Learning Aquatics the Australian Way:

Paul Carter

774 Listener Reviewer Goran Stolevski looks at this year's Palme d'or winner

Hannu Rajaniemi

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader. You can hear Dan Gardner being interviewed by Warren Boland on Sunday 13th Weekends with Warren.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Robert Rankin

J. Michael Straczynski and Jesus Saiz

It's 'Koori chick lit' for the very first time; A romantic romp in the vein of Sex and the City with some big plusses - a little reluctance for love and an Indigenous Australian central character in the international art world.

Kari Gislason concedes it would have been very easy to write a sad memoir about his relationship with his dad - but he made a concerted effort not to go down that track.

Author Mary Groves has lived the great outback dream and knows how tough it can be.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Gordan Lomas

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull is an avid reader, and the producer of Weekends with Warren Boland

Award winning children's writer Kim Wilkins assumes a pseudonym as she turns her hand to 'chick literature' with Wildflower Hill.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Making the right choice in life is never straightforward but is one of the main reasons we find ourselves and each other so fascinating. Three Dollars is the story of Eddie Harnovey, a honest, compassionate man with a brilliant wife, Tanya, and a beautiful, if possibly epileptic, daughter Abbey. Eddie's life revolves around work and the three women in his life; the third is Amanda, a childhood sweetheart who re-appears in his life with mathematical precision every nine-and-a-half years. Eddie has a lovely house in the suburbs, he has a strong moral conscience, he's intelligent and witty, and the world around him is falling apart. On the brink of bankruptcy with just $3 to his name, has he made the wrong choices?Perhaps a large part of the answer lies in the speed with which we live our lives. It is easy to feel sympathy for Eddie as he bemoans the pace of change: "Everything happens too quickly to be understood while it is happening. Analysis is impossible until the event is over."A more likely cause of Eddie's predicament may lie in the fact that his wife is about to lose her teaching position at the university and Eddie, an engineer working for the Department of Environment, has been asked by his wife's former lover to falsify a report to allow a smelting plant to be built by Amanda's father.The depth of these relationships is explored with insight and great wit, unpicking those worries that come to us at night while, like Eddie, we lie and notice (and usually ignore) the cracks and flaking of paint on the bedroom ceiling. For Eddie, it is a time to rank debts and what has become the persistence and tyranny of the day-to-day struggle to financially survive.Three Dollars was written in 1998, but set in the times of Australia's introduction to what the surely misnamed 'economic rationalism'. The obsession with material goods and the soulless never-ending pursuit of profit are both a target for Eddie's scorn as well as a source of hilarious black comedy. Written with great humour and prose which at times may seem just a little too deliberate, Three Dollars is as pertinent today as it was in the 1990s.There are times, however, when the characters' tendency to editorialise or sermonise is a touch overwhelming, even if the sentiments seem sound or relevant to Australian politics today. Take this monologue from Eddie's wife, Tanya:"People's fear of change and their despair at the lack of certainty in any area of their lives, particularly where the social and the personal meet, that is with respect to their jobs and income, if it lasts long enough, will lead them to abandon reason, to be suspicious of it and to look for scapegoats and simplistic solutions. The wisdom or correctness of a government's decision will scarcely be discussed but instead attention will be focused on the strength with which the decision was made, the apparent certainty, the conviction with which it was implemented."Admittedly, Tanya is a university politics lecturer, but the moral hectoring in the novel can easily distract from the plot and soon become tiring.Ignoring the occasional sermon, however, Three Dollars an entertaining read, beautifully written and extremely funny. It sat on my bookshelf for over a decade and was rescued only because the mixed reviews for Perlman's latest novel, The Street Sweeper, made me curious. No ambiguity about Three Dollars though: compelling, dramatic and a disconcertingly humorous reflection of the way so many of us live our lives. In 2005, Three Dollars was made into an Australian movie, starring David Wenham. A superb interpretation of the novel, both film and book are highly recommended.

Christopher Hitchens

A classic of the genre that only lightly shows its age, this novel is more an essay in speculative Anthropology than Science fiction per se.

As punishment for having stolen from his employer, our antihero, drug-addicted twenty-four year old 'Case' has had his nervous system crippled with mycotoxin, preventing him from entering the cyberspace system known as the Matrix.

Set in San Francisco in the desolate aftermath of World War Terminus, the enjoyable science fiction novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' follows the journey of two humans who remain on Earth instead of undertaking the more usual interplanetary emigration.

Marion von Adlerstein

Vikki Wakefield

Stephen Fry

John Clarke

Andy Griffiths

Gold Coast author Richard Davis says the time is ripe to re-evaluate the life of Australian opera singer, Marjorie Lawrence.

Jason Torres

This year's NAIDOC Week theme is Voice. Treaty. Truth. But the truth is that many Indigenous people feel voiceless when it comes to expressing where Australia stands on treaty today.

Tony Mulvihill has only one secret for training a good working dog, a lesson he learned 30 years ago from an Oregon buckaroo.

Disability advocates renew their push for local councils nationwide to ensure that new housing is universally accessible to address what they describe as a critical shortage of accommodation.

An educator on the New South Wales south coast hopes to have all the region's school children fluently speaking their local Dharawal language in the next 10 years.

A former ABC journalist, who pressed assault charges after her elderly mother was allegedly hit by a carer, urges Australians with family members in aged-care to install personal surveillance equipment.

A joint operation between the Australian Border Force, ACT and NSW police has discovered about 384kg of cocaine inside a second-hand excavator bound for a regional NSW business. (Supplied: Australian Border Force)

Police seize more than $140 million worth of cocaine stashed in the arm of an excavator that was destined for a business in a small NSW town.

Beekeepers in New South Wales are hand-feeding their hives as the drought cripples the bees' ability to make honey, with a shortage expected to sting consumers at the checkout.

A braille teacher says technology is causing a decline in literacy among people who are vision-impaired, prompting her to bring the tactile language into the mainstream.