How did Japan evolve from Australia's wartime enemy into a friendly trading partner in a little over a decade?

On Afternoon Light #196 Georgina Downer speaks with Andrew Levidis about Kishi Nabusuke. A controversial & complex figure, who was imprisoned as a war criminal for his role in the Imperial Japanese Government, only to rebound and become the architect of its post-war political settlement.

Andrew Levidis is a Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at the Australian National University. He completed his doctorate in History at the Faculty of Law of Kyoto University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (RIJS) and Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is co-editor of In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong University Press 2020) and editor of the DFAT Documents volume on Australia-Japan relations 1957-1975. His monograph A Memory of Empire: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transwar Japanese Right explores the international history of Japanese right-wing and the historical rise of conservatism from empire to Cold War.

How did Alfred Deakin shape so much of the 'Australian Settlement' without ever securing a clear election victory?

On Afternoon Light #195 Georgina Downer speaks with Judith Brett to explore one of Australia's most important but enigmatic figures. Who has always featured centrally in the story of federation, in part because he insisted on writing it himself.

Judith Brett is a political historian and biographer and emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. Among her books are Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, which won the 2018 National Biography Award, and From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Did you know that the most important discovery in the history of treating mental illness was made by an Australian?

On Afternoon Light #194 Georgina Downer speaks with Greg de Moore to tell the world-changing story of John Cade. A survivor of Changi, who risked experiments on himself to establish that lithium could treat bipolar disorder. A breakthrough that has been compared in significance to the discovery of penicillin.

Greg de Moore is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry based at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital. Born in Melbourne of parents who migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka, Greg has lived in Sydney for more than 30 years. He has written or co-written a biography Tom Wills (Allen & Unwin, 2008 & 2011), A National Game: The History of Australian Rules Football (Viking/Penguin, 2008) and Finding Sanity: John Cade, Lithium and the Taming of Bipolar Disorder (Allen & Unwin, 2016).