Richard Fidler

Richard Fidler is a writer and broadcaster. His interview program ‘Conversations’ is broadcast on ABC Radio and podcast around the world. He was a member of the comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars. His previous books are Ghost Empire (2016) and (with Kari Gislason) Saga Land (2017). His new book is The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague (ABC Books).

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

The moon, of course (spacesuits are provided under this deal, right?). Feeling moon dust crunching under my boots while looking down on the big blue marble would be an incomparable thrill.

The announcement in June 2000 that a first draft of the human genome had been completed was rightly recognised as a landmark in scientific endeavour. Predictions were that the sequencing of the genome would allow for the pinpointing of genes responsible for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and lead to finely targeted, even personalised, treatments for a range of disorders. That these ambitions are still some way from being met doesn’t make the discovery any less remarkable. The Human Genome Project (HGP) gave us the capacity to read the basic building blocks of life. Research into the human genome is teaching us that the relationship between our approximately 30,000 genes and who we are is enormously complex, the result not merely of the action of individual genes but also of the ways in which those genes interact with each other and with their environment.

In The Genes That Make Us, Edwin Kirk reminds us that virtually everything ‘that afflicts human beings, and everything about us that is not an affliction, too, has genetics at its core’. Interpreting genetic sequencing data is at the heart of Kirk’s practice. A Sydney-based medical geneticist and genetic pathologist, he works with patients to determine the underlying genetic source of their conditions and to advise them of their treatment options. Both an account of the human stories at the heart of Kirk’s practice and a beginner’s guide to genetic medicine, The Genes That Make Us tells of the significant progress that has been made in genetics over the past two decades, while also signalling how far there is left to travel.

To his obvious surprise, John Wood became a household name playing ordinary, reliable Aussie blokes – most memorably Sergeant Tom Croydon on Blue Heelers and magistrate Michael Rafferty on Rafferty’s Rules – two of television’s best-loved everyday heroes. (I confess to writing about the latter in The Bulletin and describing him as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’.)

Less well known is that Wood was also a busy playwright and screenwriter for much of his more public life. It’s this talent that shines here in vivid observation and shrewd evocations. Telling of the family’s move to the semi-rural outskirts of Melbourne, he conjures the unself-conscious innocence of a child: ‘I don’t think my sister Glenys was yet born. I do have a memory of going to the hospital with Dad to bring Mum and the new baby home, but it could have been Kaye’s birth two years later.’

On May Day 1955, two years after his death, a colossal memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled on a prominent site north of central. Towering above the city and containing 14,000 tons of granite, it was the largest statue of the dictator ever created. Stalin was depicted at the head of a representative group of citizens, dubbed by some as a bread queue. Otakar Švec, a prominent Czech sculptor, had won the commission in 1949. After the work’s stressful gestation, he killed himself shortly before the work was unveiled; there had been constant interference and police surveillance, and his wife committed suicide in 1954.

Švec had intended bequeathing his possessions to the Prague Institute for the Blind, possibly knowing that the recipients would never see his socialist-realist monster, but the secret police destroyed the contents of his apartment and the Institute received nothing. Following Stalin’s fall from favour, the memorial was detonated in 1962. The podium survives (it’s now used as a bar), and the platform above houses a modern sculpture of a gigantic metronome, installed in 1991.