Show Notes
Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt.
Now a TV adaptation, directed by acclaimed First Nations director Wayne Blair, and written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, tells the Goolagong story on screen in a dramatization based on her memoir. But a biopic is constrained by budget and other issues such as casting that mean the story has to be told differently. So what gets left out? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
More from Life Sentences Podcast
Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films like Robin Hood, he had lived the life of an entitled boss on plantations in New Guinea as a fortune hunter before being discovered on the beach at Bondi.
Peter Matthiessen was a giant of American twentieth century letters, and the only writer ever to win the National Book Award in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. He was a complicated man who went to great lengths to escape the privilege he was born into.
After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next book and what should it be about? Her UK publisher was not keen on her ideas and so she turned to journalism and went undercover to write an exposé of the life of a domestic servant.
Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accused of being part of a paedophile ring. In a sensational twist, he was murdered in his home.
Authorised biographies, especially of those in high office, tend to suffer from being overly respectful if not downright deferential. But in the case of Juliet Rieden’s authorised biography of Quentin Bryce, the first female Governor General of Australia, authorisation means co-operation without editorial control.