Conversations

Maggie grew up around boys, then raised four sons of her own. Now she helps parents understand the changes teenage boys are going through as they cross the bridge from boyhood to manhood (R)

Dr Irving Finkel on the ghosts who joined the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians in their day to day lives

Jackie Huggins with the story of her father Jack, who was a surf lifesaver, a rugby league player, a soldier taken prisoner in the Fall of Singapore, and the first Indigenous Australian to work in the post office

Tony spent three decades in and out of jail for property crimes and safecracking. When he joined an unusual club inside Hobart's Risdon Prison, he found his voice for the first time. Then a few years ago, on a fishing trawler far out to sea, he began the painful process of changing his lifeTony Bull grew up across the road from Hobart's Risdon Prison.As child he started running with a crowd of boys who stole money for the woodman and the milkman from people's front doorsteps.In late primary school he found himself in trouble with the law for the first time.He was 17 when he first went to jail, in Queensland's Boggo Road after a car chase with the police in Cairns.A year later, he was back in Tasmania, and inside Risdon Prison for the first time.It was a scary experience because he'd heard so many unsettling sounds coming from inside the prison walls when he was a child.In his 20s, Tony joined the Spartan Debating Club inside the jail. The prisoners, including Chopper Read, often debated teams from outside the jail, and their families were sometimes allowed in to watch the debates.Learning to debate changed how Tony used his voice. He eventually became yard boss, a conduit between the prisoners and the Superintendent.Some years later he was out of jail and working on a fishing boat called the 'Diana' when he had a pre-dawn epiphany far out at sea.He realised it was finally time for him to break the cycle of crime and incarceration in his own life.Tony worked incredibly hard to unlearn some of his old habits which had previously led him straight back into jail.Today he lives in his own unit with his beloved dog Princess and runs a home maintenance business.Further informationLearn about the Salvation Army's Beyond the Wire programTo binge even more great episodes of the ‘Conversations podcast’ with Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski go the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. There you’ll find hundreds of the best thought-provoking interviews with authors, writers, artists, politicians, singers, psychologists, musicians, and celebrities.

Writer Sylvie Bigar thought her assignment was simple — cover the history of cassoulet, a French ancestral dish. What she discovered was a world of passion, disagreement and her own family's complicated tale

Ever since he was a boy, Paul Pritchard has been fascinated with climbing rocks. His compulsion took a terrible and beautiful turn on a matchstick of rock that sticks out of the Southern Ocean in Tasmania

How the Royal Australian Navy's top chaplain lost his faith

Tom Gilling with the story of how a Scottish-born soldier named Jock McLaren became one of Australia's greatest World War II guerrilla fighters (R)

Betty O'Neill's father disappeared when she was a baby. Decades later, she opened a suitcase in Poland to find a series of clues to his secret life (R)

The US crime novelist on his unlikely career progression, and how he uses his books as a way of showing the human stories behind the headlines of the opioid epidemic in America