Christiana Manpur (8:17)

Geraldine, listen, I think one of the things. I've never been to Australia, so this is an absolute treat for me. But since I've gotten here, I have really noticed how almost everybody, certainly in official statements and the like, always are paying tribute and thanks and gratitude to the, you know, the first nations people, the original indigenous inhabitants of Australia, and, you know, thanking them for their guardianship of the land and pledging to, you know, guard this land for the elders past, future and present, obviously. And I was so struck that it's such a, it's an amazing thing. You don't hear that anywhere else in the world and it may not be perfect here, but tell me about it. Tell people about why that's so standout and how that's come to be here in Australia.

Geraldine Brooks (9:09)

Well, I think it's a very, very small gesture that we have come to make over the past decade or so to a really brutal history of dispossession that occurred during the white settlement of this country. And we have so much work left to do that goes beyond the acknowledgement of country and the acknowledgement that we are on land that was never ceded to us, that still belongs to the different Aboriginal peoples, the mobs that cared for it in the oldest continuous living culture on earth. Aboriginal culture dates back 60, 70,000 years of the cultural artifacts that we can still actually see.

Podcast Narrator (10:06)

So even, and I saw a lot.

Christiana Manpur (10:07)

Of it, I went into the gallery here, the National Gallery of Victoria, I think it's called.

Geraldine Brooks (10:13)

But we've still got miles of work to do because the disparities in lifespan, the number of incarcerated Aboriginal people, the disparities in educational outcome, these are all things that we have not done enough to address. And I think Victoria is particularly the state where you are right now, where Melbourne is, they've taken the lead on this. They are working on developing a treaty and truth and reconciliation, and they're really leading the nation in doing the work of repair that is absolutely necessary. Yeah.

Christiana Manpur (10:52)

It just strikes me that wherever we look these days, many nations, so called Western kind of democracies, they have so much of this reparation to do and almost nobody's doing it. I know Canada has started to do it, but the United States isn't. And they don't have this kind of public tribute to their first nations, you know, the indigenous Americans. And now we're seeing it paying all flee forward in a terribly violent way in what's happening in Minneapolis. And that's the flashpoint right now. But with Trump going after immigrants, what he says undesirables, and even American Citizens being killed, and it's causing a huge backlash. How is it playing here in Australia? Because it's difficult even here with immigration. But it's not as violent as what's happening in the United States.

Geraldine Brooks (11:44)

Yeah, certainly not. There's a feeling that immigration came a little too harsh and far a little too fast and hard among some people. But honestly, this is an immigrant country. Most of us, I'm the child of an American immigrant, he moved to Australia, and almost everybody is within a generation or two of immigration. So I think there's an understanding that we wouldn't be the incredibly rich and diverse and wonderful country that we are if it were not for immigrants. And there's just. It's because of the same economic pressures that people face with high prices and cost of housing and difficulty of young people to afford housing, that there's a temptation to blame that on immigration. And I think we see that in Western Europe as well. But I think people here are absolutely shocked and incredibly brokenhearted about what has become of the United States. Minnesota is unbelievable. I mean, to us, it looks like masked thugs on the street dragging children from school gates and shooting ICU nurses multiple times in the street. This is not the America that we believed in. You know, that perhaps naively for many years, that, you know, there was. There were flaws in the society. But this kind of, honestly, fascistic thuggery, it's just shocking.

Christiana Manpur (13:27)

And I think even Trump is beginning to realize that this is not playing in a sort of a television way that he hoped it would. He's started to move staff around. He's having people into the White House in from the Department of Homeland Security. I don't know how it's going to end up. But the video that they've done, frame by frame analysis, the New York Times, is shocking. I mean, there are 10 shots fired at Alex Preddy on the ground, you know, being subdued by these ICE officials. And, I mean, he is shot, and now they're beginning to say publicly that it's not, you know, the Homeland Security narrative of him being a domestic terrorist or, you know, about to assault the ICE officials is absolutely wrong, according to the evidence that we're seeing so far. And I just. I don't know how it's going to right itself, because you've got, you know, we're dealing with a very powerful person, President Trump, who is made it his business to extend the power of the executive and has decided that, you know, the guardrails don't apply to him. But I think he's going to see. And I think that it's quite clear that the American people, you know, literally can't stand this and they're protesting even. I don't know, Geraldine, but I. There's a. One of the guys who was running for the Republican position as governor of Minnesota has pulled out because he said we cannot, I cannot do this. You've got real conservative politicians even in Florida saying, you know, this is not the kind of, you know, immigration policy that even we want to see. You know, yes, we have a, a problem. There's probably a lot of illegals and we need to get up immigration situation. But not like this. Not by killing American citizens and deporting, as you said, five year old kids. The judges put a stop to that, by the way, for the moment.

Geraldine Brooks (15:20)

Yes, I did see that. But you know, even before the shooting, what was happening to that good man and it is good people. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised that he and Renee Goode turned out to be impeccable, upstanding tours of the community. Because good people stand up against bad things. And when people are being, when families are being torn apart, they do come to the street. But the thing that shocked me even before the shooting was the brutal demeanor of those guys. The guy that pushed the woman into the ice bank, the, the woman that Mr. Preddy was then trying to assist. And then the way they fell on him and the way they were beating him, a man on the ground, all these thugs piled on him and beating him. It was like watching schoolboy bullies on steroids. And it's just indefensible. And I think that, you know, I was wondering what it was going to take for Americans to really say enough. And it seems like this might have just been the thing because I was just on social media and usually I get a lot of dog videos and horse videos confessed. This is what my feed brings me. But these videos are all. You know, usually I come on here to talk about dogs, but today I'm going to speak about what's going on in Minneapolis and the cooking videos, you know, all the reels. People are fired up about this and quite rightly, and if you're not going to be fired up about this, then I don't know what would happen to this society.

Christiana Manpur (17:00)

You know, we, we started out as, as foreign correspondence.

Podcast Narrator (17:04)

That's what.

Christiana Manpur (17:04)

When we, when we first met in the first Gulf War, 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and we were all there watching the American military buildup with the coalition in Saudi Arabia. And certainly we've Covered our share of, of foreign dictators, authoritarians, people who have their own private militias, people who are, you know, dressed up like these ICE people, just about, you know, with the hoods and the, and the plexiglass. And you see their belts bristling with grenades. They're, they're carrying grenade launchers and AR15 types of guns, they said. And also, you know, Glocks and all the rest of it bristling with the kind of weapons that you generally see in, you know, authoritarian states or in war zones.

Geraldine Brooks (17:49)

I mean, even most authoritarian states don't mask up their secret police.

Christiana Manpur (17:55)

How does that make you feel? Because it makes me feel really, really scared, to be honest with you, that what we thought was over there and that we could comment on and report on and tell stories is right now here. If you're in the United, and I know you live half the year in the United States.

Geraldine Brooks (18:10)

I do. And I, I tell you, it doesn't make me scared. It just makes me disgusted. It makes me disgusted. And I'm, I'm, you know, I, I would never call anyone deplorable, but these are deplorable acts and I think supporting this is deplorable. I think that it's time to say no more.

Christiana Manpur (18:34)

Well, as I said, it is interesting to see how not Eve, not, not just the usual suspects are saying no more, but actually people who are Trump supporters are also enough of them anyway to be noticed are saying no more. But I want to ask you another thing because this goes to the heart of reporting the truth and the facts. Let's just take Rupert Murdoch. I mean he's an Australian export. Well, his Fox News is doing a lot to really distort the actual picture. They're following the Trump administration line about telling American people that Alex Pretty or Renee Goode, they were domestic terrorists like Christine Noem said of the dhs. No evidence of that at all. But what I'm saying is that at a time of such brutal and dangerous division within the society in America, you've got a major, major organization, a major so called news organization that is doubling down and making people believe that somehow these, these, these were agents of their own killing.

Geraldine Brooks (19:37)

That news organization is a propaganda arm of Trump in the United States. And here of the right wing, we, Murdoch's enterprise owns, controls something like 70% of the print media in Australia. So we're very familiar with his tactics. And he has taken what was a once great national newspaper, the Australian newspaper, and every day it is a relentless propaganda sheet against the center Left government that we have just elected early last year, just relentlessly critical, beating up stories and also climate denial, anything to do with the clean energy transition. They are fighting that tooth and nail. They're totally in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. And so this is how he works and he's done it in the UK I think. You know, for me, coming up as a journalist, with Murdoch getting more and more powerful, this was the stinking swamp that he required journalists to swim in. We were always fighting and pushing back against his propaganda machine.

Christiana Manpur (20:50)

Wow, it's really serious because it's not just, you know, trying to get eyeballs and advertising dollars. This is really affecting the way the community, if you can call it that, the whole American community is being pitted against each other. It's very, very consequential what's happening right now in the media space.

Geraldine Brooks (21:11)

I recommend to everybody that they should watch Stephen Miller's seven minute speech at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. It was the most fascistic otherizing I have heard, honestly, and I do not say this lightly since the propaganda of Nazi Germany. It's only seven minutes long. You can get it on YouTube, watch it and weep. Because this is the voice in Trump's ear every day and he is us and theming. And this is a disease that has beset civilization since Convivencia. Spain was ton of heart with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews since the war. We covered the Bosnian war with the ethnic cleansing otherizes it's the Nazi playbook and it never ends well. It doesn't end well for societies that fall down that dark, dark hole. And that is where Stephen Miller is dragging us.

Christiana Manpur (22:12)

It is, it is really alarming and we should all do well to pay attention to all of this. And we do. And there's some great reporting and by the way, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is actually doing some great reporting holding the Trump administration to account and I commend them for that. But wow, Fox News has so much weight and so much ability to change the conversation. Let me ask you something, Geraldine, because you just described how, you know, the conditions are here as well for all sorts of schisms in politics and divisions, and yet your country chose not to go down that route in the last elections. And I think you said that everybody sort of breathed a sigh of relief. And your prime minister speaks publicly about community and about being together and the values of trying to, to be together and not and not falling prey to these forces of division and violence as well.

Geraldine Brooks (23:12)

He has made it the non negotiable condition of being a member of Australian society that we do not otherwise, that we respect democracy, that we respect difference and that we embrace it. And, you know, so last year, it was not at all clear that we wouldn't follow the path of division because the opposition leader very much followed Trump's playbook, demonizing immigrants, demonizing first nations people, trying to punch down. And he was wiped out and his party was wiped out. He even lost his seat in Parliament. His career was ended. And I think we were all surprised at the vehemence with which Australia rejected that politics of division.

Christiana Manpur (24:07)

Let's take a break, Geraldine. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about our experience in the field, your amazing books. We'll take a break and we'll be right back. Back with Geraldine Brooks, journalist and author. She is in Sydney. I'm in Melbourne at the Australian Open and taking this opportunity to do our podcast with Geraldine from here. Geraldine, listen, I remember very fondly first meeting you in Dharan on the east coast of Saudi Arabia, when metric ton loads of journalists descended to follow the U.S. and allied buildup of troops in anticipation of a war to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. He had invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. But what brought me to you was an article you had written for the Wall Street Journal. You were foreign correspondent then for them. And you had gone to Riyadh, the capital, in what was admittedly at the time still is but much more than a very patriarchal society. You know, women, you know, were barely visible, much less tolerated as, as, as public figures. And you did this report with some, I guess, Saudis and businessmen, and they criticized CNN for sending me and my two female colleagues, camera woman and sound woman, to cover Saudi Arabia.

Geraldine Brooks (25:36)

The gentleman in question was a very senior official in the all important oil industry in Saudi Arabia. And he said it is a disgrace that CNN has sent a woman to Saudi Arabia to report for this important news channel because don't they realize the king watches that and he shouldn't have to get his news about his own country from a woman?

Christiana Manpur (26:05)

Oh, my God, I remembered the woman bit. I hadn't remembered the king bit there. But my God, how things have changed. But you also unveiled quite a lot of hypocrisy because I think you wrote also that in this dry country, I mean, alcohol is prohibited. It was a pretty well stocked bar in the home that you had visited.

Geraldine Brooks (26:23)

So we had our initial interview in his study, which is a more or less glass box. And he said, well, that's it has to have a lot of windows. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to sit here alone with you. Because if a man and a woman are alone together, the third person present is Satan. So I'm taking notes, and then he says. And I get up to leave at the end of the interview, and he says, would you like to meet a few of my friends? And I said, yes. And we go to another part of his very luxurious compound, and it's a little miniature Studio 54 with disco music and lights. And they're all scantily clad women in there, and the finest, you know, aged scotch whiskey being poured. And it's just. How does this place feel work when people have to hold these contradictory ideas and Personas together?

Christiana Manpur (27:13)

I mean, it's, it's, it is what brought us together. Because when I read it, I went, oh, my God, I got to find this woman and ask her about it, because it was so extraordinary. But you remember at that time, I mean, we would go to the nearest town in order to, I don't know, go out and have something to eat or if there was any downtime while we were reporting this massive military buildup. And I remember they had the religious police on the streets they then called the mutawa. And these people carried these switch sticks and they would wear these, you know, sort of cassocks down to their calves or whatever, and they would come after us and like, bang our. Our ankles and thighs. Now they're off the streets. MBS did that. He took that whole situation and removed it. But it was pretty scary, but. And yet they did let us operate, didn't they? But they didn't let women soldiers be seen.

Geraldine Brooks (28:00)

There was a lot of harassment as well. I mean, extraordinary. And, you know, I think there's still. The modernization is all very glossy, and I'm sure it's bought a little bit more accessibility of ordinary fun to Saudi lives. But MbS is still imprisoning dissidents, and particularly outspoken women are in prison in Saudi Arabia. And of course, you know, he oversaw the massacring of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who expressed opinions about necessary reforms in his country, dismembered him. And yet Trump is quite willing to have a state dinner in this man's honor. I find that as a. As an enemy of censorship and a proponent of free speech to be quite an extraordinary turn of events. I mean, the trouble with Trump is he doesn't know who his enemies are or who his friends are. He berates the enemies that have the friends that have stood side by side. With America in every foxhole that the country has chosen to dig. And then he sucks up to dictators.

Christiana Manpur (29:21)

Honestly, I think the. I don't even know what to say about where alliances will, will, will fall, where, as Mark Carney said, middling powers will have to create a sort of coalition of their own and figure out how to, you know, have economic and military and other trade relationships that don't depend on the United States. And then you've got others, people like Mark Rutter, the head of the NATO, you know, Secretary General, he is. He basically said, dream on. If you think that we can defend ourselves without the US or have a world in which we don't have very close relations with the United States, you're dreaming. So I don't know where this ends, Geraldine, because President Trump is really alienating people. I mean, that speech in Davos was something to behold. I mean, rambling, rambling, rambling. We're used to that. But then suddenly going off and saying to all of the allies, you'd be nowhere without us. And then double down the next day saying, yeah, I don't think any of the allies really stood on the coal face or on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq. Excuse me, how many, you know, died or killed there defending the United States and sharing the burden with the United States. So it's. It's a very tough one to try to figure out a new world order that somehow bypasses or insulates yourself from the United States. I mean, I don't know.

Podcast Narrator (30:39)

What do you think?

Geraldine Brooks (30:40)

I think it's strengthening the hand of China in an extraordinary ways. I'll just tell you one anecdote, which is not from Australia, it's from my time in America. But I have a friend who is the founder of an incredibly successful biotech company that has been responsible for bringing therapeutics to the market for several intractable diseases, and it's worth billions. And she was building a huge research facility in Massachusetts, and she pulled the plug on it and took it to China after Trump attacked the universities, because she said, I know in China there will be support for the kind of education that people need to do, the kind of research that the scientists I will need to employ in the next decade, and I'll find them there if I can't find them in the United States.

Christiana Manpur (31:35)

Interesting. Okay, well, that's. That's a. That's a very interesting take. You talked about literature, and you have written a number of fantastically reviewed and read and, you know, critically acclaimed books. You won the Pulitzer for March. I just Want to ask you. Then tell me a little. Remind us all about March. Because you took the Civil War story of Little Women. Which had always been told from the mother and the girl's point of view. And never from the absent soldier father. What made you decide to do a story from. I mean, basically concoct or create a story from a man you never. We never heard of in literature or from.

Geraldine Brooks (32:14)

Well, it was. It was basically a way to save my marriage. Because after adventuring around the world as foreign correspondence for a decade and a half, my husband, Tony Horowitz, decided that we should speak, spend some time back in the United States. And so we settled in Virginia. And there's a saying that the Civil War was fought in 10,000 places. And it soon became depressingly clear to me that he was going to drag me to every single one of them. He was obsessed with Civil War.

Christiana Manpur (32:41)

He was a Civil War nut, wasn't he? He wrote great books about it.

Geraldine Brooks (32:44)

He did. He wrote wonderful books showing how the rifts from the Civil War was still acting in American society. And he wrote that book in the 90s. And it was very prescient. Confederates in the Attic. About the unfinished business of the Civil War. Which I think in a large part shapes the reality that we have now. But anyway, I had to find a way to connect with this interest of his. Which, frankly, bored me to tears. I could care less about order of battle and all this. But I was interested in something that had interested me as a foreign correspondent as well. Is what happens to idealists who go to war believing in the rightness of a cause. And then in the course of being a soldier, they're required to do very immoral things. So their idealism is tested or shattered. And the kind of moral injury that comes from that. And we've seen it with the incredibly idealistic young troops that signed up after 9, 11, and. And then found themselves embroiled in all kinds of horrible human rights abuses. And so I was thinking about that, and then I thought about the beloved book of my childhood, Little Women. And I thought there was an idealist mentioned in that book. But we don't know what happened to him. The father who has gone south because of his ardent belief in abolition to be administered to the Union troops. And he's absent from the first page of the book. And in the book, as it was first published by Louisa May Alcott. It ends with him coming home. And he goes around the room and tells each of his little women how he thinks the year has changed them. But of what A Year at War did to him. Nothing in the book addresses that. So I decided to think about what the year for an idealist like Mr. March could have been in the Civil War theater.

Christiana Manpur (34:40)

It's a great act of imagination and fantastic novel. You know, you mentioned Tony. Tony died very suddenly a few years ago. And your most recent book, I think it is the most recent book is Memorial Days, when you finally were able to find a place to be able to write about his death, your grieving. And I wonder whether you have come to terms with it now. How did the writing of it help you? You even came back to Australia for part of the. The process of grieving. And I hate that word, closure, but it was very important for you to come back.

Geraldine Brooks (35:18)

Yeah. You know, when somebody who is apparently in robust good health and somebody you've expected to spend your next 20 or 30 years standing beside is suddenly gone in an instant. He was on book tour himself and he was heading to give a talk at Politics and Prose, the great Washington bookstore. And he died in the street. Absolutely. That expression dropped dead. That is exactly what happened. And our modern society doesn't really have a very good way of dealing with any of it. I learned that media and popular culture doesn't really prepare you for this event because in movies somebody always comes to the door if there's profound bad news like that, and they make sure you're sitting down and they bring you a glass of water and they ask if there's anyone they should call. And none of that happened. I got a phone call from a hospital in Washington and they just bluntly told me that he had died. And I just cried, could not absorb it. It was just ridiculous to me that my six day a week gym rat husband had died and, and then, and then this cascade of other crazy bureaucratic brutalities occurs. We were kicked off our health insurance without being informed of that. The probate court tried to appoint a guardian ad litem, which is something I'd never heard of, to interfere with my raising of my minor child. I mean, it was just the most extraordinary cascade of BS that I had to deal with when all I wanted to do was deal with my own grief. And so three years later, I was not right in the head and I realized that I had to do something about it. And suddenly the light bulb went off that you're a writer, you should write, because writing can be medicinal. And so I took myself off to the most remote place I could think of, which was Flinders island in the Bass Strait between the Australian Mainland and the state of Tasmania. And I rented a shack on a beach 35 miles from the nearest anything. And I just sat with the grief that I hadn't been allowed to express the day that Tony died. And that is what I wrote about in Memorial Days.

Christiana Manpur (37:56)

It is an incredible, incredible read, an incredible testimonial, incredible love story and a love letter and a farewell farewell letter that I think everybody should read because says so much, especially the way you just laid it out, how so many people are unprepared. And we're meant to think that in this day and age, anything that happens, you need to be able to deal with it, but you need help. And I think that it was very moving, Geraldine. And I'm so sorry because Tony was such a funny, great, wonderful, hilarious person and writer. I. I still laugh when I read. Is it Baghdad without a road map?

Geraldine Brooks (38:37)

Without a Baghdad without a map. Because without a map.

Podcast Narrator (38:40)

That's it.

Geraldine Brooks (38:40)

During the Iran Iraq war, Saddam Hussein didn't allow any maps because he didn't want the Iranians to be able to find their way around Baghdad. So we were reporting in, in Iraq during those years. And yeah, anyway, he was a ferocious reporter, totally fearless and would do absolutely anything and got into all kinds of interesting wild scrapes and managed to survive all of that just to die on the street about three blocks from where he was born. So there you go. Yeah.

Christiana Manpur (39:12)

Well, I'm coming to Sydney to give you a long delayed hug. I'm looking forward to seeing you. And we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to do our recommendations. All right, everybody, we are back with Geraldine Brooks. And is this, this is the bit where we do our recommendations. Geraldine, have you thought of a recommendation? I'm putting you on the spot.

Geraldine Brooks (39:42)

Yes, I recommend a bushwalk. It's what the English euphoniously call a ramble and what Americans strenuously call a hike. But in Australia, we call it a bushwalk. And basically it is a way of connecting with nature. And I particularly love to get out into nature and I have a favorite Australian tree, which is the angophera, which has pink bark and twisty limbs and almost a human form. And I am a total tree hugger and I just love to get out in our wonderful bush with the beautiful primary colored birds that we have and they're incredibly raucous bird calls and the scent of the eucalyptus leaves underfoot. And I think that there's something in human beings that is meant to be in wilderness because most of Our evolutionary time was in the bush and it's only a split second of evolutionary time that we've lived in cities. So I think that there's something that you can restore to yourself if you can find the time to get out in nature.

Christiana Manpur (41:07)

Well, I think that's brilliant. And I've done a few nature recommendations too. Mine is basically just please everybody watch David Attenborough and you know, and figure out. But I so agree with you though. I mean, right now more than at any other time, I think that's such an antidote and it's so necessary also for us to recognize the wonderful nature and to try to be good citizens and good custodians. My recommendation, my recommendation, I'm afraid, is going to be your books, particularly March. I want people to read March because it's such an act of, of imagination and writing and description. You've just heard Geraldine describe the bushwalk in such colorful, vivid terms that everybody will imagine what it's like to be able to know what Mr. Or Minister March thought and did. A whole new literary genre there. So I, that I, I do recommend it. March by Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning Geraldine. Thank you so much and see you very soon.

Geraldine Brooks (42:10)

Looking forward to it.

Christiana Manpur (42:11)

Bye bye. From Melbourne to Sydney or Melbourne to Sydney. All right, everyone, thank you to Geraldine and thanks for everyone for, for listening. Hope you enjoyed that. Make sure you're following our feed so that you never miss an episode. Remember, you can watch all of our episodes as well as listen to them by watching on YouTube. You just search for Christiana Manpur presents the X Files and subscribe to our channel on YouTube and you can listen for free on Global Player, download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com so this week there's no bonus episode because I'm here in Australia. But I sure you've got lots of questions that we want to answer when I'm back with Jamie on, you know, February 10th. So that's next Tuesday when I am back from Australia and we'll be answering all the questions that you may have stored up because a lot has been going on in the world since then.

Podcast Narrator (43:03)

So see you all then. This has been a Global Player original production.