Cassie McCullagh

And then she goes on and points out that in Hindley Street in Adelaide, they're rounding up Italians because of, you know, there are raids on the Italians.

It's sort of...

Really local, but also this sense of the world and the big events that are going on in it.

Amazing for such a young mind.

Yes, it's staggering.

Well, and things were happening for young women too.

And I wonder how much your own arts journalism and indeed career in radio traces back to your mother's influence.

Because at one point she talks about being given a job in the program department of Radio 5AD because, you know, the men had gone.

And she says, while I, being a woman, come like a vampire into his kingdom, I recognise and sicken at the unfairness.

Were you familiar with these diaries growing up?

And I think, Martin, your mother, Carys Harding Brown, was the kind of woman we like on the bookshelf, part of that fast set, drinking sherry, as you say, dancing till dawn.

Yeah, she sounds like she was a fantastic person.

Let's move away from Australia to Europe in World War II.

In fact, we're turning to the period before the war, to the rise of fascism, early intimations that things were changing, a time in Germany documented by Anna Seegers in her book The Seventh Cross.

But why don't we just imagine our way into that place?

That was the beginning of the 1944 film, The Seventh Cross, made in Hollywood, starring Spencer Tracy and telling the story of this extraordinary book that we're about to talk about called The Seventh Cross by Anna Seegers.

Now, this is one of those books that kind of comes as a bolt out of the blue and the idea that Virago has just republished this makes a lot of sense to me right now, actually, in the world as it is.

But it's a book that was written in the midst of the war and it's kind of, for that reason, quite special.

So Seekers was a writer and an activist.

She was a member of the Communist Party.