Transformation: Turning tragedy into triumph

With special guest:

• Dr Tim Sharp
  …in conversation with Bill Kable
  

Our guest in this program is Dr Tim Sharp, also known as Dr Happy.

Tim has produced a new book Transformation: Turning tragedy into triumph and he joins us today to spread a little happiness. The book has eleven people making a contribution with a story about themselves or someone close to them. Some of the contributors’ stories are well-known while others tell of living a quiet life before they reached a turning point in their life story. Looking outside themselves brought surprising benefits not only to others but to the contributors as well.

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Patting the Shark

With special guest:

• Tim Baker
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Patting the shark? This does not seem to be a good life lesson but when we hear Tim Baker explain the title it all makes sense.

Surfers such as Mick Fanning have had to confront their mortality. Mick is an old friend of Tim’s and he faced a shark in front of the world’s cameras. Many of us saw him swimming next to a man eating shark in the shark’s own territory. Tim Baker has had to face a different type of mortal threat, namely a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer. We do not know how we would react if confronted with this situation but Tim’s new book Patting the Shark takes us right into that world and he gives us a no holds barred account of what it is really like.

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SMS4dads

With special guest:

• Dr Chris May
  … in conversation with Bill Kable
  

Who ya gonna call?

Our guest today is Dr Chris May from the University of Newcastle and he has a simple message for new Dads with mobile phones. Sign up for SMS4 dads and you will get the advice you need to deal with the new challenges we face as a Dad. This is not limited to young Dads. The age range of Dads already accessing the service extends to the over 50 year olds.

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The Prostate Cancer Challenge

With special guest:

• Peter Dornan AM
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Our guest is not squeamish about many things. He opens up to us today about what it is like to face a condition that we still do not like talking about, urinary incontinence. Incontinence affects men and women; it has been described as the most widespread yet least known and understood affliction in society today. This problem can seriously impact on your lifestyle, job, emotional wellbeing, exercise activity and most importantly, your sex life.

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Life and Death Planning for Country Properties

With special guest:

• Owen Catto
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Our guest today is Owen Catto from The Regional Men’s Health Initiative of Western Australia.

Owen’s life as a farmer began when he worked on the family farm for 18 years with a small interest in that farming business given to him by his father. To back up this direct experience of conditions on the farm Owen also has a Bachelor of Business in Agriculture and has operated a farm consultancy business. When talking about life on the land we might say that Owen knows his onions.

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Flesh Wounds

With special guest:

• Richard Glover
  …in conversation with Bill Kable and Ken Thompson
  

Our guest today is famous.

Richard Glover is the host of the top rating Drive show on 702 ABC Sydney, and the weekly podcast of Thank God It’s Friday. He is the author of twelve books including the bestseller In Bed with Jocasta. His new book Flesh Wounds is in a similar humorous vein but the big difference this time is that it is the real story of his unusual, to say the least, upbringing.

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National Emergency – Suicide Rates for Our Men

With special guest:

• Anthony Smith
  … in conversation with Bill Kable and Ken Thompson

1901 male deaths by suicide were recorded in 2012 along with another 634 females meaning a total of 2,535 Australians lost their lives in this way. There has been no significant improvement in the period since these figures became available.

Our guest today, Anthony Smith, argues that these figures are conservative and the belief of the people working in this area is that the figure for men should be some 500 higher. Reasons for this conservatism include the shortfall in the number of Coronial enquiries and the general reluctance of Coroners to brand a sudden death as suicide because this only makes it harder for the surviving family members to deal with the tragedy.

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Keith Urban

With special guest:

• Jeff Apter
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Our own Keith Urban is an enormous success in the biggest music market of all, the United States. Who knew? For some reason Keith Urban has never been really big or even acknowledged in Australia and today we get a few clues as to why that is so.

There is a lot more to Keith than the amiable coach we see in The Voice on Australian TV and our guest today can let us in on some surprises. In his new book Keith Urban our special guest Jeff Apter takes us from Keith’s birth in New Zealand to childhood days on the outskirts of Brisbane to being “discovered” while playing at the Bayview Hotel in Sydney and reaching the stage where he is asked to sing at the opening of the Tokyo Olympic Games. On top of that Keith has been married to Nicole Kidman since 2007 to add a bit of Hollywood glamour to his life.

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The Opera House

With special guest:

• Peter FitzSimons
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

As well as being a 20^th century marvel in its soaring design it remains a source of marvel that the Opera House was even conceived in the parochial, conservative backwater that was 1950s New South Wales.

One thing that was typical then and remains so is the Australian love for a gamble so it was a brainwave of the NSW government to think of financing the construction by way of a lottery. All of a sudden there were more than enough funds to do the work of construction.

But the bigger gamble was to construct a building like no other that would be on display at the heart of the city with techniques that had not been invented based on the imaginings and sparse drawings of a Danish architect who had never taken a building design through to completion.

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The Diggers of WW1

With special guest:

• Andrew Tink AM
  … in conversation with Bill Kable and Ken Thompson

No book on Australia covering the early years of the twentieth century could overlook the 61,500 of our men killed or listed as “missing” in World War 1. Another 156,000 had a fate that was sometimes worse, they were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner.

In his book Australia 1901-2001: A narrative history, Andrew Tink, former Member of State Parliament, tells us that like the school children of Villers-Bretonneux France we must never forget the heroism of our soldiers, the diggers of World War 1.

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Life in Limbo

With special guest:

• Matt Barwick
  … in conversation with Bill Kable and Ken Thompson

In his book Life in Limbo Matt Barwick says that men in their desire to be alpha-male typically hide behind an impenetrable wall of machismo. So if anyone asks “How ya going?” the response is most likely going to be a stoic “Yeah everything’s fine.” No-one must see any sign of weakness or fragility, particularly male friends. The result is that most men avoid open and honest communication about physical or mental health.

This book changes that expectation in a big way. Matt writes openly, candidly and even dispenses some laid back humour along the way in describing his own extreme personal experiences.

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Daddy’s OK

With special guest:

• Dean Mason
  …in conversation with Bill Kable
  

In his book Daddy’s OK: Fathers’ stories of separation, divorce and rebuilding author Dean Mason takes us into the world of 14 families that have been through the trauma of separation and divorce. The 2006 Census showed that 50% of children in single parent families never have an overnight stay with the other parent, normally the Dad. But if our eyes glass over when contemplating the tens of thousands of Dads in this situation Dean brings it back to the individual personal level with these real life stories from his days as National Chairman of Parents Beyond Breakup (formerly Dads in Distress Support Services).

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Deadly Connections

With special guest:

• Keenan Mundine
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Dreamer, nothing but a dreamer. That might be where it started for our guest today Keenan Mundine after a beginning in life that really didn’t give him a chance.

But after Keenan had spent the first half of his life in the criminal justice system he came to a realisation. Keenan either had to change his ways or face up to spending his life behind bars. Fortunately for us and for Keenan he decided to make a worthwhile contribution to society. And so was born Deadly Connections where he is the co-founder along with his wife Carly.

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The Resilience Project

With special guest:

• Hugh van Cuylenburg
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

When Hugh van Cuylenburg went to India as a volunteer teacher he did not expect to be on the receiving end of the learning process. At first reluctant to even be in India he soon found that he was learning from his students how to develop the psychological foundation for success in all educational and physical pursuits.

Hugh’s trip finished up being full of surprises. He was surrounded by so much poverty yet there was also happiness and contentment. Working on his observations Hugh was able to develop The Resilience Project for application in Australia and backed up his approach with technical qualifications obtained by completing a Master’s Degree at University.

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Defying the Enemy Within

With special guest:

• Joe Williams
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

When his father presented his South Sydney first grade rugby league jersey to Joe Williams it was a special moment. When Joe went straight into the ranks of professional boxers without any need for an apprenticeship as an amateur it was another special moment. Off the sporting field Joe is an established speaker on the circuit in Australia and the USA. So what could possibly be wrong?

We learn in this fascinating discussion that behind all the achievements Joe was battling serious mental illness from a young age. There were inner voices crowding out his thoughts and trying to drag him down. Joe admits that these voices denied him the satisfaction of reaching his true sporting potential but he is now on a course that he sees as more important.

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Accidental Weatherman

With special guest:

• Sam Mac
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

This show is not for anyone expecting to hear a TV weatherman in the mould of Alan Wilkie.

Sam Mac has forged a new role for himself in the Sunrise program where he goes around Australia looking for interesting people, interesting towns in fact anything that will give his morning viewers a lift. Naturally Sam will pass on the essential weather information such as do you need to get your umbrella but he will not go into the detailed meteorological analysis behind that decision mainly because he is not a meteorologist.

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Behind Dark Eyes

With special guest:

• Jeff Apter
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Everyone remembers Jon English with those raccoon eyes and tall thin frame contributing to a very distinctive appearance.

Jon English had regular appearances in so many different forms of entertainment. He was a rock singer, a star of live musicals, a romantic star of acclaimed television series, and at all times a rascal. In between those activities he wrote sensitive music and became an entrepreneur.

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A Better Death

With special guest:

• Dr Ranjana Srivastava
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Most people in our society try to avoid death and taxes. But at least in the case of our mortality it is a universal experience, a bookend of our life, part of being human.

Our guest today is Dr Ranjana Srivastava OAM who is an Oncologist working in the public hospital sector of Victoria. Ranjana packs into her daily life being a doctor, an award winning author, a journalist and also a family life with her husband and three children.

Yet her professional life as a cancer specialist revolves around dealing with a deadly disease, cancer. It often falls to her to pass on the unimaginable news that the person in front of her has limited time to live. Some doctors can’t imagine themselves doing this because they want to help heal a condition. Other doctors can’t imagine doing anything else and for this they have a special type of courage.

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Too Soon, Too Late

With special guests:

• Ralph & Kathy Kelly
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

There is widespread knowledge of the July 2012 attack on 18 year old Thomas Kelly in 2017. The sorrow felt by the community was compounded by the loss through suicide of Thomas’s brother Stuart four years later.

Ralph and Kathy Kelly have experienced the unimaginable but as a measure of the innate qualities of them and their family they have, in the time since, made great strides in reducing the dangers on the streets of Sydney.

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Anxious Kids

With special guest:

• Michael Grose
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Michael Grose and his co-author Dr Jodi Richardson are often asked when making parenting presentations if there is an epidemic of anxiety among our young people. If you were asked the same question you might immediately say yes but before he answers that question for us in today’s program, we ask our guest what it is exactly that we are talking about. Is anxiety the same as depression? Is anxiety built into us? When does it become harmful? What can we do about it?

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