In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Martin Thomas chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Martin Thomas’s research began in the ABC’s sound archive, where he stumbled upon recordings made during the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an expedition he had never heard of.
• Martin chose the group biography form to capture the expedition’s internal tensions.
• Frank Setzler led the collection of human remains from Indigenous mortuary sites, shipping them to the Smithsonian. Martin describes this as a kind of kidnapping: displaced spirits in a foreign land.
• Martin made repeated research trips to Arnhem Land, showing digitised expedition films and recordings to community elders. Old men wept with joy at seeing ancestors and ceremonies on film.
• Clever Men ends in the early 21st century with the repatriation of the human remains, led by the late elder Jacob Nayinggull, a man Martin describes as one of the true clever men of the story, and one of his most important mentors.
• The title’s double meaning Clever Men is an Aboriginal English term for a shaman or spiritual healer. Martin explains how the title emerged from an incident in which local Arnhem Land people watched a mammalogist shoot, skin and stuff animals, concluding this westerner must be a powerful clever man from another world. The irony is intentional.
• Biography assumes a Western sense of self: names, birth dates, individual identity. In Bininj and Yolŋu culture, the dead aren’t named during mourning, numerical dates aren’t used, and the self is understood through a spirit that belongs to country and returns to it.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Erin Vincent chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Fourteen Ways of Looking.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• In Fourteen Ways of Looking, Erin Vincent revisits the tragic year when both her parents were killed in a motor vehicle accident. She was 14.
• Erin began noticing the number 14 recurring in books, films and news, prompting her to record these instances until they formed a 2,000-word essay and eventually a full manuscript.
• The narrative is fragmented rather than linear.
• Every fragment contains a reference to the number 14, drawn from history, literature, or memory, and each is deliberately paired with the fragment before and after it to create subtle, sometimes cryptic connections.
• Erin describes the compositional process as a ‘crazy jigsaw puzzle’, holding hundreds of shards of memory and fact in her head, aided only by notebooks and a highlighter pen.
• Erin discusses the active, layered function of white space on the page, which she uses to represent silences, omissions and the unspeakable, letting absence do the emotional work instead of over-explaining feeling.
• Erin reflects on ending the book with her mother’s voice from an old cassette recording
• Erin offers advice to aspiring fragment-writers: experiment freely, read widely in the form and use constraints as a source of creative freedom.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sophia Lambton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Why the narrative opened with a prologue about Maria Callas’s artistry.
• How exhaustive research revealed Callas’s brilliance and flaws.
• How a detailed calendar of events, letters and performances tracked Callas’s evolving thoughts.
• How Sophia built comprehensive files by transcribing and translating all of Callas’s interviews.
• Why chapter headings include Callas’s own words.
• How Sophia dismantled Callas’s ‘diva stereotype’ and portrayed her human story.