In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Troy Bramston chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. This is the first full biography of Gough Whitlam, a former Australian Prime Minister, since his death in 2014.

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

• The biography’s subtitle The Vista of the New came from a poem Gough Whitlam wrote in 1934 as a student at Canberra Grammar School. In it, he imagines a bolder brighter future for Australia.
• The biography’s central theme is political leadership.
• Troy Bramston is interested in how power is gained, used and lost.
• Gough Whitlam’s school reports noted his difficulty getting along with others. These interpersonal failures would contribute to his downfall decades later.
• Troy argues that Whitlam was not a man of destiny but a man of history, driven not by a sense of predestination but by a hunger to change Australia’s direction.
• Troy makes a compelling case for advancing the biographical subject. Continually asking what is new, he argues that a biography that doesn’t tell us something we didn’t know before, however well written, fails to fully justify itself.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Ian Hembrow chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees.

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

• Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees is the first full-length English biography of Anders Celsius, a modest Swedish astronomer who quietly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world.
• Ian Hembrow’s accidental discovery of Celsius’s story in 2016 sparked a years’-long quest that led him to the Arctic Circle, retracing Celsius’s 1736–37 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth.
• Celsius’s story is set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, illustrating how he thrived in the vibrant 18th-century scientific community while unlocking fundamental mysteries of nature.
• Ian Hembrow draws connections to the present, noting that Celsius, who is best known for inventing the 100-point centigrade temperature scale, now lends his name to global climate targets as humanity strives to limit warming to 1.5°C.
• How Ian Hembrow delves into Celsius’s human story, sharing the personal struggles and triumphs behind his scientific achievements and offering a poignant reminder that even great scientific minds face immense personal challenges.
• The relevance of Celsius’s story today, reminding us of the crucial role of scientific inquiry and our shared responsibility to use knowledge wisely as we face urgent challenges like climate change.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Hester Kaplan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography.

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

• The catalyst for crafting Twice Born was the death of Hester’s father, the biographer Justin Kaplan. Hester realised she had lost the chance to ask her father the questions that had always eluded her during his lifetime.
• Rather than being a conventional biography, Twice Born blends biography, memoir, and fiction, a structure Kaplan chose deliberately to view her father from many different angles and points of view, enabling her to know him in ways impossible while he was alive.
• Kaplan discovered that her father chose Mark Twain as his biographical subject because of deep personal parallels that included an early loss of parents, a traumatic childhood and an identity reinvented through writing. Hester insists that biographers inevitably choose subjects who mirror their own inner lives.
• Kaplan reflects on how memory and fiction blur once put on the page.
• Because Justin Kaplan always wrote behind closed study doors, his daughter uses fiction to imaginatively enter that space and reconstruct his writing process.