Welcome to Gleetalks
A collection of some of our most interesting and popular conversations from Sydney’s finest literary events program, hosted by David Gaunt.
We’ve hosted some of the world’s best and best known authors and thinkers over the years, sharing their stories, asking hard questions and addressing big issues. And now, we’d like to share some of them with you.
Gleetalks brings you exclusively curated great ideas, fascinating conversations and fantastic stories.
Episodes
Ronni Salt in conversation with Sunil Badami
The 1970s. The era of flares, treads, Gough… and the founding of Gleebooks – but that’s another story.
It was also the age of the advent of feminism, rampant police and political corruption, and the rise of drug-fuelled organised crime in Australia, where Nugan Hand, Mr Asia and Robert Trimbole became household names.
In this episode of Gleetalks, investigative journalist Ronni Salt talks to Gleebooks Events Manager Sunil Badami about the intrigues and politics in her new crime thriller, Gunnawah, featuring a colourful cast of characters and gripping escapades in Trimbole’s old Riverina stomping ground.
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Chris Baker in conversation with Michaela Kalowski
From Palm Beach to Cronulla, Mount Druitt to Bondi, Sydney is a city made for swimming.
Over a calendar year, lifelong swimmer, educator and writer Chris Baker swam at iconic beaches, municipal pools, harbour baths, tidal rock pools, bushland lakes and a backyard pool,
In this episode of Gleetalks, he talks to curator and broadcaster Michaela Kalowksi about his book Swimming Sydney: A Tale of 52 Swims, a valentine to the beautiful obsession of swimming in the world’s most beautiful city, and how storytelling is the best way to navigate life’s emotional currents.
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Geoff Raby in conversation with Geraldine Doogue
In the Nineteenth Century, the Russian and British played what was dubbed the Great Game for strategic influence in Central Asia.
Today, the players have changed. Combine Putin’s Ukraine folly and American isolationism and, China now has the chance to project its power globally, as the US did from the early Twentieth Century. What are the implications and consequences, especially for Australia?
In this episode of Gleetalks, Australia’s former ambassador to China Geoff Raby AO talks to broadcaster Geraldine Doogue about his new book Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy, which explores these geopolitical forces and strategic questions.
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Michelle de Kretser in conversation with Elizabeth McMahon
It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit.
In her seventh novel, Theory and Practice, award-winning writer Michelle de Kretser bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes making and unmaking fiction as we read and expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
In this episode of Gleetalks, she chats to Professor Elizabeth McMahon of the University of NSW about this mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame, of theory and practice, where art and life intersect.
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Lauren Samuelsson in conversation with Michelle Arrow
Since 1933, the Australian Women’s Weekly has been Australia’s highest-selling women’s magazine. And from birthday cakes to barbecues, the Weekly taught generations of Australians what to eat and how to cook it at home.
Drawing on recipes, food editorials and readers’ memories, Lauren Samuelsson’s A Matter of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly & Its Influence on Australian Food Culture is a celebration of the Weekly’s essential role in the development of Australian food culture.
On this deliciously nostalgic episode of Gleetalks, Lauren talks to historian Professor Michelle Arrow about how the Weekly encouraged us to be adventurous, to experiment in the kitchen, and to try new ingredients and flavours, stimulating an eclectic, Australian way of eating which is still reflected on our tables today.
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Michael Visontay in conversation with Caroline Baum
One hundred years ago, a New York bookseller Gabriel Wells, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages, which he marketed as Noble Fragments.
Half a century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family and changed its destiny.
In this episode of Gleetalks, Visontay talks to critic and author Caroline Baum about his hunt for those fragments, what he discovered in the arcane world of antique book collectors, and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism in his book Noble Fragments: The Maverick Who Broke Up the World’s Greatest Book.
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George Megalogenis Quarterly Essay #97: Minority Rule
George Megalogenis in conversation with David Marr
Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and another minority government is a real possibility at this one. Politics-as-usual is not enough for many voters.
In this timely episode of Gleetalks George Megalogenis traces the how and why of a political realignment in his Quarterly Essay: Minority Rule: The New Shape of Australian Politics with broadcaster and author David Marr.
This is about the teals, the Greens and the Coalition. In a contest between new and old, progressive and conservative, which vision of Australia will win out? But it’s also about Labor in power – is careful centrism the right strategy for the times, or is something else required? With the election only weeks away, this is essential listening to understand the new political landscape.
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