Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S7 Ep15: Bookshelfie: Julia Gillard

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

The former Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard joins Vick for a live recording in Bedford Square Gardens from the Women’s Prize Live Festival. Julia Gillard served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013 after serving as Deputy Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010. She was the first and only woman to have held either of these offices in Australian history. Following her retirement from politics, Julia has been a visiting professor at the University of Adelaide and is currently the chair of the Global Partnership for Education, the Wellcome Trust and Beyond Blue, an Australian mental health and wellbeing organisation. Julia has also written several books exploring themes of misogyny, leadership and politics. Her memoir, My Story, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year by the Australian Book Industry Awards and was the highest selling politics-related book in 2014.  Julia’s book choices are: ** Nancy Drew Mystery Stories by Carolyn Keene ** To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee ** The Secret River by Kate Grenville ** The Sun Walks Down by Fiona MacFarlane ** Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season seven of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of season seven? Listen and subscribe now!

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Oh, guys, you're on a podcast now, so you can make as much noise as you want. It's picking up. Yes. Welcome to the Women's Prize live. This is so exciting. We have a huge audience today. Make yourselves known. I like it.

Anytime we say something that we think might be funny, just laugh. It just sounds great. With thanks to Bayleys, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I am your host for Season 7 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them.

Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about the books you'll be adding to your 2024 reading list. I'm so excited to be here and I'm so excited to be here. excited by the guests that we have today. You just saw her famous misogyny speech there on the screen. I'm joined by former Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard. Julia Gillard served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013 after serving as Deputy Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010. She was the first and only woman to have held either of these officers in Australian history. Following her retirement from politics, Gillard has been a visiting professor at the University of Adelaide and is currently the chair of the Global Partnership of Education, the Welcome Trust and Beyond Blue,

an Australian mental health and well-being organisation. Gillard has also written several books exploring themes of misogyny, leadership and politics. Her memoir, My Story, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year by the Australian Book Industry Awards and was the highest-selling politics-related book in 2014. In 2020, she co-wrote women and leadership with Ngazi Oconjo Iwelea, and in 2022, Gillard edited Not Now, Not Ever, which looks back on the 10 years since her famous misogyny speech, which she addressed to the Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, in the Australian Parliament. Julia is also the chair of Welcome, the Global Scientific Foundation, addressing our most urgent health challenges. I'm thrilled to be recording this conversation in front of a gorgeous audience in Bedford Square Gardens. in central London. So please give it up for Julia Gillard.

Thank you. Thank you. I realised that was a very lengthy introduction. Welcome to the Women's Prize Live Festival. How does it feel when you have that sort of list of accolades regaled at you? Some days it feels vaguely like being at your own funeral. It's a bit of eulogy. Yeah, people talking about you. But I'm still alive and well, and very happy to be spending significant amounts of time here in the UK as well as back in my beautiful home Australia. It is the Welcome Trust that brings me here, which is just down the road on Houston Road, and doing incredible work to try and ensure that we lead a healthier future, all of us, using the power of science, to do that.

And I am also at King's College London with my colleagues at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership, which I founded there in 2017, and I'm delighted we've got a sister institute too at the Australian National University, and we're trying to increase the evidence base to ensure that the remaining barriers that hold women back in all walks of life, including women authors, are overcome, that we've got the best strategies for knocking them out of the way.

And the not now, not ever a book is actually a fundraiser to support that research work. So when do you find time to read? Well, I do find time to read. Actually, I find a lot more time to read now than in the old days when I was in Australian politics. I am someone who likes nothing more than getting to curl up with a good book on weekends, a bit of downtime. And I read most nights. I tend to read more than I watch, you know, TV or stream videos or any of those sorts of things. It's my principal relaxation. And what kind of books do you relax to? What's your escape? Yeah, I'm predominantly a fiction reader. I would say that would break down sort of three-quarters fiction,

one-quarter non-fiction. Obviously, there are, you know, wonderful non-fiction books that come out. Histories, Mary Beards, work. I love all of that. But in fiction, I read very widely from, you know, high brown, literature all the way through to, you know, the murder mystery page turners. It really depends what mood you're in and, you know, what sort of style of life you're living at that moment in Australia, summertime, when we're all very relaxed.

That's certainly when the murder mystery page turners come out. It just lends itself so well to getting lost in those stories. You said there that when you were in politics, it was hard to find the time. You must have been so incredibly busy. I remember reading that you used to have all of your paperwork in a suitcase with you that you would carry around, just on the go. Do you feel like your time in politics changed your reading habits or the books that you gravitated towards?

I don't think it changed it, but it disrupted it. Because, you know, the volume of work was so high and you would do so much reading that by the end, you know, by the time you finally, finally finished, which was often quite late into the night, you were simply too tired, your eyes were just too tired to really think that picking up a book would be a good way of relaxing. So in that more stressed period of my life, I did take up other wind-down pursuits. I had been someone who, as a younger person, had knitted. My mother was a huge knitter, and so I did take knitting back up because I found at the end of an epic day that it was a kind of rhythmic,

wind-down way of being. You know, it was taking enough of my attention that you couldn't have the incredibly busy, crowded mind, but not so much of my attention that it was winding me up instead of winding me down, whereas now really I'm back to reading because I don't have that acute pressure. To the extent that I got, you know, bits of time off, occasional, where. weekends, the period between Christmas and New Year, then I'd definitely be picking up a book. And I know you've got a book podcast as well, which you co-host with poet Sarah Holland Bats.

Tell me a little bit about that. And how do you decide which books that you want to cover? Yeah, this is a new venture for me. The podcast has been of quite longstanding, and it's associated with the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. So the King's College London Global Institute is in the Virginia Woolf building. So roughing off Virginia Woolf, we called it a podcast of one's own, kind of re-engineering her famous statement that a woman needs a room of her own if she is to write. And the format up until this year has been about interviewing women and getting them to tell their life stories and what they're doing now.

And in the course of that, I have interviewed quite a few ways. authors. But this year we decided to change it up a bit. So whilst I am still doing interviews with women where we talk about their life stories, each month I'm now doing a book club episode, either with Sarah, who is an incredible poet, let me recommend to you her book, The Jaguar, which is won the Stella Prize in Australia, which is a women's prize for fiction, or with my great friend Kathy Lett, who would be an author known to many of you, her most recent book, Revenge, has been doing the rounds. And so we're at this stage, just coming up with ideas that we like.

We're trying to showcase women's fiction, so either fiction that is written by women or is particularly focused on women's stories or both. But we really want audience engagement and people suggesting books to us. So feel free to get into that. slip stream with the book club and let us know what you think we should be reading and talking about. I feel like there's a lot of people in this audience who could be interested in a books podcast. Possibly. Yeah, I think we're with our people, aren't we?

I hope so. Does anyone here listen to Bookshelfy, the Women's Prize podcast? Yeah. Oh, well, if you do listen and even if you don't, this is how it works, we tell the story of the lives of our brilliant guests through the books that have shaped them, which is what we're doing today. And so we're going to get stuck into your first bookshelf you pick, Julia, which is Nancy Drew Mystery Stories by Carolyn Kean. This collection of 175 novels follows the daring amateur detective Nancy Drew as she solves mysteries and exciting adventures.

Often joined by her friends, Bess Marvin and George Faines, Nancy is often described as self-possessed, independent and highly talented. The series began in 1930 with The Secret of the Old Clock, and has remained popular selling over 80 million copies worldwide. How old were you when you were reading these? Look, I was young. I mean, I would have been not even a teenager, though, just coming into my teenage years.

And I picked Nancy Drew because it reminds me of that childhood period where with my family, so my mother, my father, my sister, Alison, going to the local library, Mitcham Library, was a family ritual and everybody would be borrowing books. So mum and dad would be borrowing them. Allison would be borrowing them. I would be borrowing them.

And I got hooked on the Nancy Drew series, which, as you've just indicated, is huge. There are many, many, many of them. And the library had them. And, you know, they... Nancy Drew Mysteries, never going to be featuring in a book a prize list. I am confident of that. They never have. They never will. But for, you know, a young girl, a kid, looking for something engaging to read

with a teenage girl at the centre of the action, you know, a teenage girl who's showing a lot of courage and agency and an inquiring mind and solving these mysteries, it sort of captured all of that. So I very much enjoyed reading them. I suspect, like many other delights of childhood, that if I picked one back up now, I would be saying to myself, heavens above, what did I ever see in this? And so I won't be doing that because my memory is of them being, you know, a great, a great way of having adventures even from my bedroom in South Australia. You know, Nancy Drew has been incited as an inspiration by figures like Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She's hugely popular and has been for so long. How does she inspire you?

I just think, you know, having a girl, you know, girl at the centre of it, there's lots of literature, obviously, that is very boy's own. So, you know, boys going out and having adventures. And lots of literature that is about a gang of children doing things together, but to have a female lead as a girl sort of starting to, you know, emerge into the world with, you know, your own life, your own thoughts and an increasing sense of who am I outside the immediacy of my family unit. I think that, you know, to have literature where you can read about another girl who is going through extraordinary stories, but sharing some of the emotions that you feel yourself, there's something very inspiring and engaging in that.

And, you know, children's stories have very much diversified since I was a young person, but my broad recollection of much of the literature, the picture books when I was really young and then the sort of, you know, early childhood books that kids would be given was that it was relatively unusual to find, you know, a woman with that much agency, a girl with that much agency in presence. Completely. I remember growing up and seeing characters that I felt I could relate to. And same with the kids that I work with now. When they find on the pages of a book someone that validates them, their story, that the power of their voice, it gives them such great confidence. It means that they can fulfill their potential as they get older. And you said that

You came from a family of readers, you were going to the library. How much did it impact you having a mum and a dad who really supported that, who did press books into your hand, who encouraged you to get lost in those worlds? Oh, tremendously. My family is from the United Kingdom. Actually, despite this accent, I was born in the United Kingdom. Where Welsh, my family, my dad was from a coal mining village in South Wales. my mother was from Barry, you know, now famous for Gavin and Stacey as much as anything else.

And I was born in Barry, but we migrated to Australia when I was four and my sister was seven. So, you know, my only kind of consciousness growing up was of being Australian. I didn't have any original memories from Barry. My parents, very intelligent people, but neither of them for various reasons, had the opportunity to finish secondary school. My father simply because he came from an impoverished family, my mother because she was unwell as a child, and there wasn't a system to hold an unwell child in education back then.

But both of them, despite their education being cut short, were great readers. And so, you know, from the earliest time, you know, well before the research was available about children's brain development, mum particularly was of the view that, you know, you should be talking to your baby. She would, you know, when we were very small, she would always be talking to us. She taught us to read as soon as we were able to. We both went to school already able to read. And that love of books, that books were, you know, sacred things that opened up new worlds

was really drummed into my sister and I and stayed with both of us ever since. And tell me a little bit about that move from Wales. to Australia, how much do you remember? Can you remember how you felt? Yeah, no, I don't. I don't have any memories. My sister does because I was four, she was seven, so she had started school in Wales,

and she remembers the boat trip over. But I don't have any memories of that. My earliest early memory is of being in a migrant hostel when we first landed. That's the first thing I can remember. and then my childhood in South Australia is where my original memories come from. But we were of that era of so-called 10-pound POMs

where there was a subsidised migration system for suitable migrants to go to Australia because Australia was trying to build the population. I only found this out today, but did you know that Carolyn Keene is actually a pseudonym, a publisher called the Strait Mayor-Sindexam, produced the Nancy Drew series, but there were a lot of women who were hired as ghost writers of these books paid $125 each for each one.

This is true. So we've allowed it to be included because they were all female writers. But they were contractually required to give up all rights to their work and to accept a confidentiality clause. Wow. Does that change anything for you? Yes, it does. I knew in the recesses of my mind that it was a sort of.

pseudonym, so I always expected that it was probably more than one writer, given the volume of them, that it was more than one writer. But it's fruitful that the arrangement was so exploitative. Yes, $125. Write a book. It's nothing. When they've been sold around the world and would have made a fortune. 80 million copies around the world.

Yes, that's telling us something about women, women's wages, the value of women's work. It certainly is. on the subject of springing things. I had London Hughes on the podcast and we talked about a book that she'd absolutely loved and at the end of it. And obviously now the author is in prison and she was like, that changes everything.

You should have told me that, Vic. I'm sorry. Let's move on now. To your second book, Shelby book, which is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which I think is so special to so many of us, told through the eyes of Scout and Gem Finch. We follow Atticus Finch's attempt

to defend Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the deep south of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice, but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

Now, like it was for us in the UK, was required reading for you on the English Literatured syllabus. Why did it stand out to you, though, at that time? It was required reading, and I always loved the study of English at school, so I wasn't that kid that was resentfully carrying the books home going, oh, heavens, we have to read this big book. I always wanted to do it.

And, you know, I was blessed with great English teachers. I mean, one actually stands out in my mind in primary school, the deputy principal, Mr. Crowe, would teach us English and would inspire in us a love of literature. The Harper Lee to Kill a Mockingbird was a secondary school book and it is beautifully written, I mean number one, beautifully written, completely describes the world for you, the world in which the story is set.

So, you know, coming from Adelaide, Australia, This was a description of a very different place, but she absolutely builds that world for you and you can feel yourself immersed in it. There is a sassy girl at the centre of the story, Scout, who once again is a character with all sorts of mischief in her and all sorts of courage and agency, so that captured my attention.

but it, you know, movingly unpacks for you what racism is, the impact and injustice it brings, but it also invites you to try and see the world from the perspective of those who hold the racist views. It's laying open to you why racism exists. what drives people to clutch for racist views and to enact them. And so it's a deeply moral work in terms of how the story is told, but it is a work with empathy and understanding and complexity and nuance. And so I think for young people it would still be a tremendous read. And of course it was winningly brought to film with Gregory Peck starring as Atticus Finch, and that's a very classic movie.

And it's been very winningly brought to stage too, I think. I went to see it on stage. I think it was last year I saw it in the West End. And I went with that little bit of trepidation you get when you absolutely love a book, and you're going to go and see a stage production of it and you're like, oh, just be so devastated if this doesn't land right. But I thought it really did. They managed to bring it to stage, you know, a sort of complex story,

but they managed to bring it to stage really effectively. Yeah, I went last year as well with my mum, and we were all like, please don't ruin it, please don't ruin it. But it was my mum who gave me my first copy, and she'd studied it. I think they were called O levels at the time. She'd studied it, and she still had in the margins, I know they were called O levels. It wasn't that long.

She had in the margins all of her little scribblings in pencil. And I remember I was very, very young. I was about eight years old. And I was instantly mobilised. It was like because I was a child, I had the very clean moral compass. And so right and wrong seemed so obvious. And I couldn't understand how these injustices could exist.

And the history is not, it's not that long ago. No. But just like you said, that idea of what you have to compromise as you just try and navigate the world, as you just try and exist, it started to become clearer, but there was an activism that was sparked and which never went away, and I feel like that book was the beginning of it. Reading it as a teenager, as a young person, how politically inclined did you feel? When was that sparked for you? Yeah, I grew up in a household where politics was discussed. My father, you know, coming from, you know, a coal mining village in South Wales. I mean,

he was a British Labour Party supporter, he was an active trade unionist, his political hero was Nye Bevan, who created the National Health Service, and he brought all of that to Australia with him. So in my family home, it was quite routine to be discussing what was happening with Australian politics, the Australian Labour Party, and also reflecting back here to British politics, what was happening when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, the coal miners strike, because obviously my father's family was caught up in that. Many of them are still being involved in coal mining. And so I had all of that in my family background, and we'd always been taught that it is, you know, a great offence and hugely wrong to treat anybody as lesser because they're

different. That, you know, we were taught that racism was wrong, sexism was wrong, being rude or unpleasant to the person who's serving you at the shop counter is the wrong thing to do, that you must treat everybody you meet with dignity and respect. So that value set was in my family. I think the book, though, brought it to life. in a way that my ordinary lived experience wasn't bringing it to life. And I'm that generation of Australian that we weren't really taught much about Indigenous Australia. Our history curriculum basically said, right, well, there was Captain Cook, and then, you know, let's learn forward from there, rather than, you know, Captain Cook arrived in a,

a continent that had a pre-existing culture and people that had been there for tens of thousands of years. We weren't taught about that. And so I hadn't as a young person really had to reflect on racism in a lived experience sense and the book really took me on that journey, that pathway. From that very early political engagement through to your teenage years I heard that you were a very keen public speaker and debater

and we've seen your now famous an excerpt from your now famous misogyny speech were you always destined to be Prime Minister of Australia? No, no, no, no. And if you'd, you know, through some time machine we could go back together and meet me when I'm reading to kill a mockingbird

if you ask me then, what do you want to do when you grow up? You know, the classic question adults always throw at kids. I would have said I want to be a teacher. And, you know, I like school, I liked reading, I liked English, and so I could imagine myself as an English teacher. You know, late in my high school sort of career, for one of a better word, friends' mother spoke to me and said, look, you like debating, you should think about law.

And she did persuade me that studying law would be a good fit for me. So I went to university, studied law, but I couldn't give away the book. So in Australia, it's very routine to study combined degrees. So I studied law, but studied arts with economics and English, so I could continue the study of literature. Even in my first year of university, I would have said, you know, I'm committed to the law now. Really getting interested in politics was something that,

happened from my second year at university on, there were some big education funding cutbacks and I got involved in a humble little student protest about that. I thought those cutbacks were wrong. You know, from my parents, I knew what it looked like if people were denied education. So I thought not properly funding education was the wrong thing for the government to be doing. And it was really that that got me on a pathway of more involvement, more student unionism, people starting to say to me, you know, you should think about politics. You clearly care about public policy. So it was a slow winding path, not a childhood ambition.

You talked a little bit about Australia having a mirror held up to its history, which brings us on to your third bookshelphie book today, which is The Secret River by Kate Grimville. London, 1806, William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart, Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a serious mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence is to be transported to New South Wales

for the term of his natural life. Soon, Thornhill, a man no better or worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life. Tell us why this book's important to you. Yeah, this is a work I would absolutely recommend. end, Kate Grenville is a very well-known author in Australia, I suspect less well-known here. But this is a book set on the Hawkesbury River, which is in New South Wales. It's a book in which the landscape is a character.

She beautifully describes the Australian landscape, but there's a brooding sense of menace throughout the book, because what it is really telling you about is the way in which William and his family end up intersecting with the local Aboriginal people. And so the book is telling you from William's perspective that having come from an impoverished world and childhood and life in London, having had the brutality of being transported and being a convict, he is ultimately released on licence and he claims a patch of ground to make it a farm. And for him, this is, you know, beyond his wildest imaginings that he could have the good fortune to have a piece of land that is his, to work, to live on, to make his livelihood

on, that this is a huge advance for him and his family compared with where they came from. But of course, that land is not sitting there waiting to be taken. That land is the historic and spiritual place of the local Aboriginal people. people and the displacement that needs to happen for William to realize his dreams and how he thinks about that, moralises around that, reasons his way to the final clash between him and the local people is what the novel is all about. So it's a very different work in many ways to the Harper Lee, but it is doing the same thing in the sense that for this colonial history,

which of course the Indigenous Australia saw as an invasion by people from another world who didn't understand them, their customs, their traditions, their deep connection to the land where they were met with so much violence. It is once again asking you to look at all of the story, look at what happens to the Indigenous people, that great immorality,

which is still showing in modern Australia through generations of displacement and intergenerational trauma, but also to see the world, through the eyes of William and the people for whom Australia is a land where potentially they can overcome the things that have always held them back

because of the class system and the impoverishment that they've experienced here. So it's a really beautiful work. It's certainly, you know, you live as you read it with this sort of brooding sense. You want it to all come out right, but you know as you turn the page, that it's not going to.

And it too was made into a stage play. And once again, that deep trepidation for a book you've loved, but the stage play is absolutely tremendous work and really captured the spirit of it. It's a book that helps us confront uncomfortable truths, shed new light on them. It's a book that's helped shape our understanding of Australia's colonial past, do you think that Australia has truly reckoned with its history?

No, no is the answer. And I think, like many products of colonialism, that there is an ongoing, complex and often painful debate in progress about how we turn and face the reality of this past and how we understand its contemporary manifestations in Australian society. You know, in Australia we last year had a referendum to amend our constitution to entrench what was called the voice, so a specific way of channeling the views of, Indigenous Australians, so Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, our First Nations peoples,

channeling their voices into national decision making. And when Australians were asked to vote on that, the proposition was rejected. So it's telling you that there is still a great deal of work to do to end up a truly reconciled country. having said that I can across my lifetime see that some things have got better so the work is by no means done but some things have got better I've got my home in Adelaide I've got my two great nieces and my great nephew and when I look at what they are being taught at school primary school what they're being taught in early education in child care, you know, this great silence about the before that, you know, somehow history started with Captain Cook, that has been completely broken through and they are being taught so much more about our nation and its true origins.

You described Kate Renville as a bit of a national treasure in Australia. She has, she's actually won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2001, before the Secret River came out with the idea of perfection, and she is on this year's shortlist over 20 years later. She is. With restless dolly morn. She is. I should have remembered that.

Thank you for reminding me. She's an incredible talent. Yes, so she is an incredible talent, and she's been certainly at the task of making, you know, wonderful works of literature for many years. And it would be, I suppose, improper of me to be, you know, agitating for one from the short list. So I possibly shouldn't do that.

But I'd certainly recommend that everybody buy and read or borrow Kate Grenville books when you can. They always repay the read. All shortlisted authors are available. Bayleys is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adult treat, whether shaken in a cocktail, over ice cream, or paired with your favourite book. Check out Baileys.com for our favourite Bailey's recipes. Your fourth book, Shelby Book, is The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.

In September 1883, in a small town in the South Australian outback, six-year-old's Denny Wallace goes missing. As a dust storm sweeps across the landscape, the entire community is caught. up in the search. Scouring the desert and mountains, the residents of fairly newlyweds, farmers, mothers, artists, indigenous trackers, policemen, confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient land that they inhabit, a land haunted by many gods, the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found or lost forever. Now, in your notes, you talk about the settlers in the book, trying to create a utopian society, and that much of the thinking about that utopia

happened here in London as well, in the reform and the liberal clubs. Tell me a little bit more about that. Unlike, you know, the eastern seaboard, Melbourne, Sydney, you know, Tasmania, where there's a convict history to be told. You know, certainly the Kate Grenville's Secret River is telling you that convict history

in New South Wales. South Australia was never a place where convicts were transported to. It was a colony established by free settlers. And many of them were part of various movements. Some of them church inspired, others inspired through what was then viewed as progressive thinking about what would it take to create a society that was more utopian than the UK society these people came from. And some of that then progressive thinking was done in the Reform Club

and the Liberal Club here in London. And it does mean that the history of South Australia is different. There's always lively rivalry between people from different states in Australia, like, oh, they're banging on about being free settlers again, you know, all of that. People very proud of their convict heritage to people who can trace themselves back to that period of Australian history. But this book really captures all of that and once again captures the complexities of colonialism. it's at one level just a propulsive narrative, you know, a boy goes missing in the bush. So you're turning the pages, my heaven's what's going to happen to him.

Is he going to make it? Is he going to die? This is a harsh landscape. Is someone going to do him some harm? I mean, what is happening with this child in the bush, Denny? So it's conjuring with all of that, with your desire to know what happens next to him. But it's also telling you the view from all of the individuals, or many of the individuals who live in this area and are involved in the search.

And it channels their voices very directly. So some chapters are actually written in the first person from some of the characters in the township, for example, an Afghan camelier. His story is told in the first person in one chapter. it takes you into the world of the indigenous trackers who are helping to find the child. So one of the features of Australian colonial life was in a world of racism and dispossession and often violence. Particular Aboriginal Australians, Aboriginal Australian men were valued for their ability to track in the

landscape of the bush to track lost people, to track people who were trying to get away from justice, to track animals. And so that skill base is used to try and find Denny. And so we're taken into all of this complexity in this multi-character story. Fiona said that in the lead up to writing this book, she had reread Middle March. And it's obviously a very, very, very different book, but it is taking you into quite a complete world the way that that book does. Do you think that utopia

is remotely possible now? Are we doomed? No, no, no, no. We're not... I think utopia will always be an aspiration, not a reality, but as a

full global community, I some days can find it hard to look at the headlines and to approach the world with a spirit of optimism. You know, there are many days where it all seems so weighty what is going on in the world that it's easy to feel a bit defeated by it. But I remind myself, and I am a strong believer, that over time we as a species as the people of this planet have found our way to resolve very complex problems

and to come together and to build a better world and a better world and a better world and I'm confident that that will be the direction of travel over time. Well, we said at the very beginning that that escape and that joy and that hope can often be found in the books we read in literature. And we mentioned there as well the dexterity and the deafness of Fiona's writing. You've written two books, one a memoir and the other series of interviews with leading women, women in leadership, in which you talk to female leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Jacinda Adirn.

Did you prefer one experience over the other? And would you write fiction yourself? Oh, I think it's everybody's dream, isn't it, to sit down and write a work of fiction. but having listened to the great Kate Moss speak about everything that goes into it, it would be a daunting task. Never say never, but I'm not, yes, never say never, but I'm not sure that I would bring the skill set she and so many other great riders bring. I actually joke that I'm just making it easier for myself over time,

So I wrote my memoir, you know, wrote that, co-authored women and leadership, then curated a set of essays. Maybe next time I'll just come up with the title and everybody else can do the writing. I'm making it easier for myself. But I've enjoyed each of the experiences, though they were very different. I mean, you know, writing my memoirs, I predominantly did it over one long, hot summer. in Australia and it was like being in your own fever dream day after day, just you and the computer and trying to get it done. The Women and Leadership book was a wonderful collaboration with my co-author, Ngozy,

former Foreign Minister of Nigeria, finance minister, now the Director General of the World Trade Organisation and there was something, you know, it was great fun being with her, travelling, getting the interviews. We never had a crossword as we pushed the narrative of the book back and forth between us and then really getting to draw on the expertise and thinking of others

for the not now, not ever collection of essays. I enjoyed all of it. So, you know, I can imagine writing a whole book again. I did, you know, I had to get myself in the zone. I had to do it every day. I couldn't do anything else when I was doing it. I had to have it sort of pour out.

And even though there are painful moments in that, ultimately I found it a very fulfilling process. Though I suspect I drove my family absolutely mad because I would be wandering around muttering. And I don't know whether other authors have this experience, but you go through all these editing rounds and then there's the final final round when it's laid out like it's going to look in the board.

and you can't make a change that changes the way the pagination because the indexing has already been done. So you can't, you know, something that is in three pages. You can't suddenly make it four pages by adding in so much text. And you do, you go a bit mad. I was wandering around muttering about, should that be a colon or a semicolon? And finally, my family like, just get your hands off it. It's done.

And, yeah, I probably needed their discipline to do that. But once I did get my hands off it and say, it's done, I was very pleased with it. I have heard that knowing when to stop is a huge skill. And you're right, a madness while also being a catharsis, a heady combination. Well, watch this space for the novel. Before that, it's time to talk about your fifth and final pick today, which is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It's the 1520s, Henry VIII, the Rules, England,

his queen Catherine of Aragon, but he has no heir. His chief advisor, Cardinal Walsley, an astute and adept politician, is charged with the task of freeing Henry from the encumbrance of his marriage, but Henry is subject to commands of the Pope and Catherine is a devout and loyal Catholic. Into this seething hotbed of tension and scheming steps Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man with a formidable legal mind, shrewd and ambitious. Working first as Walsley's clerk and later his successor, He emerges as a powerful player in the court's games and one with a hunger to win. As Cromwell's star rises under a capricious king with a boundless capacity for cruelty, he becomes a key player in a power play where to stumble is to fall.

And every move offers either gracious favour or certain ruin. So much of the action in Wolf Hall is set in Henry VIII Court in the 16th century. It's sort of our version of Parliament. Is that why it resonated with you? What was it about this? I mean, other than being an absolute work of genius and a masterpiece, what resonated with you? I did read it when I was in politics.

I was, when it came out, we were in opposition. So still furiously busy, but not as busy as I subsequently became when I was Prime Minister. But I was attracted to reading it as soon as it came out. I mean, it's a fascinating period of history. I'd read other Hillary, Man-Tel books. Obviously she wrote in many styles, not all of her works are historical fiction. And it was one of those books that I was thankfully on a weekend without working commitments.

It was one of those books that almost from the first page, you know, you don't get out of your pajamas, you know, you're trying to read it while you're cleaning your teeth. Like you just do not want to put it down because it was so engrossing. I don't think it was, I don't think that it was a parallel for me, you know, with the world of politics, though of course politics is infused throughout it. But it was the genius of the perspective that she took of Cromwell, the way she wrote his story. you ended up so living that period of history with him almost as him and of course you went on with the other parts of the trilogy, bring up the bodies and then the mirror and the light,

that even though of course you know how the story ends, you know, even to the last page, you're almost wanting it to come out differently and when of course it doesn't come out differently than the real history, there's a shock and an emotion in that. And for anybody to elicit that much connection and that much emotion from a reader in a story that is so well known and so well told, because all of us have been exposed to that history of Henry VIII

and what happened so many times. You've studied it in school. You've watched the, you know, Hollywood movies, the Netflix miniseries. I mean, it's everywhere. For her to bring you to that somehow fresh, I just thought was incredible, an incredible act of creativity, of genius.

Your career as a politician, it focused on fighting for justice, on fighting for equality for others. So how did it feel in that time to come against discrimination yourself? In your case, sexism and misogyny, as we saw, when you were at the top of your political game. And how much do you think that affected you, looking back? Yeah, I mean, you almost couldn't let it affect you. I mean, I always knew it was there, generally on the periphery of my vision,

sometimes moving to centre stage because of the nature of events. So it was always there, but I couldn't let myself perpetually be outraged about it or upset about it or emotional about it because I had a job to do. And so, you know, I actually, for most of my time as Prime Minister, could read in the newspapers, wherever the most sexist things said about me and almost. almost clinically detach myself and be analyzing it as a political problem rather than something very deeply personal about me. But I think all of that did lead to a welling frustration. So when I got the opportunity to call it out and I did on that parliamentary day, then that is what came out as the misogyny speech. And having come through those experiences when I I sat down to write my story.

I wanted to write really thoughtfully about gender. I didn't want this to simply be a story of, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. I wanted to try and tell the story, but also unpack what it might mean more broadly for women and leadership and what it might mean for the project of gender equality in our world. and I found when I came to do that that there's a lot we know about sexism and misogyny

and how to overcome it, but there's still a lot we don't know. And so that impulse is what led me to founding the Global Institute for Women's Leadership here, and then the Sister Institute was founded in Australia. So, you know, out of difficult things, I think some good things can come, and that's been my path on it.

Yeah, you are now the chair of the Global, Institute of Women's Leadership at King's College here in London, the Sister Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra. Julie, what are your priorities now? Do you ever miss the rush of politics? Oh yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, I think once you've got that level of political addiction, it never quite leaves you. So I watch politics in Australia. I watch politics here. I watch politics in many places in the world. And, you know, there is always a little bit of wistfulness about no longer being in it myself.

But I also made a very, you know, major decision for me in 2013 that, you know, when my political career as Prime Minister came to an end, I drew a very hard line and said, yes, I'm always going to be a politically interested, person, but that was then, this is now. I'm not going to conduct myself and be in the public square, still talking about politics, almost acting like I'm still in politics. I'm going to find things that put my values into action but are new things to do. And I've happily been able to do that and I've been offered some remarkable opportunities and I'm very content with that. But there is

sometimes just a little little itch you'd like to scratch but you know nope that was then this is now julia i do have to ask you one final question which is if you had to choose one book from i know i'm sorry oh i am sorry from your list of the favourite which would it be oh from that list oh yeah we've had wolf hall it's like giving away your children it's like choosing a favorite child you have the The Sun walks down, the secret river, to kill a mockingbird, and you kicked off the Nancy Drew mystery stories. Yeah, I think out of that list, I would have to say, to kill a mockingbird. But it's painful.

It's painful to not be able to pick all the others. You can have all five, it's fine. It's you. Julia, I just want to say a huge thank you on behalf of the Women's Prize. And from everyone, I'm sure, in the room, for, you'll do a round of applause now, actually, yeah. Thank you. For taking time out of your very busy schedule to chat to us about the books that you love. And I know you're going to be in the signing tent as well afterwards signing copies of your books so you can catch Julia there.

But one more time, thank you so much. Julia Goodhurt. And thank you very much. That's great. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Thank you.