An adventurer, an ethicist, a prison officer turned Sister of Mary and a Wiradjuri man sit with what most of us are taught to look away from: grief, and the frames inherited from institutions that no longer hold us.
Gina Chick, Simon Longstaff and Sister Anayah speak of grief not as something to overcome but as something that reshapes us. David Beaumont speaks of colonial trauma, and the institutions that carry or fail the people inside them.
Together they trace a single arc: systems coming apart, disconnection from each other and from nature as the wound beneath the wound, and what it asks of us to live with open eyes.
"We're maybe near the end of what I would call a long age of forgetting.
And by that I mean, we've largely forgotten the purpose for which things were brought into existence…
and therefore we betray those purposes."
— Simon Longstaff
"I died and I dissolved, and I was regrown as part of the interconnected web of life, no more or less important than any bird or bee or tree or fish."
— Gina Chick
"You actually need to listen to the truth. It's a very different proposition, truth listening."
— David Beaumont
"I don't sacrifice me to fit in. You keep telling the truth and you don't lose yourself and you stand on it."
— Sister Anayah
"An animal does not outsource its authority."
— Gina Chick
“I’m a firm believer in pushing those boundaries.”
— Sister Anayah
"The size of my grief is the size of our love."
— Gina Chick
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"How do we live in this land with joy? How do we graft onto what was already here?"
— David Beaumont
Show Notes
Wilderness instructor · writer · winner, Alone Australia S1
Winner of the inaugural season of SBS’s Alone Australia, Chick is a wilderness instructor, rewilding facilitator and writer who has spent decades teaching primitive skills and grief work. Her 2024 memoir We Are the Stars weaves survival, motherhood and the loss of her daughter into a meditation on being fully alive.
Executive Director, The Ethics Centre
Executive Director of The Ethics Centre in Sydney since 1991, Longstaff is one of Australia’s most-quoted public philosophers, advising boards, governments and broadcasters on questions of integrity and applied ethics. He hosts the Centre’s long-running IQ2 debates and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
The Ethics Centre · Festival of Dangerous Ideas · Ethical by Design Report
Sister of Mary · former prison officer
A Sister of Mary who once walked the corridors of a maximum-security prison as an officer turned chaplain. Sister Anayah speaks from the place where institutions meet the people they hold. Her practice is one of presence, prayer and quiet defiance.
Wiradjuri man · advocate
A Wiradjuri man whose work sits at the intersection of cultural reclamation, colonial trauma and the slow business of listening. He speaks of the institutions that carry or fail the people inside them, and of what it asks of us to live in this land with open eyes.