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Feed your mind. Be provoked. One big idea at a time. Your brain will love you for it. Grab your front row seat to the best live forums and festivals with Natasha Mitchell.

Big Ideas

If you knew the world as we know it was on the verge of collapse, would that change the way you live your life? Author, activist and podcaster Sarah Wilson has found many reasons to believe our post-industrial civilisation is nearing its end. So how does she live with this confronting reality?

This conversation was recorded at the 2025 Melbourne Writers Festival. To explore more Melbourne Writers Festival talks, visit mwf.com.au.

Speakers

Sarah Wilson - Author, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World

Carody Culver (host) - Editor, Griffith Review

Further information:

Read the Collapse Book on Sarah's Substack This is Precious

Sarah Wilson reckons with our civilisational collapse

Foreign spies attempt to infiltrate media organisations, break into restricted laboratories, target public servants on sites such as LinkedIn, approach academics at conferences … the list goes on. On Big Ideas, you have the rare opportunity to hear Mike Burgess give an unfiltered look at the threats of espionage and reveal for the first time the true costs it has on the Australian economy.

Counting and Countering the Cost of Espionage, the 26th annual Hawke Lecture presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, University of South Australia.

Speaker

Mike Burgess Director-General of Security, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 

Further information

Why national security and intelligence is women’s work Big Ideas, 22 October 2022

Mike Burgess — Espionage is a growing and costly threat to Australia

For the ﬁrst time in human history, we have the scientific know-how to vaccinate against most of the infectious diseases that killed our ancestors. But an explosion of pseudoscience and disinformation makes people hesitate to accept the shot. And so once contained diseases like measles is on the rise again. Hear why we have to act now, or risk losing centuries of gains that vaccines have brought to the world.

Presented at Gleebooks

Speakers

Raina MacIntyreProfessor of Global Biosecurity at UNSW and an NHMRC Research FellowAuthor of Vaccine Nation: Science, reason and the threat to 200 years of progress

Dr Norman Swan (host)Host of Radio National's The Health Report and co-host of What's That Rash

Plummeting vaccination rates threaten public health

The decline of the mainstream media has forced many outlets to try new things to keep audiences engaged and informed. So what works, and what is the industry's future?

The ABC's 2025 Andrew Olle Lecture was recorded in Sydney on Friday 25 July 2025.

Speakers

Geraldine Doogue - Host (with Hamish Macdonald), Global Roaming, ABC Radio National

Not drowning waving, a modern media tale — with Geraldine Doogue

Australia is a multicultural country, but up until recently, when you turned on the telly, you wouldn't know it. So what role has TV played in Australia's diverse communities, on screen, behind the scenes and in the living rooms across this country, over the past 70 years?

This event was recorded at Sydney's Gleebooks on Friday 11 July 2025.

Speakers

Kate Darian-SmithProfessorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, President of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia

Kyle HarveyCulture and media and social change historian

Sukhmani KhoranaAssociate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at University of NSW

Sue TurnbullSenior Professor of Communication and Media, University of Wollongong

Pearl Tan (host)Discipline Lead in Directing, Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS)

Further information:

Season two of Heartbreak High makes diversity feel 'banal'. This is its strength - article by Sukhmani Khorana

From Con the Fruiterer to East West 101 — the changing face of Australian TV

Join Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell with three women embracing the radical practice of finding joy in big bodies. Fat bodies are often stigmatised, stereotyped, shamed, medicalised, and politicised. Even the word F.A.T gets denigrated. But there is another way. Reckoning with eating disorders and society's limitations, Dani, Evie, and Kalpana are no longer holding back from the delights of food, fashion, dance, ocean swimming, and more. Hear why, for them, the personal is political. But can expectations to be fat and jolly become a burden too? What about the radical act of just being and big?

This event was hosted and organised by the inaugural Fat Joy Festival and the 11th International Weight Stigma Conference

Speakers

Dani Galvin (aka Dani Adriana)Content creator and body positivity and mental health advocateFat peer support facilitatorCo-creator, plus-size pop-culture inspired costumes and accessoriesBachelor of Counselling graduate

Evie (Evangeline) GardenerPublic health researcher and advocatePhD studentUniversity of Queensland

Kalpana PrasadPerformer, facilitator, choreographer with Bring a Plate Dance companyPostgraduate speech pathology studentDisability support worker

Thanks to Dr Lily O'Hara from Griffith University, the convenor of the Fat Joy Festival and the 11th International Weight Stigma Conference.

Further reading and viewing

How we think about obesity and body weight is changing, here's why (article co-athored by Evie Gardener)

The Real Cost of Appearance Ideals and Discrimination report (The Butterfly Foundation)

Fat Joy Podcast

The body is not an apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

What we talk about when we talk about FAT by Aubrey Gordon

You have the right to remain fat by Virgie Tovar

"Fat" isn't a bad word — it's just a way I describe my body by Aubrey Gordon 

Selling Stigma: Afflictive Power and Fat Oppression - presentation by Rachel Fox

FAT is not an F-word! The radical practice of fat joy

Meet apes that swallow leaves to dislodge worms and sparrows that use cigarette butts to repel parasites. Many animals use medicine to treat themselves — something that for a long time has been thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Now scientists are turning to the medical knowledge of the animal kingdom to improve agriculture, create better lives for our pets, and develop new pharmaceutical drugs.

Presented at the Free Library of Philadelphia

Listen to Big Ideas: 

Speaker

Jaap de RoodeSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory UniversityAuthor of Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves

How animals use natural medicine to heal themselves

At face value, collaboration sounds like a good thing: collaboration in the classroom, with colleagues, or between nations. But throughout history, collaboration was not always considered a virtuous act, and those who were identified as collaborators were shunned, humiliated or worse. This talk explores how people justify their involvement in wrongdoing, and how when collaboration devolves into conformity, it risks silencing dissent.

This event was recorded at the Bundanon Art Museum.

Speaker

Dr Simon Longstaff — Executive Director, The Ethics Centre

The dark side of collaboration — when thinking together goes wrong

Food is essential to human life, but are we taking it for granted? Popular chef, writer and broadcaster Adam Liaw is an advocate for good food for everyone. He takes us on a journey through the history and science of food, and its place in our societies, economies and cultures throughout time, arguing that food should play a central role in government policy making.

The 2025 Hugh Stretton Oration was recorded at the University of Adelaide on 14 May 2025.

Speakers

Adam LiawCook, writer, broadcaster

Alison CoatesProfessor of Human Nutrition, University of South Australia

Adam Liaw on what spaghetti bolognese tells us about Australian life

Books on tyrants, dictators, and authoritarian leaders are suddenly bestsellers again as we all try to make sense of the tilt towards tyrannical leadership around the world, the mass compliance it commands, and its use of terror, fear, and often violence, to govern. Two of Australia's leading scholars on China and the Soviet Union, Linda Jaivin (author of BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! The Cultural Revolution in China) and Sheila Fitzpatrick (author of The Death of Stalin) join Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell to consider two 20th Century tyrants whose legacies live on today.

Speakers

Linda JaivinAuthor and China specialistAssociate, Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University

Professor Sheila FitzpatrickHistorian of modern Russia and the Soviet UnionProfessor, Australian Catholic University and Honorary Professor, University of Sydney

This event was presented by Readings Books with Black Inc Books, with thanks to events producer Christine Gordon.

Mao and Stalin — did they lead the way for tyrannical leaders like Trump?

Through the lens of her own middle-class family, prolific British journalist Polly Toynbee explores the guilt of privilege, the myth of mobility and the role of class in British society and politics.

This event was recorded at the UNSW Centre for Ideas on March 11, 2024.

Speakers

Polly Toynbee Columnist, The GuardianAuthor, An Uneasy Inheritance, my family and other radicals

Nick Bryant Journalist, author and commentator

Too posh, or not posh enough? — Polly Toynbee on the shackles and privileges of class

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