Speaking to one of the last great characters of Australian politics, a living legend.

The ‘ISIS Brides’ are due to touch down in Sydney this week. So I sat down with Samir - a Yazidi Australian refugee who survived ISIS torture and slavery as a child.

His testimony about the brutality of the so-called ‘ISIS brides’ chilled me to my core. He told me that ISIS brides regularly prepared ten year old Yazidi girls to be raped by their husbands.

Literally the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.

Bristol University Professor of Modern Italian History John Foot discusses his book ''Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism.''

The New York Times has described Gerald Murnane as ‘‘the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.’’ A long-time favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the New Yorker describes him as the ‘‘reclusive giant of Australian letters.’’

He’s a fascinating, eccentric person, a man who notes with pride that he has never flown in an airplane or gone swimming or ever worn sunglasses over the course of his entire life. He lives in a dusty town of just two hundred people in Western Victoria and regards the ocean as an ‘‘enemy.’’ He writes of ‘‘dreams within dreams’’ and ‘‘the invisible landscape and geography of the soul’’ and he taught himself Hungarian because he felt a shared affinity with the plains of Hungary.

He maintains: ‘‘There is another world but it is in this one.” Needless to say, he is a singularly brilliant and unique individual and writer. I was honoured to interview Gerald while travelling through country Victoria in 2021.

We talked about dreams, angels, God and everything in between and Gerald told me he thought we were similar people which made me smile. I only hope to be able to write a fraction of a percentage as well as him one day.

Read the full transcript of our conversation here: https://drewpavlou.substack.com/p/gerald-murnane