CONVERSATIONS

IN 2005 I BEGAN HOSTING an ABC local radio program called The Conversation Hour. The program had its origins in Brisbane, but the following year it was brought into Sydney and NSW. Eventually, it became a national show across two networks, and we changed the name to Conversations.

My first producer was the brilliant Kellie Riordan. Kellie and I agreed the show should often feature citizen storytellers who were unknown to the wider community but who had a story to tell that was wonderful, weird, intense, funny or moving or all of those things. Kellie used to say it was these ‘unfamous’ guests that listeners responded to most strongly, because they felt they could measure their own lives against them. 

In 2006, Kellie went on to bigger and better things and a new series producer, the amazing Pam O’Brien came on board. Pam had worked for years at the BBC as a TV director, until she came with her family to live in Australia. Pam was one of the most loved and respected people in ABC Radio and I count her among my very best friends. She was very much the co-founder of the show, and built it up into such a colossus, we wondered from time to time, Dear God, what have we done? 

WHEN WE BEGAN on the program, the conventional wisdom at the time was that no radio interview should run longer than seven minutes. But we were sure there was an appetite for something richer, less combative and more discursive - something that would appeal to the head and the heart at the same time.

We podcasted the show right from the start. At first, I regarded the podcast as another annoying thing we had to attend to at the end of the day, but our wise overseers at ABC Radio, to their credit, insisted we keep at it. I didn’t really start exploring the world of podcasts until 2008, when I began to listen obsessively to the classic public radio shows from the US - This American Life, Radiolab and The Moth. These shows were a revelation. Pam and I could hear that the people behind them were operating under a similar set of ideals: a bias towards stories from everyday people, a preference for natural speech, an aversion to pompous media cliches and an appetite for strangeness, paradox and humour.

In 2011 I received a Churchill fellowship to meet some of the people behind these programs, including Ira Glass, the founder and presenter of This American Life. Ira was generous and full of insights. I was also invited to sit in with the Transom Story Workshop in Wood’s Hole, Massachussetts, established by the great Jay Allison.

   I absorbed the lessons from my time in the US, and wrote a report for the Churchill Trust. Conversations began to change as I tried to make the program more immersive, and more - I can find no better word - cinematic. I wanted listeners to the podcast to feel like you do in that moment at the movies when the trailers finish, the houselights dim, the curtain widens and the feature starts.

The audience figures for the Conversations podcast began to climb, from twenty thousand to fifty thousand program downloads a month. That’s a lot of podcast hours and I figured we would have to reach a ceiling sometime soon. Then as the numbers climbed higher, we said we’d celebrate if the monthly figure reached 100,000 downloads. The following month they shot up to 125,000. In 2017 we began to record millions of show downloads every month. 

BY 2018, Conversations had begun to take over my every waking hour, and I badly wanted to share the show with a fellow presenter. Pam O’Brien and I instantly agreed it had to be Sarah Kanowski, who was a presenter on ABC Radio National at the time. Sarah had dazzled us when she’d filled in for me: she was funny, warm, extraordinarily literate and a joy to work with. She was brilliant at live events, and could swallow a whole book in a day and make sense of it with its author. 

OVER THE YEARS, we've held live events in venues across Australia, from the Sydney Opera House to a tin-and-timber outback shearing shed. We've recorded conversations with guests in the garment district of New York City; in cyclone-ravaged north Queensland; at the side of a sparkling river in Iceland; in the bowels of the British Museum; and at the bedside of a woman who had so much to say and just ten more days left to live.

We all still take enormous pleasure from creating Conversations. There’s a great line from season 5 of the classic TV series The Wire from a journalist that neatly sums up the enthusiasm and curiosity that drives the show: I just wanted to see something new every day and tell a story with it.