Julia Gillard

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335 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Julia Gillard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Secret Life of Books · A Podcast of One's Own x SLOB: Special Collaboration · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

And I do think they've migrated from, you know, the old version that we went to where everybody was always going, shh, to you.

Exactly.

Now they have a vibrancy, they have events, which is fantastic to bring people in.

And they're also a safe space for communities who...

wouldn't find somewhere to go and somewhere to gather without that public investment.

It really troubles me that in parts of the world, fortunately not Australia, but particularly in the US, that we've seen such an assault on libraries and librarians and people whose lives have been ruined by politics around which young adult fiction they're allowed to put on the shelf.

So that

sense of cultural space, cultural freedom, inclusion, I think is incredibly precious.

Tell me about your reading journey.

I know that you grew up in Paddington and you ended up doing a PhD on, let me get this right, pollution, filth and satire in 18th century London.

So can you tell us about the reading journey that takes you from Paddington to specialising in pollution, filth and satire and has you doing what you do now in the Department of English at Princeton?

So do I, but I went there.

Yeah, I would go back to The Grapes of Wrath because it –

I guess I remember it in some ways as my first big adult book.

Yes.

And the themes of disadvantage, of displacement, of how people find comfort.

each other, community, the ability to look after each other in the most diabolical of circumstances, the way that he brings all of that to life and the vivid nature of the end, very adult nature of the end, that sort of marks for me a stage in my reading and my thinking about, you know, society and who we are and how we treat each other.

I actually saw it brought to stage, Grapes of Wrath, in London a while back.

And I went with trepidation because a book as big as that and the, you know, it's a journey across America, you know, how do you possibly bring that to stage?

And yet they did a really good job of it.

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