Bernadette Brennan
speaker
419 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2018
last heard 29 May
Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Ferenc, F-E-R-E-N-C, and that gets Aussie-ized to Frank.
He and his parents, Ida and Maya, have suffered dreadful privations before the war ended and they were able to come to Australia.
Ida had been this brilliant concert pianist and Maya had come from a big family of many siblings.
Maya ended up being taken to a work camp.
He was only one of two survivors of all those siblings and he was scarred deeply by the deaths of some of them, which he bore witness to.
And they've come to Australia almost...
just clinging to hope that this is maybe a way they can create a new life.
And Ida, when she arrives in Perth, is just horrified at what she sees as a kind of cultural desert she's arrived at and committed her life to.
And so Frank or Ferenc is this hope, this golden child that they have together.
And then he is struck by polio.
So the compounding tragedy of this family is almost unbearable.
There's lots of sunsets, though, lots of sun fading into the night.
But that's because it's Western Australia.
Yeah, the place where the sun dies.
Speaking of sunsets, I did find one little irony in this, and that is that Frank and Sullivan are both into new poetry and
And Sullivan in particular is obsessed with the First World War poets, you know, Rosenberg and Sassoon and Owen.
And he's very, you know, very much about that freshness of witness and internal thought and rhyming's just completely out.
They both think that's dreadful.
And nostalgia.
Sullivan in particular doesn't like nostalgia.
Showing 221–240 of 419 · page 12 of 21
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