FINAL DRAFT on 2SER

We're getting out the ouija board and communing with the ghosts of campaigns past. From the wild rivers of southwest Tasmania to the streets of Baghdad, to the hotel in which Bobby Kennedy was shot, we're examining some of the most important and interesting environmental, political and military campaigns of the last forty years. And we ask what can be learned from the past, and what was irretrievably lost.

Geoff Law, 'The River Runs Free: Exploring and Defending Tasmania's Wilderness,' Viking
Thurston Clarke, 'The Last Campaign: Robert Kennedy and the 82 days that inspired America,' Henry Holt
Michael Hastings, 'I Lost My Love in Baghdad,' Melbourne University Press

A dark, confronting book for teenagers ends up on the wrong shelf in a Brisbane bookshop with unexpected consequences, and a fictional artist returns to the scene of her painful early years. This week we're talking books about troubled childhoods, and the troubles books can cause kids. Also, the first installment of the Final Draft listeners' bookclub, the Bookclub of the Air!

Margaret Atwood, 'Cat's Eye'
Susan Hetherington, Associate Lecturer in Journalism, Queensland University of Technology

Welcome aboard the mobile library! Not the invaluable book bus, but the corpus of stories that refuses to stay put, the tales that migrate from place to place and from time to time. Travelling companions include: the remarkable Nigerian writer, poet and activist, Chris Abani, and the celebrated Polish foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Bruce Williams is along too, to tell us about an ancient story that's just moved into the neighbourhood.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels With Herodotus, Allen Lane
Chris Abani, Song for Night, Scribe Publications
Bruce Williams, 'Tristan', Love at Cumbersome Corner (part 8)

It may be the sincerest form of flattery, but that doesn't mean we all need to jump on the bandwagon. Tonight we're blowing the whistle on plagiarists and tipping the copycats out of the bag. With Alastair Penny Cook we discuss allegation recently made against Lynda La Plante and ask: what constitutes copying anyway? And we hear a few compelling arguments in favour of a little less mimicry in the way we handle the big questions. Anita Heiss asks us to break the mould when it comes to romance and having kids. And Robert Larkins urges us to think for ourselves when it comes to how we leave this world.

Professor Alastair Penny Cook, Faculty of Education, University of Technology Sydney
Anita Heiss, 'Avoiding Mr Right', Random House
Robert Larkins, 'Funeral Rights: What the Australian "Death-Care" Industry Doesn't Want You to Know', Penguin

The way of the transgressor is proverbially hard. Karen Knight is now an acclaimed poet, but as a young woman she was marked as a deviant and thrown into a psychiatric hospital. Only now, four decades later, has she found the voice to write of the experience. Phillip Gourevitch also knows a thing or two about the things that happen in dark places. His latest book is account of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and shows that those in the infamous photographs were far from being the only culprits, or even the most culpable. Join us to hear these, and other stories of broken rules, this week.

Phillip Gourevitch, 'Standard Operating Proceedure: A War Story', Picador
Bruce Williams, 'Cheating', "Love at Cumbersome Corner" (part 7)
Karen Knight, 'Postcards from the Asylum', Pardalote Press

David Sedaris says his friend David Rakoff 'successfully manages to pass himself off as the wittiest and most perceptive man in the world.' We concur, and have, accordingly given over the whole show to Mr Rakoff. His latest book is a grand tour of our contemporary culture of excess. On this tour we are taken to cryonics conferences and plastic surgeries, high fashion cat walks and soft-core porn sets. Through David we meet gay, modern-day Uncle Toms, and epicures who simply must get just the ice cubes for their favourite single malt overnighted from just the right frozen Scottish river. We hear how, post 9-11, New York rose from its ashes 'like a drunken, horny phoenix', and, we come away knowing we have been in the presence of a fascinating man.

David Rakoff, 'Don't Get Too Comfortable', Scribe Publications

Tonight we’re rummaging through the lost and found box. We’re talking about different ways of getting lost, being lost, and losing things. And we’re pricking up the antennae, looking for different ways of finding things. We’ll meet Caren Florance, who designed the cover for Michelle de Kretser’s award-winning novel, The Lost Dog, and find out about the fascinating art of book design. We’ll also get up to speed on the latest book from David Sedaris, a man who knows more than most about being lost and getting found. With Bruce Williams, we’ll search high and low in Cumbersome for some tricky-to-find amenities. And we’ll also talk about the relationship between gender and genre in life writing and find what can be lost in the writing of a life.

Caren Florance, designer of 'The Lost Dog', by Michelle de Kretser, Allen and Unwin
David Sedaris, 'When You are Engulfed in Flames', Little, Brown
Bruce Williams, 'Children', "Love at Cumbersome Corner" (part 6)
Mary Spongberg, Associate Professor of Modern History, Macquarie University

Goodies and baddies, cops and robbers, heroes and villains. They're
everywhere, signalling our deep-seated need to divide the world into
implaccably opposed camps. This week we grapple with these archetypes,
and celebrate the grey space, the in-between spaces in which it
becomes hard to tell the good guys from the dastardly crooks. Muddying
the water with us are angry, not-so-young British writer Alan
Sillitoe, the impressive debut Australian novelist Chris Womersley,
and the doyen of chick-lit, Wendy Harmer.

Alan Sillitoe, 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' and 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'
Chris Womersley, 'The Low Road', Scribe
Wendy Harmer, 'Love and Punishment', Allen and Unwin

Passions, the great Greek storyteller, Aesop said, are like fire and water. They make great servants, but lousy masters. Join us as we indulge in a few of our abiding passions, and find out what happens when the servants get all uppity. We meet one of Jane Austen's most passionate admirers, eavesdrop on an intimate conversation about marriage and passion, and take in a tale of a strange, persistent, and thwarted passion, from the intriguing Sherwin Sleeves.

Susannah Fullerton, President, Jane Austen Society of Australia www.jasa.net.au
Bruce Williams, 'Before Marriage', "Love at Cumbersome Corner" (episode 5)
Sherwin Sleeves, 'Lizzy Queelfight'; ('Sherwin Sleeves' is the alter ego of writer and producer, Sean Hurley. To hear more of Sean's work, visit his website www.radioghost.com)

Join us as we explore landscapes infused with myth and meaning. From islands out of Greek legend, to the epics out of own backyards, we find that in any place people call home, great stories can be found. Guiding our journey are story-teller extraordinaire, Arnold Zable, and the consistently delightful illustrator and writer, Shaun Tan.

Arnold Zable, 'Sea of Many Returns', Text Publishing
Shaun Tan, 'Tales From Outer Suburbia', Allen and Unwin

Tonight we're keeping it short and sweet. We're in search of pleasures afforded by small but perfectly formed literary genres - the short story and the novella. Recent collections of each go under the microscope, revealing just how well brief, seemingly disconnected pieces can hold together. The short stories are the work of Melbourne writer, Nam Le, whose first book has just been published, to much acclaim. And the novellas are Cate Kennedy's edited collection, 'Love and Desire' - an appropriate title for an ephemeral form and an ephermal subject. Also, a short but very interesting political experiment, with US humourist and radio host, John Moe, and an opportunity to make short, sweet audio documents of the role of books and writing in your life.

Nam Le, 'The Boat', Penguin
John Moe, 'Conservatize Me', Harper Perennial
Cate Kennedy, 'Love and Desire', Five Mile Press
LetterVox project, 'The Book Show', ABC Radio National

This week we're getting to the heart of how we get to the heart of things. Law, fiction, history, journalism. Each claims to speak of the truth in its own fashion, using different tools and ideas. Yet given the same stories, each often comes to dramatically different conclusions. Journalist Chloe Hooper joins us to discuss the difficulties getting to the heart of the tragic events of recent years on Palm Island. We'll also explore about the fruitful possibilities opened up when the imagination is given full play in the telling of history, with the wonderful Frank Moorhouse. Bruce Williams is back too, with another story getting at the heart of the matters close to the hearts of Cumbersome Lovers. Also, we announce a special new project: the Final Draft Book Club!

Chloe Hooper, 'The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island', Penguin
Frank Moorhouse, H C Coombes Creative Arts Fellow, Australian National University
Bruce Williams, 'Success', "Love at Cumbersome Corner" (episode 4)

Facts. Ronald Regan called them 'stupid things', while commedian Will
Rogers declared he didn't tell jokes, he just watched the government
and reported the facts. Facts, it seems are in the eye of the
beholder. This week in trying to get to grips with the slipperiness of
facts we meet poet and printer Alan Loney, the author of a book about
a very special book about nothing, which turns out not to exist - and
yet which is full to the brim of fascinating facts. We follow novelist
Gerard Windsor, in search of some personal facts, or what he calls 'my
own real me', a search that takes him deep into the nature of
biography and poetry, and we'll also hear all about some astonishing
facts unearthed by academic and former gang-leader, Sidhur Venkatesh,
using a very unorthodox research method.

Gerard Windsor, 'Chasing My Own Real Me', State Library of NSW forum on Fact and Fiction
Sidhur Venkatesh, 'Gang Leader for a Day', Allen Lane
Alan Loney, 'The Printing of a Masterpiece', Black Pepper

Tom Stoppard, the British playwright once wrote: 'We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke and a presumption that once our eyes watered.' This week we're off down Memory Lane, in search of that smoke. We hear two stories from two very different women, both though, looking over their shoulders, trying to make sense of the view. We also discover how books sometimes preserve traces of the lives and thoughts of their readers, as well as their authors, and we take in some more reminiscences from Cumbersome Corner with Bruce Williams.

Mira Crouch, 'War Fare: Sustenance in Time of Fear and Want', Gavemer Publishing,
Jennifer Robertson, 'Heat'
Bruce Williams, 'Meeting', "Love at Cumbersome Corner" (part 3)
Richard Walsh 'Found in Books' AbeBooks.com

The big guns get wheeled out this week to have another shot at the old chestnuts: what makes a good book? Can we still speak of a canon? And why do we read in the first place? We sit ring-side as journalist and critic Peter Craven and academic Ken Gelder battle it out and ask whether its better to love the treasure even as you enjoy the trash or, to let the trash into the treasure chest. We sing the praises of Colin Thubron, a writer who put the 'literature' back into travel lit, and we follow one man's attempt to get the late 'Butcher of the Balkans', Slobodan Milosovic, to just read the 'right books'.

Peter Craven and Ken Gelder, Overland Debate, Sydney Writers Festival, 23 May
Colin Thubron, 'Shadow of the Silk Road', Vintage
Benjamen Walker, 'Remedial Theory'

We're going 'glocal' this week - exploring the ways in which our own backyards are connected to the big, wide world. We take a fresh look at the assimilation policy after the second world war and its consequences for millions of refugees and Aboriginal Australians, with historian Anna Haebich. We find out how the quintessential technology of globalisation is advancing research into very local concerns, and we listen in to another episode in the life of the local lovers at Cumbersome Corner. Also, in the wake of the Sydney Writers' Festival, with the big names from overseas gone, we give some of the 80 000 readers who turned up a chance to have their say too.

Anna Haebich, 'Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia, 1950-1970', Fremantle Press
Regina Sutton, State Librarian and Chief Executive, NSW State Library
Bruce Williams, 'Love and Death', ("Love at Cumbersome Corner," part 2)

This week is all about crossing borders – about leaving behind a world that's familiar and taking those first steps into the great unknown.
New Zealand author Laurence Fearnley discusses her new novel about two characters reaching across the generation divide to form a deep and unlikely bond. Alice Pung drops by to chat to us about what it means to grow up Asian in Australia. And Holly Hill tells us what was behind her decision to place an online ad for a toyboy.

Laurence Fearnley, 'Edwin + Matilda', Penguin
Alice Pung, 'Growing up Asian in Australia', Black Inc
Holly Hill, 'Toyboy', Random House

'Boys will will boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men,' the great American cartoonist Kin Hubbard once sagely said. And each will have their toys, or as Benjamin Franklin put it: 'Old boys have their playthings as well as the young ones; the only difference is in the price.' With these truths in our ears, this week on Final Draft it's all about boys, and the wonderful and not-so-wonderful things they get up to with their toys. We catch the turbulence of life through the eye of an adolescent boy in the early fiction of the American Dominican writer Junot Diaz; we find out what happens when boys get drunk on Kung Fu and borrowed language, and we get our hands on the nifty new toy that turns spoken words into written texts. Also, the first installment in a special new series from a real Final Draft old boy.

Junot Diaz, 'Drown', Faber
The Ventriloquist Band, 'I Know Kung Fu,' Going Down Swinging, #26
Bruce Williams, 'Love at Cumbersome Corner' (part 1)