Q&A With Your Queue: Erin Parke
It was a holiday weekend in the United States and I underestimated how much I could get done in a car. So, for today's Queuesday I'm thrilled to be sharing a Q&A with the host of Nowhere Man. This podcast is incredible, and one I recommend if The Vanishing Point or Wild Boys were podcasts that you found captivating.
If you haven't seen my review for Nowhere Man yet, go ahead and read it here.
Q) Who are you?
I’m Erin Parke, a short, talkative news reporter and podcast-maker with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve lived up in remote northern Australia in a tropical town called Broome for almost twenty years, and love the region for its eccentric characters, community spirit, weirdo stories and complex history. Plus the beaches are fab and the pubs are fun! My main loves are long-form storytelling, camping, road trips and stout.
Q) What are you working on?
A) I’ve just released my first podcast series via the ABC’s Expanse stream, called Nowhere Man. It’s a bonkers story and I’m so proud of it. It’s about the strange saga of Robert Bogucki, who’s an American who undertook one of the most extreme survival feats ever recorded in Australia, back in 1999. He disappeared into one of our biggest, deadliest deserts on purpose, with hardly any food and water, on a spiritual quest… and after a huge and expensive search, was discovered alive six weeks later, in what became known as The Miracle in the Desert.
Over a three year period, I got to know Robert and his partner, and ended up travelling to Alaska in my own time and on my own dime to interview him. The six-part series weaves his story with much bigger, darker themes around outback survival, the extreme things people do to find meaning in life, and Australia’s tense relationship with the Outback and our history.
It’s a wild tale that has both life and death drama and quite emotional reflections around what it is to be human. I would LOVE people to listen to it, because I think it’s raw and fun and poignant, and captures lots of Aussie humour but also some of the skeletons in our cultural closet.
Q)What was the first podcast you listened?
A) Like most humans the first podcast I listened to in full was Serial. I remember consuming it during a 26 hour road trip across the remote Kimberley region, and it just lit up my mind with the quesiton ‘what stories from here could I tell in this format?’. The way the medium’s evolved to include a more personal perspective than long-form non-fiction writing or documentary films is just so liberating and exciting and full of potential.
Q) What was the most interesting podcast you've listened to?
Ohh, that’s a good question. It’s not a new one, but I recently revisited Wild Boys, which is a Canadian series by Sam Mullins. I presume most pod-fiends would have listened, but for those that haven’t it revisits a strange sequence events from 2003 in which two mysterious ‘bush boys’ are adopted by a community. But it then becomes a study of human kindness and what happens when goodwill is betrayed. I keep coming back to it because I love the relaxed, conversational writing and delivery; the way Sam invokes place and people through simple but clever writing, and how the plot twists have you going ‘WTF!’ as the story unfolds. It’s so skillfully done because it makes a complex narrative feel simple, and it doesn’t just recount events of the past – it illustrates why those events are relevant now.
Wild Boys was definitely inspiration for what I wanted to achieve with out series Nowhere Man. In fact I think I might cold-call Sam Mullins and make him listen to it!
Q) What's your favorite escape-pod?
A) It possibly doesn’t sound very relaxing.. but I always look forward to weekly release of the BBC’s When It hits the Fan. It’s hosting my two British media/PR veterans, who gossip about the biggest scandals of the week and how they were handled from a strategic public relations perspective. I like it because it lifts the veils on the communications machinery of the corporate and government worlds, and the hosts don’t shy away from discussing the moral implications of the work they do. Would highly recommend!
Thank you, Erin, for being willing to answer some questions about the podcasts that have made up your queue over the years. I know I'll be digging into a few of these!
Be sure to listen to Expanse: Nowhere Man
Presented byErin Parke
Comments ()