Background Briefing: The sexual abuse scandal nobody’s talking about. Putting someone you love into aged care is such a hard thing for everyone. The current commission into aged care and this Background Briefing program must make it even harder. The sexual abuse in this program is not from other patients but from the ‘carers’ in a system where providers seem to have all the clout. Carers are not registered, and there’s no mandatory reporting. What a terrifying situation to be in for people in aged care who realize what is happening.
Eustace Hamilton Miles Source: Wikimedia
Arts and Ideas (BBC) Healthy Eating Edwardian Style. This program tells the story of Eustace Hamilton Miles, an Olympian real tennis player (yes, real [royal] tennis was an Olympic sport in 1908 only) who promoted many different fad diets over his career. He started a vegetarian restaurant in Charing Cross, (even though he eschewed the term ‘vegetarian’), which became notorious for its links with the suffragettes, who regularly ate their. Although his restaurants and health food stores prospered during WWI, his ideas went out of fashion and he died leaving only 175 pounds. His ideas were at their most popular in the first two decades of the 20th century, a time when sleeping in the fresh air on a verandah was very popular.
New Books in History This is pretty hard-core history which assumes that one is on top of all the historiographical debates that surround the book being featured. In this case, it was Jeremy Black’s The World at War 1914-1945. My word, what a productive historian Jeremy Black is, with 100 titles to his name – five in 2019 so far: no wonder he’s known as “the most prolific historical scholar of our age”. Anyway, he snipes at other historians, refutes the idea that the first and second world wars replicated each other, and argues that the Germans started it. This episode, steeped in military history, is very bloke-y and combative and this article, from the centre-right Standpoint magazine, tells more about this historian I’d never heard of. This is not entertainment-light by any means, and I think you’d have to be interested in military and world history to really enjoy this.
Conversations (ABC) Felafel and Fatherhood a rather lacklustre conversation with John Birmingham who wrote He Died with a Felafel in his Hand (which I’ve never read) and has recently released On Father, one of those small ‘On…’ books. Not one of the better interviews.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 
Miles Franklin belonged to the Women’s Freedom League, a breakaway from Pankhurst’s suffragettes (Pankhurst was pro-War so I guess the WFL was anti, MF was for sure). The WFL had its own vegetarian cafe, the Minerva, where MF worked for a while.
Obviously vegetarianism was the rage at the time. Fits in with the podcast.