In 2005, I started hosting a local ABC radio program called The Conversation Hour. It began in Brisbane and expanded to Sydney and NSW the following year. Then it was extended to all Australian states and territories, except Victoria, where Jon Faine’s popular Conversation Hour is featured in the same time slot.
Kellie Riordan was my first producer. We agreed that the show should feature citizen storytellers, who are often unknown outside of the community but have a story to share that is amazing, strange, intense, funny, moving, or all of these things. These ‘unfamous guests’ were the most popular because listeners felt they could compare their lives to theirs.
Kellie moved on to better and more exciting in 2006 when a new producer, Pam O’Brien, joined the team. Pam was a long-serving TV director at the BBC until she moved to Australia with her family.
WHILE WE STARTED the program, it was the norm for radio interviews to be at most seven minutes. We knew there was a demand for something more decadent, less combative, and more discursive. Something that appealed to both the heart and the head. To distinguish the program from Jon’s Melbourne show, we changed its name to Conversations With Richard Fidler.
The show was podcasted right from the beginning. Although I initially considered the podcast an annoying task that we had to deal with in the end, ABC Radio’s wise and knowledgeable staff insisted we continue. It wasn’t until 2008 that I started listening to podcasts. Then, I discovered some excellent historical podcasts, such as Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and Mike Duncan’s History of Rome. These podcasts were a fantastic revelation. Pam and I heard that their creators had similar ideals. They were inclined to tell stories about everyday people, preferred natural speech, avoided pompous media clichés, and were open to strangeness, paradox, and humor.
I was awarded a Churchill fellowship in 2011 to meet Ira Glass, founder, and presenter of This American Life. Ira was kind and generous; you can find my interview with him here. Jay Allison invited me to join the Transom Story Workshop in Wood’s Hole (Massachusetts), which he established.
I took the lessons learned from my time in America and created a report for the Churchill Trust. Conversations changed as I tried to make them more immersive and cinematic. The podcast was meant to make listeners feel as if they were at the movie theater when the trailers end, the houselights dim, the curtain opens, and the feature begins.
The Conversations podcast’s audience started to grow, with twenty thousand to fifty thousand program downloads per month. This is a lot of podcast hours, so I knew we’d have to hit the ceiling soon. As the numbers rose higher, we decided to celebrate when the monthly downloads reached 100,000. They jumped to 125,000 the next month. We began to see 3.9 million downloads per month in 2017.
IN THE LAST YEAR, we have held live events at venues all over Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and a Tin-and-Timber Outback Shearing shed. We have recorded conversations with guests in New York City and tropical north Queensland.