Good Weekend Talks

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 weeping as he did so. He knows he made his friends uncomfortable by talking too much about Helena’s death at dinner parties. The silence of their shared Maroubra home was unbearable. Carr joins us to discuss his grief memoir, Bring Back Yesterday, about the loss of Helena and scrounging his way forward into what he calls “the left-over life” – a life still full of pleasures like reading, opera and the foam of a wave on your face as you enter the ocean. Today's episode is hosted by Sydney Morning Herald senior writer and columnist Jacqueline Maley.
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In this episode, we talk to Courtney Barnett, who broke into the musical mainstream a little over a decade ago as an Aussie singer-songwriter with deadpan delivery, with work veering from the witty and rambling to something evoking Margaret Atwood. The Grammy-nominated artist chats to Konrad Marshall from her home in Los Angeles, where she's about to release her fourth album, "Creature of Habit".
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Kathy Lette is a comic writer and pioneering voice in contemporary feminism whose first book, Puberty Blues, was published in 1979. Co-authored with Gabrielle Carey, it catapulted her into the public eye, horrifying her headmistress mother with its graphic depictions of teenage sex and drug taking. She has subsequently written 21 best-selling books and today speaks with The Sydney Morning Herald’s deputy opinion editor, Margot Saville, ahead of the release of her newest novel, The Sisterhood Rules.
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Todd Sampson began his TV career on Gruen, the long-running ABC series about advertising, before transforming himself into a human guinea pig to scrutinise the limits of the human brain and body.His upcoming show, called Why?, explores the reasons behind why people turn to extreme beliefs and behaviours such as doomsday prepping, base-jumping or alien worship. In this chat, hosted by The Sydney Morning Herald science reporter Angus Dalton, Sampson talks about his upbringing, how he went from 'ad man' to TV, and the moment marrying a doomsday prepper really came in handy.
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Konrad Marshall is Good Weekend magazine's deputy editor, he's also the regular host of this podcast and he's just released a new book. Run For Your Life is a year-long journey on why we run, and explores a year Konrad spent in constant motion – jogging and sprinting, shuffling and loping, while also interviewing some of Australia's most interesting runners.
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