their deaths and spooling gradually back to their first encounter. This bold, unconventional approach allows for a wider lens and different perspective on...
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Talking About A Revolution
An elegant Trotskyist, Michael Pablo grew up in Greece to become an urbane revolutionary, who made his presence felt at many of the most significant uprisings of the 20th century in an attempt to build what he called self-managed socialism. Partnered by his dynamic and fearless wife Elli...
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Acing It
She is part Japanese, part Haitian but trained and lives in the US. Nothing about Naomi Osaka is conventional, but she forged her career in the mold of her idol Serena Williams- and then beat her. Along the way, she struggled with mental health and admitted that in public, carried the Japanese…
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By George
In George Harrison, The Reluctant Beatle, veteran rock journalist and biographer Philip Norman (author of the definitive Beatles book, Shout!) gives us an access all areas portrait of a paradoxical figure who found fame a burden but emerged from the band, to grow into a new creative phase of life...
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Healing Hands
Perth based skin and burns surgeon Professor Fiona Wood is one of the most trusted and admired figures in Australian life and yet it took her years to agree to biographer Sue Williams request to let her tell her life story. Time poor and a workaholic, she eventually relented. Williams also talks…
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To Bee or not to Bee
One of the most puzzling and flamboyant women on the streets of Sydney in the twentieth century, Bee Miles became the stuff of legend, a celebrity in her own lifetime, but also a troubled soul who spent time in asylums and in and out of jail. In Bee Miles, Australia’s famous bohemian rebel, Rose...
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Playing By The Rules
Catharine Lumby is the first out of the gate of two biographers to tackle the many-faceted life of author Frank Moorhouse, who was a well known bon vivant, bushwalker and prolific author of fiction and non fiction. He was also an active campaigner on issues including censorship and copyright law....
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Love In Code
Every Australian knows My Country, the poem that made Dorothea Mackellar famous at a young age. But very few people know much about her life. In Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar, biographer Deborah Fitzgerald was approached by her descendants and given...
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The Case Of The Incredible Vanishing Woman
Anna Funder has already garnered international praise for her non fiction (Stasiland) and fiction (All That I Am) In Wifedom, she does something new and bold, creating a hybrid of genres that brings together biography, memoir, fiction and feminist critique in what she calls ‘an intervention’ that...
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The Petitioner
William Cooper was a remarkable Yorta Yorta man from Victoria, born in the 1860s who sought justice for his people by petitioning the British King for black representation in parliament. He believed that it was necessary to ‘think black’ to understand and implement justice for Aboriginal people....
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A Fraction Too Much Friction
Often acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest singer songwriters, and compared to Paul McCartney, who is a fan, Neil Finn has had a pretty regular life. He comes from a happy and musical home, which he shared with his older brother Tim. First in Split Enz and then in his own band, Crowded House,...
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The Mischief Maker
She was one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced but Gwen Harwood was also a very mischievous woman, who played literary pranks on editors who failed to publish her work. When marriage takes her to Tasmania, she hates the place. Her husband is an intensely jealous man who is totally...
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Uptown Girl
Nora Ephron had it all: success, love, friendship, a brilliantly original voice, personal style. As the writer of Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, she demonstrated an acute ability to write about relationships between men and women that was bestselling and box office gold. Her...
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Bland Ambition
Award-winning investigative journalist and political biographer Margaret Simons was hesitant about undertaking a biography of Tanya Plibersek until she made a surprising discovery of their shared enthusiasm for Jane Austen. Here, Simons discusses the differences between authorised and…
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She Called Him Daddy
In the second part of this conversation John Lahr talks about Arthur Miller’s disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe how it came about and discusses the impact of success and celebrity on Miller, as well as one of his greatest and most relevant plays, The Crucible and The Misfits, the film script…
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All My Sons
Theatre’s most respected critic, New Yorker critic and biographer John Lahr has compressed his deep understanding of Arthur Miller’s life and creative process into a fascinating biography Arthur Miller: American Witness. In this revealing portrait, full of personal anecdotes from family and...
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A rescued life
While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unaware of her life story. She was a private woman, and because she lived in Europe and America, Australia had mixed feelings about her - and those mixed feelings...
About this show
What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory in the search for the real story behind a person’s life. Whether they are writing about the famous or the forgotten, whether their version of events is authorised orunauthorised, biography is a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.
Hosted by
Caroline Baum