Every year fires rage across Canada, but this year is shaping up to be extreme. More than 4 million hectares have been burnt already – that’s double the average. The province of British Columbia has exhausted all its resources, and those of its surrounding provinces, and last week around 80 firefighters from Australia flew in to help out.
As 2SER’s “Canadian Correspondent” I checked in with The Daily on Monday morning to fill Sydney in.
I chatted with Rod Quinn about the future of hockey and vintage shopping in Toronto. There were fairly good acoustics in the food court staircase where I was standing!
Here is the podcast from my interview with Sally Knight over the weekend on Overnights. I’ve been giving updates while I’ve been away and this time around we talked about Rob Ford, Bloody Caesars and all the festivals happening in Toronto.
So, I’m off. I’ve actually left the country already but this is an interview I did with Sally Knight on ABC Overnights – me, as producer, the interviewee. It’s all about the trip I’ve been planning and how somebody can learn to drive on the “other side” of the road.
I was very excited to be able to interview Norma Percy, an amazingly accomplished documentary filmmaker whose latest work, The Iraq War, explores the murky origins of the conflict, the machinations of the war itself and the depressing aftermath.
This was first broadcast on The Friday Daily on 2SER.
I’m back on The Daily on Friday mornings. Every week I chat to Ed Blakely, Honorary Professor in Urban Policy at the US Studies Centre (at the University of Sydney) about what’s happening stateside and around the world. Last week was particularly interesting – gun violence, the “Prison Industrial Complex” and race relations in America.
This was first broadcast on 2SER on August 23.
WWII_London_Blitz_East_London (Inf-Lite Teacher, Flickr)
Life After Life is British author Kate Atkinson’s 8th novel. It’s about the many many lives of Ursula Todd, who is born many times on a winter’s night in England in 1910 and dies in many different ways – Spanish Flu, The London Blitz and various accidents. It’s all about the many twists and turns one person’s life can take and how that affects where we all end up, and at the same time illustrates what it was like to be a woman in 20th century England.
There is a whole lot of detail about day-to-day English life in the book, including some descriptions of awful-sounding food. I had fun asking Kate about that.
Kate came out to Sydney for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and I caught up with her in her hotel lobby. I started off by asking how Kate came across the idea of telling a story through one individual’s many lives and deaths.
This was first broadcast on 2SER’s Final Draft on June 8.
The Dalai Lama is visiting Australia next week. His guest lecture at the University of Sydney was the subject of some controversy.
I spoke to Kyinzom Dhongdue from the Australia Tibet Council on today’s Daily on 2SER. I started off by asking about who the Dalai Lama actually is and why this visit is significant.
I grew up with images and stories of Tibet, mainly because my mother worked with many Tibetan people in northern India as a young doctor. I always knew it as an exotic place where the people were peaceful and continually suffering. This is still the case, and I am interested to see if anything constructive comes out of this upcoming visit.
Algae – Brian Goodwin (Flickr)
Finding alternative sources of energy is high on the country’s agenda – or at least it should be. Julian Cribb is a science writer who believes that Australia could feed and power itself using algal biofuels. He joined me on The Friday Daily on 2SER on May 31.
Congratulations to Romy Ash, whose first novel Floundering has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin prize!
I spoke to the Melbourne writer and food blogger about the book, which is sparse and disturbing, but captures the feeling of driving across the Australian landscape like nothing else.
This interview was first broadcast on Final Draft, 2SER’s literature show, on May 4.
Lucie Heather Ethel 