Radical Australia

A fashion brand for people who give a shit. That's how this week's guest, Nick Savaidis, decribes his label, Etiko, winner of an Australian Human Rights Award and the most ethical fashion brand in the country. Nick started making sports balls under the label before branching into clothing. He has always had a thing for the underdog and has used this feeling for some good deeds. Nick introduced No Sweat sneakers into Australia and helped bring in the Fair Trade label. Nick saw his mother sew garments for a pittance whilst the stores made a buck when he was a child. He was born in Carlton in 1958. Nick set up a number of social enterprises with community in Yuendumu (NT) over the course of  6 years as an adult educator in literacy and numeracy, from driver education, a community laundromat and a commuity-owned digital network for high school students in the area. We think he has a good heart and it was great to hear about the forces that have shaped his life. Thanks so much for joining us this week, Nick, and f

This week's guest, Gatwech Wal, is a war survivor from South Sudan. When Gatwech was 11 years old, he had to flee his village with his older brother and he spent 11 years in a refugee camp on the border of Ethiopia. We hear this story and what it was like. Since coming to Australia, Gatwech has worked incredibly hard to have a successful life and is now a Family Law - Family Violence lawyer. This is the first of a two-part chat with Gatwech and we welcome his return in a little while for a chat about Family Law in Australia. Thank-you for joining us this week, Gatwech, and we look forward to seeing you next time.

On our last live show for the year, we welcome the return of popular guest, Robert 'Smokey' Wolfgramm. We find Robert in conversation with Joe about his PhD on the ethnic identity. Robert set out on his research to answer the questions 'What does it mean to be Fijian? What does it mean to be ethnic? How do we know who we are?'. Find out what answers Robert came to in this engaging conversation. We thank Robert for entertaining us once again this year. We wish you all a safe and relaxing Christmas and New Year. We have two great repeats over the Summer break for you, so see you next week for the first of those. Kelly & Joe

Jill Lockwood is a community-minded gardener from the Dandenong Hills, currently volunteering her time at the Knox Environment Society in Ferntree Gully with all the other 'seedy ladies' and 'HAGS' cleaning seeds and preserving the indigenous flora of the area. Jill was born in 1944 at Epworth Hospital, worked in insurance and also as a medical receptionist for 26 years. The greatest love of her life was no doubt her husband, Roger. They used to volunteer for Puffing Billy together. Jill says 'life is for living' and she keeps herself busy with various community groups. She loves cooking, baking and, of course, gardening! Thank-you so much for joining us this week, Jill, and for your contribution to your community.Knox Environment Society: kes.org.auSav Lake Knox campaign: kes.org.au/campaigns/lakeknoxJill with friend and fellow gardener, Zoe

Baba Desi. The Wizard. The Doctor. Desmond Bergen. He is known as many things and has been many things in his long life: jazzer, hippie, bodgie, pirate. In fact, he's 'been them all', he says. We are delighted to welcome Baba Desi to Radical Australia this week to share with us some tales from his long life of 94 years. Baba Desi was born in Wangaratta and also lived in Warrnambool when he was young. He has lived in Melbourne ever since. As a young man he ran Dixieland jazz dances, trained racehorses and beat up American troops with other young blokes hanging around the city. He was a supervisor at George's department stores and has always loved stirring the coppers up. He was into 'every struggle that was going on', inlcluding leading marches against the Vietnam War and nuclear power. He has run for the Senate and knew Father Bob Maguire for decades. He's been in Hollywood movies and caught the eye of Billy Connolly when he was in town. Desi says the secret to life is to be positive and just get on with thin

We are delighted to bring you a very special episode of Radical Australia this week, sharing it with you today on International Day of People with a Disability #IDOPWD, Sunday December 3. This week's guest is intellectual disability self-advocate, Colin Hiscoe. Colin has been an active member of self-advocacy group Reinforce for decades and his story is sure to both move and inspire you. Colin spent his childhood in Leeds, England, until he was 12 years old. He remembers all the kids with their sleds on the hill during Winter and going to the picture theatre. He came to Australia with his mother and started life here in Wangaratta with his Aunty. Colin endured a lot of mistreatment in his early life, from family members and other authority figures, before he stumbled upon a conference that changed his life forever. For the first time he heard peers' stories and through the sharing of these stories he began to heal. He hasn't looked back. Reinforce is a group of peers who talk about issues that their community

"Encouragement is a great thing in practise". We welcome back Percy Rogers to Radical Australia this week for the third and final instalment of our conversation with this amazing medical doctor who has done so much for so many across his years of medical practise in Australia. Percy worked until he was 86 years old. We take up this conversation at a time in his life when Percy was a single father. He worked at the Royal Women's Hospital and was a bulk-billing doctor for years. Afterwards, Percy worked as a locum in medical clinics within aboriginal settlements across Northern Australia. He loved this work and spent this time with his wife, Roz. Percy credits his longevity to a little red wine, running and his wife Roz: his three R's of life. Percy tells us he never lost his curiosity about the causes of illness and he never lost his respect for people, for being welcomed into their lives. We are so thrilled to have gotten this chance to speak with Percy this year. He is a very decent human being indeed. Thank

Imagine being able to boast that one of your claims to fame was getting yellow-carded in a soccer match against a young Maradona. Such has been the life of our lovely guest this week, Tommy Latupeirissa. Tommy's family comes from Maluku (Spice Islands) in Indonesia and they were a military family. Tommy was a young gun soccer player and represented Indonesia in the Junior World Cup in Japan. For the senior team he played around Asia and the Pacific. Tommy worked in the hotels in Bali as a public relations officer and this is where he started learning and speaking English. He came to Australia when he was 29. Tommy has been a welder and now loves his photography. He has captured many moments of the Free West Papua struggle here in Melbourne and we will be encouraging the West Papua Office to hold an exhibition of his works in 2024. In the meantime, Tommy invites you to the final gathering at the office this year on Sunday 26th November, featuring food, talks, a book launch and an auction. See the link for deta

"Advocacy never stops. It keeps going". We were treated to conversing with the lovely Ricki Spencer this week. Ricki is a trans woman, mental health and disability advocate from Footscray who has endured some really rough treatment in her life and she continues to hold her head up high. Ricki tells us that she was stigmatised and bullied throughout primary and high school for being different and she learned very quickly that there was no support for her in society: from the police, doctors and family. Ricki went on to study Community Development and volunteered with the Victorian Aids Council. She and her community were stigmatised most severely during the AIDS crisis. Ricki holds a Bachelor and Masters of Education and is now partway through her PhD on unconscious, binary, heteronormative bias among the teaching population. Ricki has found it close to impossible to secure teaching work despite being more than qualified. Ricki also uses her time as a mental health advocate and co-design practitioner in digita

"Things are not going to change unless we do something about it. Don't sit on the sidelines. Become involved". Bevan did get involved in activism and quit his job to work on the Vietnam moratorium movement in the 1970s. It was when Bevan first went to Africa as an Australian Volunteer Abroad in 1965 that his eyes were opened to African independence movements and other political struggles going on in the world. Bevan was born in Thornbury, Melbourne, in 1939. He was there at the beginning of 3CR and remembers its first transmitter, bought for $200 from the local fire brigade. Bevan has taught electrical engineering at TAFE and was pulled up by the cops in the 70s for his anti-conscription graffiti. He is a veteran of the peace movement in Australia and currently organises with the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. Bevan wants to tell you that IPAN currently has an important e-petition about the militarisation of Northern Australia on its website and urges you to sign. Thanks so much for joining us th

This week's guest, Sue Smith, has been a trailblazer and a great friend to many in the disability self-advocacy space in Victoria and beyond for many years and has just recently retired. Sue leaves a great legacy. In 2008, Sue and friend began the Self Advocacy Resource Unit (SARU) at Ross House in the Melbourne CBD, an amazing resource supporting countless disability self-advocacy groups with guidance and support to make groups harmonious and flourish. In the 1990s, before Pink Ribbon, Sue was a Warrior Woman, joining other women in a mixed media project exploring women's experiences with breast cancer and funded by the Australian Council for the Arts. Sue began her activist work at the Janefield Colony, a home for children with intellectual disabilities, where she came in and shook things up. She received death threats. She is a pretty amazing woman and leaves such a strong legacy in Victoria and Australia and all we can do is say Thank-You and we wish Sue many happy times enjoying her retirement. Thank you

This week's guest, David Ayliffe, has had a busy life with lots of different projects and this made for a bit of a rowdy show! David was born in Sydney and spent many years in Queensland, at one stage working for Murdoch newspapers before joining a cult for 21 years after a born-again experience. He met his wife there and raised four children. David is no longer in the cult. Since then, he has worked in bequests at Guide Dog Australia and he recently established Best People Care, a care service for peope with intellectual disabilities. His latest offering to the world is a podcast titled 'No Sex, please: I'm Religious', an irreverent and serious look at the history of the treatment of sex and sexual identities by the world's religions. David also works to support queer refugees in Africa. He's a busy man and was a good-spirited guest in the studio this week. Thanks so much, David!nosexplease.com.au

The lovely, bubbly, Kayla Cartledge joined us on the show this week to rally support for the YES vote and to tell us all the amazing community organising she has been up to on the Mornington Peninsula. Kayla is a Gurindji woman who grew up on Larrakia (Darwin) country, people known for their land rights activism. Kayla carries her mother's strong spirit on the Mornington Peninsula where she has lived since she was 8 years old. She is the founder of the Mornington Peninsula Survival Day events, @oursurvivalday, which have been running at The Briars since 2019 and has been busy this year with the Mornington Peninsula for YES Group. Kayla has worked with the Mornington Peninsula Council, Kinaway Chamber of Commerce and is now with Monash University. She is set to head to Aotearoa soon for an e-safety conference and is collecting experiences of vilification and hate speech in the YES referendum campaign at her site @oursonglines. Thank-you for sharing your positive spirit with us this week, Kayla, and keep up you

This week's guest, Deborah Gough, started out life on a good footing, leading a school strike in Year 7 when the bubble taps didn't work on a really hot day. So they all went home. Fast forward to when she was 12 and it was then that Deborah first thought about the life of a journalist and what that could mean for her. Deborah was a clerk at The Age and worked on Western suburbs newspapers for 10 years, inluding The Footscray Mail and The Advocate. She also worked on the free rag, Melbourne Express, which she said was great fun. Obviously Deborah has amazing writing chops, not to mention excellent people skills. She has gone on to create her own business, Stories To Keep, social and oral histories in the form of books for famlies to treasure. It's such a great thing. Deborah worked with last week's guest, Percy Rogers, to publish his memoir, Taking Action. Deborah's work has a lot in common with us here at Radical Australia and we just had to invite her on. Deborah is one of many talented people giving the tr

Percy Rogers joins us again this week for Part Two of our special as we learn about his professional life as a doctor in Melbourne. Percy has done a lot to change the birthing experience for women in Australia. He was appalled at the treatment of pregnant women in hospitals many decades ago and ushered in breathing techniques that were non-existent and which now are commonplace. Percy has always stood up for what is right, including helping those in dire straits with blanket drives and soup runs, small but meaningful gestures he learnt about during the Depression. He's a marvel. Percy held a position as the municipal health doctor in the Coburg area and claims this was his favourite post of them all. Percy's sense of adventure and love of learning has seen him work as a doctor in remote places such as the Cocos Keeling Islands and Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. We are very much looking forward to our last installment next week when we will learn about Percy's activism, something he still continues today. Than

This week's show is Part One in our interview series with Melbourne GP, health innovator and activist, Percy Rogers. Percy was a kindly GP to many people over many decades in Coburg and beyond, specialising in maternity health, but he started life in Western Australia in 1927. Percy grew up in Australia's experience of the Depression and the Second World War. He remembers how much it cost to pay lodgings whilst also trying to put yourself through college as a working-class boy. Percy was a maths whizz and was turned onto socialism at a young age whilst perusing books down a little alleyway in Perth many moons ago. He stumbled on some books talking about Marxism and he resonated with that view of the world. We are very much looking forward to learning where Percy's journey will lead us next when he returns to the studio next week! Tune in then.

Sash Gillies-Lekakis is a bright young PhD candidate and 3CR broadcaster who loves everything Latin America. He's been to Cuba a few times already in his young life and decided to learn Spanish at university, even though he comes from a family of Crimean Russians and Greeks. It's a family joke. Sasha has always loved modern history and produces Latin American Update, a long-running Sunday morning show on 3CR. Sasha's PhD is exploring Cuba's cooperation with the Pacific Islands, including training doctors for poor Pacific countries. He and his family have been communists for ever. Sasha will be co-hosting the event at the West Papua office in Docklands, Sunday 17 September, also featuring last week's popular guest, Robert Wolfgramm. There will be music, talks from Cuba and Fiji, and an auction! 838 Collins St, Docklands. Thanks for joining us this week, Sasha! Latin American Update, Sundays, 10:30am - 11amTickets for the West Papua event: dfait.federalrepublicofwestpapua.org/document/cuba-fiji-for-west-papua/

We are all phantoms. So introduces us to this week's very interesting guest, Robert Wolfgramm. Robert has done nearly everything you can pack into doing with a life: from lecturing in philosophical anthropology and sociology, to running a newspaper in Fiji during the military coup in the 00's. Robert has an interesting family background and was born in the 'village in the clouds' in Fiji before coming to Australia at age 11 when his world changed as he opened up to classical music and a bigger cosmos. It was broken down in a truck in Young NSW that changed Robert's life trajectory through a book that turned him onto sociology. He went on to lecture for 24 years. Robert says he has been blessed with meeting good people in his life, people that gave him a break. He's a pretty good bloke himself and sports a most majestic white beard. Robert will be giving a presentation at the West Papua Office in Docklands on Sunday September 17 on what the Pacific needs to do in relation to West Papua. Thank-you for joining u

Marisol Salinas from 3CR's Mujeres Latinoamericanas joins us on the show this week for our second special commemorating the 1973 coup in her homeland of Chile. Marisol hails from the far south of Chile on an island called Chiloe. Her people are the Mapuche and Marisol shares with us the trauma of her mother's life being a first nations woman and living in fear. Marisol is good at maths and physics and came to Australia when she was 23 years old when her political conscience began to grow. She has produced Mujeres Latinoamericanas for close to 30 years on 3CR, Thursdays 7pm - 8pm. Marisol invites everyone to the 'Chile 50 Years' commemoration, a full day of images and sounds at Trades Hall on Monday September 11, from 9:30am, at 54 Lygon St, Carlton. Thank-you for joinign us the show this week, Marisol.3cr.org.au/mujereshttps://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/chile-50-years-of-solidarity-struggle-tickets-684606776297 

3CR Chairperson, Pilar Aguilera, joins us this week to talk about the day that changed Chile forever and her personal family story that was swept up in it: September 11, 1973. The day of a militiary coup when Chile's democratically-elected, progressive government was taken over, a day that began the routine of storming houses and instilling fear among the populace. Pilar was just two years old. In the early days of the coup, thousands of people disappeared, were tortured and killed. We learn of Pilar's family exile from their homeland and we make time for the promotion of the 50th anniversary of that fateful day: Chile - 50 Years of Solidarity and Struggle. A full day commemoration of music, poetry, activities and empanada. Hosted by Trades Hall and organised with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union as an international solidarity initiative. See Eventbrite for further details. Thank-you for sharing you story with us, Pilar, and for being a steady presence as the 3CR Chair.https://www.eventbrite.com.au/